'The Ides of March' Review

George Clooney's latest directorial effort, "The Ides of March," is a crackling political work, almost impenetrable in its early stages because of all the dense and shrewd rarefied jabber. The script has a sort of obvious subtlety, strictly adhering to the show-don't-tell rule, yet still managing to show too much. That said, it's really good.

So, I thought I'd have some fun on Facebook, and re-create the IDES poster with the help of Michele Bachmann, but no one seemed to get (or like) the joke. Boo! I'm reusing it here, goshdarnit, with a side-by-side comparison to help the training-wheel crowd.

My review of "The Ides of March" is now online at SouthPhillyReview.com. CLICK HERE.

Interview with 'Another Earth' Filmmaker Mike Cahill

(This article was previously published in the July 2011 issue of ICON magazine. It has been republished with permission. You'll remember I reviewed "Another Earth" last month and didn't much care for the film, just its ideas and its promotion of low-budget sci-fi. Well, here comes my interview with the director and co-writer, Mike Cahill, a nice Brooklyn fella who'll hopefully learn to better match concept with craft next time 'round.)

Film and Other Frontiers
With Another Earth, debut filmmaker Mike Cahill helps boost a new emergence of shoestring-budgeted arthouse films, which tackle big-budget concepts and prove there’s ample room for intelligent life in the sci-fi genre.
By R. Kurt Osenlund

BIG-BUDGET SCI-FI CAN show you anything you want. Hollywood has successfully stripped your imagination of its limits. Unfathomable is the new commonplace. Odds are you barely batted an eye when Harry Potter and his pals soared before your eyes on the back of a photorealistic dragon, or when Jack Sparrow was swarmed by a ravenous pack of perfectly plausible mermaids. The downside to the constant wow is desensitization. In response, indie film has been increasingly tackling bigbudget premises with low budget productions, aiming to bring some gritty verisimilitude back to the sci-fi genre. Though bankrolled by Peter Jackson, District 9 seamlessly blended first-rate effects with an exotic, documentarystyle war zone. And just last year, with his film Monsters, CGI-artist-turned-director Gareth Edwards showed how a great creature feature could be made with little more than storytelling savvy and a laptop computer.

It’s from this tradition that filmmaker Mike Cahill’s feature debut, Another Earth, emerges. Leading off with the concept of a duplicate Earth that becomes visible in our atmosphere and contains a duplicate global culture (another you, another me), it’s a movie that studios might have hired Michael Bay to twist into an apocalyptic vomitorium, showered with supersonic explosions and urban hysteria. Instead, it’s a modest drama with a sci-fi backdrop, a balancing act of intimate human conflict and mind-boggling circumstances. Its protagonist is Rhoda (co-writer Brit Marling), an MIT-bound physics student who, on the night she discovers the new planet, crashes into another vehicle, killing a mother and child. Her crime lands her in prison for four years, and when she’s released, she’s nearly catatonic with guilt. She takes a thankless, antisocial janitor job (“Out, damned spot!”), and her only goal is to win a seat on a spaceship bound for Earth 2, where she can hopefully start anew. And then she meets the man whose wife and son she killed...

Cahill is a lean, 30-ish, even-tempered type who pulls his long brown locks into a tight ponytail. He seems more musician than scientist. He greets with a quick exhale of a cigarette drag and an instinctively outstretched hand. But amidst this late-night lounge persona lies an astro-geek of sometimes staggering proportions. During an interview that proved particularly otherworldly for this writer (it began at a hotel, then
continued in a car, then continued at a train station, then concluded with a phone call), Cahill talked space, cinema and the enduring powers of both.


