The continuing rockiness of the print media business was underscored yesterday when Vibe Magazine, one of the more recognizable pop music outlets, announced that it was shutting down.

Today, there’s news that co-founder Quincy Jones wants to buy back the publication and keep it alive. But note the approach:

“They [Wicks Group] just messed my magazine all up, but I’m gonna get it back. You better believe it, I’m'a take it online because print and all that stuff is over,” Jones told EbonyJet.com.

Jones sees a market for the magazine, especially in an online format, since Vibe magazine CEO Steve Aaron said the Web site was profitable.

Details are obviously sketchy at this early stage. But the “vibe” I’m getting is that Jones isn’t so much interested in saving the magazine that was Vibe — he primarily wants to keep the Vibe brandname going.

Because really, that name is what really holds the pop-cultural cachet. At its height, Vibe was the hiphop/soul/R&B equivalent of Rolling Stone, and was acknowledged as such. Toward that end, the Vibe brand was extended into areas beyond the magazine, notably as the notorious Vibe Music Awards — which, despite not being held in years, is still a familiar entity among music fans.

So yeah, I can see Quincy Jones lending his considerable reputation and resources toward preserving Vibe. But that preservation will be in the form of future Vibe concert tours, Vibe merchandise, Vibe music imprints — everything but a magazine, basically.

I had meant to mark the moment (or near enough) when my copy of Esquire Magazine’s 75th Anniversary Issue (October 2008 cover date), with the much-hyped electronic ink flashing cover, would run out of battery power and become inert.

The moment passed sometime last week, and somehow, I didn’t notice it. I must have been really preoccupied, because I’ve got the magazine perched on my dresser, amidst clutter but clearly the centerpiece of my daily mess. I guess I got so used to the constant on-off blinking of headlines over the past eight months that the animation no longer stood out for me. Thus, the cessation of that typographical motion didn’t faze me.

True to form, the lack of juice doesn’t mean the cover is now blank. All the type and small graphics are now frozen into place, looking much as they would on a regular printed page. They just no longer “move”. Key feature of e-ink.

Anyway. An eight-month lifespan for e-ink gimmickry. During that time, Amazon has pushed the display technology somewhat into the mainstream with the Kindle, presumably making hard-copy experiments like Esquire’s somewhat superfluous. I know that magazine hasn’t repeated this little experiment, despite having exclusive use of the application for 2009. A nice footnote in the history of publishing, but ultimately didn’t amount to much.

Here’s a sobering example of the perils of freelance work: Educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and its sub-contracting house Inkwell Publishing Solutions, owe thousands of dollars in back pay to about 50 editorial workers, who are now left in a lurch.

Jan Kraus, owed $6,000, has dropped her health insurance. Jennifer Mallow, who is due $3,100 and says she is lucky to survive with extra night shifts at Macy’s, now budgets her subway trips and frets when it is time to do the laundry. Gini Dustin, owed $11,000, is behind on apartment maintenance fees. Phil Opatz has maxed out his credit cards and has discovered that unemployment benefits are based on how much he was actually paid, not what he billed. “Without the pay stubs for the $10,000 that is owed me, I hardly made enough to qualify,” Mr. Opatz said.

The opening pages of any respectable textbook include pictures of distinguished professors and authorities on reading or biology or whatever the subject is. They look like the people who wrote the thing, but are actually human brand nameplates. In the real world, the books are written and edited by faceless workers in textbook factory towns like New York.

Into every freelancer’s life, there comes an past-due invoice or two. But $11,000 worth? It’s extreme, but I can understand how it can happen: Harcourt is a big, established corporation that you wouldn’t expect to duck out on payments. Any time you take on a client, you’re operating on reputation and trust. Fair or not, you assume that highly-visible companies are a safer bet than a smaller outfit that hasn’t been in business as long, and frankly doesn’t care about leaving behind a trail of broken promises. I know, I know — the past decade has demonstrated that even humongous mega-corporations can default on you. But you play the percentages and cross your fingers that you’ll get that check eventually.

