“I Be Blowin'”–De La Soul (with Maceo Parker)
[Picture Via: This Isn’t Happiness]
Tuesday
March 3, 2026
Since 2002
Category: Arts and Culture
Million Dollar Movie
Because Buster makes it better. Without fail.
From “Sherlock Jr.”
Morning Art
“Interior, Strandgade 30” by Vilhelm Hammershøi (1901)
Taster’s Cherce
Over at the Lemon Fire Brigade check out this festiveness: candied tangerine in dark chocolate with poppy seed rugelach.
At Close Range
“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.”
–Chuck Close
[Quote Via: A Type of Distraction]
Napsack on my Back
I was getting a slice of pizza the other day when a kid commented on my backpack. He thought it was fresh and wanted to know where I got it. I didn’t know it was cool and couldn’t remember where I’d gotten it. I love being lame.
Anyhow, speaking of backpacks, check out this article over at Slate by Alan Siegel.
Morning Art
“Painter and Model” by Edward Hopper (1902-04)
Million Dollar Movie
Here’s David Thomson on Susan Tyrrell in Fat City:
So you say to yourself, this Fat City is pretty damn realistic, even if you know in your heart that “realistic” and Hollywood should not be printed on the same page—otherwise paper ignites. Still, you’re marveling at it, until Oma sits down at a bar counter and starts to talk to Billy. She is going to be what is called his “love interest” or the woman he fucks, but any part of you that feels for Billy is telling him to get out just as we all might remember we have something else to do a long way away if Oma sat down next to us. Except that she is ravishing and inescapable in her downright wildness and unpredictability. She’s in the book, but just try telling yourself that she’s working to a script. And wonder how she ever got in front of the camera.
Maybe she was twenty-seven, but—it’s no lie—she could have been seventy-two. In bars in classier places, like Las Vegas or Los Angeles, you can find women who have had Botox and liquor enough to look like worn-out balloons. Oma is overweight, over-loud, blowsy, unwashed, out-of-line, trashy, drunk, beaten up, tough but self-pitying. She’s like a plate of hot chile, half-eaten, that has gone cold on the table. She is an astonishing creation, dangerous and pathetic, endearing and loathsome. Tyrrell got nominated as best supporting actress, and lost to Eileen Heckart in Butterflies Are Free, a film I refuse to remember. She was nominated by the New York Film Critics Circle, too. Not that winning any award could have made any difference, except that she might have caused a great scene at the Oscars and had to be dragged off stage. Even in 1972, that show needed juice.
She kept on acting, though she admitted that she only worked when she had run out of money. She was in The Killer Inside Me, a lot of TV, many movies you’ve never heard of and in John Waters’ Cry Baby. A little over ten years ago, she had a rare illness—it must have come from thrombocytosis—whereby she had to have both legs amputated just below the knee. I suspect that if she had been thus afflicted in 1972, the fascinated Huston would still have cast her, and let her roam as she wished. He had a true instinct for wild animals, and I can pay the actress no higher compliment than to say that in Fat City she is not just something the cat dragged in. She is the cat.
Million Dollar Movie
Here’s Thorton Wilder in a 1937 letter to Mabel Dodger Luhan:
In Austria or France go to see a Ginger-Rogers-Fred-Astaire movie. Watch the audience. Spell-bound at something terribly uneuropean–all that technical effortless precision; all that radiant youth bursting with sex but not sex-hunting, sex-collecting; and all that allusion to money, but money as fun, the American love of conspicuous waste, not money-to-sit-on, not money-to-frighten-with. And finally when the pair leap into one of those radiant waltzes the Europeans know in their bones that their day is over.
Taster’s Cherce
French Apple Tart from the excellent blog Alexandra Cooks.
Morning Art
“Man Reading,” By Georges Seurat (1884)
Beat of the Day
Rockin’, Rollin’…
Taster’s Cherce
From the Lemon Fire Brigade comes this beet, fennel and orange salad.
"This ain't football. We do this every day."
--Earl Weaver
--Earl Weaver