My sort of adopted baby brother Sam has a super sweet new mix that he's selling on his MySpace page. He and I will actually be spinning this Tuesday, May 20th, at my new favorite bar on the South Side of Williamsburg, Trophy Bar. If you are in New York and you like to have fun, I recommend you come. Here's a preview of Sam's mix.
I did an e-mail interview with Holly Johnson for my friend's webzine, Radiate. It was more of a correspondence, really. I was caught up in other things when the whole process started, and it took me by surprise when he first got back to me-and was wicked smart and political and rad and a writer, too. Had to step up my game. I think he still trounced me pretty good, though. Check it out here.
Something a little different this Friday. From my new favorite show on my favorite network (next to TCM) Adult Swim, the inspired Metacolypse (full episodes here). The biggest death metal band in the world, composed of dour, hapless rockers, wander into one epic fiasco after another, every move tracked and manipulated by a diabolical conspiracy. Here, it's nihilistic Murder Face's birthday celebration and he's sulking.
Oddly I'm going to check out Steven Beske's show tomorrow--photographs of death metal Norwegians like this cheerful fellow. In a world gone mad, these macabre rockers are almost cuddly and reasuring.
Or rather, illusions, as tricks are what whores do for money. Or candy. Neil Patrick Harris pulls some super sweet magic on a New York Times reporter--but you must read the entire piece to get what it is. Now, that's a good interview subject.
Caught "Ordinary People" on TV late the other night, and the poor quality of the transfer prompted me to send a note to the Criterion Collection folks about doing a remastered DVD with a new transfer. The film looks muddy and flat now, especially in low light scenes, and in spots it looks like a bad 70s TV movie. That's not my memory of seeing it in the theater, although that was 27 years ago. But to me it was luminous and even the dark stuff, like the sequences in the therapist's office were rich, and the low lighting seemed to hum. Of course the performances were unusually immediate.
Even though the print was bad, the distortion from shooting a digital image from the film on a TV screen makes something kind of nice and actually very evocative of that look that I remember.
Continue reading ""Ordinary People" Due For the Criterion Treatment" »
Happy to see that Junot Diaz nabbed the Pulitzer for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao". He was a tremendous presence at this year's Key West Literary Seminar, generous with his time and endlessly friendly to the women and men-but mostly women-who mobbed him, like Judy Blume here on the right who is sweating him hard. Just kidding. Helluva lot of charisma though, and a great guy. I actually think that reading "Wao" could jog one out of a non-reading lull that I think so many of us (myself included) are afflicted with in our shortened attention span era. The book is so full of energy and raw, often brutal life, and it's very disciplined and tight. Check out a podcast of Junot reading from the book here.
At a KWLS party Billy Collins was asking Junot about all the fanboy literature, comics and films referenced in "Wao", as a kind of follow-up to Billy's conversation about "extra-literary" inspirations, and weaving those into your work. Someone came up at this moment and pulled me away to deal with some crisis, and let me tell you I regret not overhearing this exchange.
Vladimir Cosma's score for "Diva" hits a high note with this tentatively romantic interlude, as does the film. On a rainy cold day in New York somehow the rain in Paris looks-and sounds-more desirable. The clip is a bit dark, but you get the drift.
This week at DIFFA's Dinner By Design two dozen or so design firms and schools presented dining environments in booths at Skylight Studios and raised money for HIV/Aids care and research. Most of the tableaux demonstrated that their designer's chief ability to shop, and shop a lot, for opulent, intricate place settings. But a couple stood out in their concept and production. The Rockwell Group created this dining table that was all hand knit, a welcome contrast to the rococo Long Island settings elsewhere. A lovely young woman named Mary was still at the table knitting.
Mary had knit the hanging lights "fixtures", each one of which had taken 5 hours to create.
Erykah Badu's album "New Amerykah" gets a savvy review from Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker--it's a invaluable primer for where Badu is coming from and where she's going, both musically and thematically. The album is challenging and strange, angry and consoling, and if you manage to get past the strange, deliberately dissonant interludes between songs you'll find a potent and intoxicating array of music.
My current favorite is the metronomic "Soldier", a call to awareness and action for a populace numbed and pacified. There's a euphoric swell of organs behind "Baptized when the levees broke" that cuts into your heart. It's followed by this passage that refers to Harriet Tubman's practice of forcing slaves to participate in their liberation; pulling a gun on them she'd say, "you march or you die".