Actually, I’d think that an outfit like Freelancers Union would be able to help in such situations, as a validation agency beforehand or as a quasi-collection agency afterward. It’d fit in well with their existing mission of advocacy for freelance workers.

I haven’t worked for Harcourt or, to my knowledge, any of its assembly/development houses. Dodged bullet, I guess. I can try to be more careful when bidding for assignments in the future, but the insidious part of this is that you really can’t control the process chain — I could be doing work for a second- or third-level supplier, and my payday ultimately depends on the money at the top trickling down. Such is the life of a wage slave (which defines about 95 percent of us, in one form or another).

Coincidentally, this story hits only a couple of days after I had to take action on a two-month overdue invoice of my own. It’s for a couple of hundred bucks, which is a small enough amount that I’ll simply write it off, rather than waste any more time or effort in chasing it down (along with appropriate last-warnings, in a mostly-vain attempt to get them to mail off a check). I’ve been fairly lucky in that, for the three years I’ve been consulting, I’ve been stiffed only a couple of times, and never for what I’d consider to be a significant amount of money. I’m crossing my fingers on that luck continuing — provided I avoid textbook mills…

UPDATE, 06/22/2009: I can confirm that the comment below really is from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, based on the originating IP address. Not surprisingly, it’s a case of he said/she said between Harcourt and Inkwell. The referenced New York Times article certainly paints both companies as sharing the blame; the only hint that Harcourt might be more broadly stiffing freelancers is this mention:

[Editor Patrick] Egan said that after he left Inkwell in late January, he went to work at another book development company, and is owed about $13,000 there, also for work done on Houghton textbooks.

But the publisher’s story is that it’s not the one withholding payment, therefore pinning the blame on the development houses. Either way, people are waiting to get paid.

June 16th is Bloomsday, as chronicled in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. And if live novel reenactments and fun-runs aren’t your bag, then celebrate Hibernian surrealism by experiencing the book’s 10th chapter, “Wandering Rocks”, in Twitter form:

[Ian] Bogost and [Ian] McCarthy have dubbed their performance “Twittering Rocks,” a play on the chapter’s title that could also mean Twittering is awesome. They have registered 54 of the novel’s key characters as Twitter users, and Bogost built a software program that tweets their first-person utterances at the correct moments in the chapter.

“The result is a complex web of timed interactions between many characters,” he said, “precisely the effect Joyce was aiming for in the novel.”

Ingenious, especially the synchronized timestamping. But more than 50 tweetstreams to track? Seems onerous. Better bet is to just follow @leopoldbloom, and not wade too far out of the protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness.

Finally, the real reason why Amazon is supersizing to the Kindle DX: Not for the graphic and advertising display possibilities on the 10-inch e-ink screen, but rather, for more room on the back of the device for author signatures.

[Author David] Sedaris wrote in a recent e-mail message that he has actually signed “at least five” Kindles, and “a fair number of iPods as well, these for audio book listeners.” A frequent chronicler of his own eccentricities, the author often encounters his readers’ quirks at the book-signing table.

Since an e-reader can hold something north of a thousand books, I’d say that the autograph space on the backside will run out pretty quick. Until it does, it’ll look like a literary yearbook. Writers will have to suffer having to share scribble space with others; and of course, if their work gets deleted off of that particular Kindle, then I assume the signing gets whited-out accordingly.

Seriously though, I wonder if Amazon’s not cooking up an electronic solution for this. I’d guess that future editions of e-books could include an e-page in the front with space specifically for an author signing. Probably have to revamp the hardware as well.

On the strength of my blog mention of the author back in December, Brooklyn’s own Soft Skull Press tapped me to do a brief review of Michael Muhammad Knight’s new novel, “Osama Van Halen”. Thanks to publicity assistant Carrie Dieringer for reaching out and sending me the review copy.

