Dig this 1945 Atlantic article on Hollywood by Raymond Chandler:

Hollywood is easy to hate, easy to sneer at, easy to lampoon. Some of the best lampooning has been done by people who have never been through a studio gate, some of the best sneering by egocentric geniuses who departed huffily – not forgetting to collect their last pay check – leaving behind them nothing but the exquisite aroma of their personalities and a botched job for the tired hacks to clean up.

Even as far away as New York, where Hollywood assumes all really intelligent people live (since they obviously do not live in Hollywood), the disease of exaggeration can be caught. The motion picture critic of one of the less dazzled intellectual weeklies, commenting recently on a certain screenplay, remarked that it showed “how dull a couple of run-of-the-mill $3000-a-week writers can be.” I hope this critic will not be startled to learn that 50 per cent of the screenwriters of Hollywood made less than $10,000 last year, and that he could count on his fingers the number that made a steady income anywhere near the figure he so contemptuously mentioned. I don’t know whether they could be called run-of-the-mill writers or not. To me the phrase suggests something a little easier to get hold of.

I hold no brief for Hollywood. I have worked there a little over two years, which is far from enough to make me an authority, but more than enough to make me feel pretty thoroughly bored. That should not be so. An industry with such vast resources and such magic techniques should not become dull so soon. An art which is capable of making all but the very best plays look trivial and contrived, all but the very best novels verbose and imitative, should not so quickly become wearisome to those who attempt to practice it with something else in mind than the cash drawer. The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion.

Vinyl Fun via My Modern Met.

This Friday night, of the hundreds of bands that will play New York City, Special Patrol Group will attempt to blow the doors off Arlene’s Grocery at 7pm. It’s a tall task to blow the doors off a rock-n-roll club. It’s taller when it’s 7pm.

But for Special Patrol Group, this is a sweet slot. Their fans, largely drawn from the coveted demographic overlap between young parents and parents of young children, require a decent bed time so they can make pancakes and attend soccer practice at 9 AM the next day.

I know Special Patrol Group because I met one of the founders of the band, Matthew DeMella, at one of those Saturday morning soccer practices a couple of years ago. He’s a music teacher, a dad, a husband, and a fellow harborer of inappropriate expectations for post-toddler soccer players. And after we talked about that stuff, he told me about his band.

Here at Bronx Banter, Alex lends us insights about the creative process, almost on a daily basis. One of the things that he says a lot, and that I take to heart, is that just showing up counts for more than you’d think. I think that’s a Woody thing. And when Matt told me about Special Patrol Group, I immediately thought about the importance of showing up.

Special Patrol Group was formed in 2005 and they’ve been recording and “touring” ever since. But when you’re a teacher, a dad, a husband; when you attend soccer practice, make pancakes, and consider those events as essential, what’s left? How the hell can you rock and roll in a sliver? Hint: a big part of the answer is having an amazing wife who says, “O.K.”

The band is comprised of four regular members. Matt and his brother Jon play guitar, Katie Patrizio provides the vocals on more than half the cuts, and Mike Blancafor is on drums. Logistics present as big a challenge as anything else.

Jon DeMella, gifted with not only musical talent but also the unflinching ability to advocate for gigs that the band may not actually deserve, does promotion. He’s awesome at it. He lives in Seattle. Katie Schmidt had to miss a gig last Halloween because she got snowed in and caught pneumonia. It would be like Derek Jeter missing three months of the season.

Special Patrol Group , as expected from a band that only plays four gigs a year, is not flawless. But they’re comfortable on stage and with each other and that gives them sufficient leeway to find their groove before long. When they do, they’re a mash of seventies and late-nineties influences that suggest a group of musicians who’ve been loving and leaving different kinds of music their whole lives. 

The songs are intelligent, unafraid of complexity, and often contain some stretch that you will be humming to yourself on the way home. Matt says “Belle and Sebastian, Elvis Costello and Dinosaur Jr.” I think I hurt his feelings when I said “Pavement,” but that was intended to be a compliment.

After last year’s Halloween snowstorm, when their lead singer and most of their fans were unable to leave their homes, they played before an audience of two. Not their fault, but still, that had to sting. On some nights, they’ve had venues give them crap about not bringing enough paying customers through the door and they wonder why they signed up for this. But there are more nights when they fill it up. There are nights when the band clicks and the fans all get sitters and, in that sliver, they’re rock stars.

