Bah Lovebug. Not really, but why not flip the script?

Check out this great gallery of photographs titled How New York City Ate in 1938 over at Gothamist.

[Photo Credit: Sol Libsohn]

Because a little Steve goes a long way…

Especially on a Monday.

Over at Vanity Fair, Scott Price has a long piece on “Diner”:

The second crisis hit when an on-set fire cost another night of shooting, and MGM refused to budget another day. Levinson needed more time. Sova suggested breaking out a second camera in the diner, to speed things up by filming actors on both sides of the table simultaneously. That, however, created a problem with sound: instead of clipping a lavalier microphone to just one actor and allowing him to say his lines cleanly—that is, without overlap from other actors, so it can be edited into a scene later—the new situation demanded that all the actors, on-camera and off, be miked. Robert Altman aside, at the time it was still rare to use overlapping dialogue, especially for trivial, tabletop chatter. “What Levinson did in a revolutionary way 30 years ago,” John Hamburg says, “is something we’re doing now.”

It was, for the final two weeks, a kind of liberation. “Because we didn’t have to worry about overlaps, we could really ad-lib,” Guttenberg says. “You could ad-lib offstage and throw the guy a fastball, and he could catch it and throw it high. That’s what made the experience so unique in filmmaking: you didn’t have to match ‘what we did last time.’ It was ‘Just give me something extraordinary. Take it wherever you want to go.’ ”

…Banter is a delicate thing, crippled by obvious effort, destroyed when, as so often happens on sitcoms, it’s reduced to point scoring or put-downs. Reiser was so quick, so on, that there are moments in Diner when he sounds as if he’s trying out material. But Levinson was also going for something deeper, a casualness implying dynamics and affections that reach back years, and even the screw-ups nail that quality. The best comes when Guttenberg’s Eddie asks Boogie, “Sinatra or Mathis?,” and Rourke brushes him back with “Presley.” “Elvis Presley?,” Guttenberg’s Eddie says. “You’re sick … ” He starts to improvise, but it’s like watching a kid let go of the handlebars for the first time: he knows he’s going to crash. “You’ve gone like two steps below … ,” Guttenberg stammers, “in my … my, uh, book.” Clearly, a blown take: The actors giggle, Stern spits up his drink, breaks character, and says, “Once again … ” But rather than splice in a cleaner run, Levinson went with the mess.

For more, check out this Q&A I found in an old issue of American Film: My Dinner with Barry (Robert Ward)

And yeah, that’s the same Robert Ward who wrote the famous “Straw that stirs the drink” Reggie profile for Sport.

The Kid Stays in the Picture.

Street shot by our man Bags.

Here’s a little remix I did with my man from Questionable Sound years ago. Classic Guru verse over a Madlib beat.

09 Lemonade Was A Popular Drink (and it still is)

[Photo Credit: Joshuaself.com]

Blue Note Album Cover Week ends with a couple of gems.

Serious Eats on how to increase your spice tolerance.

[Photo Credit: Nutmeg Disrupted]

Ah, De La+Biz=Happy Friday.

Ridley Scott recently held a 3-minute movie competition called “Tell it Your Way.” The movie could not contain more than six lines of narrative.

Here’s the winner, directed by an American, Keegan Wilcox:

More Blue Note, More.

Yeah and I know it’s not the season but still these pickled garlicky red peppers over at Smitten Kitchen look great.

It’s on a a first come, first serve basis…

Newness from Pos and Dove: Good luck to both of you.

“If you were a ghost, would you rather hang out in an empty house with other ghosts, or with people and have a good time?”

Case you missed it, here’s Pat Jordan’s little essay for the Times magazine on the Dixie Ghostbusters:

Except for the eerie flickering of our flashlights, we batted away low branches and overgrown shrubs of the old cotton plantation in total darkness. There was no moonlight. It was, Grady Carter noted, “a perfect night for ghosts.” At that point his nephew Andy held up a hand and pointed into the woods. “I heard voices,” Andy said. We all stopped. Chris Carter, his cousin, whispered, “I see a red light.” “The spirits of dead slaves,” Grady confirmed. “A demonic orb.”

Grady, 66, is the winner of three purple hearts in Vietnam; his son, Chris, 41, is a former long-haul trucker; and Andy, 46, is a former bodyguard. Now all three Carter men are Twisted Dixie, a team of paranormal investigators — or, to use their less preferred term, ghostbusters. For fees upward of $2,000 per demonic possession, they camp out at night in clients’ houses, barns, businesses or woods and “document paranormal activity,” Andy explains, referring to “ghosts, demons, poltergeists.” Twisted Dixie grosses a little more than $50,000 a year, sometimes charging fees for long investigations and sometimes working on spec at famous sites like Fort Sumter and the Burt-Stark Mansion in Abbe­ville, S.C. — often called the birthplace and the deathbed of the Confederacy, and the home of Twisted Dixie. No matter the job, they always work at night because, they say, that’s when ghosts tend to whisper.

Blue Note Badness…

Serious Eats offers seven ways to spike your hot chocolate.

[Photo Via Dizzy Dee]

Stop, look, and listen.

Olen Steinhauer reviewed Elmore’s latest in the Book Review last weekend:

In an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 2001, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Elmore Leonard listed his 10 rules of writing. The final one — No. 11, actually — the “most important rule . . . that sums up the 10,” is “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” It’s a terrific rule. In fact, I liked it so much that I passed it on to a creative-writing class I once taught. However, there’s more to it, which I didn’t pass on: “Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the ­narrative.”

Jazzy prose that occasionally lets go of “proper usage” is Leonard’s trademark. He’s a stylist of forward motion, placing narrative acceleration above inconveniences like pronouns and helping verbs. While this creates in most readers a heightened sense of excitement, newcomers may find the transition from complete sentences daunting; it may take a little time to accept Leonard’s prose before you allow it to do its work on you. I’ll admit to having to make such an adjustment when beginning “Raylan.” At the same time, I’m also a novelist who lives in fear of my copy editor; being such a coward, I can’t help respecting Leonard’s grammatical bravery.

If you’ve never read Leonard’s essay on writing, do yourself a favor, huh?

3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ”she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ”said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ”full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

[Photo Credit: Corbis Outline/Greer Studios]

Classic King Tee (featuring Pryor at the end):