Mike Cahill

R. Kurt Osenlund: Are you an astronomy nut? Space junkie?
Mike Cahill: Am I an astronomy nut? I mean, I’m obsessed with Carl Sagan and particularly [Sagan’s former assistant] Dr. Richard Berendzen. He lectured on pulp physics. I had this audio book of his that I used to listen to while driving. What was so beautiful about what he did was he took the mysteries of the cosmos and told them through emotional narratives that a layperson could really comprehend. I sought him out and asked him to be part of the film and he basically accepted. So yeah, I guess you could say I’m an astronomy nut. I haven’t studied astronomy but I do love it.

RKO: The timing of the final shuttle launch is great for your film. What was it like to find out that such a momentous event would be closely coinciding with your movie’s release?
MC: At the time, I was thinking, well maybe there can be an infusion of passion for the stars and maybe there can be noises made and ideas shared. I think it’s sad and yet, maybe this will reinvigorate a certain amount of passion for space discovery. It’ll probably raise interest in the film, too, which...well, that’s an interesting point. It’s weird—life is like that. We find connections, and yet, sometimes it’s just so random. But I never would have dreamed it was going to work out this way.

RKO: With a movie like this, you need to establish rules to define the sci-fi elements, and to largely account
for the stuff that bends reality. What were those conversations like? The ones that set the rules of Another
Earth?
MC: Well, the idea stemmed from a notion of string theory in the multiverse—this parallel world which mathematically seems to be theoretical to the next. Current theoretical physics seems to be suggesting that there is a multiverse, or there are parallel universes. The simple way to explain it is that the universe is infinite, and yet the particles in the universe are finite. The strange quality of an infinite universe and a finite number of particles means that, much like a deck of cards, it is shuffled an infinite amount of times. If you shuffled a deck of cards an infinite amount of times, you will come up with an order that is exactly the same but one card is swapped with another. It has totally different implications in the world of science, but we took that and used it by putting this new Earth in our orbit, or next to our orbit, so that there was a possibility of actually confronting the self. It’s like bending science for the purposes of metaphor.

Small budgets, big concepts: "Primer," "Monsters"

RKO: Whoa.
MC: Haha, yeah, tell me if this is boring you! It can get very nerdy. But, basically, I took that notion and put it through an artistic lens. The rules were such that this other Earth was hidden on the opposite side of the sun. How it arrived there is a mystery—perhaps through a wormhole connected to a parallel universe. We did establish certain rules and followed them, and at one point I thought of putting them in the script [more explicitly]. But it just seemed to be more something you were lectured on and less something you felt emotionally, and I wanted to stick to the emotional aspect.

RKO: Earth 2 is always literally looming overhead in this movie, and it seems to be alternately growing and shrinking. Is there an exact science to its proximity? Because as it changed in size, I was reminded of the original King Kong, and how there were size variations in the puppets they used.
MC: It’s a combination of things, really. The planets are supposed to be on interconnecting ellipses, so it actually really is moving closer to us. It starts off as a tiny blue dot in the sky and by the end there’s this looming, iconic earth up in the sky. But all of that’s essentially a poetic reference. The idea is that the exterior world mimics or reveals the interior world of the character. So, in some ways, the encroaching closer and closer intensifies as the drama gets deeper and deeper and the stakes go higher and higher. It reflects that in a tonal way.

RKO: Rhoda keeps an image above her bed. It’s of a nebula, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s an image I actually took from a childhood textbook and held onto because I found it so fascinating. I was struck by it in the movie. Can you tell me where you got it and why you chose to use it? Anything particularly special about it?
MC: Oh, wow. Well that’s one of the Hubble Telescope’s first images after they fixed the blur. When they first launched the Hubble, the image they came back with was a laughing stock, because it was out of focus. So they sent a team up to fix the calibration of the focus, and that image—which is a three-pillar nebula that shows the birth of stars—was one of the first things that came back in focus. I love that image because it’s iconic of the universe and the creation of a star, the genesis of a star, which is really powerful. Rhoda’s obsession is the stars and it symbolizes her passion.


Co-star William Mapother, Brit Marling and Cahill at Sundance 2011.


