It ain’t cheap but Gem is restaurant worth visiting. In Yonkers. Who knew?

The wife, she was a heppy ket.

Here is a track I produced with a friend. It was on a mix cd for my wife around the time we got married. The Marvin Gaye cut was looped by Lord Finesse and appeared on a rare white label record. A friend of mine played me the loop, sampled in an SP-1200, in the late 1990s and was kind enough to burn it to a CD.

The dude I made this track with put the loop into his Pro Tools and cleaned it up some. The dialogue that runs over the music here is from one of my wife’s favorite movies: Little Miss Sunshine.

Enjoy.

Are You Listening? (Bonus Beat)

[Photo Via: Holy Friend]

Photograph by Csilla Klenyanszki via Huh Magazine]

It’s all Sriracha all the time over at Laughing Squid.

The first time I hit the wax it was the news of my block/Everybody in my neighborhood said “Puba don’t stop.”

“Mind Your Business” Grand Puba (unreleased remix)

[Picture by Bags]

Paintings by Melissa Haslam via My Modern Met.

Picture by Jesse Lenz.

I want this.

[Photo Via: Food Addict]

Sure, it’s Tuesday morning but you can never go wrong with this jam:

[Photo Via: Dollar Menu]

Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller Jaws is commonly regarded as the first summer blockbuster and as a result, the movie that lead to the death of the creative boom of “New Hollywood” in the late 60s and early 70s. Its influence on not just the movies that followed in its wake, but also the marketing, business and making of movies is incalculable. However, even among film fans who bemoan the changes that the massive success of Jaws brought on, it’s hard to find anyone who dislikes the movie itself. Unlike many sudden cinema phenomena, Jaws has had remarkable staying power, enchanting and scaring the wits out of audiences via cable TV and home video ever since owning the box-office in the summer of ’75.

What’s more is that instead of simply being a nostalgia trip that doesn’t really live up to the adoring affection of its hard core fans (I’m looking at you, Star Wars geeks), Jaws holds its own as a great movie. I know personally, the summer doesn’t feel complete without at least one evening spent watching Brody, Quint and Hooper aboard the Orca. All of this leads to the excitement surrounding the recent Blu-ray debut of Jaws earlier this month.  The good news is that the movie hasn’t looked or sounded this good since the summer of ’75. (See the excellent review and screen capture comparisons here at the invaluable website, DVD Beaver.)

I recently read Peter Benchley’s novel of the same name for the first time, and I was eager to watch the movie again, comparing and contrasting what was kept, what was changed and what was completely eliminated for the screenplay, written largely by Carl Gottlieb (who also appears in the film as Meadows, the editor of the Amity town newspaper), with help from Benchley and uncredited work by playwright Howard Sackler, John Milius and Jaws co-star Robert Shaw.  The novel Jaws was better than I’d expected it to be, but the screenplay and movie are a vast improvement.

It’s easy to jump on the obvious reasons the movie worked in ’75 and still works now – terrific performances by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Murray Hamilton and especially Robert Shaw, John Williams’ memorable score, Spielberg’s taut direction. Other reasons the film became a classic are less obvious, but no less important. The technological limits of the mid 70s meant that we didn’t see much of the shark. There was no CGI, and the mechanical shark was rarely functioning properly during the shoot.

The happy result is that the moments when we do actually see the shark make a huge impact and still make people jump in their seats. Spielberg has said that if he’d made the movie 30 years later, he would have used new technology, we would have seen a lot more of the shark and the resulting movie, by his own admission wouldn’t have been nearly as good.  The audience relies on Williams’ score, POV shots of swimmers and clever visual cues like the floating barrels to let us know that the shark has returned to wreak havoc.

Another element that keeps the movie from being a staid, formulaic monster movie is Spielberg’s insistence on shooting on Martha’s Vineyard and on the Atlantic Ocean instead of in Hollywood. The Jaws shoot took over the island for months and incorporated many locals into the cast, not only as extras, but in key speaking parts as well. The organic small-town America feel of Amity Island would have been lost on the Universal lot. The film plays upon primal human fears; not simply that there are beasts in the wild who can kill and maim us when we least expect it, but also more mundane fears about losing our businesses, losing our standing in a community or within our family. It’s also simply a hell of a lot of fun.

If you haven’t seen it in years, or if you’re like me and can quote random lines from the movie at will, or if for some strange quirk of fate you’ve never seen Jaws, the new Blu-ray edition comes highly recommended.

A cool jam for a mild summer Sunday.

“Winter Meeting” By Eddie Harris

[Photo Credit: The Minimalisto]

Grand Groove.

[Photo Credit: Joanne Leah via This Isn’t Happiness]

Over at The New York Review of Books, here’s Larry McMurtry on his final book sale:

Calling it the Last Book Sale was a conceit based on the fact that my novel The Last Picture Show had been filmed on the same site. In fact, the reputable firm of Bonham’s is conducting a major literary auction on the West Coast right now. Our auction was probably the last on this scale I will be involved with.

I’ve been an active book dealer for fifty-five years, and one thing I learned to avoid is the adjective “rare.” Poe’s Tamerlane exists in twelve known copies. It’s rare and so are his stories; but most books aren’t rare. What I sold, over two days in August, were second-hand books—or antiquarian books, if you want to fancy it up. I’ve owned most of them more than once in my career, although many of them are now at least uncommon.

My firm, Booked Up Inc., owned about 400,000 books, spread among four large buildings in Archer City, a small oil patch town in the midwestern part of Texas. I also have a 28,000-volume personal library, in the same town. I’m getting old and so are my buildings. My heirs are literate but not bookish. Dealing with nearly half a million books would be a huge burden for them: thus the downsizing.

[Photo Credit: -circa]

I preferred James and the Giant Peach to Roald Dahl’s Willie Wonka books when I was a kid. There is a scene when James climbs through a tunnel in the peach and grabs a handful of the fruit off the walls. That always sounded like such wonderful thing.

While we’re at it, here’s a Food & Wine recipe for peach pie.

[Illustration by Nancy Ekholm Burkett]

[Picture by Cur3es!]

Yeah.

From Letters of Note comes this 1961 letter from Flannery O’Connor to a college English professor:

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

[Picture by Linden Frederick via Zeroing]

Ego Trip takes us back to them good ol’ days.

[Photo Credit: Martha Cooper]

This morning at the  Rockerfeller Center farmer’s market.

More peach recipes from Saveur. 

Lulu!

Louise Brooks.