February 2012
2 posts
Reds →
January 2012
1 post
From Writing Los Angeles
Don Antonio was but a lad when his father’s family removed from the city of Mexico to California. They came in one of the many unfortunate colonies sent out by the Mexican Government during the first years of the secularization period, having had a toilsome and suffering two moths, going in wagons from Mexico to San Blas, then a tedious and uncomfortable voyage of several weeks from San...
September 2011
1 post
From Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer"
Tonight, Thursday Night, I carry out a successful experiment in repetition.
Fourteen years ago, when I was a sophomore, I was a western at a moviehouse on Freret Street, a place frequented by students and known to them as the Armpit. The movie was The Oxbow Incident and it was quite good. It was about this time of year I saw it, for I remember the smell of privet when I came out and the...
June 2011
3 posts
The Tree of Life
During my viewing of The Tree of Life, at least 6 people walked out of the theater, mostly during the 20+ minute montage featuring the birth of life on our the planet. At this point, the film had been less a film and more a collection of whisperings and images that teetered between transcendent and annoying. The theater was mostly packed with Malick fans, who were all either with it, or...
History is crazy!
Robert Lincoln, by the way, would continue to run the War Department for Garfield’s successor Chester Arthur. In the 1880’s, this mostly entailed managing the dwindling Indian Wars out west, with one ghastly exception. The same week Garfield was shot, one of Lincoln’s charges, a twenty-five-man Arctic scientific expedition was en route to Lady Franklin Bay. Robert Todd...
May 2011
3 posts
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/a-gritty-acco... →
An amazingly matter-of-fact autobiographical account of drug abuse by Jeff Wald.
Dr. Edward Curtis on the bullet that killed...
“There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger - dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize … Silently, in one corner of the room, I prepared the brain for weighing. As I looked at the mass of soft gray and white substance that I was carefully washing, it...
“I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or...”
– Joan Didion “Goodbye to All That” (via karen)
March 2011
5 posts
My Magpie List is up!! →
Hey everyone,
My friend Eve has this great website (The Magpie List) where she compiles and reposts people’s lists of favorite things with links to help you check them out. In this age where we take in massive amounts of information, sorting mechanisms like this are amazing tools. Plus, it’s a fun way to find out about other people’s interests; won’t leave you with that icky...
Kate Bush is crazy, and I love her for it →
"On Harlech Beach" by Anne Stevenson
Sharpen your eyes looking back from the tide’s headland,
and the Lowry figures on the beach could be movable type-
a “p,” pink, “i” indigo, an “x” running yellow and tan
in pursuit of a flying stop. What an alphabet soup
the bay makes of them, these large fathered families
downloading their daughters and sons, sans serif and
sans grief on the...
Demetri Martin for the New Yorker: "Who Am I?" →
My favorite part:
I am sometimes referred to as Excuse Me in an annoyed tone of voice, because apparently I am in the way. I am so sorry. I am supposed to be some sort of mind reader, I guess. I am moving out of the way now as slowly as I possibly can. I am doing this and there’s nothing you can do about it.
February 2011
4 posts
From Joan Didion's "Where I Was From"
Stressing as it did an extreme if ungrounded individualism, this was not an ambiance that tended toward a view of life as defined or limited or controlled, or even in any way affected, by the social and economic structures of the larger world. To be a Californian was to see oneself, if one believed the lessons the place seemed most immediately to offer, as affected only by “nature” … Much of...
Workshop
Last night, I did an Agent/Manager Workshop. If you’re an actor, you know how awful these things are. If you’re not, let me paint you a picture. You park in the parking lot of an auto repair shop in North Hollywood. You enter into an unmarked door, and once inside, find a room furnished only with cheap office chairs on the cement floor. Inside of these chairs, are young girls,...
Raymond Carver's "The Calm"
“I was getting a haircut. I was in the chair and three men were sitting along the wall across from me. Two of the men waiting I’d never seen before. But one of them I recognized, though I couldn’t exactly place him. I kept looking at him as the barber worked on my hair. The man was moving a toothpick around in his mouth, a heavyset man, short wavy hair. And then I saw him...
Very interesting article by Karina Longworth on... →
January 2011
3 posts
Musings on Blue Valentine
We’re all familiar with the tragedy of love that’s truncated by the limitations of time, class, age and race, but what about the tragedy of love that’s allowed to go on too long? What happens, in other words, when Romeo and Juliet get the chance to grow old together?
That’s the question that Blue Valentine seeks to address and the answer is, of course, devastating. The thesis of the movie could...
Rosana Schoijett's Collage →
“A thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses.”
December 2010
3 posts
Emerson on Language and Writing
A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire...
Emerson on Beauty and Art
The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a...