“Osama Van Halen” is presented as a follow-up to Knight’s debut effort, “The Taqwacores”. While the themes and attitude regarding identity crisis for young Westernized Muslims are prominent in the new book, Knight goes a step further with a strong autobiographical angle: The real heart of “Osama” delves into the author’s struggles to reconcile his own feelings as a convert to Islam, on both the cultural and ethnic levels. There’s no attempt to mask this aim, as Knight injects himself into the main narrative, integrally interacting with his fictional characters; again, this is a next-step move, since in “Taqwacores”, he created a conventional fictional character to stand-in for himself.

Inasmuch as this is Knight’s story, presenting it as an absurdist novel often comes across as unnecessary giftwrapping. As entertaining as the postmodern punk-rock landscape here is, with Muslim zombies and Qur’an-derived superpower-granting spells keeping things lively, Knight falls back often enough on undisguised personal memoir — in particular, with the “F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Five Desi Girls” chapter — that the read becomes too bumpy. When Knight’s character is finally confronted over his inner conflicts, the dramatic sword-tipped resolution is almost expected, and the exchange with avenging angel Rabeya veers toward straw-man argument.

The individual chapters in “Osama” feel more like separate short stories, so I wonder if this book wasn’t strung together, with a grafted-on thin narrative, to achieve that. That’s definitely the case with the book’s marketing, which focuses solely upon a single, inconsequential subplot (a revenge-fantasy kidnapping of Matt Damon). If so, I think it would have worked better as a collection of shorts, interconnected only by appearances by Knight the character and Amazing Ayyub, his radical Job-like doppelganger. The flow would have been much less forced.

That said, Knight’s depiction of American Muslim youth culture is pretty compelling. The melding of pop-rock-punk subculture with tradition-rooted religion plays out in an enlightening way. Knight’s actually at his best when he taps into this raw scene and reveals it, complete with contradictions and compromises. Even the fantasy magical-realism sequences centered around Amazing Ayyub play out pretty strongly when they’re allowed to fully take over the narrative.

I found myself being reminded of Jonathan Lethem, in terms of voice, while reading “Osama”. In particular, I detected some parallels with Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude”, at least in the recollection of childhood and spiritual development. Maybe it was also the superpowers featured in both books — along with invisibility, Knight throws in a mention of human flight, which may or may not be a veiled reference to plot elements from “Solitude”.

And of course, I have to take note of the New York State backdrop for much of “Osama”. While the setting is far-flung Buffalo (the same as Knight’s real-world home base), there’s a semi-cryptic mention of my own upstate hometown, Newburgh, toward the end. That’s all the more jarring considering the recent “Newburgh Four” synagogue-bombing terror plot, and Knight’s own afterword addressing another, unsettling life-imitates-art event from this book.

Overall, “Osama” is a raucous read, with an energy that overcomes a questionable plot structure. The author has plenty to say, and even if he felt the need to divide it between himself and a fictionalized version of himself, it’s worth taking all in.

For the longest while now — probably most of this decade, in fact — I’ve often felt overloaded by advance hype over upcoming movies, music, TV shows, etc. It seems like the marketing saturation for major releases is so intense, especially accounting for the different target audiences and the range of media covered, that I usually wind up getting more than enough of the gist of the story being pitched. So much so that, yes, I usually see no reason to actually buy/go to/tune in to the work — because thanks to all the teasers and synopses, I’ve essentially already experienced it.

Maybe that’s the curse (or the blessing?) of being a media junkie. I suppose if I limited my intake to just the Web, or just TV, or just the news, only a small slice of the marketing onslaught, and thus just enough to allow me to indulge in the book/movie/whatever with a fresh slate.

Or maybe the content producers on the other end could let up on the overhype and sell the mystique. That’s what’s happened with Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, “1Q84″, the promotion of which is specifically being un-marketed, due to popular demand:

When Murakami’s earlier work “Kafka on the Shore” was released, fans complained that their response to it was dulled by too much advance press coverage. So this time around absolutely everything about the book — except the author’s name and the title — has been kept secret.