RKO: Rhoda is a 20-something ex con presented with the contrasting successes of friends and family members. It’s like the world is passing her by. As a working artist who’s chosen to pursue dreams that don’t exactly follow a set model of rules, have you ever looked around at peers and felt similar feelings? Have you ever been Rhoda?
MC: I think so. Yeah, there’s that awkward moment where she runs into an old friend of hers, and the four
years she spent in prison were the four years he spent in college. And now he’s off to business school in Boston. I can identify with that. America is such a place where there’s the progression from high school to college and then from college to life after college. So there’s this sense of where you’re supposed to be, which feeds into the movie’s notion of these ideal paths we’d like to take. But life doesn’t always work out that way.

RKO: There’s very little interaction with Rhoda’s family in this film, or at least her parents. We don’t quite get a sense of what they think about her circumstances. Did you intentionally alienate her? Or did those relationships just not fit into the story you were trying to tell?
MC: There was a lot more interaction with the family in the script, but the first edit was two hours and 40 minutes. I cut a lot of it. There’ll be about four or five scenes in the extras with the family. They struggle with trying to help Rhoda reintegrate into life and she kind of rejects it. But it felt a bit tangential to the ultimate story—I wanted it to be a nice and tight 90 minutes.

RKO: Without giving too much away, there’s a love story in this film, and there’s a point where it crosses a very crucial boundary. What is the moment like when you decide to cross that boundary, and why did you choose to cross it? Was it always written to be the way it appears in the film?
MC: It was. And it’s a very crucial moment because the kinds of stories that interest me the most are not just the stories where the protagonist has to choose between right and wrong, because it’s obvious what they should do—they should choose what’s right. I prefer when the choice is more complex. The scene in which they have that passionate night together...in some ways it’s right because they’re in love. It’s a beautiful moment. However, its only beautiful in the world that they’ve created together, and if that bubble were to burst—which, eventually, it probably will—the fall from that levity they have will be even steeper. So the stakes go higher. I like that notion that one really has to reckon with the idea—what is right and what is wrong. And, here, what can be perceived as wrong also can be perceived as right if you don’t acknowledge the past. I like the complexity of that situation.

Marling and Mapother

RKO: This is a movie that’s basically tethered to one very big idea. It’s right there in the title. What’s more important for a filmmaker—a strong core idea or strong execution?
MC: I think those two...it’s hard to put one as more important because a great core idea that’s executed poorly does not transfer anything. It becomes unarticulated. So the execution is vital, but the strong idea allows for the imagination to roam, so I think the two work in tandem with one another. This is a concept that opens up so many different possibilities and so many different stories and it’d be fun to tell many more.

RKO: When Another Earth was screened at The Franklin Institute last month, a woman in the audience remarked about how there aren’t many events anymore that unify Americans—or the world, for that matter—the way the original moon landing did. Do you think we’re still able to experience that sort of collective awe, and do you think movies have the power to create it?
MC: I definitely think movies can do that. Movies can move people in collective groups, and allow them to connect on an emotional level. The moon landing was an emotional experience that people shared together, and cinema is something that’s an emotional experience that people share together. It becomes one of those things that unites and I think one of the big questions we ask—one of the things we deal with in the film—is the question of our aloneness in the universe, as a society and and as individuals. To escape that loneliness is a deep primal urge that we have. I think through cinema, we can connect.

RKO: Finally, the inevitable question—If you met you met the other you, what would you say to him?
MC: I’d ask if he’s lived a meaningful life. And if he’s making movies, I’d tell him I’d like to see them and that he should watch this one!

Eating up 'The Hunger Games'

(This article was previously published in the June 2011 issue of ICON magazine. It has been republished with permission.)

