JULIE BUSH

Pilot Season

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:32:23 -0800

For non-show biz people, the best way to describe pilot season is this: you know how when the Lotto prize goes up to $100 Million and everyone starts buying 4 and 5 tickets at a time because if lightning strikes it could change your life forever. It’s like that, except even if you get a pilot most of them never become series and most of the ones that do get canceled before anyone’s life gets changed. And the winner is usually Tom Selleck.

Why Hollywood Is So Dumb About Piracy

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:11:36 -0800

[caption id=”flickrImage_1” align=”aligncenter” width=”335” caption=”Fireman Trying to Turn Off Broken Hydrant Under the Hollywood Sign, LA, 2006 © by exposo”][/caption]

Hollywood is always behind the times - whether being the last to know “oh no you didn’t” is not funny or the loudest objectors to new technologies (which they always say is going to decrease their profit, even though it always increases it) .

Most hilarious, though, is the way Hollywood is always first to pat themselves on the back for being cool, forward-looking, innovative, young (that just means they’re quick to hire young sociopath-douchebags with no track record then throw up their hands when they have no idea why the stuff they produce is such shit) -

But the fact remains, Hollywood is one of the oldest, whitest, crankiest-old-man businesses around.

The huge studios (which are all owned by enormous multinational corporations) are up in arms about piracy because they see themselves as the “authors” of their films and TV shows and think that anyone “stealing” their films and TV shows by downloading them illegally represents a dangerous threat to their bottom line. Or at least to the capitalist law and order system that has allowed their parent companies to rape and pillage our economies and natural resources for hundreds of years.

The biggest flaw in this logic is the idea that *money* is the greatest resource an audience can trade to the author of a film in exchange for the privilege of seeing that film. (That a corporation can be the “author” of a film is a debate for another day.)

Attention is a far more valuable commodity - one that Hollywood sometimes spends more money to acquire than they reap in money in return.

Which would you rather have:

- A movie that cost you $5 million to make and grossed $10 million, but that no one heard of, no one talked about, no one cared about, or -

- A movie that cost you $5 million to make and grossed $5 million, but that everyone heard of, everyone’s talking about, everyone cares about?

I would rather the second. Because in the former case, you have a commodity with a limited afterlife. In the latter case, you have a commodity with a far greater afterlife, both financially and culturally. Benefits accrue to the studio and the creative professionals involved in the film that are not measured in money but rather in terms of how much impact a project has - how many people saw it?

During awards season, important people (people who might be voting in the big awards) receive free screeners of anything that stands a chance of getting an award. Studios want to make sure the important people - the tastemakers - have seen their stuff. Considering it costs nothing to allow important people to download video for free - why not let the important people’s families also have access? They probably have a lot of important friends who vote too. And they probably spend a lot of time talking about this stuff at boring holiday parties. And if we’re expanding the circle of who is important, why not make it certain zip codes, because I think we can all agree that most taste is made in a few central taste zones in Brooklyn and Los Feliz.

My point is this: everyone is important. Everyone is a tastemaker. Do I want some kid in a village in India to be able to watch my movie for free because he downloaded it illegally? Fuck yeah. Because that kid is important. And getting my movie in the hands of that kid is more important than the pennies I/we could make off him. Pennies we no doubt would never make because he would have never made it to the theatre.

A huge part of a movie or TV show’s budget - sometimes WAY more than the costs of production - is marketing and advertising. Imagine there was a system where the youngest, most independent-minded, most hooked-in online could access and see movies and TV (sometimes before they’re even released) and spread word early whether something needs to be seen to be part of the conversation or not. We have that system in place and that’s piracy - and it’s the fairness at its heart - the fact that Hollywood can’t just throw a ton of plastic Happy Meal toys in our landfills to make us see their stupid movies - that they hate. It means quality stands on its own, and that getting firehosed in the face with marketing campaigns won’t blind us to the shitstorm you just made.

The bottom line is this: Hollywood spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on marketing to get people to see their stuff, trying to get them to talk about it - when the best marketing is and always has been - make something great and put it where people can see it.

Right now there is tension in the market between the way consumers want to consume their movies and T.V. - in my living room, with my twitter friends - and the way Hollywood wants us to consume it - in theaters, on the day and time they specify, on approved devices. However, it doesn’t serve them to continue resisting their own customers’ preferences. Just as the music industry no longer found piracy to be a major problem once digital downloads were widely available at the right price, so will Hollywood find this “problem” will go away once they get their heads out of their asses and wake up to the world we now live in.

