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I'd like to see that schema laid out in an Edward Tufte-style infograph. What would consider to be the sense of humor directly opposite mine?
The food is shit
I don’t laugh at jokes. Not usually. Hence my enduring non-presence at comedy clubs the nation over. I don’t dislike actual comedians deliberately doing comedy — lord knows I enjoy ‘em on podcasts — but the expectations their contexts set up make me horrifically tense and squirrely. In the prese...
Oh, it's as aggressive a humble-brag as they come. But I can't think of any other strategy at the moment.
Maybe it's me
“Is there a word,” I Asked MetaFilter “for the fear that you're doing something wrong but don't know what it is? Though my searches reveal nothing, I believe there simply must be a name for the fear that you're doing something wrong that prevents you from succeeding (broadly defined), but don't ...
You make a fair point, although I've recently been pondering turning to a fruitful career of stealing, which may obviate all this.
The Marketplace of Ideas: 10,000 in 2011 or bust
This will be The Marketplace of Ideas' final year. That is, unless the show reaches 10,000 podcast subscribers by the end of 2011. I'm still figuring out how to properly interpret my statistics, but getting to 10,000 surely requires somewhere between a doubling and a quintupling of the current s...
I don't quite know; that's why I have a complete Godard watch-through scheduled. For what it's worth, the label of didacticism doesn't get slapped on Weekend as often as it does his work from the seventies.
David Sterritt: Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews
Although I’ve seen pathetically few Jean-Luc Godard films, my meager Godard watchedography ironically includes some pictures even his fans haven’t gotten around to, like his 1980 “second first film” Sauve qui peut (la vie)/Every Man for Himself/Save Your Ass. Though you wouldn’t know if from my ...
The long and short of it: because I expected to reach 10,000 subscribers years ago. At the current rate of growth, I'll die of liver spots before I can make a sustainable career out of this.
The Marketplace of Ideas: 10,000 in 2011 or bust
This will be The Marketplace of Ideas' final year. That is, unless the show reaches 10,000 podcast subscribers by the end of 2011. I'm still figuring out how to properly interpret my statistics, but getting to 10,000 surely requires somewhere between a doubling and a quintupling of the current s...
Shamefully not. My New Yorker-reading sticks mostly to Alex Ross, Anthony Lane, and James Wood. But I now have my work cut out for me for my afternoon at the day job.
Culinary reportage is cultural reportage
I don’t believe in opinion, but I do believe in food. Whatever that means. Hence my decision to join Yelp and incentivize my own writing of, effectively, two- to three-paragraph pieces of gastronomically themed writing. I’ve quite enjoyed getting a handle on this short form, despite never claimi...
Same thing, right?
The Humanists: Hsiao-hsien Hou's Café Lumière
by Colin Marshall How often do we get two great cinematic tastes that, as they say, go great together? The Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou and the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu both, I would argue, display great taste, especially of the visual and rhythmic varietes. (Some insist Ozu had ...
Fuck, you missed the clown show? And here I thought you were so culturally savvy.
The stimulation baseline
Given my long-standing love of film, my new but flaming interest in boredom (stoked by reading David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and interviewing Lee Rourke about his boredom-centric novel The Canal), and my admiration for Manohla Dargis, I think I have a constitutional mandate to blog about...
zomg
The Humanists: Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth
by Colin Marshall On its surface, Night on Earth is nothing but people talking in taxicabs. The untold production hassle involved in this supposedly simple setup — towing gear, elaborate car-mounted lighting, routes to be driven and re-driven with each and every take — represents a truth abo...
Yeah, this is the question that makes my brain fold in on itself. I hold a tentative position, though, of doubting the usefulness/truthfulness of concepts like "who you really are". I've come to suspect that nobody "really" is anything.
Taste and identity
Reviewing Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, Adam Cadre arrives, by way of a book wherein Jeffrey Steingarten forces himself to eat everything he dislikes to attain “perfect omnivore” status, at an intersection of the ideas of opinions, tastes, and identity that’s occupied my mind lately: When Steingarten ...
You had enough money to buy a FIRST humble dwelling? Oh man...
PB&J, every damn day
I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that I pop into the studio, interview James Wood or Alain de Botton or Clive James or whomever, and then eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Not just a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich, but perhaps my fifth peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich of the week. O...
So don't hold out on us; how'd you get the ridiculous money?
PB&J, every damn day
I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that I pop into the studio, interview James Wood or Alain de Botton or Clive James or whomever, and then eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Not just a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich, but perhaps my fifth peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich of the week. O...
Exactly! That's my whole driving force with this post; I want to appreciate it all. The problems just come when I sit down and actually watch the neglected half of "it all." Blockbusters may indeed wield great technical prowess and its raw cinematic power, but damned if I can get over the stumbling block of why the exist. Not just in an intellectual sense -- "to make money," etc. -- but, y'know, the deeper "why" of their existence.
