| Mon | Tues | Wed | Thur | Fri | Sat | Sun | Total | Avg | |
| Pageloads | 144 | 168 | 175 | 231 | 207 | 206 | 165 | 1,296 | 185 |
| Unique Visitors | 119 | 135 | 123 | 172 | 132 | 132 | 134 | 947 | 135 |
| First Time Visitors | 98 | 106 | 97 | 147 | 107 | 108 | 114 | 777 | 111 |
| Returning Visitors | 21 | 29 | 26 | 25 | 25 | 24 | 20 | 170 | 24 |
As printed in The Independent Newspaper:
1. His middle name is Elias; he was born on 31 May 1930.
2. His nickname among nurses was Samson: at birth he weighed an eye-watering 12lb 6oz.
3. He should be called Clint Jnr, as he is named after his steelworker dad.
4. Drafted into the army aged 20, he managed to spend the Korean War poolside as an army swimming instructor.
5. Clint claims to have never sworn in front of a woman.
6. Despite spending half his career in the saddle, he is allergic to horses.
7. He has directed 32 films – more than Steven Spielberg or George Lucas.
8. A late bloomer, 10 of these were released in the past decade.
9. Clint met swimsuit model Maggie Johnson on a blind date in June 1953; they married six months later.
10. They divorced in 1984, nine years after separating.
11. Despite his Dirty Harry films, Clint has been very critical of violence in the movies.
12. He intended to study music before being drafted into the US army.
13. Eastwood has 109 film awards, including four Oscars, five Palme d'Ors and two Golden Globes.
14. Gran Torino is the only film in which Eastwood's character is shot dead. The Beguiled (by poison) and Honkytonk Man (tuberculosis) are the only other films in which Clint's character bites the dust.
15. He lost his virginity at 14 and has been called a "serial womaniser".
16. Spike Lee accused him of not casting enough black actors in Flags of Our Fathers. A spat ensued, Clint pleaded historical accuracy.
17. American feminist magazine Bust praised him, however, for casting female actresses in traditionally male roles.
18. In 1954, he auditioned for the lead in The Seven Year Itch but lost out to Tom Ewell who went on to star opposite Marilyn Monroe.
19. His first (uncredited) movie appearance came a year later, in Revenge of the Creature.
20. His only line was: "I've lost my white mouse."
21. In the 1950s, he was the face of Maxim Coffee.
22. He was first choice to play Charles Bronson's part as Harmonica in Sergio Leone's 1968 epic Once Upon a Time in the West, but turned it down.
23. Clint was, at one time, believed to be a vegan.
24. But he denied this, saying: "That's why I don't look at the internet."
25. Customers can tuck into hog's baby back ribs at his Hog's Breath restaurant in the seaside town of Carmel, California, where he lives.
26. He has been known to spend Friday nights manning the restaurant's barbecue.
27. In a 1959 issue of TV Guide, Clint advised readers to "always eat plenty of fruit, vegetables and vitamins and always avoid drinking excess alcohol".
28. Before he hit the big time, he made his living digging swimming pools.
29. Eastwood was also a paper carrier, forest fire-fighter, golf caddy, gas station attendant and bar room piano player.
30. He recites the Greek alphabet to calm his nerves.
31. Harry Callahan's line, "Go ahead, make my day" from Sudden Impact (1983), is the sixth most memorable movie quote ever.
32. Clint successfully ran for mayor of Carmel to overturn a law banning public ice-cream eating.
33. He stood down after one term.
34. An attempt at pop stardom bombed after his 1961 debut single "Unknown Girl" failed to enter the charts.
35. He was so appalled at his performance in Ambush at Cimarron Pass in 1958 that he almost quit acting.
36. In 1976, he called Richard Nixon's handling of the Vietnam War "immoral".
37. That didn't stop him being a card-carrying Republican who supported both presidential campaigns for Richard Nixon.
38. Clint has also supported the Democrats.
39. Director Arthur Lubin first spotted him in 1954, recalling him as "a soft, awkward, hayseed type".
40. His character in the Fistful of Dollars trilogy constantly smokes a cheroot – an unpleasant experience for the militant non-smoker.
