237 Lafayette St. near Spring St., tenth floor
Thursday, January 19, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
www.ethannichtern.com
Shastri Ethan Nichtern, a Shambhala teacher and founder of the Interdependence Project, has followed up his 2007 nonfiction trade paperback, One City, in which he examined egolessness, interdependence, enlightenment, and spirituality in a fun and fascinating way, with his fiction debut, the digital book Your Emoticons Won’t Save You. The breezy tale is set in 1998, when Alex Bardo and a group of his college-aged childhood friends are on a road trip to the camp they went to when they were kids, setting the stage for a series of memories and flashbacks about life, love, friendship, and growing up. “She looked like she was about to say something else about me, something très annoying about who I am and who I used to be and who I should become, but she didn’t,” narrator Alex says at one point about his former girlfriend. The story involves bad mix tapes, naked frolicking, car games, micro-losses of virginity, and the Wannabe Poets Brigade; the novel concludes with a selection of Alex’s poetry, featuring such titles as “A Wary Invitation to My Future Child,” “Urban Planning,” “Aw, Nuts,” and “A PostPostModern Definition of Egolessness.” If you read the fine print, you’ll discover that “aggression still tantalizes us,” “obsession’s like a bungee cord,” “delusion emits a steady hum,” “kids don’t get to make any decisions,” “parents argue over money and then slam doors shut,” “when people smile they look guilty,” and “you will become what you hate — it’s inevitable.” Nichtern will be reading from Your Emoticons Won’t Save You at a release party on January 19 at 237 Lafayette St. In addition, Ethan and his father, David Nichtern, a musician, composer, producer, Emmy winner, and senior Buddhist teacher, will be teaming up for the weekend workshop “The Art of Being Human” January 20-22 at the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York.
David Fincher knows how to make movies. The director of such standout films as Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Social Network has scored another critical and popular success with the hotly anticipated English-language remake of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s 2005 posthumously published runaway bestseller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And “remake” is the key word, as Fincher’s film, adapted by Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, American Gangster), feels like it was based more on Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 Swedish version than the book itself, but no matter, it’s still a highly entertaining, if overly long, thriller with elements all its own. Daniel Craig stars as Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who loses a high-profile case, accused of slandering a powerful businessman. Blomkvist is hired by wealthy patriarch Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), who believes Blomkvist was right, to search through the dysfunctional Vanger clan and find out who murdered young Harriet forty years earlier. Blomkvist is soon joined by investigator Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a ward of the state who is being horrifically abused by her new guardian (Yorick van Wageningen), as they combine cutting-edge technology with old-fashioned detective legwork to get to the bottom of the mystery. Craig plays Blomkvist with a stark vulnerability, letting Mara drive the film with her quiet, unassuming power that’s ready to explode at any moment — and when it does, well, watch out. The soundtrack, by Trent Reznor (look for the Nine Inch Nails T-shirt in the movie) and Atticus Ross, who also composed the score for The Social Network, opens with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” sung by Karen O, that is played over a bizarre title sequence that looks like it was meant for the next James Bond adventure. The first of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an exciting psychological drama that sets the stage for the follow-ups, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, with Craig and Mara reprising their roles.