When Matt told me he was a teacher and had a band, I thought of Robert Pollard, the patron saint of teachers-with-bands. Pollard taught fourth grade as he pounded out a dozen lifetimes worth of dingy, unforgettable riffs. Guided By Voices was an influential band, and can mount credible reunion tours for each of their many incarnations. They packed in venues like Irving Plaza and Hammerstein Ballroom and us sardines chanted G-B-V until our throats ran red. And the prevailing wisdom on Guided By Voices is that they never made it.

“Making it” is important to most, and it’s attractive to all, but it’s an obvious trap. A saner calculation utilizes your own proprietary formula and measures things privately. I can’t speak for Special Patrol Group, but it strikes me that they wouldn’t dedicate this small space in their lives to something so big unless it made them feel good. They might aspire to more, but this is what they’ve got right now. And on Friday night they’re showing up, again, and that’s pretty great start.

For more information about the band and a list of available songs, click here. 

What’s worse? The Yanks getting swept by the Tigers or the Cardinals blowing a 3-1 lead to the Giants?

Discuss.

[Photo Credit: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images via It’s a Long Season]

NLCS Game Seven. The home team has the momentum but I have a feeling that the Cards will break their hearts tonight.

Have at it, you guys.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

[Photo Via: Bonus Baseball]

Nice story on Phil Coke’s less than glamorous rise to the top by Jonah Keri over at Grantland.

[Photo Via: A Continuous Lean]

Apropos of nothing, here’s a 1981 Rolling Stone interview with Keith:

Did you find anything worthwhile in punk rock?

Yeah, there was a certain spirit there. But I don’t think there was anything new musically, or even from the PR point of view, image-wise. There was too much image, and none of the bands were given enough chance to put their music together, if they had any. It seemed to be the least important thing. It was more important if you puked over somebody, you know? But that’s a legacy from us also. After all, we’re still the only rock & roll band arrested for peeing on a wall.

Apparently, the punks weren’t impressed. They really seemed to hate bands like the Stones.

That’s what we used to say about everything that went before us. But you need a bit more than just putting down people to keep things together. There’s always somebody better at puttin’ you down. So don’t put me down, just do what I did, you know? Do me something better. Turn me on.

…Obviously, some of the Stones’ greatest music was made on dope.

Yeah, Exile on Main St. was heavily into it. So was Sticky Fingers….

Was it difficult for you to record those albums?

No, I mean, especially with the Stones, just because they’ve been at this sort of point for so long, where they’re considered, you know, “the greatest rock & roll band in the world….” [Laughs] God, my God — you gotta be joking. Maybe one or two nights, yeah, you could stick them with that. My opinion is that on any given night, it’s a different band that’s the greatest rock & roll band in the world, you know? Because consistency is fatal for a rock & roll band. It’s gotta go up and down. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know the difference. It would be just a bland, straight line, like lookin’ at a heart machine. And when that straight line happens, baby, you’re dead, you know?

[Photo Credit: Lynn Goldsmith]

Via Open Culture here is a link to a 1985 production of Waiting for Godot directed by Samuel Beckett.

[Featured Image: Laura Learns About Art]

Here’s a cute book of quotes from Ichiro–Baseball is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro. An ideal holiday stocking stuffer.

Over at the always impressive site Sunset Gun, check out this top ten.

Game Six. Have at it.

[Photo Via: It’s a Long Season]

Man, first Sunday without Yankee baseball. What to do? Well, there’s the chores of course, and it’s a beautiful day so taking a walk is in order at some pernt, too. Already did the shopping and so what’s left but cooking and Sunday football? That’s good enough for me.

Something like this would hit the spot.

Course there is a baseball game tonight and that’s cool, too.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox have a new manager. Enjoy the day, y’all.

[Photo Credit: Will Christiansen]

“A Well Respected Man” The Kinks

[Photo Credit: Nishe]

Elbow trouble for CC. Hopefully, it’s not too bad.

There was a good, long, profile of Christopher Kimball by Alex Halberstadt in the New York Times Magazine last week. Worth checking out if you are into Cook’s Illustrated/America’s Test Kitchen:

Inside the renovated Le Bernardin in Midtown Manhattan, the pink flowers are as tall as dogwoods and the latticework walls give off a coppery, sci-fi sheen, and Christopher Kimball, the most influential home cook in America, prods a fork into an appetizer of Wagyu beef, langoustine and osetra caviar from China. He pulls apart the cylinder and glances skeptically inside. “I’m happier eating at Di Fara,” he claims, meaning the slice parlor in an Orthodox Jewish section of Midwood, Brooklyn, that has been occasionally hounded by the city’s Health Department. “Just real pizza,” Kimball enthuses. “No duck sausage and crap.” It’s true that he appears out of place amid the restaurant’s boardroom-in-space décor; with his bow tie, suspenders and severely parted hair, Kimball looks like someone who might’ve sold homeowners’ insurance to Calvin Coolidge.