America has devoured the dystopian book series The Hunger Games in a manner not unlike that of the bloodthirsty viewers of the story’s horrifying, in-text reality show. But why all the fervor? Is it worth the hype? And, finally, will it make a decent movie?
By R. Kurt Osenlund

I HAVE AN UNQUENCHABLE THIRST FOR POP culture phenomena – a powerful urge to be in the know when it comes to media that balloons into something larger than life. Mind you, this isn’t to say that I schedule my evenings around cotton-candy dreck like Dancing with the Stars, or add the likes of Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 3D to my must-see list (okay, I won’t say “never” with that one). But, in general, if everybody’s talking about it, I want the dirt. When J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter installment hit the shelves, I wasn’t about to go play catch-up with its six precursors (it’s best to have grown with those novels, I gather), but, surely, I wanted in on the ending of the biggest literary saga of our time. I asked a friend, well-versed in the Potterverse, to spill all the secrets. Likewise, I was never fully on board with Lost (one can only handle so much carrot-dangling), but there was no way I was missing the perplexing series finale, since, for weeks, it was on the lips of virtually every consumer. Forget the fact that being hip to what’s hot makes me a better writer—I want, I need, to be in the loop.

The latest itch just begging to be scratched came courtesy of author Suzanne Collins, whose dystopian Hunger Games books are the new must-have doorstoppers—the new Harry Potters. The first installment, The Hunger Games, was released in 2008 and sold some 800,000 copies in fewer than two years, by which time it had remained on The New York Times bestseller list for more than 100 straight weeks. It has yielded two sequels, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, both of which have managed to outsell fiction super-giants like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I can’t take all the credit for getting swept up in this particular whirlwind—The Hunger Games was enthusiastically recommended to me by a high-powered book editor, who said, in no uncertain terms, that it was “the next big thing.” Of course, she was referring, at least in part, to the forthcoming film adaptation, scheduled for a March 2012 release. And she sold me, just as I’d all but sworn off the reading of soon-to-be-adapted novels. This time, I wasn’t going to cheat at the tail-end and consult a friend for spoilers. I was going to approach The Hunger Games the way I did, say, The Sopranos: from the very beginning. I picked up book one and soared through it in little more than a week. I’m almost finished with book three.

Author Suzane Collins

Collins imagines a post-apocalyptic North America now known as Panem. The futuristic date is uncertain, but it is definitely post-war, and the remaining nation is a tyrannical one, where an all-powerful Capitol rules over 12 surrounding Districts, each of which cowers to Big Brother and specializes in goods and services reserved for the filthy rich. The milieu is familiar, and book one (on which I’ll chiefly focus) evokes the downtrodden, future-in-rags circumstances of countless dystopian works. But there’s a nasty, shocking and mammoth hook at the core of Collins’s opus. Roughly a century before the events in the novel, a 13th District rose against the Capitol and was swiftly obliterated. As a result, the draconian rulers devised and commenced the ultimate cautionary measure: The Hunger Games, an annual, mandatorily televised tournament in which two teenagers—one boy, one girl—from each district battle to the death in a treacherous arena of the Capitol’s making. Only one victor can emerge from the grisly proceedings which, reportedly inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, reminds the adults of Panem that revolution comes with a price worse than death: the deaths of their children.

The key player amidst this eeriness is Katniss Everdeen, a precocious 16-year-old from the coal-mining District 12 who supports her widowed mother and younger sister by illegally hunting for food in the surrounding forests (she’s handy with traps and a bow-and-arrow). Naturally, the raven-haired do-gooder winds up a Hunger Games contestant (or “tribute,” as they’re known), stepping in to take the place of little sis, whose name gets called during the District 12 lottery (let the Shirley Jackson parallels be drawn). Picked to join Katniss in the Games is Peeta Mellark, a big-hearted baker’s son who’s unknown to our heroine save for a time he offered her free bread on a cold night. If you already smell a romance, your senses are dead-on, and there is indeed some unwieldy mush in the mix. But the violent thrust of The Hunger Games is more
than enough to patch up its narrative wounds.