And secrecy, it would seem, has only fueled book sales. “It is amazing. People are craving his latest novel,” Takashi Machii, spokesman for the book’s publisher, Shinchosha, told the Associated Press. Shinchosha has increased the book’s first printing to 480,000 copies from 380,000 after orders “flooded in.”

It would seem to be a lesson in less being more. Although the caveats are obvious: Murakami is an established author, so everyone knows they’ll be getting quality work from his efforts. And really, this is just the opposite extreme from over-indulgence — going to zero on previews gives potential media consumers absolutely nothing upon which to base a commitment; again, that works for an established brandname, but doesn’t for other offerings.

I guess a comfortable medium of limited sneak-peeks, fairly uniform across media channels, would be too much to ask for in the way of restraint. Ultimately, the extreme methods probably net the most fish, so expect them to persist.

I don’t know how I missed this: Bret Easton Ellis has dredged up “Less Than Zero” to write a direct sequel set in the present-day, called “Imperial Bedrooms”.

“Imperial” would be a direct sequel, because much of Ellis’ fiction subsequent to “Zero” has been set in the same world, with supporting characters from prior works further carrying on a larger meta-narrative. Conversely, the former principals would reappear in the backgrounds of those later works. “Zero” protagonist Clay had a brief section devoted to his first-person narration in “The Rules of Attraction”, and as far as I know, that was the final time he “appeared” in Ellis’ world until now.

Actually, it’s a bit unclear just what Ellis has dredged up — his book or the 1987 movie adaptation — in writing this follow-up. Because they’re two different animals, with really only superficial resemblance to one another. Yet it sounds like the author has written a sequel to the movie’s storyline, instead of the novel’s:

Easton Ellis is hoping that a movie would reunite [James] Spader, [Andrew] McCarthy, Jamie Gertz and others — and, after Robert Downey Jr.’s well-chronicled substance-abuse difficulties and subsequent triumph over them, feels that the recent Oscar-nominee could bring something special to a second turn as Julian Wells. “His character in the book is sober,” the author explained. “Fragile, but sober.”

“[A second ‘Less Than Zero’ movie] can either be a stunt and seem really gimmicky, or it could work out. But I think it would be of interest,” he explained. “Now that I’m finally done with the book I’m thinking ‘God, what if Fox wants to do this as a film?’ Because Fox did the original and I think there’s a rights issue involved…I think it would be a great idea. We’ll see.”

One thing: Downey’s Julian character dies at the end of the film, unlike in the book. So I guess Easton Ellis is thinking more about a reboot of the movie storyline. Or more likely, he’s just blowing smoke, because it’ll probably be a tough sell to reunite the original cast anyway.

I’m not convinced of the merits in having Clay “reappear here”, twenty-five years later. “Zero” is a great period piece, so I don’t see what’s to be gained by updating the milieu, other than personal catharsis:

Ellis now lives in a small apartment in West Hollywood, and he has been working on a sequel to “Less Than Zero,” which will come out next spring. The narrator is Clay, the spoiled, cocaine-deadened teen of the first book, twenty-five years down the road. “Clay is probably a more villainous version of me,” Ellis said.

We’ll see. Hopefully, this won’t inspire a similar 80s revisit of “Zero” literary twin, Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City”.

If your book intake consists of merely reading with your eyes or hearing with your ears, apparently you’re missing out by not using your mouth:

It’s part of a pattern. Instead of making music at home, we listen to recordings of professional musicians. When people talk about the [audiobooks] they’ve heard, they’re often talking about the quality of the readers, who are usually professional. The way we listen to books has been de-socialized, stripped of context, which has the solitary virtue of being extremely convenient.

But listening aloud, valuable as it is, isn’t the same as reading aloud. Both require a great deal of attention. Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words — and the pattern of the words — the reader really sees.

