Photograph by Chase Turner.

Guest Post by Cameron Anderson:

3 Reasons to be excited about the Fargo TV Series

So the new 10-episode limited TV series Fargo, based on the Coen Brothers’ 1996 classic of the same name, premiered recently on FX. Produced by the brothers, the show stars Billy Bob Thorton and Martin Freeman. As word got out in 2012 about plans to adapt the film, many were uneasy with the concept, worried that a mediocre rendition would spoil one of the crown jewels of the Coen catalogue. But after watching the first few episodes, I’ve put my own knee-jerk skepticism to rest, harnessed my enthusiasm, and distilled it into a top-3 list of reasons to not only embrace, but celebrate the new series.

1) Bob Odenkirk

Odenkirk has sloughed off his sleazy lawyer persona from Breaking Bad and adopted the role of police deputy for this series, a character he describes as the “polar opposite” of Saul Goodman. Even Odenkirk, a huge fan of Fargo, had trepidation about signing on, but has expressed approval for what he believes to be a faithful love letter to the original film. Anyone who gets Bob Odenkirk’s buy-in has got to be doing something right.

2) Coens Give Their Blessing

Joel and Ethan Coen are credited as producers for the show, but this seems more symbolic than anything: a nod of approval to the project. It’s important to know that the show is not a remake, but an extrapolation; the characters are akin to their cinematic counterparts, but inhabit a universe parallel to the one depicted in the film. All this to say that the Coens are justified in giving their blessing, for the show, created by Noah Hawley, preserves the same mood and biting wit of its forerunner without simply aping its signature tropes.

3) It’s an Ensemble Effort

We’re treated in this series to a whole new roster of characters, each skillfully cast by the show’s creators. As described above, they inhabit the archetypes set down in original movie, but are given new life by even more A-list performances. Martin Freeman’s answer to Jerry Lundegaard —the pathetic car salesman portrayed by William H. Macy in the film— occupies a similar position in the plot, but his interplay with Thorton’s Lorne Malvo gives the hokey, embattled milquetoast mold new life.

I’m just here to whet your appetite, especially all you wary Coen Brothers fans. Fear not: this is not a derivative imitation of the hallowed film. With eight episodes to go in the series, I can’t wait to see how they continue to improve and expand upon the original.

Ooooooh. 

Swiped from Biblioklept, dig this bit of goodness from Steve Earle:

[Picture by Bags]

Yes. Yes.

[Photo Credit: Rob Patronite]

Monday, man.

[Painting by David Imlay]

“Ocean Park 70” by Richard Diebenkorn.

Check out this clever and appealing new book by my cousin, Dinah Fried.

Buzzfeed has a gallery; now, go buy the book.

And then dig this interview with her over at NPR.

To Die For is a favorite.

Cool obit in the Times:

Connie Marrero, a chunky right-hander from Cuba with a windmill delivery and a wicked curveball, was nearly 39 years old when he reached the major leagues with the 1950 Washington Senators.

He went on to become an All-Star in his second season, when he threw a one-hitter against the Philadelphia Athletics, and he won 39 games in five seasons with lackluster Senator teams.

When he died on Wednesday in Havana at 102, two days short of his 103rd birthday, Marrero was the oldest former major leaguer. But his time with the Senators was only one chapter of a long career in which he became a cherished figure in Cuban baseball.

[Photo Credit: Al Fenn/Time Life Pictures via Getty Images]

Almost warm. Late April 2014.

Via Cinephilia and Beyond dig this cool Robert Altman gallery.

Cool Cover.

Nice piece on the Vivian Maier documentary by Malcolm Jones over at the Daily Beast:

To be sure, Maier was eccentric: a friendless, secretive spinster who spent her life caring for other people’s children. She was a hoarder and a person of uncertain origin: was she French or merely someone pretending to be French? On a tape found in one of those storage lockers, she can be heard supervising a game among her young charges where identities are being assigned. When one of the children asks who Maier will be, she responds, “I am the mystery woman.”

The real mystery, however, is what made that woman take those pictures, and on this subject the film is not much help, although no one seems too disturbed by that. Since it appeared in theaters this month, the documentary has received rave reviews, and understandably: Finding Vivian Maier tells a strange and intriguing story, and filmmakers John Maloof and Charlie Siskel deserve the praise they’ve received.

But as I watched the film, small alarms kept going off in my head, because questions are raised—or at least implied—but never satisfactorily answered.

Why does Maloof present himself as the sole discoverer of Maier’s work? If you read the stories that appeared several years ago when the pictures first surfaced, you know that at least three people, including Maloof, found the photos when the contents of Maier’s Chicago storage lockers were auctioned off. This is a major part of the story because it revolves around who owns what, who decides which of Maier’s images the public will see and in what form, who stands to profit, and ultimately who gets to tell and define her story.

Why does Finding Vivian Maier spend so much time interviewing the people, now grown, that she once tended as a nanny? Almost none of these people have much illuminating to say about her, other than that she was weird, secretive, and not always very nice. Moreover, most of the witnesses knew her not in her prime, but when she was older.

