Let Me In

~ Mark

Let Me In. I’m torn on this remake. I like the good suspense with a steady, chilling, creeping weirdness about it, but not so intense that I didn’t mind stopping the film a couple times to take a break. It’s crippled by a bad/ill-timed score, which drove me nuts. The young actors are very, very good and pretty much carry the whole thing when it goes off-course. The shots and locations are chosen and photographed really well. Love the contrast of warm/cold, damp/dry, bright/dark. But there’s some sketchy CGI and it seems like the director should have made stronger decisions about showing the violence on-screen vs. off. It kind of waffles. Interesting themes of power, safety, and dependency. I also loved the one perfect moment when the two leads are hanging out: She picks up his Romeo & Juliet book, which he dismisses as a boring class assignment; then he talks to her about Morse code. The premise of the whole film is good enough that I’d like to see the original.

Norm MacDonald Interview | The A.V. Club

~ Mark

It’s a very odd thing with Hollywood, where you do stand-up, you’re good at it, then they go, “How would you like to be a horrible actor?” Then you say, “All right, that sounds good. I’ll do that.” So I’m fucking excited about not having to pretend to know what I’m doing with acting.

Also:

I love abandoning shit, because I don’t like doing shit over and over and over. I’ve thrown so many jokes away. First of all, I’m not a good enough performer to pretend that “I just thought of this,” that kind of shit. It’s saying the same word over and over again, it loses its fucking meaning. Also, generally I don’t like traveling around saying the exact same thing. I don’t think that’s a very good thing to do with your life.

And also:

I don’t really care about success or money or shit. I could give a fuck. I hate fame. I hate being recognized, because I don’t know how to talk to people. I see Sandler, man, and I’m like fuck, goddamn, I don’t know how he does it, those people are fucking everywhere he walks. If you’re walking with him, all you hear behind is people whispering. It’s almost like being fucking stoned, or a paranoid schizophrenic or something, where you think people are talking about you, but they actually are talking about you. It’s fucking surreal.

Norm MacDonald Interview | The A.V. Club

~ Mark

https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/mlarson/4582751750/tumblr_liuv62Zs5p1qboc9f?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
http://mlarson.tumblr.com/post/4582751750/audio_player_iframe/mlarson/tumblr_liuv62Zs5p1qboc9f?audio_file=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tumblr.com%2Faudio_file%2Fmlarson%2F4582751750%2Ftumblr_liuv62Zs5p1qboc9f

patrickswanson:

Labi Siffre – “It Must Be Love” (from Crying Laughing Loving Lying)

I wish I’d known about this song long, long ago. So catchy.

Meadowlark Lemons.: James Brown and Wagner: Tension and Release

~ Mark

patrickswanson:

Not even Reich’s music is as exhilaratingly tense as “Doing it to the Death,” or “The Payback.” Reich’s pieces take long, extended journeys; they are exquisite processes which slowly unfold through time, irreversibly. Brown’s best music never takes a journey: it’s either just where it should be, or tantalizingly close to where it should be.

Strangely enough, I think that ”The Payback” has more in common with Tristan und Isolde than it does with Glass or Reich. It’s all about tension and release.

This whole post is straight-up brilliant.

Meadowlark Lemons.: James Brown and Wagner: Tension and Release

Marty Nemko: The Un-MBA: I teach the aspiring self-employed the opposite of what is taught in business school

~ Mark

Interesting ideas here on starting a business. Keep it simple. Keep it boring.

Biz schools focus on high-status businesses: high tech, biotech, medical devices, environmental technology, multinational corporations, etc. I teach my clients the opposite: start a low-status business, the grungier the better. That way you’re competing with less capable business owners. Few Stanford or Harvard graduates aspire to owning diesel repair shops, mobile home park cleaning, installing and removing home-for-sale signs from lawns, shoeshine stands, cleaning out and installing cabinets in basements and garages, gourmet food trucks, rehabbing tenant-damaged apartment buildings, carts selling soup, scarves, knockoff designer purses, French soap, or coffee, or placing and maintaining laundry machines in apartment buildings. It’s far easier to compete successfully in such low-status businesses. I teach my clients, “Status is the enemy of success.”

Biz schools focus on intellectually meaty, complex businesses like the aforementioned high-tech, biotech, etc.. Alas, the more complex the business, the more that can go wrong. I teach my clients to choose a simple business, such as those I list in the previous paragraph. Each business location may yield insufficient profit to support a family but, once you’ve refined the concept, as I said, just clone your simple business in another location(s.)

Reminds me of the Warren Buffett stuff I’ve read. See also being smart once, borrowing money, and sticking with what you understand.

Marty Nemko: The Un-MBA: I teach the aspiring self-employed the opposite of what is taught in business school

NBA Power Poll: The contenders – Bill Simmons – ESPN

~ Mark

Few things refresh like good sportswriting.

Orlando leads the league in “Guys Even Spectators Feel Like They Could Take Off The Dribble Or Post Up” (seven by my count).

And also:

A few years ago, I gave Steve Nash my 2007 MVP vote because that Suns roster was specifically tailored to him: it was an exquisite, ridiculously powerful race car that only one driver could have handled. This Spurs team was more like a beautiful, slightly broken-down sailboat sailing across the Atlantic — it needed a skipper who had done the trip a few times, understood his boat completely, could make a few on-the-fly fixes if anything happened, clicked with his crew completely, and wouldn’t panic if water ever started spurting from the deck.

NBA Power Poll: The contenders – Bill Simmons – ESPN

~ Mark

A man who lives among immortal blessings is not like to a mortal being.

Epicurus in his Letter to Menoeceus. (via)

Wall of Sound: The iPod has changed the way we listen to music. And the way we respond to it. – By Nikil Saval – Slate Magazine

~ Mark

As certain foodies score points by having eaten everything—blowfish, yak milk tea, haggis, hot dogs—so the person who knows and likes all music achieves a curious sophistication-through-indiscriminateness.

Somewhat guilty as charged. See also Tyler Cowen on the internet and eclecticism.

Wall of Sound: The iPod has changed the way we listen to music. And the way we respond to it. – By Nikil Saval – Slate Magazine

~ Mark

Pre-interstate Atlanta, 1919 by the Foote & Davies Company.

This is an image from the 1919 Foote and Davies map of Atlanta, taken from the very cool Big Map Blog. We can see what the built environment of downtown Atlanta looked like (and might have continued to look like) before the interstates and their ramps sliced wide chasms of asphalt and concrete through the area.

I’m trying to imagine Atlanta if we got rid of the I-75/I-85 Connector and did a Cheonggyecheon-style restoration. I can dream.