Can’t say that I agree, because reading for me remains a visual activity. I’ve never taken to audiobooks, because like any audio-visual adaptation, they force both a linear pace and a specific interpretation upon you — you might as well just watch a movie. With the written word, you can read at your own pace, and keep certain elements of the narrative neutral (or at least appropriately ambiguous).

I don’t see how that intake is improved by reciting it. Again, audiblizing the read just imposes your pace and interpretation onto whoever’s listening to you, as described above. It injects a group activity vibe to this media exercise, but one that’s inferior to the solitary experience.

Despite not currently being in any sort of legal trouble, the following quote from Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” sprung to mind this morning:

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble… “the law is a ass — a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor…”

Neverminding the context that inspired Bumble’s admonition: That in Victorian England, he was ultimately responsible for the crimes that his wife committed. The broken grammar makes it sing.

My first exposure to this little gem was via the world of comic books — specifically the fanboy-obsessive underworld that was thriving back in the ’80s. Specifically, comic-universe legal expert (there’s a niche if there ever was one) Bob Ingersoll dubbed his column “The Law Is A Ass”. I’m shocked to have found it online — and not all that surprised to see that it’s six years dead now.

Encouraged by the (seeming) success of Amazon’s Kindle, newspaper and magazine publishers are ready to bet the farm on next-wave e-readers with larger and richer displays:

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

This reeks of editorial-side wishful thinking. Publishers are focusing solely on the advertising-display advantages — that is, the ability to run display ads that simply don’t fit on phones and other handheld devices. That’s the critical missing ingredient to commanding the big-dollar ad rates that current online and digital content can’t command.

That’s great for the business side. But what’s the advantage for the audience? It’s a bigger field of pixels to gawk at, which is nice — but at what price? Not just the cost of buying get another dedicated piece of hardware, but the hassle of lugging it around and making space for it at home/office. Basically, the consumer is being asked to invest in yet another screen, on top of the TV, primary computer, phone, e-book, etc. I see this as a very tough sell, especially considering the locked-content (i.e., non-Web) model that’s at the heart of these e-readers.

This all comes back to my skepticism that any of these dedicated screens, including the Kindle, will seriously challenge the iPhone/iPod Touch. What I said before applies:

I don’t see how the e-book readers can compete, frankly. Why lug around an extra, oversized display screen when you can carry around your library in your pocket? Obviously screen-size is sacrificed, but most people are accustomed to reading off their phone screens by now. If anything, I see the Kindle, [Sony] Reader, et al becoming niche products, for those who can’t do without large-print reading; everyone else will do their e-book reading via iPhone/iTouch. The disruption comes from including the e-book capabilities in the price of the device, versus shelling out a few hundred dollars for a separate reader.

When your third screen is already in your pocket, why bother with another one that you have to carry under your arm?

Despite favoring its distinct absence in Roberto Bolaño’s “2666″, it’s clear that Geoff Nicholson, the blogger of Psycho-Gourmet, actually gets off on the culinary detailing of food in novels.

It’s all very well for Bob Cratchit and his family to sit down to a Christmas goose whose “tenderness and flavor, size and cheapness” were “the themes of universal admiration.” But since I’m likely to be reading this while sitting alone on the couch sustained only by instant coffee, I tend to develop a bad case of food envy. It’s a lot like sex, I think. I don’t want characters in novels to eat better than I do, any more than I want them to have better sex lives than I do. I’ve realized that the moments of literary eating I like best are the ones in which the characters suffer because of their food.

For me, unless it’s particularly germane to the story, such minute enumeration about what’s on a character’s plate comes off as boring. I put it in the same category as my general disdain for overwrought physical or facial descriptions in the written narrative — it tends to bog down the plot for what I feel is an unnecessary attempt at fleshing-out the character. So since I feel that way about actual walking-talking story elements, you can imagine how much of a waste of letters I consider a deep-drilled description of breakfast, lunch, or dinner would be.

