no!

My favorite fruit. Damn.

welcome to sunday in nyc

Banks are closed. I spend too much money on drinks last night and so have exactly twelve dollars to make it through the day. I, of course, blow most of this on coffee while writing the great american novel (pshaw!) at cafe grumpy. Eventually my own kind of hunger hits (the kind where I forget about food until around 8pm and refuse to think this is wrong). So I go to the nearest bodega. Scan the racks for cheapest items. Decide I'd like to try for pita bread and cheese. Total cost: $5. Trouble is, including change, I have $4. So I settle for kettle chips and twix. Total cost: $3.50. It's true what they say about only the rich being able to afford good health.

my own personal savior

There is a joke I've learned is really not a joke over the past month, which has to do with how every one living in NYC should just have a man standing outside their door who charges them upwards of fifty dollars every time they set foot outside their apt.

Well. Here is how to occasionally kick that man in the nuts: myopenbar.com.

nyc is cool. how are you all?

hello!

guys! guys! guys! LOOK!

some thoughts

--Having a blackberry is new and uncharted territory. It feels like a right of passage. Having a blackberry is like having a bat mitzvah.

--Patrick posted some pictures from his recent time in NYC. Only a handful. But they reinvigorated my need to go back there, and reminded me of my excitement for the future.

--Rico is coming to visit on Thursday!

--While home sick I watched the following: Big Love (season 2), Ocean's 13, The Last Mimzy, Talk To Me, Eli Stone (4 episodes), Sarah Connor Chronicles (4 episodes) Introducing the Dwights, Bridge to Terabithia, a whole lot of youtube.

--I started reading "I Am A Strange Loop." Sometimes I want to write all over it with notes and love. Sometimes I want to put it down and not read another page so frustrated and disagreeable has it made me. Douglas Hofstadter, why do you tease me so?

every one should be so lucky

Spread the love.

paco had a baby

Yes, 'tis true. Paco had a baby boy. Since the birth, the following has been overheard in relation to said baby boy:

"So have you seen the baby yet?"
"You mean fucking Suri Cruz? No."

(paco gets a new job) "Hey, now you can start a college fund."
"Yeah, that's what my wife said. But I think I'm gonna use the money to buy more gobots."

sucker for all things literary

Yay LAT. You have made me smile. Click on the link. You will smile too. Sherman Alexie! Junot Diaz! Douglas Hofstadter!

(Have you read "The Toughest Indian In the World"? Have you read "Godel Escher Bach"? Go now friend! Go!)

she started it

Ertel has begun a war. To her latest blog post re: Be Kind Rewind I say "ouch."

I would like to defend the movie, though only briefly.

Its simplicity, its naivete, its illogical underpinnings, its consistent skimming of the surface... was THE POINT. (And also most of these and other supposed faults were largely just direct callbacks and/or homages to other movies.)

It was a film, NOT for the child in each of us, but rather for the child who loved to watch "Ghostbusters" in each of us.

Not every one was that child. I get that. This movie is not for those people. But if yes, you were the seven year old with wide eyes over every Amblin film to cross your path... you are in luck. Because Gondry was catering to you with this one. And I believe as a result that he accomplished exactly what he set out to do.

sonic boom!

Interviewed.

Peter Kember is ever so slightly before my time, but thank god for JF who forced me through several various albums and an echoplex show. He also admitted that he named his son, Kember, after the man.

No joke.

best movie poster in ages

Now I just need the movie to be good enough to justify framing this.

i was so wrong

THIS is the best wikipedia page ever.

Though, according to Mark and John, the original entry they discovered ever so long ago included quite a few controversial gems now quietly kicked under the creative commons rug.

you've lived in la too long if

Traffic relief?

Never in my life did I think I'd care this much about traffic, but... when you commute 45min each way to work and back every day, it gets to be important to you. I have no idea how I feel about this whole thoroughfare idea (good idea? bad idea? why doesn't la just implement a decent subway system all-freakin-ready?), but during said commute this evening I found myself enthralled by kcrw's coverage of the ongoing argument.

damn

Or could this be the best wikipedia page ever? (they have a whole section just for fronts!)