"we gone keep marching on/till we here that freedom song/and if you think about turning back/I got the shot gun for your back/and if you think about tunrnin back?I got a shotgun on ya' back/(harriet style)"
From Gina Bellafante's NYT review of the new season of "The Hills":
"During its third season, which picks up again on Monday after a
three-month hiatus, “The Hills,” set among young aspirants of the
Hollywood Hills’ music 
and fashion industries, has continued to track
the emotional warfare between former best friends Lauren and Heidi,
while delving more deeply into the twistedness, gaslighting and
superficiality of the boyfriends who ensure that the tortured rivals
treat each other like Crips and Bloods. The show that looked, in all of
its Antonioni-esque plotlessness and dreamy cinematography, at the
ignominies of youthful friendship has turned toward the more
conventional cruelties that good-looking playboys perpetrate on young
women who wear low-rise pants and put on boots in warm weather."
The girls in "The Hills" certainly share a similar aimless searching to some of Antonioni's characters, and she's right about the dreamy, otherworldy photography and pace. What are the Hills girls looking for? Better boyfriends and hotter careers? Better clothes? More shoes? By contrast, there is an abiding sense of soul searching, a quest for meaning beyond what society offers, in "L'Aventurra" or "L'Eclisse". It's a insightful, depressing piece, nailing the soullessness of this "faux-improvised reality show", and by extension all of us who follow it or, in fact, write about it.
My friend Jordon was just on the set of The Wolfman in London, working with the unit photographer. Sunday night he re-enacted some of Benicio del Toro's Wolfman poses at a party for the "Elements" shoot Matthew Rolston did for Make Me A Supermodel. Not a sentence you get to write every day. More shots of Wolfman Jordon after the jump, for the Wolfman completists, as well as some Make Me A Supermodel folk shots.
Rolston with "Air"
They are powerless to stop posing.
The passing of an old friend brought me to this final sequence of Harold and Maude, both for the peerless expression of grief and, in the end, the celebration of life lived freely.
Wed 12/03/2008 11:12 12032008204
Thu 06/03/2008 11:47 06032008201-001
It's hard to leave a place that feels so much like home.
I had no problem typing out this passage below from Geoff Dyer's essay Decline and Fall from his book "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It", as I both wanted to practice writing like him, even on this simple manual level, and to pay closer attention to the meaning, as it hit pretty close to home.
"I headed for the Campidoglio and it was there, as I sat musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, that the idea of writing a book about seemed an impossible undertaking. Id did not manifest iself immediately, definitively, but I had a premonition that any hopes I had once entertained of writing such a book would one day lie in ruins about me. I had been drifting for years, and now-like the lone cloud we'd seen at Hadrian's Villa-I had drifted to a standstill. I may not have admitted it at the time-if that afternoon was a turning point, then I responded as one invariably does at such moments, by failing to turn-but at some level I knew that I had been kidding myself: that all the intellectual discipline and ambition of my earlier years had been dissipated by half-hearted drug abuse, indolence, and disappointment, that I lacked purpose and direction and had even lessidea of what I wanted from life than I had when I was twenty or thirty even, and I was well on the way to becoming a ruin myself, and that was fine by me."
One of the guys who contributed tips for my camera story over at Esquire.com was my old pal Mark Tusk. Tusk's photos of the dizzying highs and glamorous lows of New York society always seem to make you feel you are there-something about his presence and his eye just gets both the tawdry and the intimate moments right. Here's NPH getting a big wet one from bf David. Check more of Tusk shots of the creatures of the night his Flickr page.
Badu is back. Her new video for "Honey" has its embedding "disabled by request" for some dumb-ass reason, but you can see it here. In it you see Badu inserted onto some really legendary album covers from-among others-Eric B. & Rakim, Funkadelic, LaBelle, Minnie Riperton, The Beatles, Grace Jones and Olivia Newton-John. Yup, ONJ. There's a wacky "Hey Yeah!" tribute midway, but no Ryan Phillipe intro, sadly.
I e-mailed good buddy Darryl Stephens to ask his thoughts on the new album, and I liked what he said so much I asked if I could post his comments, and he kindly agreed:
"the album is interesting. been meaning to ask you about it. it feels like someone very talented started smoking too much pot. "telephone" which has a cool hook about "save me a place in heaven" is otherwise rambling and incoherent. it feels like jam sessions--not unlike WORLDWIDE UNDERGROUND--but without the obvious gem of "I Want You." i think it's gonna be a grower... and i'll find myself wrapped up in some song unexpectedly a few months down the line. there are some that stand out now. "The Healer" is good. and "Master Teachers" has a cool hook. i'm not sure, though, that she's focused enough to have a real hit here. i like it, don't get me wrong. it just feels more ambient that soulful."
