Lacking significance through having been overused; unoriginal and trite.
Media Diet
Media Diet

Media Diet

#52Films By Women

I made a pledge to watch at least one female-directed film per week that I hadn’t seen prior in 2019. I will log them as I go, and likely rank them in the same list when I am done. Did the same thing in 2016.

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Speaking of movies. This is going to get discussed a lot this year, but 1999 was a watershed year for cinema. Probably tied to nostalgia, but seemingly one of my favorites.

Magnolia, The Virgin Suicides, The Cider House Rules, Ratcatcher, Eyes Wide Shut, Being John Malkovich, The Iron Giant, Office Space, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Election, The Green Mile, Three Kings, Man on the Moon, The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, American Beauty, Fight Club, The Straight Story, Sweet and Lowdown, The Matrix, All About My Mother, Girl, Interrupted, Boys Don’t Cry.

Hell, Cruel Intentions, She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You , South Park and American Pie.

We even got installments of Star Wars and Toy Story.

So I have been reading. A bit.

I was very slowly working my way through Jude the Obscure, but I put that down for the Beastie Boys Book. I am aware I am the only person in the history of civilization that will ever say that.

I’ve been missing Bob lately. I was hoping to see his name in the photo credits.

When I was maybe five or six, I inherited my stepbrother’s bedroom at my father’s. With it, a few things he left behind, including a Beastie Boys photo pulled from a magazine taped to the wall.

Years later, when Bob and Brian J. Bowe were working on the CREEM anthology for HarperCollins, they let me pick and transcribe a few pieces for the book. One was an interview with the Beasties by Chuck Eddy. Bob pulled the art for the article from photos he’d taken, including the one taped to my wall all those years before.

Sunday Morning/Early Afternoon Not Live

Last night ‘s episode had some fun moments. Really related to the bit in Matt Damon’s monologue about staying up late with his dad to watch the show as a child. And somehow related to the Weezer sketch even more. #TeamLeslie

Also, say what you will about Miley (I have), but I enjoyed her performance and singing it alongside Sean Ono Lennon kinda got to me.

I don’t know why I am writing about SNL. I must have mono.

Welles

Been devouring Orson Welles the past week or so. Started with watching The Other Side of the Wind, which I would not recommend to another human being. Still, I found it fascinating.

Since, I’ve watched/rewatched eight films either by him, and/or starring him, or about him. Plan on keeping that up while I await next week’s Criterion release of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Even managed to crack Bogdanovich’s This Is Orson Welles, which has been collecting dust on my shelf for far too long. There’s an anecdote in the book about MGM looking for an actor to play opposite Hedy Lamarr that I’m finding far too relatable at the moment. It’s like a metaphor for my entire life:

“Welles – that’s who we want! Get him! Who’s his agent?”

“He doesn’t have an agent.”

“What?”

“No, he’s on the radio and he’s running a theatre in New York called The Mercury.”

“Get him.”

Because of the time difference, it is now two o’clock in the morning on the East Coast; ten secretaries are put on the job… [they] start wildly searching by long distance telephone. “We hear he’s at the Stork Club.” “No. El Morocco.” From Harlem to Chinatown, the telephone dragnet spreads out over Manhattan; and for four or five hours, the conference proceeds…

Finally, a secretary, breathless with victory, throws open the door: “I’ve got him for you!” she exclaims, “I’ve got Orson Welles!”

Then, somebody says, “What does he want?”

#FrasierFriday

Frasier

Well, actually, we’ve been out a couple of times. I’m really rather taken with her. She has a very playful side.  She took me miniature golfing last night.

Martin

Oh, sure, when she takes you, it’s playful. When I take you, it ends up as a short story in the high school literary magazine.

Frasier

“Through the Clown’s Mouth Darkly” took second in the all-city fiction contest that year.

Rules for a Knight

Just finished Ethan Hawke’s epistolary novel written as a letter from a knight going into battle, to their children, imparting knowledge and what they assume will be their last words.

The book is brief and contains simple, effective language and great advice, mostly collected from various sources (credited at the end).

A few rules that stood out to me:

Humility
Never announce that you are a knight, simply behave as one.

Friendship
The quality of your life will, to a large extent, be decided by with whom you elect to spend your time.

Forgiveness
Those who cannot easily forgive will not collect many friends. Look for the best in others.

Discipline
Excellence lives in attention to detail. Give your all, all the time. Don’t save anything for the walk home.

Ugly Delicious

I chose the wrong career path.

As an outsider that is still obsessed with good food (read: I have an unrefined palette), it’s speaking my language. Bourdain is my hero, but he’s far more who I want to be than who I am.

From the New York Times:

David Chang and his new Netflix series, “Ugly Delicious,” can most easily be defined by what they’re not. Mr. Chang is not a fastidious French kitchen god, a high-energy American showman or an Anthony Bourdain-like poetic observer. “Ugly Delicious” is not a stand-and-stir cooking show or a pack-your-bags travelogue.

Its eight episodes take on topics as conventional as pizza, barbecue, fried chicken and Chinese cooking. The cameras pan over jars of artisanal tomato sauce and capture the squirting juices of xiao long bao. Ritualistic pronouncements of deliciousness abound, often punctuated with a certain four-letter word, and the occasional non-culinary star — Aziz Ansari, Jimmy Kimmel — drops by to both lend and borrow celebrity wattage.

What Mr. Chang and the food writer Peter Meehan, his co-star and fellow executive producer, are attempting is something more ambitious, though: an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture.

In the first episode Chang says he hates “being told I can’t like something.”

Amen.

Now. Time to get eating.

“No, it’s the children who are wrong.”

Don’t know exactly how I feel about Apu in 2018.

But I think the conversation deserves more than a troll/PR stunt response. I wonder if Al Jean or Matt Groening understand that part of the problem with Apu is that his name is used as an insult. My best friend is Indian. I’ve seen it firsthand.

Having their response come from Lisa is a complete disservice to one of the best role models in modern fiction. I would probably stop watching the show if I hadn’t inadvertently already done that around season nine.

Darren Brown: The Push

Trying to figure out how to never have to agree to anything ever again. Afraid getting dinner with someone is only a few steps away from committing a crime.