Via Strictly Cassette, check out this nifty item. I’ve got boxes of mixes and mix-tape shows I’d like to convert…

Cross Country Remixed

[Photo Via: Day by Day]

Booyah.

Audio Tours at the Modern, narrated by kids.

[Photo Credit: Social History of Art]

Smitten Kitchen gives us baked orzo with eggplant and mozzarella.

[Todd Coleman via Savuer]

You can watch a full screen version here.

“Fireflies” by Keith Carter (1992)

I wan it, I wan it, I wan it.

[Picture Via: Artjah Gallery]

Check out Carlo Rotella’s 2008 Washtington Post Magazine profile of the novelist and screenwriter George Pelicanos:

Pelecanos was a writer, story editor and producer for “The Wire.” He wrote crucial scenes as different as the ex-junkie Bubbles’ breakthrough at a 12-step meeting and the western-style standoff in an alley between Omar Little, the street legend who robs drug dealers, and Brother Mouzone, the prim shootist from New York. Pelecanos also created Cutty, a character who turns away from the street life and opens a boxing gym, and gave “The Wire” its Greek gangsters, even providing the background voices shouting in Greek when the cops raided a warehouse. In story meetings, he refereed arguments between Simon and Ed Burns, the show’s other co-creator.

“Ed and I are often butting heads in a way that somebody who doesn’t know us might think is toxic,” Simon told me. “George’s essential role was to be the gravitas, to make the decision. We’d present our best arguments, and he’d sit and listen until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He was the one with the storytelling chops to decide. He has a really strong ear for theme and idea. He writes books and scripts that are about something. When George says you won an argument, you feel good because it means the idea was good.”

Expanding on his description of Pelecanos as a moralist, Simon said: “We didn’t know we needed Cutty until George invented him. It’s not about plotting, it’s about defining some aspect of human endeavor that wasn’t covered by other characters. Institutionally, not much is redeemed in ‘The Wire,’ yet all of us believe in the individual’s ability to act. George said, ‘We need a moral center.’_”

Burns told me a story about scripting the death of Wallace, a likable corner boy gunned down by his pals. “It could have been just Bodie, who was pretty much a monster back then, who would just walk up and kill him. But that would have left nothing for Poot, and it would have sealed Bodie as a character. The way George wrote it, Bodie can’t finish it, and Poot, who’s a good friend of Wallace, has to step up and do it. That transcends genre; that’s squeezing all the juice out of a scene.” Bodie opens up as a character from that point, grappling with a dawning understanding that the large forces bearing down on him make it almost impossible for him to act honorably and survive. “That’s why you hire writers like George,” said Burns, “because they find what’s inside a scene, what’s inside the character.”

This piece is featured in a compelling new collection of Rotella’s non fiction work: Playing in Time.

I highly recommended it.

[Photo Credit: Ian Allen for Stop Smiling]

Via Laughing Squid, peep these cardboard busts by Scott Fife.

You guys must check this out: On My Block Films.

And dig this, from an e-mail I received from Erin Pope who does community outreach for the project:

Neighbors across the 5 boroughs are challenged to create one to five minute short films (narrative or documentary) using only the residents from their block as the cast and crew. We’ve completed some sample videos that you can check out here. I can personally attest to how amazing the experience was. I only knew the neighbors in our building in a head nodding sort of way and after creating our film I’d now consider at least 12 people from my block great friends.

And the crazy thing about living in New York is, you never really know who you’ll meet when you go knocking on the door. Case in point, we shot our film with our neighbors last Saturday and through the process we met a woman who works for Obama. Forward ahead 48 hours later and my husband was meeting The President as he arrived at JFK. I have no doubt about the amazing things that will come out of each and every block’s filmmaking process!

Our goal is to create 50 films (10 from each borough) by Oct. 31st.

This is just too cool. Please enjoy this site and spread the word.

[Photo Credit: Tom Arndt via Je Suis Perdu]

Milo Manara

Here’s a bit of inexpensive crudeness from a college buddy.

[Photo Credit: Schmootography]

Mimi gives us a tomato tart with tarragon mustard.

A head nodder from Large Pro’s unreleased “The LP” album:

[Photo Credit: You1Anna]

From the man who brought us Everything Is a Remix

“RV Dusk” by Scott Listfield (2011)

Here’s a nice long piece by Bryan Curtis on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom over at Grantland:

It’s strange when two filmmakers can hardly stand to look at one of their movies. Especially when that film was as lucrative — and, for me, as beautifully sinister — as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So when I met George Lucas in December, in advance of the release of Red Tails, I asked why he and Steven Spielberg always seemed to be renouncing it.

“Oh, I’m not renouncing it,” Lucas said. Which is fair enough. Lucas mostly sounds sad when he talks about Temple of Doom. It’s Spielberg who recoils from its heart extraction, its human sacrifice, its monkey-brain buffet. He once told a journalist that Temple of Doom was “too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific.”

“People say, ‘Why’s it so dark?'” Lucas said. Then he began to explain.

“I was going through a divorce,” Lucas said, “and I was in a really bad mood. So I really wanted to do dark. And Steve then broke up with his girlfriend, and so he was sort of into it, too. That’s where we were at that point in time.”

I always liked Temple of Doom–maybe not as much as P. Kael, who gave it an over-the-top rave (after she panned Raiders)–but I thought it was scary and tense.

Here is a blurb of her review:

In this follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg creates an atmosphere of happy disbelief: the more breathtaking and exhilarating the stunts are, the funnier they are. Nobody has ever fused thrills and laughter in quite the way that he does here. Momentum has often been the true-even if not fully acknowledged-subject of movies. Here it’s not merely acknowledged, it’s gloried in. The picture has an exuberant, hurtling-along spirit. Spielberg starts off at full charge in the opening sequence and just keeps going, yet he seems relaxed, and he doesn’t push things to frighten us. The movie relates to Americans’ love of getting in the car and taking off-it’s a breeze. Harrison Ford is the archeologist-adventurer hero; Ke Huy Quan plays his child sidekick Short Round; and Kate Capshaw is the gold-digger heroine. The plot involves them with an odious boy maharajah and with Mola Ram (an anagram for Malomar), the high priest of a cult of Kali worshippers who come right out of the 1939 adventure comedy Gunga Din. This is one of the most sheerly pleasurable physical comedies ever made. A Lucasfilm Production, from a story idea by George Lucas, and a script by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. The score by John Williams is too heavy for the tone of the film, and it’s too loud. With Amrish Puri as Mola Ram, and Dan Aykroyd in a half-second joke.

Curtis gets  behind what was up for the filmmaker and why the movie was not beloved like the other Indy movies.

From A Continuous Lean, here’s a piece on Nom Wah Tea Parlor, the oldest dim sum jernt in the city.

Picture by Eric Issac.

Coolness from Buzzfeed: Famous Album Cover Locations in NYC.