playing with jude

Jude Law is only one of the many celebrities you can use as your own personal paperdoll at Paperdoll Heaven.

(No VIP registration required. Via Panopticist.)

this week's netflix

What the #$*! Do We Know: I actually watched this film? documentary? game of charades? awhile back, but I had forgotten to review it until I happened to meet one of the actors last week. The general premise is that quantum physics can improve your life, and we are shown this in two ways: through talking heads and animated science (somewhat interesting) and through Marlee Matlin acting out a plot that demonstrates the general premise (somewhat disastrous). According to the actor I met, some people prefer the straight-up documentary style and some people prefer the wedding scene where cartoon cells try to get it on with each other while the guests at the reception dance around with unexplained medical equipment. Go figure.

Angels in America, Part 2: I was still in New York when I watched the first half of this miniseries, and I'm surprised how long it took me to get back to it. The acting and writing are fantastic, but I'm afraid my reluctance to return had to do with two of my own issues: discomfort with scenes of disease and death and a lack of interest in magical realism. However, the film is so much more than that, and it is definitely worth watching.

Remember Me, My Love: This Italian film reminded me of American Beauty at one point in its portrayal of the way a family can be living together in the same house and yet still have completely separate, secret lives. The characters are engaging - at times amusing, at times cringeworthy - and the plot hinges around what happens to a man who loses his chance with Monica Bellucci.

The Aviator: I wasn't initially interested in this film because it featured Leonardo DiCaprio, but he pulled it off. His Howard Hughes was sympathetically neurotic (when he wasn't hiring women to be his "employees"), even if I can't imagine any actress with whom Leo could conjure some chemistry. I was pleased to see Scorcese toning it down a little, and when he did unleash the violence, it was in the form of the most amazing plane crash scene I have ever seen. I realized halfway through that the majority of my knowledge of Howard Hughes had been gleaned from The Simpsons, so I was thankful for the history lesson.
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no ice water in hell! fire hot!

• Timothy K. Beal's Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith is "a blue highways exploration of roadside religious attractions like Golgotha Fun Park and Holy Land, USA."

• David Fincher will be adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The popularity of this theme of a man aging backwards is growing out of control. See also: Young Lions winner The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W

• Richard Hell has a new CD and a new book. I saw him in New York not long before I left, and I was able to wrangle him into a conversation about my dissertation. That's what he gets for lecturing on Nathanael West.

• I came across this bizarre ad on Craigslist for an image control expert. Military intelligentsia welcome.

• Donna Tartt has a new story in The Guardian's original fiction issue. If you haven't read The Little Friend, I highly recommend it. (Later: The Tartt story has mysteriously disappeared, but there are many other reasons to check out the issue.)
  

• Chuck Klosterman is the latest guest on largehearted boy's Book Notes, providing a soundtrack for his recent release, Killing Yourself to Live.

• Doubting Hall offers a guided tour around the works of Evelyn Waugh.

suicidal tendencies circa 1947

1947 Project is a fascinating blog that documents the lurid and newsworthy around Los Angeles in 1947 (with some architectural sidelines). One thing I've learned through my visits to the site is that the preferred method of suicide back then has gone drastically out of fashion: drinking poison.

For example, on June 27th:

Distraught over her pending separation from fiance Billy Allen, 19-year-old Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton, Pearl L. Reid, 16, drank poison today at her home at 2653 Loosmore Street. She died. When Billy saw what she had done he too quaffed the deadly draught, and lies in serious condition in Long Beach's Naval Hospital. His doctors are optimistic for his survival, at least from the immediate threat.

From May 31st:

The 70-year-old jewelry store worker, despondent over poor health and fading eyesight, entered the mortuary, tapped on the office glass to get Mrs. Dell's attention, then drank from a bottle of poison and collapsed. A note on his body explained Rawles' reasons.

From April 25th:

Police are still trying to make sense of a last night's mysterious car chase in Echo Park. It all started when Motorcycle Office Carl Ericson spotted a taxicab that has been suspiciously repainted blue. He gave chase, and the vehicle turned onto Echo Park Avenue, racing past the lake and south towards Beverly. In front of 512 Echo Park Ave., the cab collided with a car driven by Walter Cliburne, 35, of 1947 Preston Ave. Cliburne's car ended up atop both the cab and a parked car. An ambulence was called, and the attendants directed their attention to the injured, still-unidentified cab driver. Suddenly he brought a vial of poison up to his mouth and made as to swallow. Attempts to wrest it away were fruitless, and the mystery man said, "I am going to die, so let me die."

I assume poison can only be even more effective than it was in 1947, so I wonder why it has fallen so far out of favor.
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who believes in love galore?

This song by The Sunshine - "Love" (Love! Love! Love! Love! Give it up for the sunny weather. Love! Love! Love! Love! Things can only get better...) - can really turn that frown upside down. (Forgive me. I'm infected by the euphoria.) If that doesn't work, this will.
(Thanks to swedesplease for the sunshine.)

