D. E. Boone’s Legs Talk: a modern girl’s dating tale (Jamaica, New York: Global Force Media, 2008) is one of those books you probably figured I’d buy just to look at the pictures, but there’s a lot more going on here than a bunch of arty B&W leg shots with captions: as advertised, it’s a story of a relationship that founders, and if you’ve ever had any reason to utter a sentence that begins with “You only wanted me for my…” you’ll appreciate the story line.

From the Times-Ledger in the author’s home borough of Queens:

Author and Queens native David Eugene Boone was inspired by female noir characters and Hitchcock movies when he created his long-limbed, monochromatic protagonist.

“I noticed that women’s legs were used to communicate something,” he said, “especially when they were walking away.”

Legs Talk is Boone’s first book; I have to wonder what he’s going to do for a follow-up.

(Review copy purchased at retail.)

In his classic Up the Organization, Robert Townsend asked: “If you’re not in business for profit or fun, what the hell are you doing there?”

The only problem with this premise is the implication that “profit” and “fun” are mutually exclusive. Not so, say Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher in The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), which argues that employees will bust their butts if occasionally they’re busting a gut.

Seriously. (So to speak.) There are even numbers to support this premise:

On Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For,” produced by the Great Place to Work^® Institute, employees in companies that are denoted as “great” responded overwhelmingly — an average of 81 percent — that they are working in a “fun” environment. That’s a compelling statistic: Employees at the best companies are also having the best time.

They’re also making the most money for their stockholders: for the period 1998-2006, for example, those “100 Best” outperformed the S&P 500 by 78 percent.

In addition to case histories at companies big and small, The Levity Effect lists “142 Ways To Have Fun At Work.” If you tried all of them, I suspect you’d never get any work done at all, but what if you tried none of them? You’d have a pretty dour bunch of folks and a burgeoning employee-retention problem. From the chapter “Overcoming Objections to Levity,” the response to “We don’t have time for fun around here”:

By now, it should be obvious that you don’t have time to not have fun. If you want to have a productive, creative, and engaging work experience, you must find the time to cut loose a little. It’s that simple. If you don’t, you’ll end up burning your people out; you won’t get their best work, and you’ll lose them to competitors.

The Levity Effect is not a call for corporate slapstick, though an occasional pratfall is always worth a chuckle or two. But if you’re the perennial brow-knitter who always finds the cloud in front of the silver lining, it’s way past time you lightened up.

There is, of course, a Web site.

(Review copy furnished by author’s representative.)

In the absence of a better explanation at the time, I found myself drawn to transactional analysis, as popularized by Eric Berne’s 1964 book Games People Play. Dr Berne argued that just about every personal interaction could be boiled down to simple patterns based on which ego states are involved: Child, Parent, or Adult.

This model, says Mark Goulston in Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone (New York: AMACOM, 2010), is obsolete and counterproductive:

Transactional communications don’t create traction in a relationship because they’re impersonal and shallow. These exchanges won’t necessarily drive people away … but they won’t draw people closer either. Like [an] ATM transaction, they’re rarely life-changing events, and they’re “all about you” instead of “all about the other person or company.”

And traction, says Dr Goulston, is imperative:

To understand this, picture yourself driving up a steep hill. Your tires slip and slide and can’t grab hold. But downshift, and you get control. It’s like pulling the road to meet you.

Most people upshift when they want to get through to other people. They persuade. They encourage. They argue. They push. And in the process, they create resistance. When you use the techniques I offer, you’ll do exactly the opposite — you’ll listen, ask, mirror, and reflect back to people what you’ve heard. When you do, they will feel seen, understood, and felt — and that unexpected downshift will draw them to you.

This comparison makes more sense than you’d think, at least to me: I spend much of my time in overdrive, which means I’ve upshifted as far as my transmission will let me, trying to get the maximum speed out of minimum crankshaft rotation. In a very real sense, I don’t have time for those other people, and some of them visibly resent it.

I can see some serious value in this book, especially in our contemporary “Gotcha” culture. (Berne touched on this briefly, with a game he called “NIGYSOB” — “Now I’ve Got You, You Son Of a Bitch” — but I suspect he never anticipated how it would become the dominant form of politics forty-five years down the road.) Getting through to people seems more difficult than ever: we’ve heard it all before, or so we think. Flowery oratory won’t do the job, either; it takes some serious one-on-one interaction. I can’t yet vouch for Dr Goulston’s instructions, having only just finished the book, but he’s made reasonable explanations for all of them, and allowed for the possibility that some of them might not work every single time. (Not everyone will be as reasonable as you or I would be.) At no point, however, does he leave you stranded. If you get along fine with everyone all the time, you probably don’t need Just Listen. For the rest of us, I think it’s worth a look. (If you’d like a sampling of Dr Goulston’s philosophy, visit his Usable Insights blog.)