What he does cop to enjoying about Le Bernardin is the wait staff — the thick-necked Levantine men in black tunics who start at his merest gesture and address him as “Monsieur Kim-BALL,” making everyone at the table wonder, not entirely in jest, whether they’ve been made to take French diction lessons. Kimball appreciates their formality and sheer number — the service here impresses him as serious and old-fashioned, qualities he appears to value above all. You’d probably guess as much after paging through Cook’s Illustrated, the oddly Victorian black-and-white cooking manual that Kimball began 19 years ago and continues to edit and publish every other month. For covers he favors Flemish-style oil paintings of food and illustrates recipes with spidery pen drawings and boring fonts — a look Kimball based on an antique brochure for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, believing it would make the magazine feel, in his words, “authoritative and timeless.”

“Timeless” being the operative adjective — in the sense of paring away everything lighthearted, stylish or pertaining to the idea of the zeitgeist. It’s a truism that eating in the United States has changed more in the last 25 years than in the preceding 50. Since he got into publishing, in 1980, Kimball has watched the arrival of California nouvelle and Asian fusion, the farm-to-table movement, Whole Foods and the gourmet supermarket, convenience-store sushi, the celebrity chef and the contemporary urban foodie cum blogger, and he has managed to ignore them all. In simplest terms, Cook’s Illustrated focuses on preparing middlebrow American dishes at home with supermarket ingredients and omits everything glossy cooking magazines have come to be known for. If you are interested in recreating a Tuscan-style Passover feast or wonder what David Chang, the Momofuku Ko chef, thinks about contemporary art, Cook’s Illustrated may not be for you. You won’t find wine columns and lavish photography, travelogues about the street markets of Morocco or plugs for heritage microgreens and porcini-infused balsamics. Restaurants — the editorial protein of the glossies — have been entirely banished. There aren’t even ads. Most noticeably, the magazine dispenses with the tone that the critic Alexander Cockburn described as “cookbook pastoral” — the sense that the ideal dinner is a sit-down for 16 with candlelight and hydrangea and unbridled toasting, a pseudo-Mediterranean hedonism that precludes wailing toddlers and mismatched silverware. And nothing makes Kimball angrier than the aspirational pipe dreams marketed by the likes of Ina Garten and Bon Appétit. “I hate the idea that cooking should be a celebration or a party,” Kimball told me over a bowl of chicken-and-vegetable soup at his regular lunch haunt, a Brookline, Mass., pub called Matt Murphy’s. “Cooking is about putting food on the table night after night, and there isn’t anything glamorous about it.”

“Eat at Home” Paul McCartney

[Photo Credit: Chillwalker]

Giants are up against it tonight with Barry Zito on the hill…gasp.

Cards one game from the Whirled Serious.

Let’s Go Base-ball!

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

John Cheever turns 100.

Here’s Allan Gurganus on Cheever over at the New York Review of Books:

I come, not to bury Cheever, but to praise him.

John was my teacher then my friend. Forty years later I write early every morning, like him. Like him, instead of deciding what new work to read I reread Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.” I have never let one of my students pay for lunch. Two strong bourbons are now my wild outer limit, unlike him. But that lesson also comes from John. Unlike Cheever, I’ve never made a sexual move on one of my students, even when they beg. (And lately there’s been far too little begging.)

John Cheever, now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia, was at least rarely gloomy. Fact is he was more fun per minute than is legal in a nation this Republican. If his fiction still throws off salt spray and blinding daylight, his company amused, intrigued, specialized in dares. He always wanted to have a good time. “What’ll we try for fun now, and next, and…?”

Over at Narrative, dig David Thomson on The Long Goodbye:

Robert Altman was more persistent, and difficult, but he was never quite a movie brat, even if M.A.S.H., the biggest hit he would ever enjoy, is a 1970 film. Altman was from Kansas City (born in 1925). He fought in the Pacific War and had a long training in the Midwest making industrial films before moving into television. He was in his forties by the time he got to M.A.S.H., fourteen years older than Bogdanovich, and never a clubbable man. But Altman had a similar urge to address the old Hawksian models. That drew him to The Long Goodbye (1973), a new version of Raymond Chandler’s world (scripted by Leigh Brackett, who had worked on the original The Big Sleep in 1946).