More and more the internet proves itself to be the greatest writers' resource since Gutenberg. Not that that's news to any of you...

strike or no strike

Script Cops. The world needs 'em.

(credit to Diego for emailing me about this MONTHS ago... it still hasn't gotten old, buddy)

From Crackle: Script Cops, Ep 6: ROMANTIC COMEDY BEAT DOWN

a wordless vocabulary

Well who doesn't remember Robbe-Grillet?

...Or maybe I just read too much Roland Barthes.

Vitale, Horowitz, Riordan, Schrecter, Schrecter, and Schrecter

Best wikipedia page ever.

happy vday

(from very small array straight to your cubby hole)

the fixer

Tony Gilroy is my new favorite writer.

reading 2008

Whether read for the first time or re-read for the tenth; whether flaunted for the literary street cred or shamefully hidden inside the dust jacket of a Norman Mailer; please find enclosed the complete list of books read in 2008. Updated as needed.

***

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud (feb)
Delicious. Satisfying in the way of a well prepared meal, and this book is well prepared. Her writing is a smooth, aged scotch. Is sophisticated and beautiful and glowing warm once inside you. Frank, honest; you find pieces of yourself in every character as much as you may wish you didn't.

Rule of the Bone by Russel Banks (feb)
(reread.) Because it's that good. Because at one point in my life I could have written this and the words, the tone, the style all would have been the same he captures disenfranchised youth so well here. Because these words, this tone, this style IS exactly what my brother would write right now. I made Cameron finally read it and he freaked out only two pages in, called me immediately to ask if he'd stepped into a Twilight Zone episode in which he was reading a book he himself had written sometime in the future. I didn't have an answer for him.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (jan)
Well it isn't bad. I'll be honest, I was watching 30 Rock and Tina Fey made a joke about not having read this book and I thought "you know I haven't read it either." So then there it was at the used book store near my apt and the owner behind the counter said yes read it, it's moving and well written and a tear-jerker. Well. I don't know about any of that. But it's got it's moments, I guess. And it's a quick, easy read of a book.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonthan Lethem (jan)
(reread) Jonathan Lethem is the man and this book is just about his best. There is a dry honesty in the way that he writes every single damn word that I both admire and long for in other writing. Here he's got the detective genre down (stand back Phillip Marlowe, here comes your 21st Century, postmodern replacement). He's funny and he's true and he writes every one of his books much like how my head thinks. I have to believe I'm not alone in that. Here is proof.

Zeroville be Steve Erickson (jan)
Made me like Los Angeles. I can't think of another book in recent memory that's affected me so powerfully as that. The book literally made me enjoy living in this city and that's quite the feat. I will keep recommending Steve Erickson (an entirely underrated writer), and this novel of his in particular, until I’m blue in the face. It's fantastic. Simple as that. It's Hollywood's version of Being There. It's cinema's version of Genesis.

drunken rebellion anyone?

The ultimate party game:

I've been thinking. You could make a map of the city's pay phones. You could mark them all down and carefully choose your targets. Then pick some rare combination of flagged words. How often do you think that government Echelon wiretap picks up calls that mention "gas attack" and "plutonium" and "strawberries" all together? How many times in your city in the same six hour period? Just get some latex gloves and a jacket with a big hood, and hit all of the pay phones you marked out. You could use the city like your own private Light Bright. The future doesn't have to be boring. Just pick the phones you want to light up on the Echelon warning board, and draw a glowing spiral, or write your grocery lists in lights.

(brilliantly hatched by Joey)

jk but not really

Come party with the cool kids.

end of the week

I feel like living out of my car for a while.

books that make you dumb

Yes. Just... yes.

omfg

Buttercup Festival is back!