41. He has practised Transcendental Meditation every morning for more than two decades.
42. He was the owner of the US's largest bluegum eucalyptus. A taller tree was discovered in 2002.
43. Meryl Streep claimed his Bridges of Madison County filmset was the quietest she'd ever worked on.
44. In 1958, executives at Universal Studios fired Eastwood for having a distractingly large Adam's apple.
45. Eastwood swam three miles to safety after he was in a military air crash in the Pacific Ocean in 1951.
46. His most famous singing role is in 1969's Paint Your Wagon.
47. Since 2002, Eastwood has campaigned against hunting.
48. In 2007, France honoured Eastwood with the Légion d'Honneur.
49. His heritage is English, Irish, Scottish and Dutch.
50. Clint's big break came in 1959 when he was cast as Rowdy Yates in the TV western series Rawhide.
51. He even recorded an album – Rawhide's Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favourites, in 1962.
52. Eastwood married anchorwoman Dina Ruiz – 35 years his junior – in 1996.
53. They met when the 28-year-old Dina interviewed the 63-year-old Clint.
54. Clint and the cast were so cash-strapped on the 1964 movie A Fistful of Dollars that they made their own costumes.
55. Eastwood was fifth choice for the role of The Man With No Name, after Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Ty Hardin, James Coburn and Richard Harrison.
56. He's not been out of work since.
57. It was Harrison who recommended Clint as a cheap actor who could play a cowboy.
58. Harrison later said that turning down the role and recommending Eastwood was his greatest contribution to cinema.
59. Clint still describes himself as a shy kid.
60. Clint retired from acting after 2008's Gran Torino.
61. He learned to play the piano by imitating records.
62. He wrote the love theme, "Doe Eyes", from The Bridges of Madison County for his wife Dina.
63. Chopin is one of his biggest musical influences.
64. In 2005, Clint agreed to supply the voice for a Dirty Harry video game.
65. His favourite food is sushi.
66. He used to play the flugelhorn.
67. His favourite exercise is on a less-than-manly cross-trainer.
68. As a child, his family moved around a lot because his father had to look for work during the Great Depression.
69. All that house-moving left him so lonely that he invented imaginary friends.
70. He loved Freddy the Pig stories about talking barnyard animals.
71. During the Rawhide years Clint cashed in by performing with other cast members at rodeos for as much as $15,000 a time.
72. He is a stolid admirer of Winston Churchill.
73. His passion for jazz led to the 1988 film Bird, about saxophonist Charlie Parker.
74. He had a tempestuous 14-year relationship with Sondra Locke, with whom he co-starred in six films.
75. The actor, famous for wielding a 44 Magnum, supports gun control.
76. He has seven children with five different women.
77. His oldest son, Kyle, was born in 1968. Morgan, his youngest, in 1996.
78. He co-wrote a hit single, "Why Should I Care", for Diana Krall.
79. He sings the closing song in Gran Torino.
80. He has 164 movie credits as a writer, director, actor, producer and composer.
Veteran actor-and-director Clint Eastwood prefers being behind the camera as he is ''tired'' of seeing himself on screen.
Clint Eastwood has "become tired" of seeing himself on the big screen.
The actor-and-director - who will turn 80 on May 31st - prefers to stay behind the camera and allow younger stars to take centre stage, but insists he has no plans to quit acting altogether.
He said: "I leave that to younger a
ctors now. I'm not a prize fighter who has to capture another victory. Since I worked as a director for the first time on 'Play Misty for Me' in 1970 I've become tired of seeing myself on the big screen.
"That doesn't mean I'm going to stop acting, though"
The 'Million Dollar Baby' star is still determined to try new things, and believes directing films gives him more opportunities to push himself.
He told Germany's Tele 5 TV station: "If you've done as many films as I have you stop looking back, you're only going forwards.
"As a director it's important to me to try new things once in a while. And as an actor, if a film is finished you can't change it and you have to leave it to other people to judge your work."
he could swoop down out of the sky and take out the punks! Don't worry if you don't remember - it wasn't a deleted scene from any of the Harry movies but rather comes from book 5 in the Dirty Harry novel series by Dane Hartman, Family Skeletons.
y of more than 1,000 men in India has concluded that condoms made according to international sizes are too large for a majority of Indian men. The study found that more than half of the men measured had penises that were shorter than international standards for condoms. It has led to a call for condoms of mixed sizes to be made more widely available in India.
