July 2010
89 posts
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“Hell is an Irish bar where it’s Saint Patrick’s Day every day.”
– Christopher Moltisanti
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Guessing
When Ellis says in Lunar Park that “he” wrote Less Than Zero on a 7-something day meth binge. I think he meant he got it out during the binge. He likely wrote it over a 6 month period in the library.
Or more likely, none of that is true. Or it all is.
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Bulk Questions
Is James Franco for real?
Noticed just walls and walls of Ginsberg in the Harold Washington Library, hereafter library, today.
David Markson has donated, likely it is donated, his book collection to The Strand.
Giving new meaning to getting rid of all this shit.
Giving older meaning to humbleness.
How could anyone be surprised. Even Newsweek has something to say.
So there’s an...
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Wilco, Color Me Impressed (Replacements Cover)
...
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Yo La Tengo, Periodically Double or Triple.
...
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“When boys think about girls, they think about their eyes, their legs, their...”
– Anna Karina
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Ripe for parody
In the Bowery memorizing the boards on the floor, paper all over the room, all the letters I can’t answer. This used to be home. Sculpt all day and then people come by in the late afternoon, drinking around the marble tabletop. Then we’d find some dinner. Last summer there were things like roaring big salads, hunks of chicken, tomatoes red on the lettuce. Strawberries and two kinds of...
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Updike on Drinkability
“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”
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“What is the accordion if not the musical expression of blindness?”
– Geoff Dyer, from The Ongoing Moment
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“Every night I ask the lord “Why?” and I haven’t heard a decent...”
– Kerouac, from Desolation Angels
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She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios?
Joyce: Mr. Duffy to Mrs. Sinico in “A Painful Case”
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Being Zen is an Aid to Capitalism
The rental building next to ours is being torn down to make way for the new. The owning new. The plan is to build a yuppie scum condo: totally new construction plus a waxed wife.
The certainty of noise, the possibility of rats.
Dark workers were backing up beeping trucks and taking orders from fat white supervisors unscrewing thermoses.
I thought about screaming out my window “leave...
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Id, Ego, Summer Blockbuster
David Edelstein on Inception:
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb (the name sounds like it should evoke something—but what? Dummkopf?), who specializes in plunging into people’s “subconscious” minds while they sleep and extracting their corporate secrets. (I’m with Freud in preferring “unconscious.”) But his new client, Saito (Ken Watanabe), wants the impossible: for Cobb not to steal an idea but...
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Hi, babe!
There’s a long-form article on The Room in Harper’s this month.
Wiseau’s most mystifying decision was to film The Room’s several rooftop vingnettes against a panoramic green screen, on which a shimmering digital vista was later badly composited. Wiseau’s insistence on filming The Room with two cameras is a triple-play rarity in modern filmmaking: at once...
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Fionn Regan, Protection Racket
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Dear Sirs,
The size and number of the rats in Panama City, when I passed through, truly astonished me. I saw one of them sunning himself beside the swimming pool. And another was looking at me from the wainscoting of a restaurant as I was eating a fruit salad. Also, on an electric wire which slanted upward into a banana tree, I saw a whole rat-troupe go back and forth, harvesting. They ran the...
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Sadness for Umpires
I saw on a thankfully mute television today ESPN, The Worldwide Leader in Sports, dissecting an umpire snafu that befell a Dodger’s pitcher last night. Up came the slick graphic screens designed by Risdee fratboys, with the language copy written by the douchebags of Brown, with the sportscasters in their monkey suits who would be doing more for the common good if they were at GS trading hog...
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Joy Division Control Movie Band, Candidate.
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“The far out fringe has been very in this week. Another member is Arman, one of the rare French artists to find favor in New York at the moment. Andy Warhol considers him one of the most indifferent of Frenchman.
It is getting harder and harder for artists to come up with something original in the way of invitations, but those deisgned by Arman for his show deserve an award of some kind....
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Betty Harris, There’s a Break in the...
Painting of Tiger Woods Vomiting - $80
thisistheglamorous:
From the Craigslist ad:
Original oil painting of Tiger Woods bent out of shape at the bar. Wearing a nike golf shirt of course!
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Watching the videos of Spike Jones tape I’m realizing it was Cannonball by The Breeders that reminded me of that riff in the Frelon Brun groove. Not just some random Pixies song.
Also, everyone in the 90s looks like Catherine Keener.
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Bruce, Mary’s Place. Love this tune. Every...
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“I propose a toast
to my self-control”
– Morphine, Cure for Pain
Swine: to the pigpen!
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Notes to Saturday Pitchfork
0. For the third year in a row I sneak in without really trying to. Gotta stop buying tickets for this thing, but I like supporting it.
1. We locate the central tickets for beverages area. A man wearing white bucks stripped of all their southern charm yells in my direction “hey, Metahead, when are Kings of Leon in 2004 going on?” I say “6:15, stage B. The Balance...
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He Swears
Every so often he swears to start a finer life.
But when night comes with its own counsels,
its compromises, and its promises;
but when night comes with its own vigor
of the body, craving and seeking, he returns,
forlon, to the same fatal joy.
Cavafy
“There is a kind of amnesia to do with the cinema. One doesn’t know what...”
– Baudrillard in conversation with Mike Gane, 1991, from Baurdillard Live.
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“natural guts defeating natural talent
that’s the best”
– Bukowski 