YouTube HOF: Musical Interludes - Grantland.
Annotated lyrics:
Amado mio, OK.
love me forever. DONE.
And let forever … YES, RITA HAYWORTH?
begin tonight. OH FANTASTIC.
If you haven’t seen Gilda, it’s hard to describe how absolutely captivating Rita Hayworth is. That introduction.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Cellphones Are Eating the Family Budget - WSJ.com. Among other things.
When people bypass simple solutions to write to someone like me, that tends to mean there’s an ulterior motive on board.
Caroyln Hax. Ha! Awesome.
The part that matters most to me:
I am writing a book called “Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music”
Yesssssssssssssss!
The Case for Allowing Richard Wagner's Music to be Performed in Israel : The New Yorker
It’s about expectations and consistency. Whatever I expect from a four-star restaurant has become unachievable. […] If the food isn’t delicious, everything else will just seem annoying, and that happens quite a lot.
Sometimes Formica Is Better Than White Cloth — How to Cook Everything - NYTimes.com
The fact that it’s not simple doesn’t mean it’s a paradox: it means it’s not simple.
Also:
Focused, competent evil is a very hard force to legislate against.
Los Angeles Review of Books - Happiness Is A Warm Glock: Paul Barrett On America’s Gun
A trend I had noticed in nearly every book I’d seen in the last year: They never say what they’re about. Almost as a rule, hardcover books (and increasingly e-books) favor laudatory “blurbs” over descriptions–opting for short quotes from important authors, CEOs, celebrities, or media outlets to make their case.
Competitive people are most annoying to other competitive people.
This is a casual prejudice that is not like the visceral hatred that plagued the early decades of Mormonism, […] but a symptom of a thoughtless incuriousness.
Mystic Pizza. The ‘80s were a golden era for coming-of-age movies like this one. Really great job at undercutting the drama with humor and twisting some of the scenes and characters in really smart, unexpected ways. Also features a wee young Matt Damon in a small role!
“In Augusta, to photograph James Brown, these pictures were taken when he suggested we go for a ride. He told me he would show me ‘his town.’ So we jumped into an old car and drove around. He would stop the car when he saw someone sitting in their yard, run up, do the split, yell out, ‘I feel good,’ and jump back in the car and drive off. It was all so spontaneous and hilarious, and it took the onlookers by such surprise. Brown was a fun-loving character and a good sport.” Harry Benson, Photographer
Warrior. Some plot points are about subtle as a kick to the head, but the power is there, too. Much, much better than I expected, thanks to a great cast (A.O. Scott: “These are tough guys, but you can only care about them if you believe that they can break.”) and a great pace. Ebert:
This is a rare fight movie in which we don’t want to see either fighter lose. That brings such complexity to the final showdown that hardly anything could top it — but something does.
Many commentators are framing the matter in terms of raising or lowering the relative status of aid recipients. So it’s the aspiring student, the virtuous retiree, and the brave veteran, rather than the irresponsible bums. That’s a distraction (albeit a legitimate correction), as the real question is whether the political equilibrium is shifting toward takers. That’s takers as roles in particular political struggles, not individuals with “taker” stamped on their foreheads.
Various forms of crony capitalism arguably are on the rise. Is the political influence of the issue-specific takers, relative to the issue-specific makers, a growing problem in American politics? What does the evidence actually suggest?
Filed under: arguments. Cf. Charitable arguing:
Taking a moment to hunt for an interpretation that makes an argument good — before you denounce it as a bad argument — is a nice heuristic that forestalls the tempting leap from “There exists an interpretation that makes this a bad argument, but it may not be what he had in mind,” to “This is a bad argument!”
I think of children sort of like Voyager probes, except instead of sending them out into space you send them forward in time. They carry messages from your civilization inside them, on into the weirdness of the future.
Lev Grossman, “Thoughts on Being a Writer and Having Children” (cf. Neil Postman)
The Terminator. I find it interesting mostly as a historical artifact. It’s adequate, but I’ll take T2 over it any day if I’m just looking for fun. It is amazing to see the progress in special effects we’ve made. A lot of the stuff in this movie looks really clunky now. Contrast with Aliens, where pretty much everything is still perfect. What a difference two years can make!
I know these are masterpieces, and you’re supposed to let their brilliance wash over you while you contemplate their significance, but I really couldn’t make myself stand there for more than a few seconds,” said museum-goer Vernon Bailey, admitting he spent more time reading the placards describing each painting than he did looking at the art itself. “They have all these Monets and Renoirs in there, but I made it through that entire wing in, like, five minutes. By the end I was just blowing past these iconic works—Nighthawks, American Gothic, that really famous pointillist one—and thinking, ‘Okay, done, done, done.’ What’s wrong with me?
Interesting discussion of Breaking Bad…__
The point isn’t that the show is unrealistic or hard to believe, but the narrative function of the ways in which it is: Which disbeliefs are viewers asked to suspend, and which ideologies are they encouraged to retain?
Truth and falsity properly considered are properties of language, not of images.
Errol Morris in conversation with Lawrence Weschler.
The Informant!. Soderbergh walks a fine line here with genre and mood. Can’t say I love it, but it’s got a great pace and the way the layers of lies and revelations and confusions and contortions pile up is a lot of fun. Excellent soundtrack, and Matt Damon totally proves himself. My latest Soderbergh film rankings: