A Couple of Recommendations.

c. David Grim (taken 7/4/09)

This photograph really has nothing to do with what I wanted to write about today, but it's a fairly innocuous abstract that I enjoy, so I thought I'd include it anyway.

What I wanted to do was to give shout-outs for a couple of cultural artifacts that I've recently discovered.

It seems strange that I could have possibly missed Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation of S.E. Hinton's Rumble Fish during the 80's, especially given the fact that The Outsiders was one of my favorites as a teen. This intensely moody and stylized depiction of Tulsa kids getting in trouble definitely meets my criteria for celluloid art.

Starring Mickey Rourke, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Vincent Spano, and with notable appearances by Dennis Hopper, Lawrence Fishburne and Tom Waits, this is a movie to let wash over you with all of its sordid glory. I read somewhere that Coppola was inspired by Larry Clark's early photographic work of adolescents doing bad things, and I believe it.

Meanwhile, if you don't mind a lot of details about sailing, you could do a lot worse than to check out Jonathan Raban's "A Passage to Juneau", which mixes tales of Vancouver's explorations in the late 1700's with the author personal tragedies. While some of the arcana of the sea takes some patience to wade through, I found the book extremely well written and emotionally affecting.