*

Created by: Paralegal

Original Article

Things Are Bad For Women, And Getting Worse

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:44:53 -0800

[caption id=”flickrImage_1” align=”aligncenter” width=”425” caption=”Releitura - Cindy Sherman Â© by BrunoEddy”][/caption]

Women are the bitch of society - and it’s getting worse and worse -

Between inequality in the workplace - TV shows starring domestic abusers - a political climate focused on diminishing women’s rights -

My question is - why aren’t we outraged?

Why aren’t women everywhere getting loud, and angry about this?

Why, in this moment where our rights and our respect are vanishing faster than boyfriend tees at a sample sale, are we more invested than ever in cutesy, girlish stuffÂ - our Pinterest boards and our eyeframes without lenses and our Etsy hair accessories and our Young Adult novels - the kinds of clothes, hobbies, conversation topics, professions that are sure to never, ever make erections disappear -

Here’s why I think.

I think we have a strong interest in pleasing those who are in power.

And I think we have an instinct not to do anything that feels threatening, aggressive, masculine. We have been strongly warned (culturally, inter-personally, professionally) that getting assertive, threatening dicks in any way, will sideline us, turn us into laughing stocks, leave us the single spinster alone with her handmade cat blankets and her angry diatribes. If we speak the truth - if we even say the same thing a man might say - we risk being marginalized socially or even losing jobs, as we make ourselves vulnerable to looking ridiculous by going against the tide.

And we risk love, being loved, if we seem up in arms, angry, embattled. Standing behind lines drawn in the sand.

So I do see why this is happening - and why we’re letting it.

But I don’t think those are the only two choices.

I know for a fact it’s possible to be both assertive and feminine - to both stand up for the rights and respect of women and still value and hold the respect of men. I think if change is going to happen anywhere - it’s going to be with the 51% of Americans who are women, who have to be watching what is happening with some dismay, and who need to know they can still be loved, still be part of the great club we call society, even if they speak out and stand up against these trends.

We are powerful. But we have to stop undercutting our power with every sartorial and conversational choice we make. If we’re afraid of being sidelined, marginalized, ridiculed, we have to know that over there where we’re going to be is where the cool people hang out - the adults. The ones who don’t put up with this sick psychosexual infantilizing game where one gender is on top, one is on the bottom, and both work hard to keep it that way.

This is a great breakdown of the current and most recent numbers of women of all the different jobs in Hollywood. All the numbers are flat around or (way) below 25%. This is obviously my area of interest in terms of employment - but it also affects us all because this is our culture, what we see on TV, what we see in movies. The piece mentions that studies show that the more women involved with a project, the more likely it is to have a woman character.

Original Article

tommy's tenacious tumblr: What I've Learned About Smart People.

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:39:13 -0800

tommy's tenacious tumblr: What I've Learned About Smart People.:

tmac721:

Going to Harvard means I have the very unique opportunity to be around a lot of smart people. Now, when I say “smart people,” I don’t mean that guy who always wins trivia night. I mean, blazingly intelligent individuals who are regarded as the pre-eminent scholars in their field. It’s pretty…

Cults, Communities, and The Heidi & Frank Show

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:37:47 -0800

The roar of my neighbor’s un-mufflered pick-up greeted me in the carport. She got out and told me she was going to a live broadcast of her favorite pirated internet radio show - The Heidi & Frank Show - at the Hooter’s in North Hollywood. She strongly encouraged me to come.

As appealing as that sounded, I had to regretfully decline. However, I was struck by her zeal in proselytizing on behalf of Heidi and/or Frank. I’m from the rural South, so I’ve been on the receiving end of my share of well-meaning invitations to church suppers, youth groups, baptismal founts and lock-ins.

It wasn’t till a while later when her truck roared up - backwards (she always backs in) - when I noticed a giant “Heidi & Frank Show” banner covering the entire back of her truck gate - that I realized the full extent of her Heidi & Frank conversion.

“Where’d you get that banner?” I asked.

“I had it made,” she said. “To support the show.”