Now personally I don't find this funny at all because in Wales we find that condoms are too small for Welsh men. So the Archive fully supports condoms being made in differing sizes.
to wobble - The Dead Pool had finally turned fans off Dirty Harry, Pink Cadillac and The Rookie were simply dreadful. And to add insult Clint's brilliant, White Hunter, Black Heart had failed at the box-office. The Unforgiven would regenerate a career that many thought was over. Indeed in many ways his latter career has surpassed that of his early years.
ying sides of the same character. Compare the first shots of Eastwood we see in each movie - in High Plains Drifter we see him riding out of a sun hazed, devilish looking landscape, whilst in Pale Rider he comes out of a much more heavenly landscape, seemingly in answer to a young girl's prayers. In High Plains Drifter Eastwood may be Satan personified whilst in Pale Rider is he very much a force of good.
the town red (literally), renames it Hell, deputises a dwarf and basically wreck havoc in his quest for revenge, while in Pale Rider he goes up against a big conglomerate thus allow the smaller miners to make their stakes. There is a truly effective moment in Pale Rider where a young girl is reading a passage from the Bible aloud at the dinner table and as she mentions the fourth horseman, Eastwood's Preacher rides past the window.
week - I only wish that were true. However A Policeman's Lot (out next month) was actually completed in the first draft almost two years ago and Arkansas Smith which came out this March was also a year old by the time it saw print. Today I received an offer from Hale for my next Jack Martin Black Horse title - The Ballad of Delta Rose will see print sometime in 2011.
assured follow up to both Tarnished Star and Arkansas Smith.
e and son are killed by Union Guerrillas (Redlegs) he joins the Confederates and becomes a one man killing machine. When the war ends Josey's unit surrenders but he refuses and then witnesses his unit wiped out by Redlegs under the command of Captain Terrill - Wales then goes crazy with a Gatling gun.Clint Eastwood As Rowdy Yates In Rawhide
Clint Eastwood had been appearing in films and television shows since the mid-1950s, but his breakthrough role was as Rowdy Yates on the television series Rawhide. So when it came time for Clint to record an album, it was only natural that he should turn to western music rather than rock 'n' roll.
The album opens with "Bouquet Of Roses." Clint's voice is smoother than one might imagine it being. While there is nothing particularly intriguing or compelling about his voice, Clint is a completely competent singer. And his voice totally fits the feel of this record. Most of the tunes, like "Bouquet Of Roses," are mellow and sweet.
In songs like "Along The Sante Fe Trail," Clint is going for an authentic old western feel, complete with sad-sounding harmonica. "The Last Round Up" was written by Billy Hill, and had been a hit for Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby in 1933. Clint Eastwood does a very nice version of it.
John Wayne became a screen legend as the man of action; Jimmy Stewart became one as the man of conscience too paralyzed to act; Clint Eastwood did it as the man of action pricked by conscience. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) made him an international star. Thematically, the good, the bad and the difference made him a movie icon.
Having spent 60 years as an actor and 40 as a director, on Memorial Day Mr. Eastwood celebrates his 80th birthday. Over a career where his co-stars have included Ginger Rogers, Tyne Daly, Meryl Streep and Hilary Swank (oh yeah, and Eli Wallach , Gene Hackman and Morgan Freeman, too!) the guy Life magazine called "Squint" Eastwood quietly disproved the conventional wisdom that there are no second acts in American lives.
By Flickgrrl's count, thus far professionally Mr. E -- Flickgrrl cannot call him Clint, although he has asked her to -- has enjoyed four unusually rich acts.
Act I: As the situational ethicist of spaghetti Westerns such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) where The Man With No Name (whose name was actually Joe) blazed a radically middle path between two warring clans. FULL STORY
ery excited to see this book finally in print and hope that readers everywhere will enjoy it. The book will also be available later in a print format.
lived, breathed and had all the human strengths and weaknesses. I wanted to reflect that in my characterisation of the great man.Stephen Griffiths, a mature student at Bradford University, is being questioned by police over the killings of Susan Rushworth, 43, Shelley Armitage, 31, and Suzanne Blamires, 36, pictured, three prostitutes who worked in Bradford’s red light district and went missing over the past year.
Police found parts of a woman’s body in a river on Tuesday after calls from members of the public. It is understood that a severed head was discovered in a rucksack.
West Yorkshire police were last night checking missing persons files. It was reported that they were investigating three more unsolved murders possibly linked to the case. Mr Griffiths, 40, who is studying criminal justice, specialising in homicide, is a postgraduate student with a degree in psychology.
The bachelor lives in Bradford’s red light district. One neighbour said he would walk around in a long black leather coat and boast he was doing a “PhD in Jack the Ripper”.
On a social networking website, there is an entry under his alleged alter-ego of “Ven Pariah” saying he is “the misanthrope who brought hate into heaven”.
