September 2008
40 posts
So this Kurt Andersen article is awesome.
[We have been through booms and busts before. And this being the city it is, the ups and downs seem more extreme and operatic than elsewhere. We are drama queens. “Poor dear reckless New York,” Henry James wrote a century ago. But the city also, in its gimlet-eyed, show-must-go-on way, makes do and muddles through. James: “Its mission would appear to be, exactly, to gild the temporary, with its...
WatchI could not be more excited to see this movie. And not just because my name is in the title.
will be back into the tumbs next week. lots of life bizness happening during this one.
“This is a once-in- a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event.”
– Alan Greenspan, on the potential black Monday tomorrow. Oy.
WatchWas good!
David Foster Wallace, man. Sad sad sad. At least I will always be able to credit him with some of my favorite phrases in writing, not the least of which is “bobbing fellatially,” to describe cruise ships in a harbor. I can’t really think of a better way to put it than that.
Listen
“Centuries from now, when historians look back on New York, they will say Rome...”
– Robert A. Caro, last week.
Zadie Smith on Kafka
[At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his 12-hour shifts that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system, 8.30 am until 2.30 pm. And then what? Lunch until 3.30, then a sleep until 7.30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After...
Rich's ANTM recaps are back. →
and he’s KILLING it.
“There is an attitude that you’re not a real artist if you make money, if...”
– Hmm. Damien Hirst, here.
[Yes, I can write about a lot of things Besides the summer that I turned sixteen. But that’s my ground swell. I must start Where things began to happen and I knew it.]
—-Mark Jarman
So, SP's friends won't even back her up. →
Hmm. But then, frenemies are the foundation of the American experience.
WatchThe Cutrone Minute is more and more becoming the best thing ever.
RENT's over. Sort of sad, right? →
If you were anything like me in high school, this sort of hits you in the babymaker. Anyways, one song glory and all that.
“There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy?”
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, provoker of sighs.
{What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss! - as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? … Oh, is there no way you can express it without...
Lessons.
A tropical storm is the wrong environment in which to buy furniture or make a peregrination to Red Hook. Noted for the future.
Today in good calls.
[Who’s Sony going to call to pen its reboot of “Ghostbusters?” Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg. The studio has recruited “The Office” writer-producers to work on a new installment of the 1980s franchise that starred Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Harold Ramis as bumbling ghost-hunting scientists.]{via}
Artist's Wives/Muses Given a Voice →
An adorable professor emerita named Ruth Butler is publishing Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin, a look into the world of the women who supported the painters during their heydays (the real-life version of Kate Christensen’s excellent The Great Man, perhaps?). I intend to devour it. She says that even despite plenty of mistreatment, philandering,...