Disclosure: From review copy in ebook format. Publication is scheduled for September; Amazon.com is offering pre-order at one-third off.

Larry Van Meter spots an anomaly in a Forties Western:

Unable to find a seat on the train, she is rescued by Jim Gardner, who owns the luxury car at the back of the train. Jim as it turns out is one of the new Oklahoma millionaires, having struck it rich in the oil fields of Sapulpa. He’s also a cad, clear to everyone except this “New Woman.” Gardner takes a shine to Catherine, gives her the nickname “Kitten,” and invites her to get off the train with him in Sapulpa. Now, maybe [director] Albert Rogell wasn’t paying attention during this scene, or maybe he had forgotten his Oklahoma geography, but the train from Cleveland to Kansas City doesn’t stop in Sapulpa. But maybe this is Oklahoma’s fate in the American cinema, an indeterminate place somewhere on the American map.

Which explains, sort of, the premise of Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes to the Movies (Oklahoma City: Forty-Sixth Star Press, 2009), edited by Van Meter, which collects nineteen essays on the image of the Sooner State as portrayed in American film, from the days of silents to the present, with stops at Cimarron, The Grapes of Wrath and The Outsiders, just to name a few.

Telling a tale set in “an indeterminate place” has its advantages: you can make it up as you go along, as Albert Rogell did in 1943 while shooting In Old Oklahoma, which he actually shot in even-older Utah, and nobody will raise a fuss: for the 297 million Americans who don’t live here, Oklahoma could be as remote as Timbuktu. They know we belong to the land, and the land we belong to is, well, kinda bland, when it isn’t openly hostile.

Sooner Cinema acknowledges this phenomenon without taking umbrage. Filmmakers tell stories, and sometimes those stories drown out considerations of place: those snowcapped mountains just outside McAlester in True Grit don’t resemble anything you or I have ever seen just outside McAlester. But True Grit’s story wasn’t about Oklahoma so much as it was about the No Man’s Land it was once thought to be in the territorial days — and ultimately, it was about John Wayne, a man bigger than any No Man’s Land ever was. In this context, getting the facts straight about Oklahoma is a secondary, maybe tertiary, consideration. In fact, Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory, a biography of Woody Guthrie, somehow manages not to mention Oklahoma at all.

Then again, being associated with a vague sort of mythology may work to Oklahoma’s advantage. Van Meter notes in his introduction:

[I]s there any Wyoming film that doesn’t show the Grand Tetons? or a Colorado film that doesn’t incorporate the Rockies? or a Hawaii film that doesn’t show a surfer? Oklahoma films aren’t compelled to show the state’s X to prove its Oklahoma-ness.

If you live here, and if you ever expect to have to explain to someone from New Jersey or New Brunswick or New Delhi what it’s like to live in Oklahoma, Sooner Cinema will make your task that much easier: you’ll know the difference between celluloid and reality, and you’ll be able to tell when that difference actually matters. And if this task somehow doesn’t fall to you, you’ll still have the pleasure of discovering some cinematic wonders set practically in your own back yard. If this be mythology, make the most of it.

(Review copy furnished by the publishers.)

Two years ago, Oklahoman writers Steve Lackmeyer and Jack Money put together a book about the rebirth of Oklahoma City and the undoing of the havoc wrought by the urban-renewal plan masterminded by I. M. Pei. It was called OKC: 2nd Time Around, and Doug Loudenback can tell you all about it here. If you saw that book and thought, “Yes, that’s all very well and good, but what about the first time?” you’ve arrived at the right review.

Larry Johnson, who has been maintaining the Oklahoma Collection at the Metropolitan Library System, has assembled a collection of nearly two hundred photographs from the city’s first seventy years, currently in print as Historic Photos of Oklahoma City (Nashville: Turner Publishing, 2007). One of the most compelling shots is from Day Three — the 24th of April, 1889, two days after the Land Run — showing rows of tents (there were no permanent structures yet) seemingly knocked out of position along the sides of the rudimentary street. This was a legal matter: two different townsite companies were platting the place, and their survey lines didn’t quite match. For decades thereafter, north-south streets downtown had a noticeable “jog” at Clarke Street, later Grand Avenue, now Sheridan Avenue.