It is understood that Mr Griffiths was detained after detectives studied CCTV footage from the city centre over the weekend, when Miss Blamires went missing.
Separate searches for all the missing women had been continuing throughout Bradford but until yesterday police refused to link them.
Miss Rushworth was the first to go missing, on June 22 last year. She spent the previous evening with her family in Thornton before returning to her bedsit in Manningham.
Ebooks, along with dozens of other forms of digital goods, used to be hot sellers on eBay. Buyers loved them because they could purchase and download the item instantly, and sellers loved them because they could sell as many as they wanted without enduring any additional costs. EBay decided to change the rules, however, and now digital goods are no longer permitted to be sold through auctions. But you can still sell your ebooks on eBay – without breaking the rules.
Most modern home computers come standard with a CD burner. If you have purchased your computer within the last five years, chances are, you have a burner. Using this one piece of equipment, you can keep selling ebooks on eBay and still be within their restrictions. Instead of selling ebooks for digital download, you can burn each ebook onto a new CD, and mail them to your buyers.
Burning your ebooks onto a CD may seem like a setback, but it’s really not. For starters, blank CD’s are incredibly cheap, and you can pick them up just about anywhere – including Wal-Mart. The shipping costs for mailing a CD are incredibly low, especially if you utilize media post. So your buyer doesn’t have to pay that much more to have the item shipped to them, and you don’t have to spend that much more to burn the ebook onto a CD. And, you can still sell as many ebooks as you want; your only limit is how many blank CD’s you can get your hands on.
Besides the low costs, your buyers will actually be better off with buying ebooks on a CD. In the past, when a buyer decided to upgrade their computer or lost their files to corruption, they lost their ebooks along with it. That would mean they either had to repurchase the ebook – if it was even still available – or be out the money they spent. This can’t happen with a CD; buyers will have a hard copy of their ebook, will be able to make copies of their CD, and can keep on using it for years to come.
If you sell more than one ebook on eBay, you can cut down on costs by adding multiple purchases to one CD. If you have a buyer who purchases three of your ebooks, for instance, you can put all three ebooks on one CD instead of creating three separate ones. This is another convenience factor for your buyers, as well.
The ban on selling digital items on eBay has caused a lot of sellers to abandon the idea of selling ebooks. With less sellers marketing ebooks on eBay, you have far less competition on eBay than ever before. And by using CD’s to sell your ebooks, you won’t be breaking eBay’s rules, and you’ll be offering your buyers something tangible to keep their ebooks safe at the same time. Take advantage of the opportunity to make big money with your own home business on eBay by selling ebooks, and you’ll never look back!
"I like seeing Clint enter a restaurant."
That's how veteran movie writer Richard Schickel begins his fascinating new book about Clint Eastwood.
"Or wait — let me refine that statement — I like NOT seeing him enter a restaurant."
To put it another way, "He seems to know all the side doors in town." New
nce the Leone epics - Hang em High starts with a homage to the classic The Ox-Bow Incident in which Jed Cooper is strung up for rustling even although he has been tricked and thought he'd bought the cattle at a good price, not realising that the seller had actually rustled the animals."Pandigital Novel users can easily access their existing Barnes & Noble digital content," said bookseller exec Chris Peifer, "and enjoy sharing a wide variety of eBooks with friends through innovative [beta] LendMe technology — whether or not those friends have a dedicated eBook reader." LendMe allows you to pass an ebook off to a friend or colleague for up to two weeks, although — just like a physical book — you don't have access to it while the other person is borrowing it.
Despite its name, the Novel isn't merely an EPUB and PDF e-reader. It has 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi for email and web browsing (a virtual touchscreen keyboard is provided), plays music and video and displays photos. Other apps include an alarm clock and a calendar. Files can be transferred to Mac or PC over a mini-USB port.
Use the included stand for video watching and alarm clocking
Built-in storage is a measly 1GB, but there's a SD/MMC slot that will accept cards of up to 32GB. The whole shebang weighs one pound (0.45kg), and Pandigital claims that battery life is up to six hours when reading. Undoubtedly, it's noticeably shorter when performing such CPU-intensive tasks as watching video. That CPU, by the way, is the tried-and-true ARM11.
Normally, we wouldn't be all that interested in yet another addition to the growing ranks of e-readers, but Pandigital's partnership with Barnes & Noble earns the Novel a second look. But until we can get our hands on one, we can only look at its specs.
