Shots!

I think they're riffing on the song Shots that left me feeling aurally bludgeoned the first time I heard it.

David Rakoff — Half Empty

Just finished David Rakoff's new book Half Empty and promptly put his previous books on my To Read list. I laughed, I cried, and he's much too smart to reduce to a summary quote, but these are some of my favorite zingers:

If others had reservations about trusting me, they seemed to dissipate as quickly as that fleeting moment where one hesitates before undressing in front of the dog.

I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint.

...how lovely the friends who deliver a potted amaryllis... its pink and-and-white striped petals like a child's drawing of an ideal flower, if children could actually draw.

Two great interviews about his book: Daily Show / Fresh Air

And finally, the first ten minutes of his Oscar-winning adaptation (in which he also acts) short film, The New Tenants:



And then, lastly, there's this self-assessment:

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness—a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib chronic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair...

Fun!

John Waters — Role Models

Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

"But what about love?" you may ask. That terribly exciting disease that, to me, feels like another full-time job...I know that true love is supposed to be companionship, growing old together, blah blah blah. I thought that was what friends were for, not sexual partners! Some of us want hot lunatic porn sex and we want it forever!

I've always said true success is figuring out your life and career so you never have to be around jerks.

Boys...Turn your belt around to the right side so that the buckle is forty-five degrees off center. Nothing is sexier, the secret sign that your gun is loaded, so to speak...Lustful, beautiful juvenile-delinquent boys have been wearing their belts this way for decades of erotic confidence, and I expect you to do the same...Always be dressed in your full cult finest in case you are arrested. There is only one fashion photograph that counts in our world: the perp walk.

John Waters on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

This blows away all my little regrets over shows I missed at SXSW with one giant regret:



Of course those three guys have hung out before:



Side note: Bill Murray has been green-lit to play the part of Terry Flanagan in the upcoming biopic of my life.

What's In My Bag?

Just discovered Amoeba's What's In My Bag series via Boing Boing. I wish I had more friends I could talk to about record shopping:

Best Trainhopping Documentary I've Seen Yet

Freight Travels: a home movie from Megan Hess on Vimeo.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

OMG! I just rented the HBO 1983 recording of Pee-Wee Herman's stage show at the Roxy on a whim and was shocked (shocked!) at how funny it was. What more can I say besides Phil Hartman and a Sly Stone medley? No? Then think of it as a proto-Boosh? Still no? Then we're not friends. Rent it on Netflix immediately (move to position #1) or you can watch it here (but you need to install some junk so just netflix it):


Watch Pee Wee herman show 1981 in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Jon Stewart in the No Spin Zone

Label under "People I Wish Were My Friends." I'll let you guess which one:

Elephant House

I just stumbled upon this great flickr set of Edward Gorey's home on Cape Cod (now a museum). A few years ago I was looking at a book of photos of his house that showed a small door at the back of a closet that led into a secret sunny room that housed his childrens book collection (sadly not a part of this flickr set). The man had so many books they had to shore up the beams holding the house up!











Here are some interesting tidbits from Wikipedia:

• Roomed with poet Frank O'Hara while studying French at Harvard.

• Although many people assumed he was English based upon his aesthetic, Gorey was American and had never visited Britain.

• In later years he wrote and directed numerous evening-length entertainments, often featuring his own papier-mâché puppets, in an ensemble known as La Theatricule Stoique.

• For many years he religiously attended all performances of the New York City Ballet.

• His knowledge of literature and films was unusually extensive, and in his interviews, he named Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Francis Bacon, George Balanchine, Balthus, Louis Feuillade, Ronald Firbank, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, Robert Musil, Yasujiro Ozu, Anthony Trollope, and Johannes Vermeer as some of his favorite artists.

• Gorey was also an unashamed pop-culture junkie, avidly following soap operas and TV comedies like Petticoat Junction and Cheers, and he had particular affection for dark genre series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Batman: The Animated Series, and The X-Files; he once told an interviewer that he so enjoyed the Batman series that it was influencing the visual style of one of his upcoming books.

• Although Gorey's books were popular with children, he did not associate with children much and had no particular fondness for them. Gorey never married, professed to have little interest in romance, and never discussed any specific romantic relationships in interviews. In the book The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, published after Gorey's death, his friend Alexander Theroux reported that when Gorey was pressed on the matter of his sexual orientation, he said that even he was not sure whether he was gay or straight. When asked what his sexual preferences were in an interview, he said,

“I'm neither one thing nor the other particularly. I am fortunate in that I am apparently reasonably undersexed or something...I've never said that I was gay and I've never said that I wasn't...what I'm trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else...."

The Maria Bamford Show!

I just watched every one of these and wish there were more. Another person on my list of people I wish I was friends with (new tag!). I think this is the best web series I've ever seen. I'm going to rip each one off youtube before they disappear!

Season One

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

Season Two

 [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20]

"I believe in the human mind's power to create 

fantasies that reassure itself in times of trouble."

Davy Rothbart on Letterman

Davy is on my top ten list of people I wish I was friends with (the first one doesn't get started until 2:30):

A Night Out With Ruth Gordon

I found this great quote by Ruth Gordon (aka Maude in Harold and Maude) describing the time, during Prohibition, when the expression “doing the town” meant something. I can't describe how much I love identifying with a person or a time years, decades, or centuries later. She said the following is a typical itinerary for dinner to dawn in the 1920s:

"For a really swell night out in the Twenties you’d probably start out at an elegant place like the Crystal Room in the old Ritz-Carlton on Madison Avenue. Oh, did they have wonderful food there. You ordered a la carte of course. Anything you wanted. You’d start off with the oysters, then you’d have a lovely soup with croutons on the side. Then, if you were truly eleganza you’d have some fish, and then you’d have the game, if it was in season. (That was Fanny Brice’s great restaurant line—“Give me anything, as long as it’s out of season.”) Or you’d have the gigot—which was a big thing all by itself. Nobody thought too much about salad. Salad, in those days, was Lobster Salad or Chicken Salad. And the desserts were paradise—Baked Alaska and profiteroles! Nobody cared about diets. Everybody ate chocolates and cakes and whipped cream. Adele Astaire [sister of Fred], a friend of mine, had a chocolate soda every day of her life, as I did for the most part, and once I said to her, “Why don’t we ever get fat?” She said, “We are just fortunate that we are blessed with poor assimilation.” I don’t know what she meant by that, but it’s true that we ate anything that we wanted to and we certainly did not get fat.

After a lovely late dinner at the Crystal Room you’d go over to Harry Richmond’s Wigwam Club. Of course it was during Prohibition so you’d have to order something like Chicken à la King just to hold the table, but actually you were there just to have more illegal drinks. Depending on how you felt at two or three in the morning, you’d make your way up to Harlem and go to Small’s Paradise or The Savoy to hear the great bands. Then you might have a snack at one of the little Harlem bistros where you would eat what we now identify as “soul food.” At seven or eight in the morning you’d arrive at Reuben’s, which was on Fifty-eighth Street between Fifth and Madison, where you would have breakfast. And everybody who was anybody was always there.

Going out in the Twenties was so glamorous, so dazzling. Everybody was beautiful and everybody was sexy and nobody was economical. If you weren’t glamorous and beautiful you stayed home. But the whole idea was to have money, to be striking. Nobody was concerned about being cultured or being talented."