Taste and identity
Reviewing Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, Adam Cadre arrives, by way of a book wherein Jeffrey Steingarten forces himself to eat everything he dislikes to attain “perfect omnivore” status, at an intersection of the ideas of opinions, tastes, and identity that’s occupied my mind lately: When Steingarten ...
... and I really, REALLY don't want to work for Google.
The particular sadness of Zappos
How could I go to Mexico City this fall without a pair of Mexico 66es? Designed in anticpation of Mexico City's 1968 Summer Olympics by Onitsuka Tiger, they remain available today in a prime example of the aesthetic timelessness — or at least wide-timespan-iness — I so desire in my wear, foot-...
Yeah, but I said Bret Easton Ellis, not that specific book.
Portrait of a shitheel
Jason Kottke posted about "I am an American conservative shitheel", a few-paragraph story a guy once wrote on Something Awful. It's told in the first person, from the point of view of a narrator who describes his day, naming a bunch of the state-funded or -run services he uses both directly and i...
Reels. 1920s-era sex reels.
50 ready-made media angles on The Marketplace of Ideas
I know for a fact some of you readers and listeners wield awesome media power. I also suspect you, like me, have a strong interest in bringing more in-depth, long-form cultural conversation to and hearing more in-depth, long-form cultural conversation on the radio. So why not use that awesome me...
So far I've foregone the niceties of a house, a family, a car, or a garbage disposal. Maybe I'm still screwing myself over by eating foods other than rice.
R.J. Cutler: The September Issue
Wait, Anna Wintour just gets up and does a thing she’s good at or things associated with what she’s good at all day? You mean to tell me she doesn’t have to temp for eight hours, editing Vogue in stolen moments of downtime? Oh, I see; she’s figured out some sort of rolling welfare scam, right? ...
Academic bureaucracy, so it's kind of always casual day. But the waves of nihilism hit with the same force.
Objectivism
Nobody really puts an “objective” on their résumé, do they? I understand that the how-to wisdom of the résumé ancients dictates that thou shalt put one at the top and, within, thou shalt describe thyself as an "accomplished administrator seeking to leverage extensive background in personnel mana...
Logged five years in one so far. Pretty much dead inside by now.
Objectivism
Nobody really puts an “objective” on their résumé, do they? I understand that the how-to wisdom of the résumé ancients dictates that thou shalt put one at the top and, within, thou shalt describe thyself as an "accomplished administrator seeking to leverage extensive background in personnel mana...
Don't worry; in addition to my approval of James Franco, I maintain a limitless store of anger about James Franco. Because James Franco is... the kind of issue... you get... angry about?
James Franco and Matt Taibbi: Leading Full Lives
I recently read long-ish profiles of James Franco and Matt Taibbi. After reading each one, I thought, "They are both leading very full lives." In a good way. From The James Franco Project in New York magazine: According to everyone I spoke with, Franco has an unusually high metabolism for produ...
I found only the printer-friendly version displayed in full, but yeah, thanks for passing that along -- the piece and three follow-ups make for a fascinating exchange. And if we could somehow install a hall of mirrors inside the rabbit hole, maybe we'd approach the metaphor we need?
Woody Allen: Manhattan
All those scenes in Woody Allen pictures which found him lining up with a date to see Von Stroheim or The Sorrow and the Pity were partly jokes about Woody the film nerd, but they also reflected a period when adventurous moviegoing was part of the agreed cultural duty, when the duty itself was ...
Your thoughts? (Been a while since I've seen either.)
He wanna travel
This article, from the Japanese magazine Paper Sky, is an interview with Haruki Murakami about writing and the states of mind brought on by foreign geographical contexts, and vintage record collecting. It was pretty much precision-engineered to get me to read it:I hate asking you this, but her...
Oh man, I don't even know what that is. But it sounds cool already.
A map of Couplândia
The latest chapter of my 101 Contemporary Novelists Without Whom Your Brain Might Well Shrivel and Die is up today at The Millions. It’s about Douglas Coupland: “I’m not saying that the bulk of novels out there aren’t art — they are — they’re just not modern art.” Douglas Coupland, “Why Wr...
Luckily, I excised my questionable claim about these racers not being enormous dicks just before posting.
Bottom of the pyramid
Lucas Brunelle and his buddies bike very fast, against the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, through major cities everywhere. Brunelle himself does it with a couple of video cameras strapped to his head. These are what have come to be called “alleycat races.” They’re unofficial and ill...
Hey, "mostly accurate" is more than I ever would have hoped for!
What I know about the Beatles
Some friends have expressed concern that my knowledge of the Beatles’ catalogue is more or less limited to a song about a raccoon who intends to shoot off the legs of his rival. My excuse is that, growing up, I looked around me and saw that pretty much everyone in the world liked the Beatles,...
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