To Do 05.28.20

WATCH: Books

You might notice a media cross-pollination theme with this week’s To-Do List. Here, I suggest watching movies about books. Not film adaptations of books, not movies about authors – that’s too easy. These are movies about books; either one book, or books in general. 1) Start with Osio Theater, which is renting/streaming The Booksellers, a new documentary about antiquarian booksellers, their beloved bookshops, and the rare and historical books that they are custodians of. 2) Director Richard Linklater’s second film in his Before trilogy – 2004’s Before Sunset – is about a book that Ethan Hawke’s character wrote about his romance nine years prior (in the 1995 film Before Sunrise) with Julie Delpy’s character. 3) If you want light and airy, try Bridget Jones’s Diary or You’ve Got Mail. 5) If you’re up for dystopian and chilling, Francois Truffaut’s masterful Fahrenheit 451 is the smart choice. 6) And for a zany mobius loop revolving around Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, try Adaptation, adapted by Charlie Kaufman.

READ: Music

It’s good to be able to read musical notes, and maybe now’s a good time to teach yourself. But what I’m suggesting here is that you read books about music. Here are some recommendations of music genre books (as opposed to books about a single person or band). Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a deep survey of contemporary music composers of the 1900s, from Mahler to John Cage. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain does the same for early punk rock in the United States (where it began). British music journalist Syliva Patterson reviews her three decades of covering pop music’s biggest names in 2016’s I’m Not With the Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music. Bob Blumenthal’s Jazz: An Introduction to the History and Legends Behind America’s Music is a near definitive book that takes you from the early roots to the new born fruit. Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States by Kip Lornell is like a well-written text book, complete with suggested listening, reading and viewing.

LISTEN: To film

If you’re burned out on watching Netflix movies, try listening to podcasts about film. Luis Camara, chair of CSUMB’s Cinematic Arts and Technology Department, recommends two. One is FilmSpotting, which he describes as “a weekly podcast [in which] two guys in Chicago talk about new movies – very different from Siskel and Ebert.” Episodes are about the length of a feature film, with a theme, interviews, discussion, retrospectives, re-enactments, and a Top 5. When they reviewed La La Land, they brought in an expert on musicals and compiled a Top 5 musical movies list. Camara’s other pick, which he calls “amazing,” is You Must Remember This, a deep and rigorous look back at, according to host Karina Longworth, “the secrets and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century.” Past episodes have covered the first Hollywood weight loss guru and the rise and fall of Hollywood’s blonde female icons. The new season launched on May 26 and investigates the story of Polly Platt, the anonymous secret weapon behind some of the most highly regarded films of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. youmustrememberthispodcast.com, filmspotting.net.