More than thirty pages are devoted to that first decade of the city, including a scary shot of a May 1896 tornado, described by the Weather Bureau as “a twisting serpent-like cloud.” This particular funnel did no damage, though a sister storm took out a house and a barn near Britton, then a separate town.

The photos inevitably vary in quality, though their reproduction on contemporary paper is just fine, and Johnson’s chapter introductions and captions capture the spirit of the time. From page 137, here’s a sentence that could just as easily apply today:

Amazingly, the city led the nation with four years of economic gain during the Depression, and four new buildings over 18 stories (including the two tallest) were built during this time.

And it’s not just pictures of buildings, either. In the center of the book is a two-page spread showing Governor Charles B. Haskell and his staff, shortly after the stealthy relocation of the state seal from Guthrie to Oklahoma City in 1910. Construction of the actual Capitol being several years away, Haskell’s office is in the Huckins Hotel downtown. The first and last photos are dated 27 May 1961, and portray a downtown civil-rights march; in one of them you can see Charlton Heston being fitted with a sandwich board proclaiming ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.

This collection will of course be welcomed by history buffs, but it’s not intended just for them. Oklahoma City has always been a place that defied one’s expectations. Historic Photos of Oklahoma City presents the people who made it so and how they did it, in a language that speaks louder than mere words.

(Review copy furnished by Turner Publishing.)

I have no idea what that little origami-snowflake toy is properly called; when I was growing up it was a “cootie-catcher,” and after flexing it enough times, you’d pop it open, unfold a section of it, and somehow your fortune would be told.

So when the girl opens up the device in the early moments of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, I had to keep watching no matter how much I might have been put off by the premise. What it says is “Dream is destiny,” and while I’ve always distrusted dreams — my dreams, anyway — I felt I could trust Linklater, if only because he’d given us Before Sunrise, a romance I dearly loved because, unlike the case with almost every other such story, I could identify with either lead.

Linklater didn’t let me down. The structure is something like what I remembered from Slacker, with seemingly-random people coming by, speaking their piece, and then dissolving into the next scene. But the look is wholly different: the thirty or so scenes were shot in live action and then turned into animation, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes sort of realistic, sometimes hyper-unrealistic. If this seems a hodgepodge, well, so do my dreams, and dreams are at the very heart of Waking Life.

About ten minutes in, I was prepared to dismiss the whole thing: “Eye candy,” I thought, “to compensate for the preposterousness of the words.” But that, too, is characteristic of dreams: whether you can learn anything from them is independent of whether you can make sense of the narrative. “There’s no story,” asserts one character, a novelist. “Just people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest story ever told.” Nothing at all in there about continuity.

So slowly, surely, I was drawn in, marveling at the look of the thing while trying to keep its seemingly-contradictory premises from overwriting my own programming. And I decided that Linklater wasn’t trying to sell me a packaged philosophy: he did, after all, throw in an almost-perfectly serious scene in which a film class on Kurosawa is conducted by a monkey. If there is a philosophy, it’s that of the salad bar: there are plenty of things you’ll like, but if you go for all of them, you’ll quickly discover that there’s too much on your plate. You can call it a “neo-human evolutionary cycle” if you’d rather; for a moment I saw myself as Horatio, being informed by Hamlet that there are more things in heaven or earth than I’d suspected. And the ending, well, isn’t.

Perhaps Waking Life was intended to recapitulate, then extend, Descartes: “I dream, therefore I am.” Dreams and reality might even be somehow interchangeable. We already know that some of our “objective” measurements are affected by our perspectives: accelerate yourself towards the speed of light, and keep one eye on your watch, if you can. Was Linklater trying to anticipate what might be beyond Einstein? I don’t know. I do know this, though: in 2001, when it was released, I couldn’t have sat through Waking Life. My mindset of the moment wasn’t prepared to accept anything that didn’t fit into the structures I’d built for myself; I’d have dismissed it out of hand as Slacker Goes to Grad School. Today, it seems more like an artifact of a life I didn’t know I’d had. Maybe it really was all just a dream.

(Review copy lent me by a friend — thank you, Aero.)

Last month I brought up the 2006 Bollywood feature I See You, noting that it was an adaptation of Marc Levy’s novel If Only It Were True, albeit without actually crediting Levy. This was in fact the third time I’d mentioned this film, once on this site and twice elsewhere, so at the very least, I reasoned, I ought to see the darn thing.

The story starts with Raj Jaiswal (Arjun Rampal), your basic Charming Rogue who has a TV talk show in London with the cheeky title British Raj. He’s done well for himself, with a lovely high-rise and a Porsche Cayenne, and he thinks himself prepared for anything, with the exception of the arrival of a young woman on his balcony who explains that it’s really her balcony.