This was like lightning striking me dumb, the idea that anyone could care so much about Heidi & Frank - who, from what I’ve gathered online appear to be a couple of profane idiot-whisperers (“Topics discussed on today’s After Hours: tweets out of context, downs, swollen lady bits, fly hair quests, and lit hickeys… it’s radio worth watching!”) who specialize in the kind of community-building first espoused by the Hitler Youth.

I was blown away by my neighbor’s banner - by the idea that anyone could care so much about a show, feel so identified with and invested in a *money-making corporate enterprise* as to spend her own money to help advertise for them - till she drove up a while later with her new Heidi & Frank mudflaps.

That’s when I realized - isn’t this a goal of anyone who makes stuff, who tells stories for a living and depends on the enthusiasm and support of others to help spread those stories around? Don’t we all want our listeners, our blog readers, our T.V. show watchers or movie watchers or novel readers to feel so invested in and identified with our stories they create their own mudflaps on their trucks, to extend those myths those mud-encrusted-rubber couple inches further into the world?

I guess we can all learn a think or two from Heidi & Frank, and not just about swollen lady bits.

I’ve spent all of 60 seconds studying this Heidi & Frank, but seems like they’re following the cult leader’s handbook:

People are put in physical or emotionally distressing situations [Hooter’s in North Hollywood]
Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized [I’m listening to Heidi & Frank.]
They receive what seems to be unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader or group [this is the logline of any radio show]
They get a new identity based on the group [my neighbor feels so identified with the show she used her own money to make a banner for her truck to advertise for them]
They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled. [the more they listen to Heidi & Frank, the less contact they have with the outside world]

I’m reading

Original Article

What To Do If You Are Depressed

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:55:31 -0800

[caption id=”flickrImage_2” align=”aligncenter” width=”500” caption=”Lounging Pup © by Teeejayy”][/caption]

There are a few people in my life whom I suspect may be depressed. This isn’t the kind of thing you can just ask about - unless you’re super close. Even then, it feels presumptuous, like advice-giving (which I’m trying to avoid).

But I have a strong urge to help, and I feel like I know a lot about this stuff (from struggling to help myself with migraine disorder.) So I thought I might post some links here just in case.

This is from Dr. Mark Hyman, who is an extremely knowledgable functional medicine doctor who can help with a lot of different conditions:

“7 Steps to Treat Depression without Drugs

Try an anti-inflammatory elimination diet that gets rid of common food allergens. As I mentioned above, food allergies and the resultant inflammation have been connected with depression and other mood disorders.
Check for hypothyroidism. This unrecognized epidemic is a leading cause of depression. Make sure to have thorough thyroid exam if you are depressed.
Take vitamin D. Deficiency in this essential vitamin can lead to depression. Supplement with at least 2,000 to 5,000 IU of vitamin D3 a day.
Take omega-3 fats. Your brain is made of up this fat, and deficiency can lead to a host of problems. Supplement with 1,000 to 2,000 mg of purified fish oil a day.
Take adequate B12 (1,000 micrograms, or mcg, a day), B6 (25 mg) and folic acid(800 mcg). These vitamins are critical for metabolizing homocysteine, which can play a factor in depression.
Get checked for mercury. Heavy metal toxicity has been correlated with depression and other mood and neurological problems.
Exercise vigorously five times a week for 30 minutes. This increases levels of BDNF, a natural antidepressant in your brain.”

Chris Kresser is another very knowledgable functional medicine practiotioner who has an entire series about depression here. He also has a great podcast I listen to which you can find here.

Kris Carr survived cancer by radically changing her diet, life and mindset — and now she writes about it on her blog. Here you can find her site’s posts about depression.

I wish I had more time to write about this, but at least this is a start. Mood disorders are such a plague on creative people. Most of all, I want you to know you are not alone. And you are loved. By me.

X Julie

I am reading:

Original Article

Co-Sign

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:22:13 -0800

[caption id=”flickrImage_1” align=”aligncenter” width=”500” caption=”Hollywood Hills Â© by djjewelz”][/caption]

I hadn’t talked to my dad in a few months because I was buried in script-mode. So I almost forgot just how crazy he is.

The point of the call was just to catch up - as I drove to a doctor’s appointment across town. But since all I’ve been doing for months is writing, I don’t have a lot to catch people up on. So I told him what I’m excited about - which is that I’m thinking about buying a house.