Lessons learned.
assistmylife:
Let me tell you about the time I sent a Harry & David gift basket to my boss’s dead uncle for Christmas:
That’s about it. I sent a gift basket to my boss’s dead uncle. I forgot he died, okay? It happens. He wasn’t MY uncle. Besides, who doesn’t love a Tower of Treats, dead or alive?
November 2010
3 posts
From "The Market-Place" chapter of The Scarlet...
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the...
From "The Custom-House" chapter of The Scarlet...
Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly, - making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility, - is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each of its separate...
My favorite line from "The Love Song of J. Alfred...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
October 2010
1 post
Ours is a Junkyard Romance
I am a natural creature,
A spiny toad.
In my state, I am
Confused by stoplights,
And distracted by bright, synthetic things.
Or.
I am a machine, I’ve been told.
My oiled parts are to move this way, or that.
My thoughts turn outward like the gradual leaf of a succulent.
The park is a zoo,
Sad, wild things being stared at by sad, dying things.
One of them twitches their tail.
Somewhere, on the...
September 2010
1 post
2 Big Sur Poems
Big Sur Poem #1:
My favorite things about Big Sur are:
Wet rocks in the sun,
And the pools of clear water that gather between them and the sand,
And the way my feet fit on top of them.
Sand-encrusted seaweed,
Countless harbor seals, their bodies strewn across the rocks, like fat fishes –
And the way one bats at another. I’d say - playfully, listlessly, reflexively.
Pale pink and...
August 2010
4 posts
Mos Def - "It ain't my fault" →
Mama ya don’t say, uh
Oil and water don’t mix
Petrolio don’t go good with no fish
Aw, it ain’t my fault
BP, big pimpin, big problem, bad presence
Billionaire pirate, boiling point, burst pressure
Aw, it ain’t my fault
Say man, who pushed the marshes back ?
Where’s the hurricane shelter and the garden at?
Aw, it ain’t my fault
Said, from the gulf of Mexico to the broke levee...
(Some of) my Favorite Footnote from DFW's "Big Red...
Mr. Harold Hecuba, whose magazine job entails reviewing dozens of adult releases every month, has an interesting vignette about a Los Angeles Police Dept. detective he met once when H.H.’s car got broken into and a whole box of Elegant Angel Inc. videotapes was stolen (a box with H.H.’s name and work address right on it) and subsequently recovered by the LAPD. A detective brought the...
Part of my favorite footnote from "Consider the...
“As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical...
"Landsharks" - my new short story
You are at the beach. It’s a weekday. Your friend Annie calls days like this “taking a personal day.” Annie uses phrases like this all the time – she makes jokes about her shrink and her meds and refers to her house as “the Ashram.” These phrases are designed to be cavalier, but they end up making her seem less experienced, you think, like a 12 year-old in eye shadow. Skipping school is what...
July 2010
1 post
From WHITE NOISE by Don Delillo.
“This is the big new worry,” he said. “Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It’s the things right around you in your own house that’ll get you sooner or later. It’s the electrical and magnetic fields. Who in this room would believe me if I said that the suicide rate hits an all-time record among people who live near high-voltage power lines? What makes these...
June 2010
2 posts
April 2010
3 posts
8 ball, very good ball →
everything about this scene is just perfect!
Link to the Low Anthem singing Charlie Darwin →
Set the sails I feel the winds a’stirring
Toward the bright horizon set the way
Cast your reckless dreams upon our Mayflower
Haven from the world and her decay
And who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin
Fighting for a system built to fail
Spooning water from their broken vessels
As far as I can see there is no land
Oh my god, the waters all around us
Oh my god, it’s all around
And...
March 2010
1 post
L.A. Time Warp
First poem in a long while. Scribbled on a pastry bag while driving from the airport. Rewritten and now, impulsively posted on the internet.
Here you go, readers…
L.A. Time Warp, once again.
As you make your way among
White-washed freeways
Pale blue cargo truck’s shimmering chrome
A silver plane hovering like a lost bird.
What are these train tracks for?
You know that there’s a woman...
February 2010
5 posts
Nabokov's Memory Speaks
There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawled in midair…. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up … and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who...
babies were cuter in the 50's →
I swear my beatlemania will subside soon . . . i... →
January 2010
5 posts
Yeah, this is kind of awesome. →
STUFF I SHOULD HAVE ALREADY KNOWN ABOUT
When we were kids, doing well in school was something that was applauded by parents and held up to us, or at least to me, as a mark of intelligence. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to hear things like “he was just too smart to do well in school,” and “It’s never the smart kids that excel in classes, it’s just the pencil pushers.” Because...
a link to my casiotone review from . . . july... →
The final photo session in 1969 at Tittenhurst. →