Brooke Smith in Series 7:
The Contenders

Anyone who’s seen an episode of Survivor knows that, beyond the appeal of social cunning and ever-challenged athleticism, there’s something primal conjured up when watching such a contest—the animalistic-meets-voyeuristic thrill of a do-or-die, last-man-standing battle. It’s a concept that, if not exploited by two-thirds of reality show producers, has inspired plenty of prescient fiction that comments on audience bloodlust. These stories—The Running Man, Death Race and Series 7: The Contenders, to name a few—merge the lure of Roman gladiators with the fly-on-the-wall immediacy of modern surveillance, creating the ultimate form of elimination entertainment. That we, the viewers of these commentaries, are one step removed from their fictional sub-scribers changes nothing of the hard and vicious fact: this is what the people want. What makes Collins’s take on the formula so terribly compelling is that she turns the cameras on children.

The age level of Katniss and her peers is something Hunger Games readers must constantly reconcile, and pit against their desensitized interests in the sort of tournament that, while horrific, is bloody exciting. How can I allow myself to be so wholly engrossed in this story when the crux of it concerns teens killing each other? The profound conundrum, combined with Collins’s lightning pace, gives the tale a breathless urgency. And these kids aren’t giving each other sleeper holds—they’re slitting each other’s throats, impaling each other with spears and arrows, and subjecting each other to torments like attacks from venomous mutant wasps. Bear in mind, too, that this is young adult fiction, aimed squarely at consumers in the very age group of the Games contestants. It’s quite likely that, with an entertainment diet that’s bound to also include a few video games where burly avatars get digitally disemboweled ad infinitum, teen fans won’t think much of the series’ awesome undercurrent, and will instead just add The Hunger Games to their lengthy lists of obsessions. But older readers, who find their gladiatorial guilty pleasures suddenly filled with youngsters, may
need to frequently slap themselves to recall just who these books are for, let alone what they’re about. You can find all the real-world relevance you want in the story’s themes of politics, war and socioeconomic class, but that hammer-swing of ugly youth mortality, that unforgiving theft of innocence, is what gives this grim fairy tale its heady weight.


Entertainment Weekly recently released the exclusive first
images of Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen.


And it’s going to make matters all the more tricky for the hotly anticipated movie, which faces the challenge of not describing the high-stakes carnage, but visualizing it. At the risk of sounding like yet another glutton for gore, I dare say it’s unfortunate that Lionsgate Entertainment, the film’s distributor, has inevitably opted for a PG-13 rating to rope in the widest possible audience. Though some may rest easy knowing that Collins is adapting her own material (with a little help from Shattered Glass scribe Billy Ray), the visceral reaction her book elicits doesn’t want to be watered down. Fierce as it may be, the violence validates the hugely ominous mood that’s always brewing beneath the surface as Katniss attempts to eke out any semblance of teenage normalcy. Its intermittent, ferocious and unfiltered arrival confirms the reader’s fears and keeps things riveting. It needs to be rough and rated-R gritty.

If not, attention may well be drawn to all that doesn’t hold up as well in the story, namely plot holes and puppy love. Collins surely has a knack for making the pages fly and establishing a bracingly vivid environment, but she’s not going to win any Pulitzers for her prose, nor is she immune to the occasional lapse in logic. A fantasy feminist in the wrongfully validated tradition of Stephenie Meyer, Collins projects onto her story what we can only assume is an idealized version of herself—a noble, angsty superwoman who’s pined after by not one, but two hunky dudes. In addition to Peeta, there’s Gale, Katniss’s longtime friend and hunting partner, who’s about ready to chase after more than just deer. Events are never reduced to the midnight-soap melodrama of Twilight, but the impending love triangle shows more than a passing resemblance to the vampiric affair, and the self-importance it suggests about both the author and the heroine is begging to insult you on screen. Same goes for the plot elements that simply don’t jell, even if you’re more than willing to suspend disbelief with a story set hundreds of years in the future. For instance, there’s little trouble buying the notion that the Capitol can electronically control all that takes place in the arena, but how is it that every breath the tributes take is caught on camera? Are there recording devices fixed to every square inch of the landscape, even the interiors of caves? How will the filmmakers account for this?