Dr Shivani Dutt (Vipasha Agarwal), the lady in question, is having an extended out-of-body experience, while her flesh-and-blood body is being kept on a ventilator in a West London hospital after an auto accident — except that it wasn’t actually an accident: she discovered staffers engaged in a grisly organ-harvesting scheme, and as far as they’re concerned, a comatose witness is the best kind. And while normally Raj would greatly enjoy the prospect of a beautiful female visitor, Shivani upsets all his plans. It doesn’t help that apparently he’s the only person who can see or hear her.

If you saw 2005’s Just Like Heaven, with Reese Witherspoon, you’ve pretty much seen this story already, except that this being a Bollywood film, there are semi-spectacular production numbers at regular intervals. Despite their inclusion, I See You runs a mere two hours, fairly short by Bollywood standards. This being a romantic comedy, you expect a certain number of punchlines, and I See You does not disappoint. Agarwal is almost scarily beautiful in her screen debut — Rampal said in an interview on the DVD that they were looking specifically for a newcomer — and the supporting cast seems to be having a good time, especially Michael Maloney as Inspector John Smith, who’s properly suspicious throughout and never once says “What’s all this then?”

Is I See You as good as Just Like Heaven? I think so. But I have to dock it points for concealing its origins.

(Review copy acquired by me at retail.)

Late last year I happened upon a writeup of a new film from India, and the pitch went something like this:

I See You is the film in question that has a unique storyline of a man falling in love with a woman who can be seen only by him. While Arjun plays the male lead, Vipasha is the newcomer heroine who plays a beautiful young ‘n’ charming lady opposite him. A feel good popcorn entertainer that is going to get a smile on your lips and an occasional tear in the eye, I See You marks the directorial debut of Vivek Agrawal.

I filed this away for future reference, and then forgot about it.

Some months later, I was talking up doomed romances at work — that is, while at work I was talking up doomed romances, not some other way around — and Trini suggested Just Like Heaven, starring long-standing crush object Reese Witherspoon. I saw it and pronounced it good; what’s more, I sought out, and eventually obtained, a copy of its source material, a novel by Marc Levy called If Only It Were True. (My kind of title, you have to admit.)

Earlier today, I spotted I See You on Amazon.com (no, not one of those damn downloads), and the first of two reviewers pointed out distinct similarities between this film and Just Like Heaven.

The second reviewer was a distinctly-unhappy Marc Levy:

Vivek Agrawal has completely stole the story from [my book]. It’s really amazing that not only he stole the story, dialogues of the book (even the name of the dog in the movie is the same than in the book) and still put his name in the credit as a writer!

Levy, at least, got paid for Just Like Heaven. I have no idea if he got paid for an earlier Bollywood film based on the same story, titled Vismayathumbathu.

(Adapted from this post at a sister site.)

When I was a kid, I wasn’t exactly glued to the phonograph, but I never got too far away from it either. In 1965 (not quite twelve) I’d started buying those magical little plastic wafers, and while the newest stuff was always to be found at the Big Stores, there was much joy to be had browsing through the obscurities, not least because they were often cheaper. One common discount-store practice was to bundle three singles, carefully placing one I might actually have heard of on the outside of the package, and letting the lot go for a buck. I picked up lots of old Motown map-label singles that way.

Spiegel, the Chicago mail-order house, offered record players in several price ranges, and during this period they offered bundles of 45s for cheap; I remember snagging a pack of twenty-five, complete with incredibly-shoddy cardboard carrying case, for something like $4.99. To my despair, there were only twenty-four different titles in the pack: for some reason, they’d thrown in two copies of Wand 171, Nella Dodds’ “Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers” b/w “A Girl’s Life,” one of which I bestowed upon my sister.

I knew Wand, vaguely: they were a corporate cousin to Scepter, and the Kingsmen had wound up there. The Dodds record sounded nothing like the Kingsmen, though: this was soulful stuff, somewhere between girl groups and Motown, and it stuck in my head for several decades despite the fact that I’d never heard it on the radio.

Once Al Gore got around to inventing the Internet, I went hunting down other Dodds sides, which turned out to be not so easy a task: she’d become a favorite of the Northern Soul fans in England, and the six singles she’d cut for Wand were commanding big bucks in the collectors’ market. I wished I’d held on to that second copy of “Finders,” which, it turned out, was her second single: the first had been a cover of the Supremes’ “Come See About Me,” an album track (from Where Did Our Love Go) that hadn’t been scheduled for a single release on its own. “Come See About Me” got airplay on the East Coast, and eventually word of it got back to Berry Gordy, Jr., who wasn’t going to stand for this sort of thing and put out the Supremes’ version in a hurry, despite the fact that “Baby Love” had been released just last month and was still making chart noise. Diana and company got their third consecutive Number One; poor Nella was cut off at the knees.

