March 2011
43 posts
Interview with John Waters →
thenervousbreakdown.com
Davis: I’m Jewish, and often think of that bit by Moses Maimonides, something akin to, “every Jew is an actor playing a Jew.”
John: I have to tell you my only Jewish thing is that whenever I write an email on my Blackberry I and sign it, “Best ‘JW,’” it corrects to “JEW” in all capital letters, which is really embarrassing. Sometimes, I’m writing an agent and saying “thank you so much for your offer, and ‘Best JEW.’” Thank God I catch it every time. My other friend is named “Rach” and she always signs “RX” and it auto corrects to “Sex.”
Davis: Maybe if you could combine the two, best “JEW Sex,” you’d be right in there.
John: Yeah, that would be true, yeah.
Majoring in the Arts
Blue Skies For Black Hearts
Blue Skies for Black Hearts - Majoring in the Arts
Cellist Wendy Warner In A Russian Mood →
npr.org
Cellist Wendy Warner owns two cellos. One was built by Becker in 1963 and the other by Gagliano in 1772; “it’s like being married to two different people,” she says.
Warner won the 4th International Rostropovich Competition in 1990. She went on to study with Rostropovich, and I was fascinated when she told us that he never played the cello for her in their lessons. Instead, he would play the piano or conduct, and he would unleash his imagination and colorful thinking. He was “very pictorial,” she says, and he wanted Warner to learn to generate her own sound with a vast palette of colors. He didn’t demonstrate because he didn’t want his students to imitate him. Warner has long believed, like Rostropovich, that people are born with an ideal sound within them, and that their task is to find it and give it voice.
Who will play Assange?
Speculating for The Daily…
holy fuck i don’t care if this is old holy fuck meringue cookie
E. L. Doctorow once remarked that appearances are all we have, so we should treat them with great care. We are often told that privacy is disappearing, that the most intimate secrets are open to public probing. But the reality is the opposite: what is effectively disappearing is public space, with its attendant dignity. Cases abound in our daily lives in which not telling all is the proper thing to do. In the film Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact: “A visiting gentleman accidentally opens a bathroom door and discovers a woman completely nude. He quickly takes a step back, closes the door, and says: ‘Pardon, Madame!’ That is politeness. The same gentleman, pushing the same door, discovering the same completely naked woman, then says, ‘Pardon, Monsieur!’ That is tact.” It is only in the second case, by pretending not to have seen enough even to make out the sex of the person in the shower, that one displays true tact.
Anthony Mackie adjusts to film roles →
chicagotribune.com
“I can’t play Spider-Man because Spider-Man don’t look like me,” he said. “It’s frustrating that the movies I want to make I haven’t been able to make. Orlando Bloom was given 15 opportunities after ‘Lord of the Rings.’ Black men are given no opportunities…..In the early 1990s, every black actor you know now was starting out and making movies,” he added, becoming more animated. “They were making more movies under Daddy Bush than we are under Obama. Which is ridiculous.”
While Listening to Yuck Album All Day
- Heard Brenda Walsh saying: actually, my plans got poxed.
- Heard brave drummer tell guitarist: turn off the fucking flanger.
- Saw Winona Ryder before Black Swan.
- Wanted Camel non-filtered.
“Those are the two big enemies. Bitterness and style. If I can escape both, then I’ll be happy.”
— Elliott Smith
Elliott Smith on Helter Skelter
“Elliott figured that Lennon was probably so pissed off when McCartney walked in with ‘Helter Skelter,’ with this attitude like, ‘that’s the song you’ve been trying to write your entire life and I just wrote it in five minutes, and recorded it with Ringo in the other room. I just wrote it, recorded it, you were busy working on whatever, Oh Yoko Number 9. Clipping up pieces of tape and taping them back together.”
Feelings
Bunky Green
Bunky Green - Feelings
This has to be the greatest introduction to the schmaltzy ‘Feelings’ that I’ve ever heard. Even when ‘Feelings’ kicks in, still pretty sweet.
Vanguard [record label] was trying to market Bunky as a sort of soul/R&B artist (à la Grover Washington). On his albums as a leader, there are quite a few cover tunes including “The Greatest Love Of All,” “What I Did For Love,” and even “The Entertainer.” From Transformations, here is Bunky playing “Feelings.” Yes, that “Feelings!”
Lover I Don't Have to Love
Bright Eyes
Bright Eyes - Lover I Don’t Have to Love
Bright Eyes introduced this song last night as: “This is a song about sex with strangers. If I had the time, I’d have sex with all of you.”
Strange Time for Art
“We’re in a strange time in which art is marginalized in public practices. The best thing that could happen for art in this country—I’m half-serious in saying this—is that censorship would be imposed. Art would suddenly come through a level of awareness that I don’t think it has in contemporary America, especially literature. We had a critic take issue recently with a book who said, ‘The problem with this book is the characters are not likable.’ Was Raskolnikov likable? I mean, would you like to live next door to Hamlet? That should be the first act of censorship: Characters cannot be likable for 25 years. And no happy endings.”
John O’Brien (Dalkey Archive publisher)
Luke Rathborne on South Williamsburg
Best person in the neighborhood whose name you don’t know?
I saw this guy with a beard the other day. He was walking his bike. He had on a tie-dye kind of shirt and had a mustache. Have you seen him?
—
The sense of humor on this guy!
The Boy With The Lou Reed Eyes
The Lisa Marr Experiment
The Lisa Marr Experiment - The Boy With the Lou Reed Eyes
Planting Seeds
Built to Spill
Built to Spill - Planting Seeds
They’ll play your favorite song, just to sell shit to you.
I think Bill Hicks was right, about what they should do.
Looking for serious minded, fun loving, T.V. commercial watching candidates →
media-match.com
The perfect candidate has a computer, internet connection and an attention span longer than the average television commercial
You may be required to watch and rate up to 20 commercials or more a day.
San Francisco
Brett Dennen
Brett Dennen - San Francisco
Would love to visit this poor lovesick dude in the “old Victorian down in the Lower Haight” he’s going to rent for himself.
