Hey Now Edition…

From I’ll Let you be in my dream if you let me be in yours…

Here’s Manohla Dargis in the Times on the “it” movie of the moment:

“Bridesmaids,” an unexpectedly funny new comedy about women in love, if not of the Sapphic variety, goes where no typical chick flick does: the gutter. Well, more like the city street that Lillian, a soon-to-be wife played by a wonderful, warm Maya Rudolph, dashes into, dressed in the kind of foamy white gown that royal weddings and the bridal industrial complex are made of. Suddenly realizing in a salon that she’s been hit with food poisoning, she flees like a runaway bride, except that it isn’t a man who’s making her, uh, run, but the giddy, liberating humor of the writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.

…It would be easy to oversell “Bridesmaids,” though probably easier if also foolish to do the reverse. It isn’t a radical movie (even if Ms. McCarthy’s character comes close); it’s formally unadventurous; and there isn’t much to look at beyond all these female faces. Yet these are great faces, and the movie is smart about a lot of things, including the vital importance of female friendships. And it’s nice to see so many actresses taking up space while making fun of something besides other women. Perhaps the biggest, most pleasurable surprise is that “Bridesmaids” doesn’t treat Annie’s single status as a dire character flaw worthy of triage: she’s simply going through a rough patch and has to figure things out, as in real life.

I’m game. Looks like fun.

There are nine days left to see the Romare Bearden show at the Michael Rosenfeld gallery on 57th street.

From the New York Times review by Roberta Smith:

Romare Bearden (1911-88) spent more than 30 years striving to be a great artist, and in the early 1960s, when he took up collage in earnest, he became one. A small exhibition at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, organized to celebrate the centennial of Bearden’s birth, delivers this message with unusual clarity. It contains only 21 collages, all superb, in an intimate context that facilitates savoring their every formal twist and narrative turn, not to mention the ingenious mixing of mediums that takes them far beyond collage.

The works at Rosenfeld were made from 1964 to 1983. Some are not much larger than sheets of typing paper; others are more than four feet on a side. Their suavely discordant compositions involve both black-and-white and color photographs and occasional bits of printed fabric; almost all depict some scene of black life, past or present or imagined.

Highly recommended.

Serious Eats offers 10 lovable salads.

I’m not sold on figs. They can be too sweet for me. But I’ve had some that are appealing, especially when combined with something tart like a balsamic reduction.

Boogaloo baby.

[Picture from The Girl Can’t Dance]

Movie Star hubba hubba:

Audrey Hepburn and Paul Newman

Hubba hubba Part II.

Grace Kelly: Eternal Style.

Click here for a photo gallery of the one and only Gordon Parks.

Say goodnight, Gracie…

Bill Gallo, the longtime cartoonist for the New York Daily News died yesterday. He was 88.

Filip Bondy has a loving tribute today in the News. And here is Lupica, delivering the goods:

This newspaper, the Daily News newspaper, was born in 1919, and Gallo was born in 1922 and first walked through the doors as a copy boy and into the rest of his life in 1941. He was more the Daily News than anybody who ever lived. He would keep drawing his pictures. He would keep telling his stories through those pictures to the end. We hear all the time about how the newspaper business is supposed to be dying. Nobody ever told Bill Gallo, even as he was.

“The News is the only life I ever really knew once I got back from the war,” he told me one time, not so long after I first walked through the doors of the old offices on 42nd St., between 2nd and 3rd, that famous globe in the lobby. “And it’s the only life I ever wanted.”

…He was a friend to anybody who ever opened this newspaper and cared about it. And so today, one last time, you open the paper and there is Bill Gallo. There is Bertha and old Steingrabber, and Yuchie and Thurman Munson the day after he died. There is the work of those pens and pencils and brushes. The right hand reaches out one last time, across all the years, and the business is alive and so is he.

Here is a gallery of Gallo’s work.

The News, and New York Sports, will not be the same without him.