Your Hunger Games cast, clockwise from top left: Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson,
Liam Hemsworth, Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, Amandla Stenberg,
Wes Bentley, Willow Shields, Lenny Kraitz and Paula Malcolmson.

Luckily, the team that’s been assembled to bring The Hunger Games to life is more promising than not, with a cast whose every addition has been tirelessly covered in the press. Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) will take the lead and wield Katniss’s mighty bow, while heartthrobs-in-training Josh Hutcherson (The Kids Are All Right) and Liam Hemsworth (The Last Song), will compete for her affections as Peeta and Gale, respectively. Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks and Stanley Tucci are set to round out the supporting cast, along with an extensive—and, of course, expendable—selection of teenage newcomers. Leading the behind-the-camera talent is director Gary Ross, a former screenwriter whose filmmaking credits (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) offer zero indication that he’s capable of helming a gloomy yarn about futuristic unrest and forced, broadcasted slaughter. But, then, The Hunger Games is also about the emergence of untapped strength, and perhaps a newly-challenged captain is just what it needs to take off. In any case, at this point, it will matter very little to me what news surfaces before the film’s release. The seed has been planted. Like so many readers, I’m waist-deep in this phenomenon, and, true to my pop-culture urges, I’m hungry for more.

My Office

Confession: I've been dying to do this post for a really long time. I know full well that it's extremely self-indulgent, but honestly, if I were to come across such a post on someone else's blog, I'd be hugely fascinated. Let's go ahead and say that's half the reason I'm publishing it. My office is the one room in our apartment that's wholly devoted to movies. It's the upscale version of the bedroom of my youth, which was papered, floor to ceiling, with filmic paraphernalia. It's a pretty spot-on reflection of me. Here I'll give a tour of its sections, all of which, you'll see, follow a color scheme ("Oh god, here we go," I heard you say...)

These posters alternate frequently, with one cardinal rule: I must adore the film and the poster. I won't put up that which advertises garbage simply because it's pretty, nor will I put up a poster for a great movie if it's ugly (i.e. no "Winter's Bone").

Moving to the left, this is the wall adjacent to the last one. Hanging above my worktable is an amalgamation of stuff culled from my old bedroom, from ticket stubs to magazine clippings to film school equipment. Clockwise from top left: quite possibly my favorite shot of Meryl Streep, a ticket assemblage with stills of Bette Davis and Cary Grant, a photo I took of my favorite local theater, a reel from my grandfather's projector, a decoupage of various stubs, an original photo of the "Gone with the Wind" premiere (a gift from a friend), pics of Maria Falconetti and Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart and, finally, my student film -- all on one little reel.

I've long been enamored of Vanity Fair covers, and found they were among the very few magazine-sized, tack-on-the-wall sort of things that warrant a large frame by themselves (it doesn't hurt that these particular fold-outs fit that color scheme perfectly). Along with them we have actual Vanity Fair issues, a picture of my honey, a few awards (oh, stop), a poster for "The September Issue" and, tucked away with the other mags, the very September Vogue in question -- that Sienna Miller-fronted beast from 2007. (Beneath the mags is a desktop computer, but that, like the worktable, isn't all that fetching.)

My "Hours" gals. This is one of my favorite posters ever. It's SO beautiful, and worthy of permanent placement. To account for the size of the space it had to fill, I had to cut it and squeeze it into a smaller frame. Here's the secret: I trimmed around the the right side of Meryl and moved her closer to Julianne and Nicole. No one ever notices.

I know, I know -- it's SUCH a bloody cliche. But come on -- it's in Italian.

