Barcelona

~ Mark

Barcelona. I think it’s the weakest of the three loosely-related movies (Metropolitan is great; The Last Days of Disco is really enjoyable, too.), but there’s plenty to like. I appreciate the layers of themes. You’ve got two cousins working out how to be family. They each are figuring out their careers and romantic relationships. And they as Americans are navigating what it means to be a foreigner. Along with other less character-specific stuff like ‘80s self-help/management trends. Whit Stillman is a good writer. Ebert says.

~ Mark

rachael-maddux:

jasontravisphoto:

Drinking Hanson’s beer, Mmmhops, with Hanson

Austin Ray totally nailed this article for Creative Loafing. I took some photos. We drank beer with Hanson. It was a lot of fun.

I mentioned this on Twitter already—I’m not sure what would have seem crazier to 11-year-old Me: That one day she’d have a dude pal (that would be Austin, mentioned above) who “got” Hanson, or that Hanson would make a beer. But now that I think about it, actually, the beer maybe would have seemed more likely.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about this for a while and haven’t quite cracked it, but in short: back when I was someone who would have identified in any real capacity as “a Hanson fan,” people in general and boys in particular were, to put it quite elegantly, basically like total megadicks to me about it! Liking this band was probably the thing I got teased about the most in middle school. It probably wasn’t that much, actually, just amplified times a million by the general OMG OMG UGHHHH EVERYTHING IS AWFULNESS of being an adolescent human/female, but it still hurt and made me feel weird and bad about myself in a way nothing else quite could. This was true even on into high school, when Hanson was quickly becoming more of a personal relic than an active~*~*~love~*~*~; I think I was a sophomore when a friend of mine, a senior, in a very convoluted and roundabout and deeply personally stabby way, mocked me for it in front of our entire creative writing class.

MEANWHILE, one of the greatest things ever, when I was a wee fan and an even wee-er Person Thinking About Becoming A Writer One Day, was when people wrote things that seemed to really “get” the band, which is actually not super hard to do but does requires a certain amount of taking-them-seriously, which is a tough prospect when the subjects are widely beloved by teenaged girls. Two pieces I remember in particular: This Rob Sheffield review, and this Spin feature (well, except that subhed, but eh). They took the band seriously, and by extension I felt like I was being taken seriously, and that was huge.

Anyway, can’t wait to drink some of this stuff. I will probably giggle a lot.

~ Mark

heidisaman:

“Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man. It is a noisy, physical apparatus; it is difficult to concentrate—and you have to do it from eight-thirty to six-thirty, five days a week. It’s not an environment an artist would ever choose to work in. The only advantage it has is that you must do it, and you can’t procrastinate…”

— Stanley Kubrick on making films

Photo of Kubrick on the set of Barry Lyndon via a certain cinema

~ Mark

Kanakaweb: Sargent: All Ava Maria. So awesome. (via)

Below the original is my attempt to copy Sargent’s painting. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how people learn to paint. I’m starting to think that maybe copying paintings you like is a good way to study other people’s paintings technique while forcing yourself to learn some basic skills along the way. I gather that this is how students learned to paint back in the day, so it seems like a good thing to try in my spare time.

The painting took about an hour to complete, but I feel like I learned a lot in that time. Here are my random notes in case you are interested…

This entire thing is fantastic.

Donald Trump Licked My Flesh, Part 3

~ Mark

Legacy is a marketing tool; it exists for the convenience of people who want to sell you something. It has nothing to do with the athlete, whose accomplishments aren’t going to change if he plays past his prime, literally aren’t going to change at all, because Skip Bayless doesn’t own a time machine. Legacy is a post-Jordan, made-up idea that glorifies “going out on top” as part of a corporate strategy, presuming that fans don’t have memories and can’t cope with the complexity of a human life. Legacy belongs in the same pile of bogus thought-propaganda as “controlling the narrative” and “personal brand.”

Donald Trump Licked My Flesh, Part 3

~ Mark

Any gifts and time you give to family members are investments in them as people, vs. investments in your relationship with them. It’s “I want the best for you” vs. “I want the best out of you” — a fine distinction, but an important one.

Hax!

I Am Legend

~ Mark

I Am Legend. Ah, dude. This could have been so amazing. The early scene in the dark building has to be one of the most intense film moments ever, because Smith is not a commando and he is scared as shit. It’s also filmed just about perfectly. I love the early gut-clenching mood anxiety, and the exploration of the toll of solitude (see also: Moon, Alien, Solaris). The movie goes off the rails by the end. The CGI-fest is jarring enough, but the shift in tone is really disappointing. But man, 90% is incredible. David Bax puts it well:

There’s more to a movie than how it ends. Take, for example, Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, which spent an hour building one of the most daring and intense genre blockbusters in years before the third act from some other, dumber movie swooped in and delivered the automatic weaponry and explosions no one was asking for at that point. It’s a shame but it doesn’t obliterate the experience of what came before it.

Emmys: Jerry Seinfeld on Why He May Never Go Back to TV (Q&A) – The Hollywood Reporter

~ Mark

I made Comedians in Cars out of that show [The Marriage Ref]. If you look at it, you’ll see what I was going for on that show. I think it’s interesting to hear people talk about something that’s powerful and interesting to them out of the box. But I couldn’t make it happen. One of the big things I realized was that the audience is stopping these people from talking. The other thing I realized is that I was much more interested in comedians than I was in a lot of other people whom I thought I was interested in. So, in some ways, I took that pot, smashed it on the ground, took four or five pieces and re-glued them into another thing.

Emmys: Jerry Seinfeld on Why He May Never Go Back to TV (Q&A) – The Hollywood Reporter

An Impossible Number of Books: Matthew L. Jockers’s “Macroanalysis” –

~ Mark

Changing the canon — or even a proliferation of canons, as literary studies has fractured into a collection of increasingly well-defined subfields — takes us only so far. Readers are finite creatures, capable of making their way through only a tiny fraction of the millions of books published over the centuries. The problem, at this sort of scale, has less to do with canonical selection bias than it does with our inevitable ignorance of nearly everything that has ever been written. It’s one thing to claim that a particular book was influential in its day (though influence is a tricky matter, more sociological and economic than literary) or that a text has been treated as important in subsequent scholarship. It’s something else entirely to argue that the same book is “representative” of a genre’s or an era’s output, especially when even the best-informed critics have read almost none of the material in question.

An Impossible Number of Books: Matthew L. Jockers’s “Macroanalysis” –