Blog Archives

Vernon Wells’ father, Vernon (the artist known as “V”) Wells, is an illustrator.

Check out his site.

On Ruth Ann Steinhagen.

Mark Jacobson on the new Kubrick documentary:

After Strangelove, the canon was filled in. There was The Killing, from 1956, in which Kubrick reconfigured time to stage a racetrack heist and had Vince Edwards tell Marie Windsor, “Don’t bug me, I got to live my life a certain way.” There was Tony Curtis, talking like Sidney Falco/Bernie Schwartz as he washes Laurence Olivier’s back in Spartacus. And, of course, there was James Mason’s Humbert Humbert shooting Clare Quilty in the boxing glove and telling Dolores Haze of the “great feeling of tenderness” he has for her. But how could anyone have predicted the transformative experience of 2001? Four straight nights, we lay on the carpet between the first row and the screen, staring up into the Light. When it was over, the usher peeled us from the floor.

Which brings us up to The Shining, which, like so many Kubrick fans of my vintage, I lined up to see the night it opened at the now-torn-down Criterion Theatre in old, scuzzy Times Square.* Barry Lyndon had been an oil painting. But The Shining augured so much more. Pre-Internet rumors had been circling for months: Kubrick, holed up in his English mansion, had ordered forklifts of books delivered to his file-filled study. He read the first few pages of each book, groaned, and threw it against the wall with a thump. A huge pile of discarded material grew, a dozen feet high or more. Then the thumping stopped. The master had found his new vehicle: a Stephen King horror story set in a haunted hotel. Brian De Palma had a hit with Carrie; King was hot. Bemoaning that for all his success he had yet to make a film that had “done blockbuster business,” Kubrick pounced. Aesthetically, it made sense—a Kubrick horror picture, a return to the reliable genre chassis, one more opportunity to merge the high and the low in that seamless wiseguy way.

Except it sucked. For the Kubrick fan, The Shining was like watching Roger Corman on Robitussin, a 16-rpm Fall of the House of Usher, some classroom chunk of faux-Pirandello absurdism. Among my ilk, the verdict was that the great Stanley, egghead avatar of Cold War cool, had gone terminally corny midway through A Clockwork Orange, halfway through the “Singin’ in the Rain” scene. The Shining seemed the final nail in the suddenly square-shape coffin. It was a rough year for the heroes of youth, with Bob Dylan born again, Muhammad Ali finished, and now Kubrick.

I mean, “Here’s Johnny!” This was supposed to be funny?

Saveur gives a mess o Parsley recipes.

Pick up a book and read now I’m wise.

[Picture by Bags]

Got off the train on 231 and Broadway one night last week and saw a guy selling books on the street. The man was barely holding it together and he didn’t look to have much of anything but then I saw this: Heinz!

Torn cover, sure, but a first edition. I gave him a couple of bucks for it. He was grateful and so was I.

Motherwell Monday.

Man, this is just about the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.

No, wait–not that, Vernon Wells.

Coolin’…

[Photo Credit: Bull Days]

Gone but not forgotten…

[Photo Via: Dream Landscapes]

If I stay here I’ll go nuts.

Oh My God by Shannon Plumb from Smack Mellon on Vimeo.

My pal Shannon.

Serious Eats has a matzoh taste-test. Oymen.

Abandoned Building photography by Masa Kores.

A fuggin Men.

In 1993, the acclaimed novelist Richard Ford wrote a piece for the New York Times called “Stop Blaming Baseball.”

Check it out:

Sometimes I think it might be instructive just to turn my fan’s back on the game, vote with my feet, find new books to read, go hunting in October, fishing in April, let baseball crash and burn and see what comes up from the ashes. That’s the American way, too: chop down all the trees, kill the animals, pollute the rivers, then try to figure out what to do with the real estate. (It may be happening anyway.)

Or less severely, I’ve thought we could just call baseball off for a year or two. Take a breather. Clear our heads of all the clatter and clack. Fewer of us than we suppose might mind — mostly the writers would mind.

But finally it’s not even that important to me. I would feel silly acting betrayed, as some do, and taking extreme measures just because my national pastime won’t allow me the precise same pleasures it always has. And so, in a purely self-serving way, I have declared myself willing to reorder my priorities (you have to work earnestly for your illusions). And excepting for my own list of suggested alterations, I’m willing to use my imagination to believe that baseball will stay enough the same for me to go on liking it as it faces the difficult challenges of coming into a new century unexempt from antitrust, sharing its precious revenues, paying its players more but making them not that much happier and somehow resisting the urge to become more and more like jai alai. I still sincerely wish somebody would get rid of the goddamn mascots, and I wish ballplayers, especially those who’re making unusually large sums but for some reason “are not seeing the ball well enough this year,” would quit telling me that they’re out there to have fun when they don’t seem to be having that much and when I don’t really care to begin with.

[Photo Credit: Ashley Littlefoot and  Chuck Garfien via It’s a Long Season;

These pictures of Greg Luzinski via It’s a Long Season.

Ann Street Studio gets us ready for spring with these lovely shots of the Ansonia Hotel.

s

Matthew Gallaway greets the spring hullo.