It’s brutally hot in New York. Keep cool.

[Photograph by Cereal-Killer 72]

Live and smokin’.

The Tate.

[Picture via Hebdomania]

Honey-roasted peaches with Marscapone and thyme.

Yeah, Nicole Franzen rules.

Peace to Mark W for hipping me to this ill mash-up.

Yes, indeed, it’s fun time:

Dig this gallery of famous people by Bob Willoughby.

Hot and Cool.

It’s Sidney Lumet Week at the Walter Reader Theater, guys. If you are around, check it out. If you’ve never seen “Q&A,” it’s worth it. Nolte at his best:

Drawings by Ricardo Fumanal.

Keeping it light on a hot day, dig this gallery of refreshing sorbets and granitas over at Saveur.

[Photo Credit: Brooke Slezak]

Summer Jam: The Great Dot X.

[Painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez]

Jam it on the One.

Matt B hipped me to this blog post by Lawrence Block about the difficulty of adapting books for the big screen:

Once in a while, of course, someone really gets it right. Once in a while there’s a movie that takes a book, slaps it on the big screen, and works like a charm even as it reflects the writer’s vision. The most vivid recent example would be the Coens’ remake of True Grit. I’d read the Charles Portis novel first, then saw and enjoyed the Henry Hathaway film with John Wayne and Kim Darby. It wasn’t the book, but I thought it was a pretty good movie.

But the Coen brothers went back to Portis’s book, and took the revolutionary step of putting that story on the screen, using his scenes and dialogue pretty much as written. And blew the earlier picture out of the water.

Oddly, something very similar happened seventy years ago. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon succeeded so utterly that not many of us realize it was the third adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel. (The 1931 version starred Ricardo Cortez; the 1936 remake, called Satan Met a Lady, had Alison Skipworth playing the Sydney Greenstreet role.)

It’s also not widely known that Hammett deliberately wrote the book in the form of a prose screenplay, with nothing on the page that couldn’t be shown or spoken on the screen. It was his notion that movies were the future, that writers were best advised to write books that could be filmed, and that the ideal tactic would be to do the screenwriters’ work for them while writing the book. After this was conveniently overlooked by two sets of filmmakers, Huston did what should have been done in the first place, and put Hammett’s lines, essentially verbatim, in the mouths of the perfect cast. There’s a reason the film gets better every time you see it.

Amen, to that. It’s a near perfect movie.

Simple Pleasures are the best.

Spaghetti with spring garlic and chilies at L’Artusi.

Louis had skills. These are his collages.

Here’s a long piece on the new Muppets movie. 

Phil Hughes looks to show us something this afternoon.

Derek Jeter has the day off.

Brett Gardner LF

Curtis Granderson CF

Mark Teixeira DH

Robinson Cano 2B

Nick Swisher RF

Jorge Posada 1B

Russell Martin C

Eduardo Nunez SS

Ramiro Pena 3B

Never mind the heat:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: the most talented, Joel Zimmer]

Richard Phillips

Serious Eats learns you how to grill pizza.

Over at Egotripland, Prince Paul offers his 10 favorite sample flips.

Listen n loin.