February 2012
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Three citations, "secret downer" edition
“Even more striking is [The Nutty Professor]’s pessimistic and sorrowful conclusion—that everyone, including Stella Stevens’ character and us, prefers the greasy and aggressive braggadocio of [Buddy] Love to the gentle and klutzy fumblings of [Julius] Kelp.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum
“You know, The Artist is pretty much a TOTAL DOWNER about a depressed guy getting left in the dust....
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It’s Friday so I have another blurb over at Spectrum Culture. Click for further evidence of my pith skillz.
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“don’t look at my inbox! what kind of monster are you?”
– my co-worker brian (via yoursecretary)
Direct quote of thing I said.
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For @SpectrumCulture, I wrote about seeing The Muppet Movie for the first time.
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Contradictory (or not) citations
“This is a catastrophe that we hope will not end where it began; it might go on and become a story. It will not have to be made up — that is all-important to us — but we do have to know in what odd places to look for missing parts of a story about a wildfire and of course have to know a story and a wildfire when we see one. So this story is a test of its own belief — that in this...
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We Need To Talk About how the first 30ish minutes of Lynne Ramsay’s film audaciously juliennes Lionel Shriver’s text into a nonlinear collage of pure cinema before settling into a relatively conventional — albeit superbly crafted — adaptation, hitting the book’s narrative highlights but unable to match its depth. Why did Ramsay change horses mid-stream? It was my favorite movie...
January 2012
32 posts
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“Hours? Do they take PCs? Printers? What do we do?”
– Strangely haunting message — in its entirety — written on a fragment of index card stuck inside a library book
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“Once the tube’s only extant certificate of “quality,”...”
– Tom Carson, brilliant on his “PBS apostasy” and submitting to Downton Abbey
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Hell is other jingles
Because I want everyone to share my pain, I have inflicted my tortured relationship with that “Stock Up On Joy” Coke jingle (previously considered here) on the readers of Spectrum Culture for this week’s List Inconsequential: “If There is a Hell, This is the Soundtrack.” They even dug up the YouTube link. I am so sorry.
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“The know-it-alls are always the last to know. Everyone’s a diagnostician,...”
– Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet. Oh hell yes this book is now in my possession and breaking my brain already.
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“I’m not a fan of establishing shots….I have a ‘no...”
– Steven Soderbergh
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WatchHey, you know what singlehandedly justifies the existence of The Artist? Matt Zoller Seitz’s “Vertigoed” mashup contest. Participants are rescoring scenes from throughout film history with Bernard Herrmann’s classic swoony Vertigo theme, inspired by M. Hazanavicius’ controversial borrowing of said theme and subsequent upbraiding by the apparently-still-alive Kim...
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Witnessed
Today I found myself in one of those situations where it seemed that a likely result would be me giving a statement to the police. I was in a 7-11 to pick up some chocolate-covered pretzels. Some rowdy youths were also in the store, being loud but not doing anything wrong as far as I could tell. The short, ponytailed manager started yelling at the youths and it got ugly. A rough transcript from...
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Shocked
Alec Baldwin is taken aback. 30 Rock, “Dance Like Nobody’s Watching,” 2012.
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“We tried to define bore, and found out how relative and personal the term was....”
– Barry Hannah, Nightwatchmen
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Dreamt last night that I went to see We Need To Talk About Kevin—which in waking reality has yet to be released outside of brief qualifying runs in NY & LA—and it was being projected onto a floor; to watch it, you had to sit on a small stool that rotated 360 degrees for some reason, and keep your neck craned down to gaze at the projection beneath your feet. Actually, I don’t think I...
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“What he had felt for his furniture he felt now for the bars of his cell, for the...”
– Stanley Elkin, A Bad Man
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Vivid memory that must be from 1993, when I was seven: In my mom’s car with my mom and my aunt, pulling into our driveway, my aunt talking about that new Frasier show and asking “do you think he’ll end up with Roz”
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Kelsey Grammer is having a hard time
Boss, “Stasis,” 2011
December 2011
35 posts
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the top 15 books I read in 2011
#15: The White Album (Joan Didion, 1979) — I’d previously only read Play it as it Lays, which I think gave me the wrong idea of Didion; all that chic Hollywood nihilism, you know, not really my thing. But of course her nonfiction is great. The time-and-place specificity of these essays can be either thrilling (LOL @ fuckhead Jim Morrison) or boring (something about the L.A. freeway system in...