I suppose this is, once again, “a failure of synthetic imagination on my part”, to quote McInerney, dovetailing with my general indifference toward elaborate foodstuffs. I’m not sure which of my palates I should work on first: My gastronomic or my literary.

The prospects for a new business magazine glossy (read: print) were dim even before this current Great Recession hit. So it shouldn’t be too shocking that Condé Nast has pulled the plug on the once-ballyhooed Portfolio, a mere two years after launch.

Not to be completely self-centric here, but there goes another source for freelancing gigs. I wonder if they’ll keep the website alive; Condé’s recent history with folded titles says they won’t, and I don’t know that Portfolio.com has built up enough of a community/presence to warrant its preservation.

Recently Hachette Book Group provided me with an advance review copy of “The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection” by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, a historical nonfiction hardcover due to be released on April 27th. Thanks go to Valerie Russo for sending me the book. Below is my review.

“Crimes” is an expansive look at the evolution of French society from the mid-19th Century to the end of the Belle Époque, with particular focus upon the shifting mores in Paris toward authority and class structures. The culture of lawlessness during this period, and the state’s ongoing attempts to quell new breeds of criminals, get special attention throughout. The Hooblers offer up several examples of sensationalist crimes from this period that foreshadow 20th- and 21st-Century standards: The first bank-robbery getaway car, mentally-deranged serial killers, public-spectacle crimes of passion, etc. Accompanying this luridness is the counterbalance of the development of professionalized police detective methods that pioneered modern crime-solving, with legendary figures like Alphonse Bertillon and Francois-Eugene Vidocq showcasing France’s contribution to worldwide law enforcement methodology.

The husband-and-wife authors dedicated a lot of research to this broad sketch of France’s sociopolitical climate. Unfortunately, they felt the need to fixate their study around a single noteworthy event: The 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. That crime did indeed take on epic proportions in its day, but the Hooblers try to position it as a culmination of the previous half-century of French societal criminality.

Frankly, it’s a strained argument, especially when the details and background of the theft’s mastermind are revealed. Using the Mona Lisa as the centerpiece to this historical narrative smacks of an attempt to locate a center of gravity for what can otherwise be a too-tangential collection of episodes: Everything from the Dreyfus Affair, to Sherlock Holmes, to the prevailing popular penny-dreadfuls are tossed in as background. Even the name-dropping of Pablo Picasso as a onetime suspect in the Mona Lisa heist comes off as gratuitous.

I suspect the motivation for this structuring was driven by marketing concerns more than anything else. The promotional copy is concentrated upon the Mona Lisa angle, giving the impression that the bulk of the content would be about this single crime (”crime” singular, unlike the book’s title). That extends to the book’s physical presentation: When I showed a colleague the jacket cover, she instantly thought it looked like a novel, and was surprised when I told her that it was actually a nonfiction. This is all calculated to draw in readers, but I’m thinking it’ll result in considerable disappointment among the mis-targeted audience.

Approach “Crimes” as a collection of true-crime vignettes, and you’ll find the read rewarding. Look at it as a famous-painting thriller, and you’ll feel short-changed. And consider yourself lucky to have that choice.

I haven’t been keeping up with coming attractions pre-hype, because I was surprised recently to come across a movie marquee poster for The Informers, set to release in New York in a couple of weeks.

I knew that the filmed adaptation of this collection of Bret Easton Ellis interconnected short stories had been in the works for ages, but I didn’t think it had gotten anywhere close to completion. It’s probably a small miracle that it emerged from development hell.

I’m crossing my fingers on a good end result, not least because my recent movie-going experiences have been way more miss than hit. The cast is top-grade, which guarantees nothing but should be a good sign. Another plus is that the original 1980s Los Angeles setting has been preserved, instead of being updated to present-day; that’s all the better for the nihilistic tone of the original.