And from those specifications we see a device that — on paper, at least — appears to be worth its low price. It won't be as easy to read in the sun as a Kindle or Nook, but it does have a reverse-image mode for night reading, while the Kindle and Nook get more difficult to read after the sun goes down. Also, the Novel can switch between portrait and landscape mode, a trick neither the Kindle nor the Nook are capable of.
Pandigital didn't get back to us with answers to our questions as to whether the touchscreen display is of the less-responsive resistive type or the more-responsive capacitive type used in, for example, the iPad, and whether the TFT LCD uses either IPS or AFFS technology to improve viewing angles. But at $199.99 we're going to assume resistive and no IPS or AFFS until we learn otherwise.
Battery life isn't great, especially when compared with the Kindle and Nook, which can run seemingly forever without recharging. But it's more colorful and versatile than those dedicated monochrome e-readers, and at a price point so low that it's almost an impulse buy for the gadget-crazed.
If, that is, it lives up to its specs.
an anti-Dirty Harry movie. Clint's character Ben Shockley is a washed out cop - the first real shot of him reveals his drinking problem when a empty bottle of Jack Daniels drops from his car as he stumbles out of the driving seat.
oody exciting all the same.
final few miles, in a heavy armoured bus, Eastwood realises that the entire police department are out to stop them.To mark the 40th anniversary of the release of Let It Be, and the accompanying Academy Award-winning film (both rele
ased in May 1970), Guy Garvey tells the story of the fractious and often bitter sessions that documented the demise of The Beatles.
Featuring contributions from many of those who worked on the Let It Be sessions, including director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, engineer Alan Parsons, photographer Ethan Russell, author Richard DiLello and engineers Dave Harries and Brian Gibson, this programme explains how a project (originally a TV documentary, titled Get Back, which was designed to re-energise the band and capture their stripped down rock'n'roll roots), instead documented power struggles, bickering and conflict.
The project was perhaps doomed from the start. Paul McCartney's original suggestion was for the group to play three shows, which he hoped would refocus and invigorate the band after the tensions experienced during the recording of the White Album. When this plan failed to materialise, the idea evolved into a worldwide broadcast of a live concert.
Paul decided that the rehearsals should be filmed for a documentary that would promote the live broadcast and they began at Twickenham Studios on 2 January 1969. Everyone involved in the rehearsals considered them to be disastrous. Harrison was increasingly resentful because he felt his songs were either derided or ignored; Paul's attempts to hold the band together and rally spirits came across as controlling; John had all but withdrawn creatively, seldom contributing even to the arrangements of his own songs; and Yoko Ono - who often spoke on John's behalf as he sat silently by - was a major source of tension.
The intrusive film cameras and the cold, unfamiliar settings of Twickenham Studios contributed to the ill feeling. Fed up with John's creative and communicative disengagement, George announced that he was leaving the band. He went to Eric Clapton's house, where he wrote Here Comes The Sun, but within a few days he was persuaded to return to the group.
After three weeks of filming, the band were still unable to agree on a location for the proposed concert, so Michael Lindsay-Hogg suggested they stage an impromptu performance on the rooftop of their Apple headquarters. The live performance took place on 30 January in front of a small audience of friends and employees but it was short by the police after complaints about noise. Filming continued the following day and then no further work was carried out on the project until March, when John and Paul called engineer Glyn Johns to EMI and offered him free rein to produce an album from the recordings.
By Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais, adapted by Lizzie Nunnery
December 1980. When just forty people turn up to John Lennon's memorial service in Liverpool, his old friend and promoter Sam Leach is forced to act.
film critic is brutally slain. Clint was thinking of Pauline Kael, his harshest critic - It was Kale who, when critiquing the first Dirty Harry (1971) film, accused Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood of making a "fascist" and "racist" film. The critic in this film is made up to resemble Kale as she appeared during this film's release as an in-joke. Pauline Kael was a critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991.
'Dirty Harry is a remarkably single minded attack on liberal values, with each prejudicial detail in place. When you're making a film with Clint Eastwood you want things to be simple, and the basic concept of good versus evil is as simple as you can get. This film is more primitive than most, more primitive and dreamlike; fascist medievalism." - On Dirty Harry.
"Clint Eastwood isn't offensive; he isn't an actor, so one could hardly call him a bad actor. One would have to do something before he could be considered an actor at all." On Magnum Force.
Harsh words indeed - but then Kael also lambasted The Outlaw Josey Wales, so perhaps she wasn't the best person to be judging these movies. However that didn't stop her detesting The Enforcer though giving Tyne Daley some grudging praise.
