August 2008
82 posts
Things not to do alone in your apartment at any...
Read Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby.
I found an old copy in a free bin on my stairs last week—it shone out at me from the box like a beacon. See, I had been avoiding seeing the movie since I was 15 (partially because I didn’t want to think of Ruth Gordon as evil, ever, and also because I was one of those skittish children who wouldn’t sleep for weeks following a...
July 2008
103 posts
people are reading magazines again?
[An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the...
A Celebration of Maurice Sendak with Tony Kushner →
With guests: Meryl Streep, James Gandolfini, Dave Eggers, Spike Jonze, Linda Emond, Catherine Keener, Anika Noni Rose, Stephen Greenblatt and others. 92nd St Y. September 15, tickets go on sale TOMORROW.
There’s no way I am missing this. Like, not even if someone I know has a child that night. Sidenote: are any of you seven months pregnant?
The Great Chick-Lit Cover Up (Guardian UK) →
Apparently all ladies books in the UK are getting the girly cover treatment, high-minded or not. Yeah, it’s here too. Does this really look like it just won the Pen/Faulkner and is mostly about the struggles of octogenarian New Yorkers after the 80s arts boom?:
A dingo made her crazy?
To quote Anthony Lane: “The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take Mamma Mia! to be a useful contribution to that debate.”
Or as funny lady Julie Klausner, who is as rad as ever, put it: “I thought about what a mentally retarded person’s reaction to the Mamma Mia! film would be, in all honesty, just as Katy St. Clair showed, in her...
Public School Intelligentsia →
I have to say, this blog has been sort of awesome lately, guilty-pleasure, online reading-wise. I don’t know who is behind it or how they seem to be doing it in real time—or at least a day behind, which isn’t so bad—but I enjoy it. It’s like taking what people are talking about on the internet and running it through a line of coke and then dipping it in a blue razz...
“June 16, 1948: The artist who really loves people loves them so well the way...”
– The Diaries of Dawn Powell may be one of the best books I’ve ever read, and it’s simply her musings not meant for the general public. I’ll probably excerpt the shit out of more of this book/explain who Dawn Powell is as I go on, but wow. Much recommended.
Fear and Trigger Finger in NYC
Last night, sometime in that indigo cavern between 4 and 5am, I woke up, as I do most nights now, in an insomniac jolt. This is something that can usually be cured by drinking a glass of water or watching something mild and milky on my computer, some sort of visual sedative like old episodes of 90s sitcoms. Worst case, I get up and start doing work (my mother, a master of twisting her insomnia...
30 Rock really does me right some days.
Liz: I got in this business to be like Rosemary, to make people think. Jack: No, you got into this business because you’re funny and you’re weird and you’re socially retarded.
MJ- Wanna Be Startin Somethin’ 2008.
Not...
is it embarassing
that i got my b-day party dress inspiration from blair waldorf for this evening? please don’t answer this.
E-Mancipate →
Presented without comment: E-mancipate.
Margaret Atwood.
“On the whole she fares better with the men, if they can work their way past the awkward preliminaries; if they can avoid calling her ‘little lady,’ or saying they weren’t expecting her to be so feminine, by which they mean short. Though only the most doddering ones do anymore. If she weren’t so tiny, though, she’d never get away with it, if she were six feet...
I would not exactly dub this "succeeding in...
Or at least you know, not without really trying.
Not great.
Gladys Nederlander, 1925-2008 →
I know, I know. We lost Sofia yesterday, she went to the great Shady Pines in the sky, and that was very sad. But we also lost Gladys Nederlander (nee Rackmil) at age 83, one of Broadway’s most legendary producettes. Born Gladys Lenore Blum in 1925, she rose beyond her first-generation Jewish immigrant status and married not once but thrice, each time further ascending up the entertainment...
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
Man I am...
Decisions
kettering:
I’m having one of those days where I don’t like myself that much. One of my favorite, most favorite, Kurt Vonnegut quotes (which I have quoted like three times just on my blog(s) in the last year or so, due to its awesomeness and his death), goes:
“Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder....
MBAR- The Debtor
File under: the only thing I...
Tracy Letts →
Great piece on the Pulitzer-winning playwright in the NYT this weekend:
“Asked what he wrote about in Oklahoma, he replied instantly, “Violent madness.” There was a disturbing story in the first grade,” he said. “We had to make little books where you illustrate the cover, and my story was called ‘The Psychopath.’ The cover showed a man hanging in the closet, and he had also shot himself in...
“The circumstances of women’s lives…provide examples for new ways of...”
– Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Margaret Mead, whose book of social anthropology, Composing a Life, is giving me far too much to think about right now.
good morning
A: i am also mad because i wanted to treat myself to the famous $8 egg and cheese at the general store but it's too hot to eat
Me: bourgeoisie problems?
A: are there any other kind?
Ok, Snagfilms is pretty awesome.
That is all.
But also: Watch Black, White + Gray. It’s so good, and so free.
i found two pennies. →
“This experience has left me to grapple with learning how to remain an honest writer in New York: In truth, I’m not sure it can be done.”
For someone so young, Jess says some things. And some of them are worth saying! What a blessing to have the jig be up before she is using it to juice her own batteries down the line (though I’m not entirely sure she won’t). I wish...
WatchGreat behind-the-scenes on the Waterfalls/public art in the city 2008.
Encouragement.
C: Just wanted to let you know--even though you get old, the wounds of adolescence never heal
C: Happy birthday!
Kay Ryan →
It’s official, today Kay Ryan was just named the new poet laureate:
[“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”…For a woman who once shrank from exposing herself, this...
25, off to a good start.
[If there is a philosophy implicit in these pages, it is that great pleasure in food is there for the taking. Food is not a metaphor for life. It is life, and eating is an art. Now, more than ever, in this era of obsessive self-denial, obsessive overindulgence and obsessive moderation, it is deeply satisfying to be reminded that, as Fisher writes, “often the place and time help make a food...
in which we discuss language
A: i had no idea she was that funny and/or witty
R: i plan to use banana split as a way to describe people
A: "that chick is a banana split" et al
R: people really don't talk like that anymore...is it because no one wants to objectify women in such creative ways?
A: ha
R: it's always bitch, whore, slut
R: never, she is a curdled milkshake and send it back please
Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe in a (possibly...
TC: Poor innocent me. And all this time I thought you were a bona fide blonde.
MM: I am. But nobody's that natural. And incidentally, fuck you.
TC: Now do you think we can get the hell out of here? You promised me champagne, remember?
MM: I remember. But I don't have any money.
TC: You're always late and you never have any money. By any chance are you under the delusion that you are Queen Elizabeth?
MM: What's that cunt got to do with it?
TC: Queen Elizabeth never carries money either. She's not allowed to. Filthy lucre must not stain the royal palm. It's a law or something.
MM: I wish they'd pass a law like that for me.
TC: Keep going the way you are and maybe they will.
MM: Remember, I said if anybody ever asked you what I was like, what Marilyn Monroe was really like-well, how would you answer them? I bet you'd tell them I was a slob. A banana split.
TC: Of course. But I'd also say you are a beautiful child.
“Please excuse me if the answer is obvious and the question is retarded, but what...”
– -Kate Christensen, The Great Man
Like the last person to arrive at a really good party, I am devouring Christensen’s latest this week (which recently won the Pen/Faulkner). There are a few missteps in the writing, but in general, I am reading it very slowly, like a meal I don’t want to... 