Later: If you absolutely refuse to give it up for the sunny weather, you can sulk under the clouds with a sad, sad favorite, Dayna Kurtz's "Love, Where Did You Go?" I loved this song so much when I first heard it in March that I rushed out to buy the CD, and it holds the dubious honor of being the only thing (well, inanimate object) that I lost in the move to L.A.

ask itka

Among the many members of my advisory board, there's always been one whom I thought should go pro. Now, you too can benefit from the wisdom of Ask Itka.
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fearless freaks al fresco

Thanks to a free screening sponsored by the Los Angeles Film Festival, I saw The Fearless Freaks Friday night under the stars. (Sure, it was in the courtyard of a glorified mall, but hey! there was free popcorn, ice cream, and seat cushions.) I've been on a bit of a music documentary kick lately, so it was interesting to compare this portrait of The Flaming Lips, a band I much admire, to other recent offerings: DIG!, Some Kind of Monster, and Malfunkshun. Sadly, The Fearless Freaks suffered in comparison. Even if you have a compelling subject like The Flaming Lips, it does not let you off the hook from having a narrative arc. Even the most dramatic scene of Steven Drozd prepping his heroin rig on-camera came practically out of nowhere. Band members came and went with barely a mention of reasons for their departure, and while Wayne Coyne is lovely to listen to, a documentary for the ages needs more gravitas.

Other reviews: The New York Times, The Village Voice, Seattle PI, PopMatters

it's the kung fu littéraire!

I had some posts earlier about Michel Houellebecq's recent trip to the Hammer, but for various reasons, I was not able to follow him for the rest of his sojourn around Los Angeles. Luckily for us, the LA Weekly was.

Outside the restaurant, Houellebecq took a break to smoke a small cigar and talk about his literary rivals in France. “People claim to attack each other for ideological reasons, but it’s much more animalistic than that — it’s because they inhabit the same space.” Then he dropped into a martial-arts crouch and looked quickly from side to side. “They come from the left, they come from the right — it’s the kung fu littéraire!” he said, launching himself into a series of surprisingly deft swivels and kicks, dispatching his enemies one after another. But when it came to Bernard-Henri Lévy, the celebrated French philosopher known by his initials, “BHL,” Houellebecq transformed himself into a raptor out of a cheap Japanese horror movie and bit Lévy’s head off. “That was BHL, folks!”

In other follow-up news, I was not able to attend the Los Angeles Conservatory event, "Looking at Los Angeles" (mentioned here), and apparently I missed Julius Shulman telling Ben Stiller his work was crap.

is this a comment on literary ego?

Giancarlo Neri's sculpture "The Writer" is on display in England. (Notice the little tourist.)

Later: Loneliness. Not ego.

popsicle meltdown

I so wish I had been there for this: a gigantic Snapple-manufactured popsicle couldn't take the heat and flooded Union Square with its gloppy goodness...

The 25-foot-tall, 17½-ton treat of frozen Snapple juice melted faster than expected Tuesday, flooding Union Square in downtown Manhattan with kiwi-strawberry-flavored fluid that sent pedestrians scurrying for higher ground.

Firefighters closed off several streets and used hoses to wash away the sugary goo.

“What was unsettling was that the fluid just kept coming,” Stuart Claxton of the Guinness Book of World Records told the Daily News. “It was quite a lot of fluid. On a hot day like this, you have to move fast.

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five, seven, five

largehearted boy calls attention to this Q&A between John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats and Kevin Sampsell, entirely in the form of haikus reflecting on songs from The Sunset Tree. You can also see John Darnielle's Amazon recommendations here and his CD-R Go! here.

chaos and capri sun

Things Not Overheard at a Conceptual Art Gallery Opening...

the world could use some good news

A common virus kills cancer.
Missing boy scout found after four days in wilderness.
Ex-KKK member convicted in 1964 murder of civil rights activists.
Fear and anxiety shut off during female orgasms.
Lions rescue, guard beaten Ethiopian girl.

Now that's more like it. World, take note.

children are whores

I couldn't resist repeating Umberto Eco's rationalization of his win as a ten-year-old of an essay competition arguing for mortal sacrifice in service to Mussolini. (Via Rake's Progress)

"Children are whores," he says bluntly. "They are ready to repeat what they see on the TV screen, and it was the same with us." So did he believe it when he was writing it? "I don't know. I don't remember. I remember having been completely confused the morning when I woke up and I said to myself, do I really love the Duce?... So it means that we had doubts."

if kafka had a blog

It's hard not to make the comparison when you see the way The Kafka Project has designed the web publication of Paul Kerschen's translations of Franz's diaries from 1910-1923. Each day, a new entry arrives, sharing Kafka's thoughts on the mundane and the profound. (Via Maud Newton)

Today, for instance, I was rude three times, once to a conductor, once to someone introduced to me—so there were only 2, but they pain me like a stomachache. Coming from anyone else it would have been rude; how much more so coming from me...Though now I say to myself: look, the world lets you strike it, the conductor and the man you were introduced to kept calm, the latter even said goodbye as you went off. But that means nothing. You can achieve nothing when you fail yourself, but what else do you miss in your own circle? To this speech I answer only: even I would rather suffer blows inside the circle than strike blows myself outside of it, but where the hell is this circle—for a while, yes, I saw it lying on the earth, as if squirted out with chalk, but now it just hangs like this around me, it doesn’t even hang at all.