I kinda wish that “Glamorama” had made it to the screen instead, as “Informers” isn’t the strongest of Ellis’ work. But I’ll still take it. Just so long as the soundtrack doesn’t include ’90s refugee Snow and his one-hit-wonder “Informer”…

This off-the-cuff tweet, by yours truly, about the suicide of Nicholas Hughes didn’t elicit a reaction over in Twitterland. Let’s see if it gets any sort of response here in the regular Web/blogosphere:

I guess it would be highly insensitive to label this as “continuing the Plath family tradition”, right?

And for further context, Sylvia Plath’s poem about her then-infant son: “Nick and the Candlestick”.

Not that I’m into I-told-you-so’s, but, well, I told ya so:

Watchmen disintegrated 67 percent to an estimated $18.1 million for $86 million in ten days, trailing all previous superhero movies that debuted in the $50 million range through the same point. For perspective, 300, which Watchmen was oft compared to, fell 54 percent to $32.9 million in its second weekend (for a $129.2 million total), and, among major comic book movies, only Hellboy II: The Golden Army and Hulk had steeper drop-offs. The weekend further cemented Watchmen’s status as a movie with much more limited appeal than other superhero pictures, rooted in its non-mainstream source material and its diffuse storyline and marketing.

For context, I believe the standard second-week dropoff for new releases these days is 50-60 percent from the opening week. So this is indeed a nosedive of a decline.

The movie will still pass the $100-million box-office mark, but not much past that; and with a runtime of nearly three hours, it’s going to take a couple more weeks for it to limp to that milestone. Too many factors ultimately crippled this adaptation, commercially, for blockbuster status to take hold. So we won’t have to worry about the spectre of a Watchmen franchise of sequels/prequels.

Nope, I haven’t gone to see it. I don’t see doing so. If it cleaves so closely to the book, I’ll struggle through re-reading that for the dozenth time (struggling because I’m finding it to be unbearably dated by now, plus too-thinly plotted).

An almost-wholly personal blast from the past: I’ve come across the only promotional blurb that ever solely sold me on a book.

That book is an obscure one: “The Shattered Horse” by S.P. Somtow. I haven’t read it in years; I might still have my 20-year-old paperback copy somewhere in storage (I’m not inclined to dig it out). I remember it as an eye-opener for my teenaged self because it involved a down-and-dirty deconstructive interpretation of ancient Greece and Greek mythology, casting both in a much more paganish guise than I had known up to that point.

Anyway, the author (who, to his credit, was actually slumming when he wrote this) crafted this fantasy novel around one simple idea: That Astyanax, the last heir of mythic Troy, survived his apparent infant death and grew up to restart the Trojan War.

And here’s the language that sold me:

An era of myth is ending, an age of heroes and bronze; the time of iron and armies awaits, as yet unborn.

Kidnap eternal Helen - and start the Trojan War. Again.

What can I say? Something about that last line, with the free-standing and ominous “again” finalizing the concept, grabbed me. The book itself ended up a worthwhile-enough read.

If this wasn’t intentional, it should have been:

Near the corner of Bowery and Great Jones Streets, there’s a modest-sized but noticeable movie poster for today’s big release, Watchmen.

And a couple of doors up, there’s a building with a for sale/for lease sign hanging from it, signifying that it’s represented by Ozymandius Realty.

I’d like to think that the building has been available for months on end — good chance of that, in that ‘hood — and someone in Warner Bros. marketing saw it, leading to a strategically-placed (yet insider-targeted) ad buy.

Who watches, indeed?

The big techie-geek buzz today is over Amazon’s Kindle (software) being ported to the iPhone/iPod Touch as a free app.

So for all the hype that Amazon has generated over its e-book hardware, it actually acknowledged that Apple’s ubiquitous devices threaten to undercut dedicated e-book gadgets, and so is hedging its platform bets:

This is a shrewd move. It’s unlikely that many will want to trade the Kindle reading experience for the iPhone’s, but it should prove a useful complement that drives more Amazon revenue. As Mozilla’s John Lilly opines, the iPhone Kindle application is “useful if I’m somewhere and forgot my Kindle,…and I’m sure that I’ll buy books with it to read a snippet then really read on my Kindle.”

