Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I hope your week is going well, you're maybe checking out a movie as the theaters re-open (we quite liked Black Widow, which was a little deeper than I expected about family and survivor's guilt).  So let's all all pull up a chair and we can chat about what I found at the stores this weekend.

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An update from last week, where I have been informed that Pump Up The Volume, while still not streaming anywhere, is now available on blu-ray from Warner Archive.  So no special features, but apparently a very good transfer.  I can't recommend it enough as an exceedingly 1988 movie.

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What a weird coincidence finding this piece of 1987.  I just had my first checkup in a while and well, there's a bit of middle-age spread going on and my doctor recommended trying the Mediterranean diet.  And hey, wine and pasta and olive oil and seafood with the occasional red meat?  I'm down for that.  And hey, a recipe for seafood paella.  (I love a good paella; there's a place called rustico in our neighborhood that makes it and serves it in a skillet and it's fantastic.)

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Playboy magazine obviously and rightfully has an extremely complicated cultural history, not to mention a more personal history for a lot of people who came into contact with it.  Is this a justification I'm making for picking up this collection of how Playboy for a long time was the most influential publisher of genre fiction?  Saturday Evening Post and New Yorker had the mainsstream markets, but if you were a Stephen King or a Ray Bradbury or Kurt Vonnegut trying to break out of publishing in some of the sleazier markets (King has talked about how he doesn't have a lot of his early publications because the magazines simply ceased to exist) Playboy was the market for you.  It definitely didn't hurt that Alice K. Turner, the long-time fiction editor for Playboy, had some amazing taste.  The major problem of this collection though is just how male it is.  There's only one woman author here; but then, it's Doris K. Lessing, the only science fiction author to win the Nobel.  But geez, the authors in this; Joe Haldeman and Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick and Donald Westlake and Damon Knight and so on.  It's a ridiculously good collection.

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Back in the day when I worked at Barnes & Noble, they would have a section of what was called Books On Books.  I grew to love that whole little genre of people writing about their love of books, or writing, or collecting books.  And this is one I read back in the back then, written by a husband and wife who discover their mutual love of book collecting.  It's a lovely book (with a sequel, Slightly Chipped) about collecting and loving books without the crazy revering that some have, like book thieves.

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Do I own the earlier edition of this?  Sure.

But really, everyone needs to see Yojimbo.  It's Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune at the height of their powers in a tale of a wandering ronin who comes to a small town with two bands of mobsters extorting the townspeople....and immediately tries to figure out how to turn this to his advantage.

"How can I con these yokels?"

It's been adapted a ton of times, most notably as the Sergio Leone movie A Fistful Of Dollars (an unauthorized adaptation that Kurosawa and film studio Toho successfully sued over).  Very, very much worth checking out if you've never seen it and a great example of how a lot of the samurai dramas were also quite funny.

That soundtrack is killer, right?

Yojimbo is available from the Criterion Collection and is currently streaming on HBO Max.

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Finally, a new feature: my Recommendation of the Week!   Pig is a new release starring Nicholas Cage in his best performance in years (and I was a big fan of Mandy and Mom & Dad) as well as being the directorial debut for editor Michael Sarnoski.  Cage plays a loner outside of Portland living with his truffle-seeking pig, the pig gets stolen....and I don't want you to know anything more before seeing this.  It goes to places and moods that I definitely was not expecting and I welcomed.  I think it's definitely one of the best of the year.  I fully understand if you're not comfortable going back to the theater yet but if you are this is worth the trip.