When Brandon and I combined our stuff, his "Titanic" joined my "Brokeback Mountain" and "Atonement," and thus was born our Love Conquers All wall. The knickknacks include my grandfather's projector, its corresponding match that I found at a thrift shop, old cameras, an old hat (we like to pretend it belongs to Angelina "I want my son back" Jolie), a slate, the clamshell for "King Kong," 3D glasses and framed pics of Katherine Hepburn, Cate Blanchett, Orson Welles and Greta Garbo.

A lot of people accuse me of being anal for alphabetizing my DVDs. The response is simple: a) I am rather anal, and b) How the hell would I ever find anything if they weren't aplhabetized!?! This is where the geek in me comes out full-blast -- this here is my baby. My film collection is my favorite material thing on the planet. It's been growing for over a decade and, as you can imagine, I am in firm, life-sustaining denial of DVD being replaced as the premiere home video format. Not under my roof, darling.

If you've taken the time to read this, I hope you enjoyed my little office tour, and I hope I made it entertaining enough to distract from the self-indulgence. Now, back to work...

Why I Still Love Print Media

This is a republished version of an article I wrote for the March 2011 issue of ICON magazine. I feel an obvious tinge of hypocrisy posting it online but, hey, I gotta get my work out there just like anyone else. It has been republished with permission. Just pretend you're reading it in print.

Have fun with your Nook -- I'll still be browsing the newsstand.
By R. Kurt Osenlund

What you hold in your hands is a labor of love. Roll your eyes and call me a hopeless sap, but it's true. A whole team of people poured their guts into the content on these pages, and we're more than happy to know that some of it might smudge its way onto your fingers and literally stick with you after you've finished reading. We're pleased with the fact that you can roll up our work and shove it into your purse, fold it in half and slip it into your pocket, or file it away in a stack you might later dust off and revisit. We like that you can touch what we create, and we like that, once you've had your fill, you end your experience not by clicking a tab or minimizing an app, but by very symbolically and very romantically closing a book.

I'm 27 – three months older than Mark Zuckerberg. I'm part of the generation responsible for transferring the vast majority of our media consumption from the page to the screen, whatever dimensions, picture quality and degree of portability that screen may boast. I'm deeply grateful to be a young and hungry professional in the era of digital dominance, if only for the exposure and resources it affords. Any professional advancement I've achieved has come, at the very least, via an e-mail exchange or the cyber-broadcasting of my byline, and in terms of my everyday work, it is virtually impossible for me to fathom how writers and editors got by in the days of analog journalism. It would be like removing every bit of equipment from a quarry worker's arsenal and leaving him with a wee hammer and chisel. I'll admit that about 80 percent of my own media consumption takes place online, and that includes reading the latest national headlines, devouring the latest celebrity scandal, following the work of the writers I admire, and, yes, browsing oodles of material brought to my attention via Twitter and Facebook.

All that said, I will never fall out of love with the printed page, nor should our culture at large. The tactile pleasures of leafing through magazines, newspapers and books are what guided me toward this industry in the first place. And while I know I'm part of the problem, the unrelenting – if gratuitously premature – talk of print media's crumpling demise never fails to jab like a dagger.

When computing all the pessimistic points, specifically in regards to journalism, the key issue I always return to is just that: the issue. Reveling in the point-and-click immediacy, you may well turn to the Web for the newest updates on Gabrielle Giffords and Hosni Mubarak, or peruse the hottest Fashion Week couture while dodging ads and subscription offers in a slideshow on Vogue.com. But never will you find online the distinct, bookended art of a printed issue – an issue with an encapsulated voice, perspective, theme and design. By nature, the Internet is a universe of instantaneous information, and no Web site thrives without delivering near-constant updates. Thus, your experience with a webzine, or with a print outlet's online presence, is never complete. Such a thoroughly modern, Zuckerbergian notion is surely exhilarating to some, and there's no denying the luster of limitless variety or the satisfaction of getting what you want when you want it. But another kind of satisfaction – the gratification of having gathered a concise collection of words and images in the precise manner in which a skilled group intended it to be gathered – is lost online, lost in the sea of lethally efficient and furiously fast data that, however useful and attractive, undermines artistic value in our society.