I covered a lot of this territory in my Single File review of “Finders Keepers”, but I’m mentioning it here because at long last, the wizards at England’s Ace Records have gone through the Scepter/Wand vault and reissued on CD all six of Nella’s singles, both A and B sides, plus three previously unreleased tracks. As usual with Ace, the documentation is superb, and from it I learned not only what she looked like (rrowr) but that I shouldn’t even be looking (when she cut those first sides she was not yet fifteen years old). And you may have seen her anyway: she has a Bacon number of 2.

Ramón Salazar’s 20 Centimeters, just to balance all its plot complications, assumes the frenetic pace of those people spinning plates on the tops of poles on the Ed Sullivan Show to the accompaniment of the Sabre Dance from Khachaturian’s Gayane. Certainly Salazar has loaded plenty on his plate: Marieta (Mónica Cervera) is a hooker and a pre-op M2F transsexual and a narcoleptic. What’s more, every time she nods off she has fantasies somewhere on the continuum between high-budget music videos and low-budget Hollywood musicals, and, oh, did I mention she lives with a dwarf who wants to learn the cello? You’d expect this to have a high WTF quotient, and of course it does, but it’s just insane enough to work.

Not as angry as Hedwig and the Angry Inch and a lot more European than Transamerica, 20 Centimeters fits into no particular niche: it’s a romantic comedy, maybe, but it’s also rather gritty in a dreamlike sort of way, as though Scorsese had been working for the old Arthur Freed unit at MGM, and there’s far more in the way of punchlines than I expected. The musical numbers are somewhere between wacky and wondrous, and my old rule of thumb — really drippy love songs work better in Spanish than in English — is seriously put to the test, especially when one Spanish-language number drifts imperceptibly into “I Only Want to Be With You.” The only real misfire is the finale, which is set up beautifully but which is choreographed to too earnest a version of Queen’s “I Want to Break Free,” and while Cervera is game, she succeeds mostly in reminding us how much we miss Freddie Mercury.

The title? Well, Marieta is every inch a woman, except for, um, eight inches. (Do the math.) As a motion-picture epic, it ranks somewhere below, say, Fellini’s 8½; as the answer to the question “What would you get if Pedro Almodóvar decided to remake Grease?” it’s very good indeed.

(Disclosure: Reviewed from DVD purchased by me.)

Artist Sandow Birk, it seems, had stumbled across an old copy of Dante’s 14th-century Divine Comedy, with illustrations by Gustave Doré. At some point Birk noted that Doré’s engravings, while true to Dante’s story, inevitably reflected a mid-19th-century sensibility as well, and maybe it’s just possible to update the tale enough to reflect life at the beginning of the 21st. Working with writer Marcus Sanders, Birk, over a three-year period, completed the entire Comedy in three (of course) volumes, each presented as an art exhibition alongside his original drawings.

Sean Meredith knew Sandow Birk: the director had translated Birk’s In Smog and Thunder, a tale of a Civil War between Northern and Southern California, into a 45-minute film back in 2003. And the Inferno, the first section of Dante’s trilogy, seemed a natural. But a full-fledged CGI epic would cost zillions. Paul Zaloom, who had worked with Birk and Meredith on the Smog and Thunder project, and who knows puppets as well as anyone, suggested that the film be done in the style of Victorian “toy theatre,” which would require a few hundred puppets but which could use Birk’s drawings as sets.

Dante’s Inferno, the film, premiered at Slamdance this past winter, and if you were wondering if the contemporary references mar the story, the answer is no: the original structure of the Inferno is not tampered with, and the punishments, updates notwithstanding, still are designed to fit the sins. And the look of it is simply marvelous: the fact that you’re viewing a bunch of cardboard cutouts mounted on sticks doesn’t occur to you at all after the first couple of minutes, and Birk’s drawings on the big screen are, well, fiendishly clever. James Cromwell is the voice of Virgil, and he conveys wisdom, world-weariness, and occasional irritation, just as he should; Dermot Mulroney’s Dante, appropriately, manages to sound simultaneously headstrong and scared spitless. It’s a marvelous piece of work, gritty yet somehow uplifting; it was the last screening I caught at deadCENTER, and I can’t think of a better finish to a splendid festival.