Two "Match Point" jokes:
1. It was funnier than "Hollywood Ending".
2. Trivia: killing the girlfriend and an innocent bystander was the original ending to "Annie Hall".
Then I saw Narnia with young Master Delicious. Is Aslan Hobbes? He's an animation when he's alive and just stuffed when he's dead. What a different, and less solemn, movie that would be! The El Capitan show, featuring their mighty Wurlitzer, they have before the movie is pretty cool, also.
SPOILER: Aslan is Jesus.
I really should read the paper more often. From the LA Times:
calendarlive.com: Hollywood should rewrite own script: "Los Angeles moviegoer Leonard Kolod recently spent $9.50 for a Beverly Center showing of New Line's 'A History of Violence,' only to be bombarded by nearly a dozen advertisements and previews preceding the film. Kolod complained to Loews Cineplex, but rather than placate its customer, Loews admonished Kolod in an e-mail that ads 'have been part of the cinema experience for many years' and are necessary to offset costs as 'screen actors are now receiving upwards [of] twenty million dollar salaries per movie and the films themselves are costing over one hundred million dollars to produce.' To which the Leonard Kolods of the world will say, 'Next time, I'll wait for the DVD.'"
Yesterday I ran into a writer friend of mine, who like me is writing a pilot.
HIM: I'm writing this, and I realize that I'm a very bad writer.
ME: I know. I feel like, at most, 70% of a man right now.
That's what the first draft is like.
But today I am starting to rewrite! And, as much as I hate writing, that's how much I like rewriting. First drafts are a pain in the ass -- they're wasteful, such a huge percentage of stuff that you know as you're writing it will never see the light of day.
But then you make your decisions about what to do with this junky pile of papers that represent the failure of your career, and indeed the failure of your character as a human person, and start rewriting and it starts to feel better. Almost everything you do is improving the script -- except for the intractable problems, like one's lack of talent. But even that, now that your mood is better, doesn't seem insurmountable.
Then what am I doing here instead of rewriting? I can't take too much good feeling, that's what.
Via BOP and Teachout, which I haven't read lately:
Four jobs you've had: Meatroom clerk, record store clerk, temporary secretary, Executive Producer
Four movies you could watch over and over Annie Hall, Spinal Tap, Duck Soup, Godfather II
Four places you've lived: Palo Alto, Brooklyn, Hoboken, Hollywood
Four TV shows you love to watch: Simpsons, Daily Show, The Office (USA), Hockey Night In Canada, esp. "Coach's Corner"
Four places you've been on vacation: Brewster, MA, Nice, Quebec, PQ, Kona, HI
Four Websites you visit daily: Deadspin, Andrew Tobias, The Morning News, Digby
Four favorite foods: Zankou chicken, Stilton, oysters, really fresh porter
Four places you'd rather be: Saratoga Springs, NY, Paris, SBC Park (ne Pac Bell), in The New Yorker
From John Spencer's obituary in the Los Angeles Times:
"Right after he signed the contract for the pilot, his agent called again to say he'd just come across 'the best new American play' he'd ever read, called 'The Glimmer Brothers,' Spencer told The Times in 2001.
Again, it was a role that Spencer felt he couldn't pass up.
He played Martin Glimmer, a dissolute trumpet player who's about to pay the final dues of a hard life, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts during 'The West Wing's' summer hiatus in 1999.
Two years later, he revived his well-reviewed role in 'Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine' — same play, different title — at the Mark Taper Forum while filming 'The West Wing.'"
Today we had trouble breaking episodes in the room (i.e. thinking of stories), because we didn't have our showrunner, because he was on the phone fighting off notes from the executives telling him to take out jokes from an episode we'd shot, because the jokes were be too mean.
Let us grant the incorrect premise of the executives and say that their notes would make the episode, what, 5% better. Even so, it's at the expense of the future, yet-unplanned show. That show is some unknown percentage worse, because the showrunner's energies are devoted to beating back notes.
Often executives behave as if show creators' time and energy were not zero-sum, while they make it negative-sum, by sucking the energy out of them.
Let others be scared of terrorism; that's penny-ante stuff. We want to be scared of la longue duree; it's more existential-y. Thus climate change is perfect. The natural contrarian in me would love to believe that, because it's the fashion to be scared of it, it means that everyone's wrong. But I don't see the evidence.
What I have been doing is reading a bunch of climate blogs, so from time to time I will bring you a Delicious RSS (DRSS) of what I find. Today, for example, via Climate Change Blog, we have Dr. James Hansen, who's Senate testimony in 1988 was the first big alarm bell, writing in the International Herald Tribune:
The Earth's temperature, with rapid global warming over the past 30 years, is now passing through the peak level of the Holocene, a period of relatively stable climate that has existed for more than 10,000 years. Further warming of more than one degree Celsius will make the Earth warmer than it has been in a million years.
Business-as-usual scenarios, with fossil fuel (CO²) emissions continuing to increase at 2 percent per year as in the past decade, will yield additional warming of two or three degrees this century. That implies practically a different planet.
The Earth's climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. These include not only the loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale due to rising seas.
Some dude has written the old Holiday Lights program, where you can put Christmas lights around the edge of your screen, for Mac OSX.
And this shall be a sign unto you!
I've been drinking and paying bills, so the following, via BOPNews, I really "responded to" (to use current Hollywood parlance):
Think Denk: Hemiola with a Conscience:
"Now, I associate with each past piano teacher some wisdom-pearl, and John Perry was the first to express to me, so that I really heard it, the very obvious notion: how much poorer Bach would be (nothing, in fact) without the dissonances. (A pianist in master class had forgotten to tie over a crucial dissonant note). This composer, who we imagine so in touch with the cosmic harmony, such a master of musical logic and organization: the logic is built, so to speak, on a sea of contradictions, an uncountable array of types of dissonances.(Ugly, ugly dissonances!) Sometimes you hear Bach performances where these dissonances really 'speak,' and also quite often you hear them only by the way... the dissonances become like fresh herbs stirred into a stew too early, losing their flavor in the slow cooking. It is so easy to take them for granted, to forget their edge. "
BBC NEWS | Antarctica's ice bottom exposed
(Alternative title for this post: "Suck on this, Mars!")
Q. What kind of car should a guy drive who has a bumper sticker that says "Unlock Your Mind Through Hypnosis"?
A. An Infiniti, of course.
I really ought to read Majikthise more:
Personally, I'm a huge believer in what Hirschman calls "ignorance and dust"--not caring about tidiness and not cultivating any special skills to produce domestic order. One of the way society controls women is by setting unrealistic bourgeois aesthetic standards and foisting them on women. One way women can resist the patriarchy is by rejecting these standards as unreasonable.