I asked him if he would consider co-signing a mortgage with me, since I don’t exactly have two years of stable job history. (One of the many perks of being a writer.)

I don’t even feel like trying to put down here all the crazy things he said. Like when he kept bringing up his divorce from my mother - and how we and all the lawyers keep going after him for everything he’s got. (If that were true, how did he end up on the sailboat, and we ended up with our lights cut off?)

In the midst of sobbing and trying to make sense of this craziness - I forgot I was actually on my way somewhere.

I think I’m posting this because I want to remind myself some day - in case I forget again - that I can’t keep treating him like a normal father. Because he just doesn’t want to be that for me. He refuses. He’d rather pathologically lie - claiming his credit is too poor to co-sign for me (p.s. he owns a Ferrari), claiming he was hit so hard by the recession he’s had to dip into his retirement (p.s. he “retired” a few years ago - isn’t “retirement” when you “dip into your retirement”?), he’d rather go on meaningless angry rants about how he doesn’t cheat people and walk away from mortgages the way all these other scumbags do -

I remember I had an appointment but I forget where.

I kept trying to pin him down as to why this innocuous (to me) request made him so upset. The way I see it - if co-signing the mortgage isn’t something he feels like he can do or wants to do, all he has to do is give me a normal reason (or not), be nice about it and move on. I don’t see the need to get vicious, cruel, and mean about it. To rip apart and belittle every part of what I’m doing (including the city I’ve chosen (Los Angeles), my chosen career, my idea to get a roommate to help off-set the costs of home-ownership (“you don’t think that would look ridiculous and weird?” any weirder than my own father refusing to co-sign with me?), and everything I know about the real estate process.) Oh and he managed to compare me to my sister (who has owned a house with her husband for a few years in a vastly cheaper market) - making the implication both about my being single compared to her, and their joint income being more, and their joint job history being stable - and I just wanted to scream at him -

I am single because you have mistreated me my entire life.

I didn’t say that - but I did say variations of -

Don’t you get - the way your father treated you - that’s how you’re treating me.Â

And -

You want to know why I don’t call you or visit you ever? This is why. Because this is what awaits me on the other end. Would you call you?Â

I keep driving and driving - maybe if I just keep moving I’ll see it when I pass.

He wanted to know why I didn’t ask my “mother and father” (stepfather) to co-sign. I was like “you’re the one with the mansion and the yacht out back - seems obvious that you would be the one with the great credit.” He said something like “you treat me like shit. The only reason you ever call is because you want something from me.”

I pull off to the side of the road. I give up.

I went to my first Overeaters Anonymous meeting last week. I don’t know yet if it’s right for me - though my experiences clearly resonate with those of OA. However, I started listening to this podcast of OA speakers. And I am ob-sessed. I listened to Martha O. (12/17/11) tonight - who described getting cancer while bulimic, and looking forward to how thin she’d be. There’s something about how honest and raw these people are - how much I relate to what they’re saying - I just can’t stop listening to them.

Original Article

On Not Rolling the Log

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:56:56 -0800

lareviewofbooks:

Image: © Paul Bausch onfocus.com

Today The Dial is in the hands of novelist Glen David Gold, who explores the prickliness of literary sociality, the loneliness of an aging William Faulkner, and other tribulations that flesh is heir to.
— Tom Lutz

Transactions along the Mississippi Delta

GLEN DAVID GOLD

Recently, I spoke to a group of MFA students at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I wanted to pass along the best advice I got in my own MFA program 15 years ago. Our professor Wilton Barnhart had said, “cultivate literary friendships.”

It was almost a koan in its three-word simplicity. He meant us to sift through what that verb, that adjective and that noun might mean to us. He did not add a clause that I now wish he had: “and for Christ’s sake, do not let them become transactional.”

The world after publication is — beyond its many joys — an evaporating and ruinous goldfish bowl of thwarted ambition. If you write long enough, you will know editors and agents. You will have dinner with people who give interesting fellowships to weeklong retreats in the south of France. You will teach at good programs and you might know when a publisher’s child is having a birthday and what his favorite Transformer is, and these facts more than the quality of your humanity might be what makes you a chess piece when another writer slaps you on the back and asks you if you might read something he wrote.

