You should just sit down, there should be a bottomless thing of chips and really good salsa and then your meal starts. This whole thing about sitting down and ordering chips and salsa and paying $5.00 for it is insane.
Annie Clark. Amen.
As there is no appetite, sexual or otherwise, without excitement, the sane person has to be unusually mindful of all the ways she has of attacking, trivializing, ignoring, ironizing and generally spoiling her own excitement. So she will prize charm in herself and others because charm gives excitement a chance; and she will be suspicious of her own shyness–and more sympathetically suspicious of other people’s–because it too smugly keeps the excited self at bay.
A Cadger’s Map of a Begging District. Frontispiece to The Slang Dictionary; or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases and Fast Expression of High and Low Society. (via)
A Fine Balance: Can one write about yoga without being either overly precious or deadly earnest? | More Intelligent Life
Spiritual experiences are easy to put into words, as long as you stick to cheesy, clichéd ones.
We recognize our sexual desire by the fact that once again–once again, after childhood–we feel our safety and our excitement are in conflict with each other. When we feel we are taking a risk, or are at risk, there is always an object of desire in the vicinity.
Flights of Fancy: How birds (and bird-watchers) compute the behavior of a flock on the wing – American Scientist. Image from the STARFLAG project, INFM-CNR. I am reminded of Kevin Huizenga’s starlings once again.
Since money always promises something other than itself–it is only, as we say, worth what it can buy–it seems to protect us, as promises do, from the fear of there being nothing and no one that we want.
Adam Phillips. I think I’ll post a couple more from his very good Going Sane later.
Rope
Rope. This was pretty good, but not quite high enough suspense levels with all the dinnertime distractions. There are some great side characters, though. I like the novelty of having the movie run in real-time with one camera tracking around the room. It’s based on a play of the same name, which leads to a big downside for me: walking standing talking walking standing talking walking standing talking. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never gotten into theater that much. Only so many things you can do when you’re trapped in a room, and this is no Rear Window. My updated Hitchcock rankings:
- Rear Window
- To Catch a Thief
- Notorious
- Vertigo
- Rope
- Psycho
- Sabotage
- North by Northwest
- The Man Who Knew Too Much
James Stewart has a pretty good track record for me. I’ll need to see some more of his movies. And I think I’ve had my fill of Hitchcock for a while, unless there’s something really awesome I still haven’t seen…?
Marginal Revolution: In praise of picture books
The authors of picture books are often relatively “agenda-less,” since most people don’t read the text, the selling point is the pictures, and the book is so expensive that the publisher doesn’t want to rule out the broadest possible audience.
Opinions | Meteuphoric
Katja Grace gathers her opinions in one spot. I’m repeatedly surprised and delighted by how valuable I find some bloggers’ hunches, musings, and asides, e.g. Justin Wehr’s squibs, Ben Casnocha’s assorted musings, Colin Marshall’s heuristics.
Baking for Beginners: An Introduction to Temperature – The Atlantic
You may read this and think: High maintenance! Picky! Temperamental! But I hope you’ll view it like this: Pastry is logical and consistent and wonderfully fun.
Baking for Beginners: An Introduction to Temperature – The Atlantic
The American
The American. It seems that critics are a bit mixed, but I’m with Ebert: I loved this one. It got billed as a semi-action-thriller. Yeah, there’s some killin’, but this is really more of a slow-burning mood piece like Le Samouraï. Or, say, a Sergio Leone western – there’s even a scene with the Once Upon a Time in the West McBain massacre playing in the background. This is not (just) about assassins doing jobs, but about an existential crisis–I detect some parallels in In Bruges, and in film noir like Blast of Silence and my beloved Out of the Past. Except this is set in sunny Italy. Great photography, absolute minimal soundtrack.
Some obvious detractions are the heavy-handed dialogue with the priest and also the–yep–hooker with a heart of gold. But still. Master craftsmanship from Anton Corbijn. I’ll probably watch it again soon. Coincidentally, the only movie I watched twice last year was Clooney’s Michael Clayton. The guy’s got great taste.
Stavin’ Chain playing guitar and singing the ballad “Batson,” Lafayette, Louisiana. 1934. Photo by Alan Lomax. (via)
Your Shit, My Stuff, Goldilocks, and Making the Bed You Sleep In
The less frequently we use something, the stronger the argument for valuing access over ownership.
Playboy Interview: Metallica (April 2001)
This interview is packed with wonderful tidbits. James Hetfield on day jobs and the early tour routine:
We worked at day jobs. After that, we’d throw parties, take the furniture out of the house and smash the joint. We smashed dressing rooms just because you were supposed to. Then you’d get the bill and go, “Whoa! I didn’t know Pete Townshend paid for his lamp!” Come back off the tour and you hadn’t made any money. You bought furniture for a bunch of promoters.
Hetfield on growing up differently from Lars Ulrich:
I could afford maybe one record a week, and he would come back from the store with 20. He bought Styx and REO Speedwagon, bands he’d heard of in Denmark. I would go, “What the fuck? Why did you buy Styx?“
Kirk Hammett on Hetfield’s Nothing Else Matters:
All I could think of at the time was, James wrote a fucking love song to his girlfriend? That’s just weird.
Hetfield on alcohol abuse and parenthood:
You can’t be hung over when you got kids, man. “Dad, get the fuck off the couch!” Well, they don’t say that—yet.
Ulrich on Matt Damon:
PLAYBOY: Your wife, Skylar, used to date Matt Damon, and he made her the model for the female lead in Good Will Hunting. A few years ago, Matt described you as “a fucking rock star who’s got $80 million and his own jet—a bad rock star, too.”
ULRICH: He said that before we met. And he’s apologized about a hundred times. The first five times I saw him, he would spend 10 minutes apologizing profusely. He really is a sweetheart.
Ulrich on collecting art:
Hanging out backstage with Kid Rock is an amazing turn-on, no less so than sitting and staring at my Dubuffet for an hour with a fucking gin and tonic.
On the first tour through America, my spandex—I fucking hate saying, “my spandex”. It’s a pretty evil phrase.—They were wet from the night before, and I was drying them by the heater. A big hole melted right in the crotch. It was like, “They’re like pantyhose.” I just opted to keep my jeans on, and that was the best thing that ever happened.
James Hetfield in the April 2001 Playboy interview with Metallica.
When I open my mouth, most of the time something somewhat eloquent comes out, and once in a while I talk a bunch of fucking bullshit. I’m aware of that.
Lars Ulrich in the April 2001 Playboy interview with Metallica.
An interview is a halfway point between a psychoanalytical sitting and a competitive examination.
Federico Fellini in an interview with Bright Lights Film Journal.
8½
8½. My first Fellini. Features a nice blend of reality and the daydreams of the protagonist. I also appreciate how the protagonist-director’s anxiety and creative listlessness are undercut by the mastery of the actual director’s work. A film about being lost by someone totally in control. It is a quite beautiful film. They say it’s one of the greats
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Mark Larson 