Couple of days of hubba hubba.

[Picture by Jean-Francois Jonvelle]

I know it’s only Tuesday but any day is a good one for Sunday Pork Ragu, live and direct from wunnerful people at Food 52.

Albert Brooks has written a book. I hope it is good.

If it is nearly as funny as this Proust Questionnaire, the world will be an unhappier (but funnier) place.

Right-O.

The Batman and Robin by Frank Miller.

Oliver Wang digs deeper in the L.A. Times:

“Shook Ones Part II,” from “The Infamous” album, is Mobb Deep’s most-cherished hit, so iconic that when Eminem needed a draught of sonic courage in “8 Mile,” he turned to it, with its distinctive tick-tock drums and dark, minor-key bass line.

Except, it turns out, the source of that bass line wasn’t a bass line at all, one reason the sample eluded discovery. The longer “Shook Ones Part II” kept its secrets, the more it became a holy grail for sample seekers, complete with debated theories and false leads. In solving this cold case, Bronco (born Timon Heinke) and his revelation harkens to a seemingly bygone era of competitive sampling and sourcing.

In the late 1980s, as affordable digital samplers such as E-mu’s SP-1200 and Akai’s MPC-60 entered the market, beatmakers discovered the creative potential of looping and manipulating bits and pieces of music from other artists’ recordings, called “samples,” to build new songs. They sought out unused sounds on increasingly obscure records to stay ahead of their peers — and possibly copyright attorneys — and sample hounds followed just as intensely. The adage that “knowledge is power” gave samples cultural capital — DJs could build sets using “originals” while vinyl sellers could mint small fortunes by selling records sporting “known” samples.

Channeling the spirit of E.B. White, here’s Chris Jones with 20 things that should rarely, if ever, appear in your copy:

1. Is your name F. Scott Fitzgerald? [Edit: Or Gene Weingarten?] No? Then take your adverbs out back and shoot them in the head and bury them in lime.

2. Popular culture references, unless you’re writing about popular culture, in which case you should probably occasionally refer to popular culture, but only through your clenched teeth. The names Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Bilbo Baggins, and Lady Gaga should not appear in your copy unless you’re writing a story about three fictional characters and their chance encounter with a hobbit on a quest.

3. Any sentences that read as though they might have appeared in an academic text; therefore, “therefore” is not permitted. “Heretofore?” Get the f**k out.

Goodness how delicious…

Spring is the time for peas and over at Serious Eats there are a bunch of good-looking recipes like this one…one time for your face.

Here’s Peter Bogdanovich on Ernst Lubitsch:

Sometime in the late 1960’s, I asked Jean Renoir what he thought of Ernst Lubitsch. He raised his eyebrows and said, enthusiastically, “Lubitsch!? But he invented the modern Hollywood.” By “modern Hollywood,” Renoir meant American movies from about 1924 to the start of the ’60s. Before Lubitsch’s arrival to California from Germany in 1922 (to make a Mary Pickford vehicle called Rosita), Hollywood films were under the overwhelming influence of D. W. Griffith, circa 1908 through the epoch-making The Birth of a Nation in 1915 and beyond. Victorian, puritan, Southern, montage-driven, Griffith was the father of film narrative. As pioneer Allan Dwan told me, he would go to see Griffith’s movies and just do whatever Griffith was doing. The majority of American directors felt similarly, including John Ford and Howard Hawks.

When Lubitsch arrived, however, things started to change. He brought European sophistication, candor in sexuality and an oblique style that made audiences complicit with the characters and situations. This light, insouciant, teasing manner became known far and wide as “the Lubitsch Touch.” By the end of the 20’s and throughout his short life—he died in 1947 at age 55—Lubitsch was probably the most famous film director internationally, except perhaps for C. B. DeMille. Today hardly anyone remembers either one of them. Yet while most of DeMille is pretty forgettable, if sometimes fun, Lubitsch is always fun and often as good as it gets.