C&C 75: A Run, RAN, and Recent Reading

I guess I’m doing a 5K, plus the usual

To begin, something unusual: a request for your help.

On June 29, I will be participating in the 2025 Defeat Multiple Myeloma Run/Walk. As a highly sedentary individual, I could not be more surprised by this turn of events. But I signed up for this 5K to acknowledge two important people in my life. My mother Ann has been living with multiple myeloma, a form of cancer, since 2020. All of the funds I raise will go directly to research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, where my wife Rosemarie has worked for decades. The doctors there were enormously helpful to my family when my mom was diagnosed. I’m doing this 5K to honor my mom and salute Rosemarie’s career, while also thanking the Fred Hutch team for their efforts.

If you’d consider making a donation, I’d be grateful. Any amount is welcome. I’m already more than halfway to my goal of raising a thousand dollars, and with federal funding of scientific research in jeopardy, there’s no better time for this kind of direct contribution.

Two quick notes: I’m signed up for the virtual 5K, which sounds like I’ll be taking part via Zoom but actually means that on June 29 I will be following a 5K course of my own design. It wends through my favorite Seattle neighborhoods, is all flat surfaces, and ends with beer and tacos, because Ann Keenan did not raise any fools. Also—and I cannot stress this enough—I will be walking, not running, so no need to worry about injury.¹

Related: at ProPublica, journalist and multiple myeloma patient David Armstrong considers the history and the outrageous cost of Revlimid, “one of the bestselling pharmaceutical products of all time” and the drug my mother is taking. And Gina Kolata reports in the New York Times on a new immunotherapy treatment regarded as a “potential cure” for the disease. It’s experimental, hugely expensive, and rough on the human body. But it’s progress.

Again, any donation is welcome. Thanks for listening. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

What I’m Watching

Some movies I opt not to watch until I can experience them for the first time on the big screen. I avoided Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) for decades until I had a chance to see it in a theater.² I made the same choice regarding Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), and I’d like to thank past me for that wise decision. The 4K restoration in release to mark the film’s 40^th anniversary is the ideal introduction to this epic, inspired by Japanese history and Shakespeare’s King Lear.

It also serves as a robust rejoinder to Quentin Tarantino’s retirement argument. “I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker,”³ QT has said. “I want to stop at a certain point. Directors don’t get better as they get older. Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end.” John Huston’s filmography, ending with Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and the exquisite The Dead (1987), would like a word. Ran sits squarely in the final quartet by Kurosawa, 75 years old at the time of the film’s initial release. Only an “old man” would know how to tell this saga of an elderly warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai) who divides his kingdom among his three sons without considering the repercussions, would understand how vanity can undermine the best intentions, would intuit exactly how much to grieve over humanity’s folly in the face of an indifferent universe. My other takeaway: bring back the court jester.

What I’m Reading

Fair Play (2025) by Louise Hegarty begins as a closely observed novel about a group of Irish friends, almost in a Sally Rooney vein. In the extended opening, Abigail plans a New Year’s Eve celebration that doubles as a birthday bash for her brother Benjamin, their social circle gathering at an Airbnb for their traditional murder mystery party. An outsider is welcomed, news is exchanged, secrets are kept. Then, in the morning, Benjamin doesn’t wake up.

But fear not: the eminent detective Auguste Bell soon arrives to solve the mystery. Although his very presence presents its own mystery. Why does it come after Hegarty has provided us with lists of rules on Golden Age crime-solving from the likes of S. S. Van Dine, creator of Philo Vance? Why is the Airbnb now a manor house, Abigail and her friends suddenly the types of characters who would inhabit it? And why does Bell routinely voice thoughts like, “He didn’t want to give the game away yet. It was only Chapter Fifteen”?

The Bell sections alternate with excerpts from Benjamin’s online condolence book, work emails, and passages told from Abigail’s perspective as her life bafflingly moves on without Benjamin in it. Hegarty’s true subject is grief, the author using the format of the vintage detective novel to probe our responses to death, the one mystery that will never be solved. It’s an inspired gambit. The parallel narratives don’t mesh in fully satisfying fashion, but each is evocatively written and illuminates the other.

I don’t pay attention to Amazon reviews, even of my own books, but I was curious about how this innovative approach was being received by readers. Here’s the review spread on the day I finished the novel.

As they’d say in baseball, that’s some spray chart, with Hegarty hitting to all fields. And likely proof that she has done something worthwhile with this book.

Speaking of ambition, Matthew Specktor’s memoir The Golden Hour (2025) charts the slow fade of both a marriage and an industry, the author having front row seats for both. Specktor is the scion of a Hollywood clan, his father a still-successful high-powered agent, his mother an accomplished writer who struggled to find her own place. He entered the family trade, starting in an agency mail room before becoming an executive and later a screenwriter. That rarified position gives Specktor a unique vantage point as Hollywood is racked by changes:

The movies will boom, and then they will bust, and in the course of a few short decades will drift away from their place at the center of American cultural life, thus ceasing to exist as I have already come to know them. But not yet.

Specktor charts that evolution from a range of perspectives, not all within his household. He adroitly adopts the POVs of Tinseltown titans with offices on higher floors than his old man’s, power brokers like Lew Wasserman and Michael Ovitz, the latter depicted as the avatar of those “artists without a medium” who will preside over Hollywood’s “period of imperial decline.” Other sections, purporting to be the thoughts of Specktor’s former college professor James Baldwin and 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, feel like writing exercises but still represent admirably big swings.

Privilege, recognized and otherwise, rears its head throughout the book. Specktor reels off a list of high school classmates who have gone on to showbiz success. His mother was branded a scab following the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike, the rewrite assignment that earned her that ignominy only coming about through her husband’s status. When Specktor describes his parents as “middle class but happy,” you have to remind yourself that he’s grading on a Hollywood curve.⁴ But a different definition of the term haunts The Golden Hour. When producer Bill Mechanic becomes the head of Fox, he announces that the studio will focus on tentpoles and “things on an ultra-low budget,” boldly declaring, “No. More. Middle. Class. Movies!” But it’s those middle-class movies that Specktor yearns to make, that his mother wants to write, that provide work for his father’s clients, that serve as “America’s dream of itself.” The end of those dreams signals the end of that America. Specktor is well-suited to chronicle the rude awakening.

1. Yes, I referred to it as a run in the title of this newsletter, but you try resisting that alliteration. Have you read the Renee Patrick books? Littered with alliteration.

2. I even managed to duck it while staying at San Francisco’s now-shuttered Hotel Vertigo, where the movie constantly played in the lobby and on a channel in every room. That took some effort.

3. No one has ever voiced a similar opinion about “old-women filmmakers,” because we’d need more women filmmakers first.

4. He also makes two references to outer-borough accents, which would imply the existence of an inner-borough accent. I, for one, would like to know what such an accent sounds like, but that’s probably the outer-borough chip on my shoulder.