But this was now the Los Angeles of the early 1970s, filmed in wide screen with an easygoing zoom photography by Vilmos Zsigmond, and a total reappraisal of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. The knowingness and the biting wit of Bogart’s private eye was replaced by Elliott Gould, untidy, hapless, perhaps a little druggy, a sucker most of the time, talking to himself, and a man who has a neurotic cat but no girl. Hawks’s fantasy had been immaculate and irresistible, but Altman saw Marlowe as a dreamy loser, falling behind the money race of L , inclined to trust the wrong people, but ever amiable. His single comfort in the film is the fond, mocking way the song “The Long Goodbye” (written by John Williams, lyrics by Johnny Mercer) is the only score to the picture, a refrain that keeps coming back in so many different styles and versions.

But The Long Goodbye opens and closes with the old standard “Hooray for Hollywood,” and it concludes with a gesture toward the unyielding conclusion to The Third Man. So Altman knew his history but he distrusted it and felt sick over the white lies of the factory system. In a sour Altman touch, Sterling Hayden plays the alcoholic writer who has given up the ghost, trading on our knowledge of Hayden’s own remorse over having been a friendly witness for HUAC. No one ever accused Altman of being a gentle fellow. He had a mean streak. But its offsetting benefit was the mistrust, solitude, and breakdown in his films, and it went with a helpless sympathy in the way he looked at the oddity of people. This was Altman’s third coup in three years. For in 1971 he had redrafted the Western as a melancholy love story about a fool who cannot impose his story on the world but who ends up with an epic triumph that no one notices in the falling snow and the lamenting songs of Leonard Cohen. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) had Warren Beatty as John Q. McCabe, in a beard and derby hat, a brothel-keeper of sorts in the Northwest, taken over and smitten by Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), but such a chump at handling the local syndicate that he signs his own death warrant. (It’s another film about the defeat of the individual.)

As photographed by Zsigmond, McCabe and The Long Goodbye proposed a new way of seeing. For decades Hollywood had constructed and composed its images as framed things: they were the brickwork of stability. But Altman and Zsigmond substituted a slippery wide-screen vista where the slow zooms oozed in and out, and we were left as searching eyes. “What should I look at? What is there to see and what is hidden?” Altman often seems to film in what Gavin Lambert, referring to a part of Los Angeles, once called the “slide area.”

That was as radical a stylistic departure as Godard’s jump-cutting, for it argues that the screen’s threshold is a place for searching, instead of somewhere we receive decisive, chosen sights. The imagery relinquishes its old assurance, but we are drawn deeper into the maze and the illusion. And the melancholy in both these pictures is part of a forlorn inquiry, wistful over the old, vanished indicators. Altman went further still. Where once sound had been skillfully miked and the final soundtrack mixed, cleaned, and clarified, for sense and meaning, these two films leave us asking ourselves, “What did he say? Did you quite hear that?” The spatial confusion was aural too, and the players were miked separately, often with the new radio mikes, and a mix was then made that brought voices in or out and was seldom clean and not always audible. This may seem perverse, but a movie where looking and hearing are muddled or compromised may get closer to our uncertain experience of life than the emphatic precision of the golden age, when a shot or a frame did not pass without being completely informative and “correct.” “Was that take ‘okay’? If not, take it again.”

Another facet to his style was Altman’s developing interest in groups—and that was another novelty in American film, where the hierarchy of stars, supports, bit parts, and extras had been set in stone. Altman was always close to scorning or bypassing stars—he and Beatty got on badly because of this—and he loved crowded shots and group scenes. The first destination for that approach would be Nashville (1975), a whimsical portrait of the real place, with twenty-six roles of more or less the same size. Further down the road, Short Cuts (1993), derived from stories by Raymond Carver, was a panorama of Los Angeles in which the pattern of overlapping events conveys a very fresh sensibility for real turmoil held in place, or kept calm, by the principle that no single story, person, or self-centered universe really matters enough to be the center of attention. That’s one explanation for how Altman was making the most innovative American films in the moment of The Godfather. By reputation, Coppola’s picture is violent. But Brando’s Vito Corleone is as adorable as he is magnificent. Think of Joe Pesci in Casino (1995), and you realize how much hideous pathology is left out of Vito. He has a kitten in his lap in that opening scene; the enchantment goes all the way to the moment he is playing with a grandson in the garden and has his heart attack. He is gracious, kind, and sad.

Excerpted from Thomson’s new book, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies.

From from the vaults, here’s Pat Jordan’s 1990 GQ piece on Traci Lords.

“Traci Lords With Her Clothes On,” By Pat Jordan