In sum, by providing a Kindle for iPhone application, Amazon has opened up a compelling complement to its Kindle device, one that will likely feed more revenue to Amazon while simultaneously crippling rivals’ efforts to build a critical mass of iPhone e-book readers.

For now, the Kindle app provides a taste (and more, considering that it’ll render color pictures/illustrations, something the grayscale Kindle hardware can’t do). The plan is to entice book junkies to testdrive on the familiar small touchscreen, in the hopes that they’ll step up to the $300 real thing. (I’m thinking part of the enticement package should be a coupon for one free book download — otherwise, folks will have an app that doesn’t look at anything but preview snippets.)

I see a longer-term strategy here, though. If the Kindle doesn’t sell in bunches (and I don’t believe Amazon’s claims to such so far — they had a limited-run of the original Kindle, so no wonder it sold out quickly), then they at least have established a beachhead on the most popular mobile platform out there. The whole point is to sell the digital properties, and cornering a spot on the iPhone — and crowding out competing e-reader apps, not-so-incidentally — gives Amazon some insurance.

For myself: I haven’t downloaded Kindle onto my iTouch yet. Don’t see a compelling reason to do so. I’ve got reading material on my device already, so I have no issues about squinting at the small screen for reading pleasure (unlike the digital curmudgeons at Time Magazine). I’m just not sure I want to start stockpiling literature on my iPod, along with the present music, games, contacts, etc.

I’m not sure who’d be more disappointed that no one wants to do a follow-up film to soon-to-be-released Watchmen:

- The studio execs, who savor a franchise-like gravy train of (improbable) sequels and/or (more plausible) prequels?

- Or the less-sophisticated comic book fanboys, who care more about how many weapons Nite-Owl’s airship has than about the storyline’s psycho-political nuances?

Oh, wait — has this presumed blockbuster landed yet?

I understand all about preemptive marketing, i.e. stoking a movie’s buzz before it hits the screens so that audience anticipation results in packed houses. And in this case, it’s not wholly manufactured: Superhero flicks have been silver-screen solid gold this decade, so it’s reasonable to expect Watchmen to hit big and instantly spur talk of a return engagement (in this case, the starring actors’ contracts all stipulate possible reprisals of their roles).

But really. How’s all this chickens-before-they’re-hatched talk going to look if the film bombs?

I hate to say it, but the elements are there for this one to fall short, commercially. As far as mainstream appeal, consider that it’s way too long for typical popcorn-movie fare (three hours), which will also cut into the raw number of screenings, further driving down its numbers.

The lack of recognizable faces in the casting isn’t doing anyone any favors either. The characters and storyline are already wholly unfamiliar to the mass market — unlike the built-in mythology that precedes a Spider-Man or Batman to the screen — so having unknowns in the key roles does nothing to draw in casual moviegoers. Just look at The Spirit, which went with a total unknown to play the title character; that wasn’t the biggest reason for that bomb, but it certainly didn’t help.

So the commercial side is looking a little wobbly. True, it should still open at No. 1, simply because there’s nothing else really competing with it, this week or even next. But I don’t see that being sustained enough to hit blockbuster levels.

What about the artistic merits? Sadly, the lukewarm review about the too-faithful adaptation of the original graphic novel confirms my misgivings about the whole thing, to the point where I’m pretty close to taking a pass on it. The cinematic pedigree behind it isn’t selling me either: I didn’t care for Zack Snyder’s previous commix-to-screen adaptation, and there are signs that Watchmen is going to showcase some of the same sins (particularly over-reliance on spoken narration, even if it will be Rorschach).

I’m far from batting 1.000 on these kinds of predictions. With my luck, Watchmen will be a monstrous hit, and the derivative material will flow freely from Warner Bros. content-cranking machine for years to come. If so, I can look back on this post and, probably, lament the way things should have been.