I finally saw Sin City the other night. It was enjoyable, but far from the great movie that I expected from other people’s reviews. My major concern going into the movie was that it would not be “comic booky” enough, but actually that was the part that they did best. The real problem is the fact that Frank Miller is stuck in the early 90s. There was tremendous progression in Miller’s early work from Daredevil to Ronin to Dark Knight. Since then, he has basically stagnated. Something the movie made far too clear.

I just finished reading Drive by James Sallis. Midway through the book, a character asks, “Where’s Marlowe’s apartment?” That about sums up the book. Although Sallis dedicates the book to McBain, Westlake and Block, it is an extended play on the work of Raymond Chandler. Unfortunately, it evokes Chandler’s later confused work, when he was writing while drunk, rather than his best work like “The Long Goodbye.” If you admire Chandler, avoid this book, and instead pick up Gun, With Occasional Music by Johathan Lethem. Lethem’s book can be read profitably more than once. Sallis’s is merely good to occupy a couple of hours.

this month, that I first used a computer. It was in a school computer lab, and it was a DEC PDP-7. No video terminal, just endless streams of perforated paper. The language we learned was Basic, and when I look at my code, I sometimes get the feeling that I never really got past that. Anyway, if you had told me then,that I would still be working with computers, I never would have believed it.