It’s hard to explain to writing students that there are pods of very friendly, arguably moral authors who treat each other as if the literary life is led on a firing range. They meet you alertly, brightly drawing from natty holsters their own signs of power, rank and aid, and then requesting that you do the same. They aren’t evil, really, and the impulse behind it is so close to camaraderie it almost smells right. We all need help, and we all want to help each other, which makes the nuances of the transaction murky. Some people never see the problem at all and others treat every request like you’re asking for a toe of which they are particularly fond. In the end, parsing the aspirational nature of literary friendship is as much of a longshot as sexing the yeti.

Read More

utilities: Eames | Dot Pattern Fabric - Design Drawing /...

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:56:32 -0800

utilities:

Eames | Dot Pattern Fabric - Design Drawing / Sketch

I love getting to see preliminary drawings and sketches for pieces of art and design. Sometimes works are so iconic I forget they once didn’t exist. Seeing such small pieces feels like viewing the exact moments someone was creating something great. Amazing.

Antoine Wilson's Notes on "Hack"

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 10:50:20 -0800

lareviewofbooks:

¤
ANTOINE WILSON

Notes on “Hack”

“Taste has no system and no proofs.”
—Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’”
1. To start with comedy. There is only one unimpeachable criterion: Is it funny? But a question follows close behind: Funny to whom?

2. Apocrypha from the world of television: A sitcom writers’ room is working late into the night, trying to generate the perfect gag to punch up a scene. Joke after joke is pitched, but nothing seems to work. The scene remains stubbornly flat. Finally, a writer pulls out a box of index cards and rifles through them. He stops, pulls out a card, and asks: “Can the floor be wet?”

3. A Hack can get a huge laugh out of an audience. And yet he can also rightly be called unfunny. When we employ Hack as a pejorative, we call into question the audience’s taste. We say, in effect: You are laughing only because you have no taste.

4. Meanwhile, to himself and to his fans, a Hack is justified by his success; he need not justify himself otherwise.

5. The comic who recycles old jokes, confirms stereotypes, pantomimes his way through his act, and makes folks chuckle without in any way threatening the established order is offensive to us precisely for failing to offend.

6. A Hack comic is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, “poking fun,” never “killing.” He is the jester who won’t risk the king’s displeasure.

Read More

lynda barry card w/ purple paint spatters © by xinem … [Lynda Barry] told a story about the...

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 03:46:06 -0700

lynda barry card w/ purple paint spatters © by xinem

… [Lynda Barry] told a story about the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helps patients experiencing phantom-limb pain. Barry discussed one patient who felt that his missing left hand was clenched in a fist and could never shake the discomfort — could never “unclench” it.

So Ramachandran used a mirror box — a compartment into which the patient could insert his right hand and see it reflected at the end of his left…

See Your Own Trouble Reflected

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:08:50 -0700

[caption id=”flickrImage_1” align=”aligncenter” width=”375” caption=”lynda barry card w/ purple paint spatters © by xinem”][/caption]

… [Lynda Barry] told a story about the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who helps patients experiencing phantom-limb pain. Barry discussed one patient who felt that his missing left hand was clenched in a fist and could never shake the discomfort — could never “unclench” it.

So Ramachandran used a mirror box — a compartment into which the patient could insert his right hand and see it reflected at the end of his left arm. “And Ramachandran said, ‘Open your hands.’ And the patient saw this” — Barry opened two clenched fists in unison. “That’s what I think images do.

“I think that in the course of human life,” she continued softly, “we have events that cause” — she clenched her fist and held it up, inspecting it from all angles. “Losing your parents might cause it. Or a war. Or things going bad in a family.”

The only way to open that fist, she said, is to see your own trouble reflected in an image, as the patient saw his hand reflected in a mirror. It might be a story you write, or a book you read, or a song that means the world to you. “And then?” She opened her hand and waved.

I read this article about Lynda Barry - who became a writing and creativity teacher when the market for her comic strips dried up.

I was pretty troubled in college - and whenever people (people like the other girls in my eating disorders recovery group, for instance) would suggest to me that writing was therapeutic for me - I thought this idea was bullshit at best.

However, I do think writing has a cathartic quality - not in a confessional, I’m-making-my-audience-my-therapists! way. Rather, in the way Barry describes above.

If something has caused you to close, cave in, get smaller - writing about it, creating around it, reflecting it in the world again and again - gets you bigger again.

via Cartoonist Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself - NYTimes.com.