AFTERTHOUGHTS FROM DARRYL IN THE SECOND HALF
The New York Times Travel Section picked up on a story I've been hawking around town for a couple of years: The Rock Pools Of Sydney. I felt some decidedly mixed emotions upon opening the link when a friend sent it--editor after editor had passed on the idea, and here it was on arguably the biggest travel page. I don't mind losing the story so much, because I want to write a book about the rock pools. Does this help or hurt that? I'm not quite sure, but I'm certainly going to be a lot cagier as I shop ideas around. At least I know my ideas are good....
I slacked and didn't post this in real time, or indeed in any timely manner. Is it funny to read trailer reviews after the movies they are advertising are out? Maybe. Perhaps it's appropriate to be finally posting these on Oscar Day, the last big stop in Hollywood's marketing cycle. I've come to find the whole breathless glorification of movies on this day a little insipid--aren't they constantly celebrated in the deluge of marketing that accompanies their releases (see below) and by everyone yammering incessantly about them in lieu of talking about anything substantial, like books, or pressing global crises? Does the film business really need to throw itself a party, given how completely it dominates our culture?
This is over two months old. Mea Culpa, John Jay, Mea Maxima Culpa. A couple excerpts from Jay's complete real time trailer review(and now he does the features after the jump.
2:48: "I like how they add the Requiem to give Alien v. Predator some class..."
3:09 "God help me this dialogue is bad....
...Killing better start soon"
Continue reading "John Jay's Real Time BlackBerry Trailer Reviews: AVPR " »
My big camera piece is up at Esquire.com; this one took months of research (read: I got to play with a lot of amazing cameras). Here's Carolina on the beach in Key West (all roads lead South today) shot with the Leica C-LUX 2, my top choice for travel photography.
This note about the song from roommate Kyle Hausmann:
Murder Ballads, the Nick Cave's collaborative album which includes "Henry Lee" done with PJ Harvey, was released in 1996, around the same time that the two artists - so says the vague Internet - had a brief but intense relationship. Some accounts claim this was an affair while Cave was with another woman; others do not reflect any infidelity. (It was perhaps Harvey's only relationship known to the public, and may not have been very secretive very long). By all accounts, Harvey ends the relationship, and Cave is devastated.
The the story the lyrics tell, the history of the two singers (whatever that history actually is), and the way the two touch and look at each other...
"
I often think Overheard In New York's quotes seem made-up, but this one is so specific and improbable I think it must be true.
Hot straight guy #1: Geez, what size shoes do you wear, dude?
Hot straight guy #2: They're size fourteen.
Hot straight guy #1: And how tall are you?
Hot straight guy #2: Oh, I'm 6'1".
Hot straight guy #1: Damn, dude -- you must have a huge cock!
Queer: Dude...
Hot straight guy #2:
Man, I thought you were gonna say what I always hear -- 'Dude, big feet
-- you know what that means? Big shoes!' I hear that all the time.
Hot straight guy #1: I know, right?
Hot straight guy #2:
I like to say, 'Yeah, it means a big cock, right?' but that always
leads to an awkward silence. I applaud you for coming right out with
that.
Queer: Um...
Hot straight guy #1: Yeah, I left my shoes at my girlfriend's the other day, and her mom made a comment on them -- 'Big shoes...' I mean, her mom!
Hot straight guy #2: That's crazy.
Queer: Guys, look -- unless you're gonna whip 'em out, can we stop talking about your gigantic cocks, please?
--1166 6th Ave
Overheard by: Duncan Pflaster
I found myself at Central Park at 10:00 a,m. yesterday--the snow from the day before was melting as warm rain fell and a thick mist was the result. I ran into a woman who had two serious cameras hanging around her neck--she'd come to the park to take photos and couldn't believe her luck. "I feel like I'm in a dream," she smiled.
I'd never been more glad I had the Canon G9 with me. Couple more after the jump.
..I'm just crumblin' 'erb." Outkast's consoling words feel relevant (player below) in a troubled month that saw a lot of passing of disparate talents--Renfro, Ledger, and now Roy Scheider. Some were far too soon, and the papparazi and celebrity press fascination over the irrelevant details of Ledger's death is grim beyond words--and the helicopters hovering over the private funeral in Perth so profoundly wrong I can't believe it was permitted. And Scheider's death in some way marks the end of living connections to the universe of all the fine 70s films--Klute, Marathon Man, All That Jazz--dirty, innovative, real. No more Altman, either. There seems to be a wholesale clearing of some deep, authentic cinematic voices. So much trouble in this crazy world.
