Category Archives: Literary
On television
A lady lifted the lid of her toilet tank and found a small yachtsman, on the deck of his boat, in a bowl. They spoke of detergents. A man with fixed dentures bit into an apple. A lady in a crisis of choice phoned her friend from a market and settled for milk of magnesia. [...]
On “writing”
That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all. —Renata Adler, “Castling”
John Waters’ Role Models
In the 1960s, John Waters was an admirer of a lesbian stripper in Baltimore named Lady Zorro. “She just came out nude and snarled at her fans, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ To this day,” Waters writes in his splendid new book, “Zorro is my inspiration.” The rest of my review of his [...]
from Eve’s Hollywood: A confessional L.A. novel
I was probably 13 when I realized there was this whole, huge, unexplored and exciting expanse of guys who were mainly adventurers with talents that they were hoping to connect into the Hollywood carcass while there was still time. I remember the day it hit me. I was standing across the street from what is [...]
“the angry orca”
Charlotte Rampling in Orca (1977) Related: Does Mark Jude Poirier have special psychic powers? Here’s an excerpt from his story of February 4, weeks before the recent events at SeaWorld Orlando: We drove to Wildwood Aquarium, left Alice at her apartment, even though it had been her idea to go. The week before, a German [...]
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Berlin notes — getting there
Wed. 2/10. We ended up closing down the airport bar. It was only 8:00 pm, but the terminal at JFK was empty, except for the people who worked there and a few other would-be travelers. The waitress explained they weren’t getting any new customers and they’d be pulling down the grates soon. She suggested we order [...]
Also posted in Elsewhere, Motion Pictures Tagged berlin film festival, Berthold Viertel, Christopher Isherwood, Conrad Veidt, Little Friend, Prater Violet Leave a comment
recent reading
“Do you know what the film is?” Bergmann cupped his hands, lovingly, as if around an exquisite flower. “The film is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion it revolves with enormous dynamism. It cannot pause. It cannot apologize. It cannot retract anything. It cannot wait for you to understand it. [...]
Also posted in Motion Pictures Tagged Christopher Isherwood, film in books, Prater Violet Leave a comment
diagramming sentiments
From an article in today’s New York Times about the emerging field of sentiment analysis: a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.
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Biography and music
One of my recurring frustrations with entertainment biographies is overdocumentation. Concert dates, recording sessions, studio memos pile up as if the profusion of unmediated data will ultimately transmit a deeper understanding of the performer. Usually, though, all that minutiae just ends up obscuring the subject. That you learn a singer took a fifteen-minute break during [...]
Also posted in Music Tagged biography, Female performers, Jenny Diski, Literary, LRB, Music, Nina Simone, Rolling Stones, Sway, Zachary Lazar Leave a comment
On the point