Tonight and tomorrow at the Film Forum…motherfucker.

David Lebovitz does Guacamole.

There is a good story by John Le Carre in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required). It’s about the making of his novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. The piece centers on the tense relationship between the film’s director, Martin Ritt, a left-wing Jew who’d been blacklisted, and its star, Richard Burton, the larger-than-life Welshman.

Here’s my favorite part:

In one of the few conversations of substance that I had with Burton during our short spree together, he almost boasted of how much he despised the showman in himself; how he wished he had “done a Paul Scofield,” by which he meant eschew the big-screen heroics and the big-screen money and acept only acting parts of real artistic substance. And Ritt would have agree with him wholeheartedly.

But that didn’t let Burton off the hook. To the eye of the puritanical, committed, connubial leftist and activist, Burton came too close to everything Ritt instinctively condemned. In a 1986 interview, he has a line that says it all: “I don’t have a lot of respect for talent. Talent is genetic. It’s a gift. It’s what you do with the gift that counts.” It was bad enough to put profit before art, or sex before family, or flaunt your wealth and your woman, or ostentatiously soak yourself in liquor, or strut that world like a god while the masses cry out for justice. But to waste your talent was a sin against gods and men. And the greater the talent–and Burton’s talents were legion and extraordinary–the greater, in Ritt’s view, the sin.

Love Ritt’s take on talent. But Le Carre doesn’t think Burton was a wasted talent. He concludes the article:

Richard Burton was a literate, serious artist, a self-educated polymath with appetites and flaws that in one way or another we all share. If he was the prisoner of his own weaknesses, the dah of rectifying Welsh puritanism in him was not a hundred miles from Ritt’s. He was irreverent, mischievous, generous-hearted but necessarily manipulative. For the very celebrated, being manipulative goes with the territory. I never knew him in his quieter hours, but I wish I had. He was a superb Alex Leamas, and in a different year his performance might have earned him an Oscar, the prize that eluded him all his life. The film was grim and black-and-white. That wasn’t what we we wearing in 1965.

If either the director of his actor had been less, perhaps the film also would have been less. I suppose that, at the time, I felt more protective of the podgy, stalwart, and embittered Ritt than of the flamboyant and unpredictable Burton. A director carries the whole burden of the film on his back, and that includes the idiosyncrasies of his star. Sometimes I had the feeling that Burton was going out of his way to belittle Ritt, but in the end I guess they were pretty evenly matched. And Ritt surely had the last word. He was a brilliant and impassioned director whose righteous anger could never be stilled.

Here’s a disturbing 2010 Vanity Fair story by Mark Bowden–“The Case of the Vanishing Blonde”:

From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.

And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual.

[Photo Credit: Amanda Friedman]

Check out this long piece on the D.O.C. by Alex Pappademas in Playboy.

Who the hell is the D.O.C.? It’s been nearly 25 years since the rapper released his astoundingly great debut album, No One Can Do It Better. It was produced by Dr. Dre when Dre was churning out hot product at an ironic-in-retrospect pace: In a single year Dre made the D.O.C.’s album, as well as N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton and N.W.A co-founder Eazy-E’s solo debut, Eazy-Duz-It. The D.O.C. was a cocky, charismatic young rapper with a knotty, complex flow—his delivery had more bob-and-weave than your average West Coast rapper’s, and he reminded people of East Coast guys like Rakim. The kid with the golden voice, he called himself. Within three months he’d sold half a million records—until injuries to his vocal cords sustained in a car accident rendered him barely able to speak and totally unable to rap.

After that, the D.O.C. was a living ghost. He made two would-be comeback albums, but his real career existed behind the scenes. It became an open secret that he’d ghostwritten rhymes for Dre on The Chronic and 1999’s 2001 and polished lines for Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. The D.O.C. was a fixer, a problem solver, a hip-hop Winston Wolf. Once a breakout star, he now existed in hip-hop as a legend in the background of other people’s rhymes. Dre shouted him out (“Like my nigga D.O.C., no one can do it better”) at the end of “Nuthin’ but a G Thang,” the first single from The Chronic. More than 10 years later, so did Brooklyn-born Jay-Z on “Public Service Announcement”—“HOV, not D.O.C./But similar to the letters, no one can do it better.”

“Eclipsed” by Sangram Majumdar  (2009)…found via This Isn’t Happiness.

Ari Seth Cohen celebrates older women with fabulous style. 

Take that Kangol off.

[Photo Via: -Circa]

Went to Mission Chinese last Friday with a friend. Got there with the early birds when it opened and were seated right away. By the time we left an hour later the wait for a two-top was three hours. No, thank you.

But the food was fun–Kung Pao Pastrami?–and the killer dish was thrice cooked bacon. I’d go back for that alone. I’d just make sure to go early–and maybe lunch is doable, too.

[Photo Credit: Time Out]

Early 1950s painting by Richard Diebenkorn.

Here’s and op-ed by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman from the L.A. Times on How Not to Say the Wrong Thing to someone who is sick:

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn’t feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague’s response? “This isn’t just about you.”

“It’s not?” Susan wondered. “My breast cancer is not about me? It’s about you?”

The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie’s husband, Pat. “I wasn’t prepared for this,” she told him. “I don’t know if I can handle it.”

This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan’s colleague’s remark was wrong.

[Picture by Susan Derges]

“V” is for vinaigrette!

Happy 49th, Biz.

This is interesting:

“Orphans” is known as a very dark play. What do you make of audiences laughing?

Baldwin: I had gauged in my mind that a third of it was funny and two-thirds of it was odd and tragic and dramatic. We go out for the first preview, and it flips. It’s suddenly two-thirds funny and one-third dramatic. Which I was very unprepared for.

Foster: It’s still being massaged. What we all agree on is: The performances have to come from the heart. If the laughs happen, the laughs happen. But we’re not catering to that. It’s easy for me to ride the wave of laughter, hook the audience and ride the laugh, but I’m not doing that here. The spearhead will become sharper.

Baldwin: Part of the challenge is the era of the play. In “Orphans” you have me saying to a young guy: “Come on over here, son, you’re a good boy, let me encourage you. You want some encouragement? Let me give you some encouragement.” Back then this was straightforward dialogue, received by the audience without much irony. Today it’s a gay and sitcomy world, where innuendo is seen in everything. We asked ourselves, “How do we say those lines and stay with it,” because there’s no gay subtext to what Harold is doing. But at the first preview people snickered at that.

Foster: [mutters to himself] Why are they laughing at that?

Is there anything you can do to deal with the audience snickering?

Baldwin: You just play the lines straightforwardly. And you focus on your intention. My character grew up in an orphanage, and he’s determined to give these two other orphan boys a chance.

“Edward Hopper’s Coffee,” by Zach Thurmond (2009)

Kick the Bobo.

[Photo Credit: Gary Land]

It’s in the air.

[Photo Via: This Isn’t Happiness]

May 26th to be exact.

The best way to to boil an egg from Food 52.

Muscle Cars by Cheryl Kelley.