Since I can practically hear the Apple minions gathering, let's get to the iPad. Sleek, relatively compact and capable of hosting whole publications page by page, the iPad, along with its ilk of also-rans, provides the closest thing we have to the digital re-creation of the issue experience. I think it's a great thing. It's a virtual magazine of magazines, a newspaper of newspapers. Through with the latest edition of The New York Times? Good for you. You're now free to move about the new GQ with the swipe of a fingertip. You can still slip it into your purse, if not your pocket. You can carry it with you on public transportation (perhaps the one venue in which the print world has been able to maintain top billing). However, your connection to what you're consuming is still kept at bay, at arm's length. You're still a slave to the dazzling, but imperial and impersonal, Screen. As a writer, I can definitively say that I prefer to hold my work and the work of others in my own two hands. But the true measure of the palpability that's lost in pixelated translation lies with photography.

A few weeks ago, the annual Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue fell through my mail slot. It might be my single favorite piece of continually printed media. Have you seen this year's beaut? There on the gilded, maroon cover, decked out as if plucked from a Josef von Sternberg movie, are the dashing likes of Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway and James Franco. Pull out the three-panel cover, and the rest of Norman Jean Roy's stunning group photo is revealed: Jennifer Lawrence, Anthony Mackie, Jesse Eisenberg, Olivia Wilde, Andrew Garfield, Noomi Rapace and five others are lined up across a swanky bar, looking out enticingly and beckoning you to pay the cover charge. Inside, the eye candy surges on with, among other things, the requisite portfolio of Hollywood portraits, an aesthetic high point for a publication that delivers a monthly gush of brilliant shots.

Magazines such as this, and even newspapers in all their halftone glory, serve as your personal scrapbooks of the work of supreme contemporary artists, be it original photography or pre-produced imagery collected and compiled for your consumption. It's a privilege, really – for a price that rarely exceeds $6, you're given a catalog of windows into potentially hundreds of different worlds, and you own the art in a capacity that's but one degree from its intended state (an un-doctored print). I run a blog, I manage a weekly publication's Web site, and any breaking picture that “must be seen” will almost always reach my eyes via the Screen. But those who contend that viewing the digital rendition of the photography in Vanity Fair – or The New York Times, or GQ, or Sports Illustrated or American Cheerleader – rivals the experience of drinking it in in the real world musn't be trusted. You simply can't beat the sensation of marveling at a printed picture, no matter how many copies of it can be saved to your desktop.

And speaking of copies, the collection is joining the issue as a victim pounded down by the iron fist of the Screen. How lovely that you can bring the whole Harry Potter saga with you to the beach on your compact Kindle (try not to get any sand in the grooves!), but how sad that you no longer have any use for all seven beautifully beefy volumes, no longer need to to gaze at Mary GrandPré's whimsical, iconic cover illustrations. The advent of digital is unfurling endless opportunities, but it is also robbing us of our possessions, our libraries, our fundamental relationships to spatial objects. Sure, my three-foot-wide archive of the last four years of Vanity Fair is unwieldy compared the convenience of the search-and-discover archives of VF.com, but how I love what's contained in those three feet, from the glossy design to the editor's letters to the contribution the stark, uniform spines make to the tableau of my office. How I appreciate dusting off an issue and revisiting it, remembering how I felt the first time I scoured its pages. The Screen insists that the media I consume exist not on a shelf or in an office, but in an alternate realm where it can never be held and never be enjoyed at its full sensory potential. Everything around me tells me that I should leap onto the digital train and never look back, but truthfully, I'd rather just step onto a train with a book.