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Clearly I did not follow my own advice.

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A recent story about progress towards beginning construction of Ballpark Village next to the new Busch Stadium – now with condos, and the possibility of breaking even! – reminded me of an article by William Gibson. Gibson wrote of the “gone world” in a city as described by a friend, the familiar buildings and areas of New York City that natives knew but were gradually disappearing over the last 20 years as they gave way to new development meant to ‘regood’ the city:

The sewing machine spare-parts quarter, for instance (gone), or the tenement that once housed McGurk’s Suicide Hall (gone). Bits and pieces of SoHo and TriBeCa and Chelsea, all gone. Had I not had so observant a guide, I certainly would have missed them, these glimpses of vanishing things, but my friend had treasured them all, and was pained by their going, and took care to show them to me. It was his conviction that they were invariably replaced by much less interesting things (to put it mildly), and I generally agreed.

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In his third outing as the amnesiac agent Jason Bourne, Matt Damon maintains the low-drag efficiency he established in the first two installments – David Denby in the New Yorker even compares him to a bullet – as he relentlessly backtracks the genesis of his former secret identity to its source. As appropriate for the endcap to an informal trilogy, the knobs are all ratcheted up – chases are notably extended, nominal allies within the CIA themselves are put at risk, and Bourne’s counterespionage chops put to ever greater challenges. Yet somewhere in the process, we lose some of the balance that was previously maintained between cat and mouse, and thus some of the critical tension that came from it. Before we get to that, however, let’s revisit how we got to this point in the story.

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To put aside the obvious, Stardust the movie is not Stardust the book. This is as important as it is tautological aka trivially self-evident, since we the adoring fans of the latter are often prone to forget when sitting down to watch the former. This was immaculately captured in a brief blogging exchange between William Gibson and Cory Doctorow over the subject of the perenially imminent film adapation of Neuromancer. Gibson’s initial consternation, not at the perpetual delay (or in his words, the liminality) but at the presumption that “feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis,” in turn fueled Doctorow’s observation:

Books, by and large, don’t make very good movies (how many great film adaptations of novels can you think of that were true to the original that were worth seeing? How many total, utter disappointments can you recall?) Yet people who meet novelists inevitably ask, “anything of yours been made into a movie yet?”

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