"Daley's performance is very warm and makes Eastwood's holy cool seem more aberrant than ever."
These days the Oscar winning actor can laugh off these old review, but Eastwood was known to get upset by Kale's reviews,
bemoaning to friend that she didn't understand what he was doing. And it's true - Josey Wales in particular is a beautiful elegiac movie with bags of heart, but Kael just saw an over violent western with no humour. Maybe she slipped into the wrong screening by mistake.
"The opposite of sophisticated movie-making. Clint seems to be trying to blast through his own lack of courage as an actor." On Tightrope.
The critic in her famous speech at a festival in 1976 link Eastwood to what she called, The Veitnamization of American movies. Later that year Dr Ronald Lowell presented an article in the Los Angeles Times in which he attacked Kael and actually said she thought the opposite of what she actually said. And Clint also fired back, stating that Kael used cynical times to label him simplistic. 'She found an avenue that was going to make her a star,' Eastwood said in an interview. 'I was just one of many subjects who helped her along the way.'
"Excruciatingly bad. Clint is a perfectly atrocious director." On Bird
"A psychopathic version of the old Saturday Morning Serials." On Sudden Impact.
Even after retirement Kael continued to hit out at Eastwood, saying that the Museum of Modern Art should be ashamed for showing retrospectives in his honour. She also said critics had been hogwashed on The Unforgiven and that it was another western where you were a pacifist until you had to start shooting. After that not much more was heard from the critic who had now fully retired but she would continue to bemoan the state of cinema privately until her death in 2001.
Archive and The Clint Eastwood Project. Both are equally well written and interesting. Another site well worth visiting is The Clint Eastwood Net - This unofficial site contains a great discussion board as well as pages and pages of Eastwood information. The Clint Eastwood DVD site is an official site from Warners advertising the brilliant 35 film box set. And there is also an official site for Clint's newest movie, Invictus. And there are a fun bunch of Eastwood quotes HERE.
The carpet outside wasn’t quite red, but there were plenty of sequins, plunging necklines, and faux-casual acceptance speeches last night when about a hundred publishing types gathered at a club in the Meatpacking District for the 2010 Moby Awards for book trailers.
Book trailers have emerged in recent years as an important part of book marketing, though how much the often ingenious (and expensive) videos help to sell books is anybody’s guess.
The roster of nominees included some impressive literary and extraliterary firepower, though many of the nominees — including Thomas Pynchon, up for Best Performance by an Author for his voiceover in the trailer for “Inherent Vice” — didn’t show.
Zach Galifianakis, who was not in the crowd, won the award for Best Cameo for his searing portrayal of John Wray in the trailer for Wray’s novel “Lowboy.” (Wray — who was also, suspiciously, the presenter for the award — played Galifianakis.)
Dennis Cass won Best Performance by an Author for the hilarious and much-forwarded “Book Launch 2.0,” which on closer inspection turns out to have been meant to promote his memoir “Head Case.” (Current number of views on YouTube: 66,066. Current Amazon ranking: #730,822.)
The award for Best Low Budget/Indie Book Trailer went to Kathryn Regina’s delightful “I Am in the Air Right Now,” while the mind-blowing stop-motion animation of Maurice Gee’s “Going West,” produced by the New Zealand Book Council, took home the prize for Best Big Budget/Big House trailer.
There were also special awards for Most Annoying Use of Klezmer Music, Biggest Waste of Conglomerate Money, Bloodiest, Bloodiest, Bloodiest Trailer (the low-budget underdog “Killer”) and Most Annoying Appearance by an Author. (That means you, Jonathan Safran Foer!)
The novelist and critic Dale Peck, who knows a thing or two about annihilating a book’s prospects, presented the award for Book Trailer Least Likely to Sell a Book to Patricia Rockwell’s “Sounds of Murder.” Mercifully, a technical glitch prevented him from playing it for the blood-thirsty crowd.
Dennis Johnson of Melville House and the MobyLives blog, which organized the event, also gave a special Golden Whale statuette — a gray whale, since the sperm whale cousins of Moby-Dick were all sold out at Toys “R” Us — for best foreign book trailer to the creators of “Etcetera and Otherwise,” a violently comic assault on Canadian literary lions done in a style that brings Margaret Atwood into a kind of north-of-the-border “South Park.” (Blame Canada indeed!)
That trailer also includes a line that itself deserves an award for Best Blurb: “This book decapitated Michael Ondaatje!”
