Letters to the Editor

Stroking my inner boyfriend
BY DANIEL REITZ
(10/12/99)

Daniel Reitz rightly points out that narcissism is not the same as loving oneself. Coming to terms with the "inner boyfriend" is a long and painful process that must necessarily take in the good with the bad. Gooch's narrative is filled with the same shallow and clichid prattle that fills so many self-help books. I rather doubt that Gooch has ever truly felt the self-loathing that is engendered by abusive early home life or by society. Gooch may have the fab apartment, the big toy, the youthful face, the wonderful job, ad nauseam, but he remains a shallow and empty shell of a human being. He should write us a book on being human and learning to love the inner self that is caring and kind, loving and constant.

Before modern cosmetics, face paints were made with beeswax; lovely furniture screens were created to protect the ladies' faces from melting by the hearth. Gooch's book is one of those screens, written to keep his face from sliding off and revealing the lizard beneath.

-- J.A. Murray
Charlottesville, Va.

Reading, writing, quarterly results
BY MARK GIMEIN
(10/13/99)

I note your point that most new businesses in America -- the small ones, the ones that create most of the jobs -- are not funded by venture capitalists. The thread business my uncle started in 1937 was funded by my grandmother. She came to this country in 1912, and somehow had managed to save $1,200 -- a fabulous sum back then, especially for a working-class family struggling through the depression. My father tells me she handed the cash to his elder brother David and said, "Here, go start a business." I believe the Koreans have an institution called the "kibun," in which family members contribute a fixed sum every month. Once a year or so, a different family member takes the collected pot and starts a business, invariably hiring to work in it the closest relative in need of work. There is much blather about discrimination and access to "capital," but the fact is that the ladder for economic immigrants is formed of private savings and sweat equity.

Still, I work out here in Silicon Valley, and I know how poor I am, despite my being here only a year and seeing my options increase in value. I don't know how long this amusement park will stay open, and I don't claim V.C. madness is a model for life, but it is as good an introduction as any to "the business game." Better that then sex education, values clarification, reading methods that do not use phonics, or any of the greater frauds perpetrated by the educationists.

-- Richard D. Henkus
Santa Clara, Calif.

Kubrick's last film: An open and shut case?
BY SEAN ELDER
(10/08/99)

I think you missed the point: Brill's Content's "Eyes Wide Shut" piece was about the way misleading pre-release perceptions of "EWS" as a taboo-busting, sexually explicit thriller influenced people's (largely negative) reactions to the film when they saw it, and may have hurt its reputation in the long run. The movie was simply not what people had been told to expect. Warners, PMK, Cruise, Kidman and Kubrick (who approved the sales strategy before he died) made a choice to go for the traditional exploitation-movie approach: Sell the sex (even if there isn't much), open wide and pack 'em into the theaters on opening weekend before word gets out that the movie isn't the erotic romp we said it was. It was a calculated business decision, that's all. Perhaps the film would have received better reviews, and better word of mouth, if critics and audiences hadn't been deliberately misled, but the film would certainly have taken much longer to gross $55 million that way -- and it might never have reached that total.

Kubrick biographers have written that the director was frustrated by the number of years some of his films (like "2001") took to reach profitability. Maybe with "EWS" he just wanted to cut to the "money shot" a bit faster.

-- Jim Emerson
Seattle

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