My heart aches with it. Yes, I fall in love too hard. Do you remember January 2005? There was wonder in those drawings, and now the wonder is back.

what happened

Last night we took a ride around Hollywood in the Ron Paul stretch limo. I don't think I could make this up if I tried. Obviously it was the last place I expected to find myself after dinner at Greenblatt's and wine at Stella, and how this happened I don't know if I could possibly relate. Suddenly there we were, walking back to the car, when Dre starts running down Sunset for no apparent reason. When he came back to us, out of breath, all he could manage through furious grinning is "it's the ron paul limo! we're gonna go party with them!"

And in the limo: A man gave me a shirt that he'd made and afterwards I found out he was an anti-semite. The cops turned a flood light on us and told every one to lay off the megaphone. A hospital technician named George told me stories over champagne of girls who don't seem interested anymore when he admits to them he's not in "the business."

I guess, all around it was a night of the unexpected. Jon Brion sat facing me all through dinner, sometimes staring but mostly writing. This man (whose real name is James) and his screenwriting pal chatted up Laura and I at the bar. At times I didn't know who I was.

if you're a "believer"

As much as I may lambaste McSweeney's... I read this anyway. If you didn't already know it, Jonathan Lethem is my favorite author ever. I do think Dave Eggers is occasionally amusing... but in this conversation the both of them are brilliant in their own ways and it is good. It is very good.

Some quotes that I believe to be true statements:

I've been in LA this week, and as horrible as it was staying on Sunset, I do really like the city's enthusiasm for just about everything, every stupid ugly cheap thing. I like that they get excited about making TV shows. That they want to make things, and make them quickly, and then make more things, and reach people, and make them laugh or cry or whatever. It's nice — it's jumpy and desperate in a healthy and wide-eyed sort of way. They obviously fear death, and this is good. - Eggers

(I feel it now, in my current bi-coastal life. LA to NYC to LA to NYC and back...)

Okay, several thoughts, an attempt to burrow further inside this subject, our subject, our slippery, elusive hydra-headed rant. Too much I feel we're surrounding the real subject, pecking at it. But that feeling is good, actually, that urge, that itch, it suggests we're somewhere worthwhile, scrabbling to get in. That's the lovely, quite traditional frustration which drives everything worthwhile: art, falling in love, good conversation.

First, I have a superficially amused response to your pitting California-naive-liveliness-creativity against New York-sterile-academic-death urge — after my ten years in California, and my return to New York (from whence I came) I've consoled myself and ordered my self-understanding around a rejection of California's ahistorical, goofy, new-age, banality-of-evil olestra (nothing sticks, I get drunk, I fall down, what's the problem) atmosphere in favor of New York's intense, achievement-ratifying and knowledge-based substantiality.

But those are my silly biases. Needless to say, safe to say, cultural 'life-urges' and 'death-urges' thrive in their many (remarkably) different urban biospheres equally, in close coexistence, and so often, so confusingly, wearing one another's clothes at unexpected moments. -Lethem

there is art here

This weekend we built Rome in a day.

even before seeing the movie

Bobby Fischer died!

Little known fact: When I was a kid he was my hero.

or am i origami

Last night I met a guy named Andy, who enacted with me what we both agreed would be the perfect date: sitting in a parked car, semi drunk, obsessively going through unknown mix CD's to find out what the next song would be, and singing along when inspiration struck.

Yes, Andy appreciates the nostalgia tied to Eve 6.

los angeles gettin' ya down?

According to G: "this is awesome" (it is).

the long and short

Much thanks to Cheryl's LAX pick-up skills. Have you noticed lately that she's a peach?

The result: I am now back in that city of angels that I'm sure missed me more than words during my three week stint to places where winter actually feels like winter.

To be brief. FLG and PHX was a "nice" of the boring variety. In other words: a very needed kind of nice for some one who hasn't taken a vacation in longer than she wants to remember. And NYC was MasterCard priceless. The lower east side apt that G lent me kicked some ass. Also, it came complete with both a big brother and a cousin, who were almost as entertaining as the city itself. Said big brother even threatened to beat up an unnamed suitor, should he fail to meet up to big brother's standards. I felt the love. As well: Julia Farwing was there in some rare form indeed, quoting our subway rides to me over numerous cups of coffee.

Am I glad to be back?

...