[Photo Credit: Kutlu]

Rest in Peace, Frank Pierson.

“At each level you reach, you have to tear up what you have done before, which cost an enormous amount of psychological and emotional energy. That makes the process of screenwriting very, very difficult. And I don’t know any screenplay that I have ever worked on where I did not go through ten to twelve or sometimes sixteen drafts before I showed it to anybody.”

[Quote via The Poor Dancing Girl She Won’t Dance Again]

Smitten Kitchen gives us peach pie. And I, for one, am not only thankful but hungry.

[Photo Via Shaolinchild]

Some summer lovin’ from Hilo Chen.

Via Kottke check out this bit of Mile Davisness over at Noise Made Me Do It.

David Remnick has a long profile on Bruce Springsteen in the New Yorker:

Early this year, Springsteen was leading rehearsals for a world tour at Fort Monmouth, an Army base that was shut down last year; it had been an outpost since the First World War of military communications and intelligence, and once employed Julius Rosenberg and thousands of militarized carrier pigeons. The twelve-hundred-acre property is now a ghost town inhabited only by steel dummies meant to scare off the ubiquitous Canada geese that squirt a carpet of green across middle Jersey. Driving to the far end of the base, I reached an unlovely theatre that Springsteen and Jon Landau, his longtime manager, had rented for the rehearsals. Springsteen had performed for officers’ children at the
Fort Monmouth “teen club” (dancing, no liquor) with the Castiles, forty-seven years earlier.

The atmosphere inside was purposeful but easygoing. Musicians stood onstage noodling on their instruments with the languid air of outfielders warming up in the sun. Max Weinberg, the band’s volcanic drummer, wore the sort of generous jeans favored by dads at weekend barbecues. Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s childhood friend and guitarist-wingman, keeps up a brutal schedule as an actor and a d.j., and he seemed weary, his eyes drooping under a piratical purple head scarf. The bass player Garry Tal-lent, the organist Charlie Giordano, and the pianist Roy Bittan horsed around on a roller-rink tune while they waited. The guitarist Nils Lofgren was on the phone, trying to figure out flights to get back to his home, in Scottsdale, for the weekend.

Springsteen arrived and greeted everyone with a quick hello and his distinctive cackle. He is five-nine and walks with a rolling rodeo gait. When he takes in something new—a visitor, a thought, a passing car in the distance—his eyes narrow, as if in hard light, and his lower jaw protrudes a bit. His hairline is receding, and, if one had to guess, he has, over the years, in the face of high-def scrutiny and the fight against time, enjoined the expensive attentions of cosmetic and dental practitioners. He remains dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit. (“He has practically the same waist size as when I met him, when we were fifteen,” says Steve Van Zandt, who does not.) Some of this has to do with his abstemious inclinations; Van Zandt says Springsteen is “the only guy I know—I think the only guy I know at all—who never did drugs.” He’s followed more or less the same exercise regimen for thirty years: he runs on a treadmill and, with a trainer, works out with weights. It has paid off. His muscle tone approximates a fresh tennis ball. And yet, with the tour a month away, he laughed at the idea that he was ready. “I’m not remotely close,” he said, slumping into a chair twenty rows back from the stage.

He don’t celebrate Sunday on a Saturday night no more…

[Photo Credit: Summer Sun Goddess-s]

“Portrait of Lunia Czechowska,” By Amedeo Modigliani (1919)

Jelly or Boston Creme? Which one of dese?

[Photo Credit: Nom-Food]

Rain Pryor and Kelly Carlin talk about comedy and growing up funny.

[Photo Credit: Kelly Carlin]

This is a lousy-looking clip but the movie, Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography, is something you must see.

Our pal Mark Lamster on the New York Public Library:

Sometime last year, the New York Public Library (NYPL) retired its pneumatic-tube system, which had been used to request books for more than a century. This change was made without ceremony or fanfare; I learned of it unexpectedly, when I walked into the catalog room prepared to deliver a call slip to a clerk behind a large wooden desk, only to find a notice directing me elsewhere. For a few moments, I stood there, unmoored, before moving along as instructed. That pneumatic call system had changed little since the library’s open-ing in 1911. You still filled out a slip, and you still turned that slip over to a clerk, who would load it into a metal cartridge. With a slurpy shoomp, the cartridge would be driven by air pressure to a station down in the stacks, where another clerk would retrieve your book, which was then sent back up to the call desk by a dumbwaiter. In recent years, this procedure would take about 20 minutes. In decades past, I’m told, it was closer to five.

The passing of a steampunk relic might occasion a fit of nostalgia and no more—in New York, the cycle of life is accelerated, which is perhaps why we are so attentive to our history—but in this case, something greater seemed to be at stake. One could hardly contrive a more blatant metaphor for the uneasy shift, in the world of letters, from the physical to the digital. The very future of the book, and the printed word in general, is uncertain. We’re at a moment of profound change in the way we consume information, and that change is shaping the kinds of information we value. It is also shaping the spaces in which we consume information. How does one even begin to think about designing libraries in a time of rapidly developing technologies and shifting programs?

[Photo Credit: Cat’s Eye View @ MLP]

Groucho pimps goods over at How to Be a Retronaut.

Image Via This Isn’t Happiness.

Dig this! A series of fictitious dishes designed by my cousin Dinah.

[Photo Credit: Etsy]

Rock and fuggin Roll. Pictures by Bob Gruen over at Everyday I Show.

This looks promising.

[Picture Via Live. Laugh. Love]