Race and ethnicity: Atlanta by Eric Fischer.
I was astounded by Bill Rankin’s map of Chicago’s racial and ethnic divides and wanted to see what other cities looked like mapped the same way. To match his map, Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000.
At The End Of The Grosse Freiheit: The Beatles In Hamburg – The Quietus. Photo by Astrid Kirchherr, I believe, girlfriend of Stuart Sutcliffe.
The kids we surveyed show very little understanding about how much money different jobs actually pay. Younger children tend to grossly underestimate–on average, the 5-year-olds figure police officers make $29 annually, lawyers make $59, and dancers pull in a comparatively huge $165 a year.
Basically, Sword-and-sandal : Hollywood epic film :: Spaghetti Western : Hollywood Western. And this is fascinating: “A number of English-dubbed Italian films that featured the Hercules name in their title were never intended to be Hercules movies by their Italian creators. [List of 8 examples]” Italian imitations of Hollywood that were later twisted and repackaged by the American movie industry. I love it.
Working ideas included a “Don Quixote” film starring Clint Eastwood with Eli Wallach as Sancho Panza; a Siege of Leningrad epic with Robert De Niro; and a remake of “Gone With the Wind”. Damn.
Photos of people eating solo. Interesting that when you post things without explanation, the reactions can be unpredictable.
Rear Window. Good Lord. This is a near-perfect movie. Better than any other Hitchcock I’ve watched, by far. This is in must-see territory.
At last R gets down again to his score, though he still has no pen which he likes.
This is fantastic:
To mark the debut of Lorin Stein’s first issue of The Paris Review, the publication has put its entire interview archives online….Moreover, they’ve replaced the old PDF format with normal HTML pages, meaning that they can be Instapapered or Apple-Fed for those in a rush to find the secrets of good writing (e.g. find all: “ideas,” “where do you get them”).
Vonnegut, Larkin, Burroughs, Williams, Amis, Baldwin, Barthelme, Maxwell, Allen, Calvino, Wilder, Karr, Ryan, Tate, Crumb…
Oh, my stars and garters. Where to begin?
Tyler Cowen: “Doesn’t everyone who might suffer a loss have a potential claim to complain? At what percentile of wealth does your claim to complain go away or diminish?” And also: “Beware of moral arguments which do not address ‘At which margin?’”
Marginal Revolution: Does the well-off law professor have cause to complain?
Suddenly, Last Summer. Good movie. Its roots are in the Tennessee Williams play, so it’s very, very, very mono- and dialogue-heavy. You could probably just listen to this one and get a lot out of it (and so maybe not the best use of the medium?). The cast is why you watch it, though. Katharine Hepburn owns the first half-hour. Elizabeth Taylor owns the last. Montgomery Clift is the stable (and somehow not boring) guy in the middle who gently keeps the story moving forward.
“Ava didn’t want Frank’s men hanging around all the time,” another friend said, “and this got him mad. With Nancy he used to be able to bring the whole band home with him, and Nancy, the good Italian wife, would never complain – she’d just make everybody a plate of spaghetti.”
Good article. One of the best ever, they say.
[An opinion poll on diamond purchases] noted, for example, “A woman can easily feel that diamonds are ‘vulgar’ and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry.” The element of surprise, even if it is feigned, plays the same role of accommodating dissonance in accepting a diamond gift as it does in prime sexual seductions: it permits the woman to pretend that she has not actively participated in the decision. She thus retains both her innocence—and the diamond.
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? – Magazine – The Atlantic
There’s always something more interesting going on than whether I like something or not.
À bout de souffle (Breathless). This was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature-length film and one of the first of the French New Wave. At least it’s a trim 90 minutes. I didn’t find it all that interesting but some viewers think otherwise.
I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
We need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t.
And now I know the name for this. (via)
The Forer effect (also called the Barnum Effect after P.T. Barnum’s observation that “we’ve got something for everyone”) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, and some types of personality tests.
Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent. When the painting debuted, the right strap of Mme. Gautreau’s dress was falling off her shoulder. Scandal!
Mark Larson 