The other first thing you notice is the vibe of Peanuts Take Manhattan. Metropolitan exists in a world populated solely by children and, moreover, by children who act comically adult-like. Parents are rarely mentioned, and even more rarely in-scene. (“I don’t think I’ve met anyone’s parents,” Tom notes.)
Good appreciation here. I need to watch Metropolitan again. I’ve liked all of the Whit Stillman movies I’ve seen.
Metropolitan, or How I Learned to Stop Kvetching and Love Christmas by Ben Mauk
“Comedians are known for having long marriages,” he says. Why? “I have to apologise for the self-serving answer I’m going to give you, but: we’re smart. If you’re smart, you stay married if you can. Marriage is hard for everyone – that’s a basic fact – but it’s a better life if you can do it. Very nice. Very relaxing. Very enjoyable.”
And:
To this day, Seinfeld still marks crosses on a calendar, keeping regular hours (albeit relaxed ones: most days, he says, he’ll meet a friend for a two-hour breakfast) and spending 20 minutes a day doing Transcendental Meditation, which is the only topic to jolt him from his default nonchalance into real enthusiasm: “I could do the whole interview about TM, to be honest, but we’d just lose everybody. I’ll describe it very simply: it’s like you have a phone, and somebody gives you a charger for it. And so now you can recover from this exhausting experience of being a human, twice a day. It’s deep rest. Now that’s something that can help people. As opposed to this idiotic calendar thing.”
2013: Roundup • Albums • Songs • Writing • Sounds
This is the third annual installment of my favorite sounds and moments from music this year. All sounds have been extracted from their songs and smashed together in the SoundCloud player above; the list is below so you can follow along.
For three years now I’ve enjoyed Matthew’s collage of his favorite sounds of the year; you might enjoy it too.
This is pretty wonderful.
Music fans tend to regard the implosion of the record industry like most Americans think about overseas wars — we know it’s out there, and it’s very likely bad, but we quickly grow tired of hearing about it because it doesn’t appear to affect us directly.
See my Steven Hyden tag for a couple other of his music articles I’ve liked.
Taken. Preposterous fantasy fulfillment popcorn flick that has everything you need, if that’s all you seek. Tough guy does cool shit! Gérard Watkins was perfect in his brief appearance. Liam Neeson also has a great badass role in The Grey. If you’re looking for another good abduction/chase movie set in Paris, you need to watch À bout portant (Point Blank).
He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self Reliance. Pretty clear echoes of Seneca:
They undertake one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle. As Lucretius says: “Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.” But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion.
If you want to be a beautiful writer, not wanting to connect your illness to your brilliance is nearly impossible.
Being a part of the Disney thing for so long will make you not want to be this perfect little puppet forever. Eventually, I hit a limit and thought, Screw all this, I’m just going to show people who I am. I think that happened to a lot of us. Disney kids are spunky in some way, and I think that’s why Disney hires them. “Look, he jumped up on the table!” Five, six, ten years later, they’re like, “Oh! What do we do?” Come on, guys. You did this to yourselves.
Who knows how much of this is just really good, massaged PR messaging, but still. An interesting look from the inside out.
The point is, as we’re paddleboarding [25 miles] … there wasn’t a tree, there wasn’t a corner, there weren’t mile markers. You had to break it down even smaller. Into the stroke. So I sat there and tried to perfect my stroke each time I pull. The angles of how I’m pulling the paddle back and going forward. How long I’m going. How I’m using my wrist. All these things. You try to make the stroke perfect.
Filed under: practice.
Kyle Korver’s Big Night, and the Day on the Ocean That Made It Possible
Dallas Buyers Club. It’s not great, but never really goes wrong, and I like the moment-to-moment push and urgency of the thing. Great to see a likable hero who never remotely approaches perfection. Matthew McConaughey is something special.
I always tease them at the beginning of the semester about their writing—I say, “Whenever you write me at 11 o’clock on a Thursday night begging me for an extension on the paper, the prose is always so beautiful and the email is so wonderfully structured.” It’s a joke, but it’s also not a joke—in that situation they understand the rhetoric of the form to which they’re committing themselves: They understand who they are as a writer and a beseecher, they understand who I am as the person in charge, they understand what evidence to adduce in their favour—their dog died, their computer broke or whatever. Which is why the email begging for the paper extension is always a well-written piece. But whenever they have to write three paragraphs about women in Genesis or whatever—when they have to make an argument—it’s basically “word salad,” because they’ve never read anything that presents a text, wrestles with it and comes up with some conclusions. For that reason, I think it’s better that they should be reading Pauline Kael reviews in the New Yorker than Derrida.
Filed under: Daniel Mendelsohn.
Quick shout-out: The Cutting Class is one of my favorite tumblrs. It is a true joy to stumble on writing like this, where someone smart points out things that you’d never notice and makes you aware of a whole other world of smarts that you’d otherwise never know about.
Be gentle especially when you’re right.
Bruce Timm
Best intro in television history.
What an opening! Batman: The Animated Series is still one of my favorite shows.
I feel like this song was, for many American children, an introduction to Deep Thinking. Even at age 8 or 9 you heard this and thought something like, “There is some essential yearning and sadness and an essential sense of loss in life that we can’t escape, though many things are also beautiful and happy and the power of love and human connection is very real,” even if your mind didn’t yet have all these words in that order.
Dad Magazine: Thanksgiving Edition. “The Value of a Dollar: Dads Weigh In”. Check out the archives.
Oblivion. If you have seen and enjoyed a science fiction movie, you will probably find something to like here, where they’re all mixed and mashed into a movie that’s far from perfect, but more than good enough. Easy to find plotlines and moods from movies like Moon, Solaris, the new Solaris, 2001, The Matrix, WALL·E, Star Wars, Star Trek. (I particularly like the space-captain-retiring-to-California parallels with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Star Trek: Generations). I would have been okay with more time exploring the love/memory/identity stuff and less generic action, but no biggie. Outside of the plot, a few areas I was impressed by: camerawork with a smart sense of space and geography; world/technology design and general gorgeousness; and a good soundtrack by M83, et al.
12 Years a Slave. Not sure how to talk about this one. Hard to watch. At times it is very, very on-the-nose. If you’ve seen Steve McQueen’s Shame and Hunger, this will be no surprise. But it’s strange that it doesn’t feel… dramatic. It is focused. It is facts. It also makes you feel some of the same unease (the score is a huge contributor here). The movie is all in the protagonist’s perspective, which unfortunately means everyone else can seem a little flat (despite the cast being awesome), or merely functional. But it also puts you in the center, witnessing the moral bargains and compromises, comparing and contrasting how each person manages an impossible situation, and perhaps suggesting the futility of passing judgment on how each copes. A couple more things to note. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but you don’t get the sense of time passing, though it’s ostensibly twelve years we see. Could definitely be by design – the monotony and sameness by design – I’m just not sure. And I gotta say, I’m not thrilled with Brad Pitt’s late appearance. He’s got too much star power to show up so late, in such a role, for so short a period. I couldn’t quite get used to him. It’s not his fault, though. Anyway, good movie. The contrast with Django Unchained could not be more stark.
Enough Said. Sometimes we are our own worst enemy, as they say. Louis-Dreyfus is a genius. Gandolfini is instantly lovable. Keener plays a perfect flaky narcissist. Such a good heart to this movie.
Mark Larson 