Original Article

"….from Bernard Malamud: “If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track...."

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:47:25 -0700

“

….from Bernard Malamud:

“If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”

”

- The Drawing Board (Terri Windling’s blog): On Creative Burn-out: Part IV

Reading all the parts, all the quotes, and everything Terri posts: Always recommended.

(via gwendabond)

I don’t know what nationality this werewolf perched in London is, but I have to think...

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 22:16:51 -0700

I don’t know what nationality this werewolf perched in London is, but I have to think he’s American.

If I were to make blog t-shirts, the first would say PROVOKE ANXIETY.

This feels like a founding principle to me – of the way I write, the way I live, the way I encounter the world.

If I’m doing something that doesn’t make me anxious – that doesn’t make me delay, worry, perseverate, talk about it endlessly – it doesn’t feel worth doing.

I don’t want to waste my time feeling…

Provoke Anxiety

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:16:01 -0700

[caption id=”attachment_1706” align=”aligncenter” width=”461” caption=”I don’t know what nationality this werewolf perched in London is, but I have to think he’s American.”][/caption]

If I were to make blog t-shirts, the first would say PROVOKE ANXIETY.

This feels like a founding principle to me - of the way I write, the way I live, the way I encounter the world.

If I’m doing something that doesn’t make me anxious - that doesn’t make me delay, worry, perseverate, talk about it endlessly - it doesn’t feel worth doing.

I don’t want to waste my time feeling safe and comfortable.

I provoke anxiety - in myself, in others - because that’s where art lives.

Art is anxious. Not safe.

[caption id=”attachment_1708” align=”aligncenter” width=”614” caption=”In an effort to take you behind the scenes here on the blog, I bring you a picture of this blog post being written — in the lobby of The Hoxton, London.”][/caption]

I’m listening to Julie Klausner’s amazing podcast “How Was Your Week.” She really loves the things she loves (1970’s stars, animals reading her book, musical theatre, reality T.V.) — and helps you love them too.

Original Article

Positions of Privilege

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:34:33 -0700

lareviewofbooks:

MATTHEW SPECKTOR

on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.
Joan Didion © Ed Wexler
The Los Angeles Review of Books gives its pages this week to discussions of Joan Didion on the occasion of her latest book, Blue Nights. Didion, an icon of literary L.A. despite living in New York much of her life, wrote in 1976 that “[t]o shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.” That attention to style, structure, perspective, and meaning animates these essays by Meghan Daum, Susan Straight, Amy Wilentz, Richard Rayner, Amy Ephron, and today, Matthew Specktor, who grew up around the corner when Didion lived in Brentwood.

¤
Joan Didion
Blue Nights
Alfred A. Knopf, November 2011. 208 pp.

Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer. Long before The Year of Magical Thinking, in which a social worker calls her just that, we understood Didion to be cool in every sense of the word. Whatever was happening behind those bug-eyed sunglasses, within that frail frame, the author’s relentless arrangement of information — the research, the reshuffling — kept hot feeling in line. This was true in Play It As It Lays, where the institutionalized Maria Wyeth’s separation from her young daughter exists mostly between parentheses, and it was true in The Year of Magical Thinking, where the immediacy of loss is often cut with diagnostic material: W.H. Auden, observations about grief, and observations about those observations (“the question of self-pity”) interceding before anyone gets wet. There is a moment in Blue Nights, in one sense The Year of Magical Thinking’s logical extension but in another sense unlike any book in Didion’s corpus, that seems to me specifically revealing: leaving a physical therapy session where she’s been working out alongside members of the New York Yankees (!), Didion remarks upon her declining capacities. “My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether,” she writes. “Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.”

“The correct stance?” It seems an odd thing to be fretting about in the midst of a meditation on aging and grief, but, in a way, Didion’s entire body of work has been about this positioning: “the attitude, the tone.” These things have always been primary in Didion — the words themselves have never been permitted to violate or distress the stance too much — which is frankly why a good portion of it doesn’t interest me much. It’s also why Blue Nights is so forceful. On the one hand, her cognitive confidence — or at least her cognitive capacity — is as powerful as it ever was. The book’s surpassing lucidity (its title, seemingly generic, is in fact perfectly chosen, referring as it does to a specific set of latitudinal conditions in which “the actual light … becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres”) owes much to the tension between that cognitive strength and the cracking, at last, of the writer’s attitudes. Neither nakedly confessional nor coldly composed, Blue Nights is startling in its effect, and remarkable even within the context of Didion’s impressive shelf. (Just because the work doesn’t interest me doesn’t mean I haven’t read a lot of it, or that I don’t think it’s any good.) Blue Nights is heartbreaking, in a word, and if it isn’t among her most exacting performances — in fact it contains a few moments of unusual clumsiness — it may yet be among her finest.

