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Stop reading if you’ve heard this before. In 1999 I sent myself to Melbourne to watch the Australian Open and discovered that the city was teeming with independent bookstores. New books, used books, out-of-print books, old periodicals. Shops were closed on Sundays—shopkeepers allowed to have lives, what a strange concept—but there was this cafe that had a library.

While having a latte, I picked up Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. Never read him before. Tranquil beginning. A man and a woman are having a picnic in an open field. There’s champagne. He’s going to propose to her. Then there’s a shout and suddenly the man is running. Four other men join him from other parts of the field. They’re running towards a big hot air balloon. In its basket is a boy, wailing. A man is clinging to the basket by a rope. A great gust of wind picks up the balloon. The men grab the lines to keep balloon and boy from floating away. The wind lifts them all up.

Two lattes later, I was an Ian McEwan fan. I had to go back to the hotel and pack, so I tried to buy the book but it wasn’t for sale. It wasn’t till I landed in Singapore airport the next day that I was able to buy some Ian McEwan books. (Enduring Love was the most thrilling part of the trip. The top seeds fell in the first week of the Open and the big story was Enqvist making it to the final. Kafelnikov won. Swedes dressed as Vikings roamed the bars and broke bottles on their heads. I saw Seles beat Graf easily. Hingis the winner said Mauresmo “played like a man”.)

Personally I classify McEwan’s books into Nasty and Nice. Nasty—terrible things happen, no one is saved, nearly everyone’s a shit. Nice—terrible things happen, but if people aren’t saved exactly, there’s an attempt at redemption and sympathy for the characters.

Nasty: First Love, Last Rites, In Between The Sheets, Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, Amsterdam, Black Dogs, The Innocent

Nice: Enduring Love, Saturday, Atonement, On Chesil Beach, The Child In Time

Nasty or nice, all his books are leavened with dread.

There’s a movie version of Enduring Love directed by Roger Michell and starring Daniel Craig, Samantha Morton, Rhys Ifans. Craig gets the character but is too sculpted to be a teacher. The balloon sequence is done well; the stalking of Craig by Ifans is occasionally risible. Ifans might’ve been more menacing if I hadn’t just seen him as the daffy roommate in Notting Hill, also by Michell.

Daniel Zalewski profiles Ian McEwan in the New Yorker. For someone who specializes in dread and unease, he sounds like a nice man. Thanks to Budj for the link.

Andy Warhol, Mickey Mouse

After the second world war artists were steeped in history and introspection. Art has never been more serious in its view of life than it was in the era of Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon. But even as modern painting reached such heights and depths, western society was going through an epochal transformation. The power of the capitalist economies in the postwar era was unprecedented in world history. An entirely new lifestyle, that of “consumerism”, was born.

Consumerism instantly inspired artists. Pop art in America and Britain took the surfaces of objects, the instant appearances of the new bright world, as its subject matter. Everywhere, emotional depth in art was censored. Abstract Expressionism had to die. Art could teach people to look at the world in a new way: to embrace the cool. Pop art taught everyone to enjoy money and the mass media and 1980s post-modernism taught the same lesson again.

How art killed our culture by Jonathan Jones.

Ooh, strong words. Discuss. I asked Leo Abaya of the UP College of Fine Arts to react to the piece: read his opinion in Comments.

I’ve been feeding the stray cats regularly for a few months, but they haven’t gotten any friendlier. They turn up at mealtimes and meow at the door, but they shrink away when I try to pet them. They want to stay feral, roam the neighborhood at will, hunt rats and insects. No domestication, they’re free agents.

In contrast Koosi my eldest cat happily abandoned the outdoor life the day we met. She has no interest in going out again. Saffy joined the household when she was one month old; she doesn’t like the outdoors. Mat is a different case. He was about a year old when he turned up outside my building; the guards said he’d jumped out of a moving car. When I saw him he immediately approached and allowed himself to be rubbed. I started leaving food for him at the guardhouse, then one day he turned up at our doorstep. He came in, took a tour of the apartment, pooped in the litterbox, ate some kibble while Koosi and Saffy leapt on top of a shelf and loudly protested the invasion. After that visit he would regularly invite himself in. Eventually he took to taking long naps on the couch. He never had trouble getting strangers to feed him—he’s the master of the adorable pitiful gaze—so the main attractions of living indoors are the rubdowns, the litterbox, and the couch which he has filleted with his claws.

Koosi, Saffy, and Mat all like being spoken to.

Taken with a phone camera at the Eheads reunion concert, 7 March 2009.

On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the “inside man” in a classic con game called the pigeon drop. A magician named Dan Harlan orchestrated it for a television series I co-hosted called Exploring the Unknown (type “Shermer, con games” into Google). Our pigeon was a man from whom I asked directions to the local hospital while Dan (the “outside man”) moved in and appeared to find a wallet full of cash on the ground. After it was established that the wallet belonged to neither of us and appeared to have about $3,000 in it, Dan announced that we should split the money three ways.

The Art of the Con by Michael Shermer in Scientific American.

“Con” is short for “confidence game”—success depends on whether the con artist has gained his mark’s confidence. The pigeon game figures in David Mamet’s excellent The House Of Games. Con artists exploit the greed of the mark; in the movie they rely on the mark’s sense of intellectual superiority. The psychiatrist (Lindsay Crouse) thinks she can read the charming con man (Joe Mantegna), but the con man reads her better. Ricky Jay the magician is a co-star and consultant, along with an actual con who is not identified.

Watching the movie again I got to thinking, Could I do that for a living? I sort of live by my wits, freelance writers have to, and there’s an element of the con in that. Naah, I’d probably burst out laughing during a crucial moment. Which of my friends could be a con? Ernie would turn the game into a musical and become so engrossed he’d forget that it’s all a con. Big Bird would view the mark as a tragic figure (he’s about to lose his money) and fall in love with him. Bert would focus on his breathing, which would lead to breathing problems. Kermit most likely, since he would explain everything to the mark in a rational manner that would allay any suspicion. Then he’d return the money and explain just what happened so there goes the con.

Another Mamet movie, The Spanish Prisoner, is based on the classic con game that goes by that name.

If you’re using an iPhone from Globe Telecom, there’s something you need to know about the default internet settings. Or else you could be merrily surfing along, only to be hit by a 50,000-peso phone bill at the end of the month. Which is what happened to someone we know. Here’s the story from Gerry K, whose 15,000 and 17,000-peso phone charges are on the low end of the monthly statement shockers. We know Gerry’s a madman but he’s right in this case, not just because in a crazy world the mad etc, but because this has happened to a lot of iPhone users here.

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Scarcely had I finished gloating over having kept my new year’s resolution (I will not buy any books for the first quarter of 2009) I found myself at a bookstore paying for a copy of Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943. It was the 70s-martial law baby-pre-open markets upbringing that made me do it (“If you don’t grab that book now it’ll disappear forever!”). I’ll forgive myself for the rule violation and go back to observing the moratorium until 31 March 2009.