La Baie des Anges (Bay of Angels). A man, new to the casino world, falls in love with an older, compulsive-gambling veteran. A simple story well-told. I have no idea if he’s seen it or not, but I think some of Woody Allen’s DNA comes from this strand. Also, given the up and down nature of gambler’s luck, you can’t help but wonder if the ending would be different if the credits rolled a little later. Such is love. Recommended!
The story behind James Carr’s “At The Dark End Of The Street”:
It amazes me that THIS is the story behind one of the best soul songs ever recorded:
It was the Summer of ‘66, and Memphis was chock full of DJs in town for a convention. Songwriter Dan Penn and session guitarist Chip Moman were taking advantage of the situation, cheating Florida DJ Don Schroeder out of his money in a card game.
They wrote the song about two lovers in an illicit affair while on break from the game. ”We were always wanting to come up with the best cheatin’ song ever,” Penn explained.
They went to Quentin Claunch, partner in Goldwax Records and a fellow alumnus of the Muscle Shoals music scene, and asked to borrow his hotel room for a half hour. He agreed, on the condition that whatever song they wrote, they give it to Claunch for his singer, James Carr. A deal was struck and the rest is history.
Terrific song. A Youtube search will show you all the cover versions out there.
One of my favorite new-to-me songs from earlier this summer.
Adam and I visited the wonderful public radio program (and podcast) The Marketplace of Ideas, and they’ve just posted the show. A lot of in-depth talk both about our philosophies of dress and about the behind-the-scenes of Put This On.
My favorite idea from this interview: style qua semiotics.
Happiness and the right to pursue it are sometimes wildly unrealistic as ideals; and, because wildly unrealistic, unconsciously self-destructive.
Interesting essay with some good tidbits. This bit on pathologies could also apply, more mildly, to how we react to differing opinions:
We tend to pathologise the forms of happiness we cannot bear.
And on education:
There are, for example, only two reasons for children to go to school – apart, that is, from acquiring the werewithal to earn a living: to make friends, and to see if they can find something of absorbing interest to themselves.
Happy endings in life, and in fiction too perhaps, are really about where you decide to roll the credits.
What we call terrorism is always asymmetric warfare. You’re a small group with no reputation, and you start covertly blowing up or murdering the people of a big group, like a government or a nation-state or a whole race. And you can’t just do it and then go and do the next one. You have to do it, and then go and do your PR. “We just bombed your mall. It was us.” And then maybe you do it, and some other guys, these upstart assholes across town, are calling up the news and saying, “We did it! We bombed the mall!” So then you have to get your PR guy on the phone and say, “No, they’re full of shit. WE bombed the mall.” So it’s about branding to that extent.
Why cities grow and why urban planning as we now practice it won’t really help the millions who are moving to mega-cities (read: slums) in other parts of the world.
Apres Garde is one of my favorite tumblogs.
Hyperbole and a Half: The Four Levels of Social Entrapment. “There is a special kind of awkwardness between two people who don’t know each other well enough to interact effectively, but are familiar enough that ignoring each other’s presence isn’t really an option.”
Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.
Single-minded focus too soon can be a hindrance. Better to branch out and learn how to practice and fail well.
The real risk is in not changing. I have to feel that I’m after something. If I make money, fine. But I’d rather be striving. It’s the striving, man, it’s that I want.
From historian Daniel Boorstin’s introduction to The Image, his book from 1961:
When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect — we even demand — that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house to not only shelter us, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or to take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our “national purpose” to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of nearly two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.
We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for “excellence,” to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to a “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be a God.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never have people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.
A 1910 illustration of how Atlanta’s Peachtree Street would look in 2010. The future is now! « pecanne log.
P.J. O’Rourke goes to Afghanistan.
A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.” It’s a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.
Bowie + Keaton. Photo by Steve Schapiro, I believe.
A VICTORY OF SORTS : a newspaper blackout poem by Austin Kleon
This was nicely juxtaposed in my tumblr stream.
Mark Larson 