Read More

yourmonkeycalled: Saul Steinberg is the Best #4from Steinberg...

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:15:43 -0700

yourmonkeycalled:

Saul Steinberg is the Best #4
from Steinberg at the New Yorker

Follow the Rabbit Holes

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 20:35:32 -0700

Follow the rabbit holes. As many as you like.

They are like the fractal flowers: everything is connected underground. Following something that appears to be a distraction is not a waste of time, if — and it’s a big all-caps IF — you can do it consciously.

Here is what happens down the rabbit holes.

You find that one small seemingly unrelated thing plants seeds for the next piece.

The piece you’ve been looking for. Or the piece you didn’t even know you needed.

You connect the dots.

You find the treasures.

You discover that all roads lead to the thing you’re trying to get to anyway.

You realize that you are not avoiding your project. You are investigating an aspect of it. Or learning something that will help you with it.

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:39:21 -0700

I’m going to London for a month.

I’ve got to turn in a script first, then I’m going. Because I can. Because this is the kind of thing I always fantasized about as a child – this is what I thought my life would be like. And so far, for the most part, it hasn’t been.

But something big shifted inside me this year. Maybe it was that I got so sick – (I’m feeling a lot better now, thanks to some good doctors and a ton of work on…

Delusional Nicholas Sparks Interview

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:18:33 -0700

Sparks says: “I’m going to interrupt you there. There’s a difference between drama and melodrama; evoking genuine emotion, or manipulating emotion. It’s a very fine eye-of-the-needle to thread. And it’s very rare that it works. That’s why I tend to dominate this particular genre. There is this fine line. And I do not verge into melodrama. It’s all drama. I try to generate authentic emotional power.”

But, well, he always does kill someone by the end of his tales, usually to maximum handkerchief effect. “Of course!” Sparks says. “I write in a genre that was not defined by me. The examples were not set out by me. They were set out 2,000 years ago by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. They were called the Greek tragedies. A thriller is supposed to thrill. A horror novel is supposed to scare you. A mystery is supposed to keep you turning the pages, guessing ‘whodunit?’ “A romance novel is supposed to make you escape into a fantasy of romance.

What is the purpose of what I do? These are love stories. They went from (Greek tragedies), to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, then Jane Austen did it, put a new human twist on it. Hemingway did it with A Farewell to Arms.” That’s one of his favorites, and he points it out as he walks the aisles of the bookstore.

“Hemingway. See, they’re recommending The Garden of Eden, and I read that. It was published after he was dead. It’s a weird story about this honeymoon couple, and a third woman gets involved. Uh, it’s not my cup of tea.” Sparks pulls the one beside it off the shelf. “A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Good stuff. That’s what I write,” he says, putting it back. “That’s what I write.”

JULIE BUSH

Pilot Season

Why Hollywood Is So Dumb About Piracy

Things Are Bad For Women, And Getting Worse

tommy's tenacious tumblr: What I've Learned About Smart People.

Cults, Communities, and The Heidi & Frank Show

What To Do If You Are Depressed

Co-Sign

On Not Rolling the Log

utilities: Eames | Dot Pattern Fabric - Design Drawing /...

Antoine Wilson's Notes on "Hack"

lynda barry card w/ purple paint spatters © by xinem … [Lynda Barry] told a story about the...

See Your Own Trouble Reflected

"….from Bernard Malamud: “If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track...."

I don’t know what nationality this werewolf perched in London is, but I have to think...

Provoke Anxiety

Positions of Privilege

yourmonkeycalled: Saul Steinberg is the Best #4from Steinberg...

Follow the Rabbit Holes

Night London Panorama with Full Moon © by Dimitry B I’m going to London for a month. I’ve got to...

Delusional Nicholas Sparks Interview