WOB I Get Out of the Dark (And Into My Car)

Alright, alright, admittedly, Italian theorist Gabriele Pedulla's new book about film's transition from the cinema to our iPads and the cultural-historical aesthetic implications has very little to do with pop star Billy Ocean's song about demanding, if not forced, romantic love. Not nothing. But little.

Pedulla's book does argue though that film no longer represents a communal, but individualized experience, and that film going itself is anymore a self-conscious act of exclusion from the norms of spectatorship in the digital age. News, which if you still go to as many films as I do in the theater--popcorn, book, and gramophone in hand--is both a little bit embarrassing and embarrassingly thrilling. As Pedulla writes, "When we stop going to the movies, or go feeling as if we are doing something exceptional, as when we get decked out for the opera...," then those who still are going will have infinitely more leg room... er, "films will no longer be the same."

One more reason to go to the movies this summer, while they kind of, sort of are. (Minus all the talkers. We get it, you "know" what's going to happen. You figured out the movie. Well done! Why not put away your cell phone now and solve the mystery of exiting the theater!)

Excuse me.

I'll close in mentioning that Moonrise Kingdom is delightful, and now showing down the street.

Oh, and WOB stands for Wall of Books, the giant wooden gatefold at the front end of our store, where we often display artful, equally-outside the lines, thinking-persons' books like In Broad Daylight, published, by the way, by Verso Books, based in Brooklyn, and which makes a point to publish only eight books every year, by writers like John Berger,  Rebecca Solnit, Slavoj Žižek, and loads others.