There is a lot of good stuff to be found in Andrew Corsello’s GQ profile of Louis C.K. (never mind the “genius” part if you can). I especially like this:

“All of that”—the death of the New York club scene in the early ’90s, the Pootie Tang debacle—”has helped me form what I call my 70 Percent Rule for decision-making.” C.K. then describes a practical application of a worldview laced into many of his best routines—that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy.” If we just wrest our eyes, literally and figuratively, from our digital gizmos and the shitty, spoiling impatience they instill, we’ll see that this life, this planet, is amazing. That it is something just to be in the world, seeing and hearing and smelling. That for trillions of miles in every direction from earth, life really is blood-boilingly, eye-explodingly horrific.

“These situations where I can’t make a choice because I’m too busy trying to envision the perfect one—that false perfectionism traps you in this painful ambivalence: If I do this, then that other thing I could have done becomes attractive. But if I go and choose the other one, the same thing happens again. It’s part of our consumer culture. People do this trying to get a DVD player or a service provider, but it also bleeds into big decisions. So my rule is that if you have someone or something that gets 70 percent approval, you just do it. ‘Cause here’s what happens. The fact that other options go away immediately brings your choice to 80. Because the pain of deciding is over.

“And,” he continues, “when you get to 80 percent, you work. You apply your knowledge, and that gets you to 85 percent! And the thing itself, especially if it’s a human being, will always reveal itself—100 percent of the time!—to be more than you thought. And that will get you to 90 percent. After that, you’re stuck at 90, but who the fuck do you think you are, a god? You got to 90 percent? It’s incredible!”

[Picture by Randel Plowman via Just Another Masterpiece]

Food 52 offers 8 recipes for Cinco de Mayo. 

Photograph by Thomas Prior (via MPD).

Let’s Get Lost.

[Photograph by Nicole Franzen]

Adam Begley’s new biography, Updike, reviewed by Orhan Pamuk in the Sunday Book Review:

Aside from his enormous talents and Protestant work ethic, Updike’s defining characteristic is his signature style, which he owes to his desire to be a graphic artist, and to his stunningly visual memory. Like Proust, like Nabokov and like Henry Green, all of whom influenced him, Updike wrote sentences that work through the precise meeting of visual detail and verbal accuracy. Updike was fully aware that this precision required a wide verbal range and ingenuity; indeed, when he criticized Tom Wolfe’s failure to be “exquisite,” Updike’s point of comparison was his own style.

And here is Louis Menand’s Updike appreciation for the New Yorker:

Updike wanted to do with the world of mid-century middle-class American Wasps what Proust had done with Belle Époque Paris and Joyce had done with a single day in 1904 Dublin—and, for that matter, Jane Austen had done with the landed gentry in the Home Counties at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and James had done with idle Americans living abroad at the turn of the nineteenth century. He wanted to biopsy a minute sample of the social tissue and reproduce the results in the form of a permanent verbal artifact.

Updike believed that people in that world sought happiness, and that, contrary to the representations of novelists like Cheever and Kerouac, they often found it. But he thought that the happiness was always edged with dread, because acquiring it often meant ignoring, hurting, and damaging other people. In a lot of Updike’s fiction, those other people are children. Adultery was for him the perfect example of the moral condition of the suburban middle class: the source of a wickedly exciting kind of pleasure and a terrible kind of guilt.

It’s easy to understand why people identify Stephen Dedalus with Joyce, and why they identify the narrator of “In Search of Lost Time” with Proust. But it’s strange that people persist in identifying the protagonists of the Olinger stories and the Maples stories and the Rabbit books with Updike. Those characters are Updikean in certain limited ways—unusually sensitive, unusually death-haunted, unusually horny. But they are not unusually smart or unusually gifted. They could never have created John Updike. And only Updike could have created them.

[Photo Via: The. Buried. Talent.]

Lots of deserved attention being paid to Nas’ debut record Illmatic which turns 20 this year. A documentary, mix tape tributes, you name it.

Here’s one of my favorites so far–an in-depth interview with Large Professor:

DX: Yeah, Nas always said Illmatic was like his application to the Rap gods membership club. Sort of like a “Hear me out..this is what I’m doing…I belong here,” thing.

Large Professor: Definitely, definitely. Yeah, that was it, and with that album, I always say that was a more lyrical-driven album, if anything. Like, the beats were cool. They were good backdrops, but just the lyrics and the experience that he was putting down over those beats just it is why that album is heralded the way it is today.

DX: You’re being really modest, man. Those beats were not just okay.

Large Professor: Nah, I mean, they were bangin’. “One Love,” you know what I mean? “The World Is Yours,” and everything… But you could have had some clown get those beats and put some bullshit down, and them shits, it wouldn’t have been nothing. Nas put something down that was like, “Yo, this is… It’s not the icing on the cake. This is part of the cake.” It was like, “This ain’t the icing on the cake; this is the cake almost,” and the beat was almost like the icing. Nas’s rhymes were like the cake because, you could have gotten any old body to rhyme on them beats, and you would have been like, “That’s cool.” But [with] the stuff like “The World Is Yours,” he was tapping into the spirit of the beats and everything. It was like, “Yo, what is this? This is like world is yours type shit, man,” and that’s serious business.

DX: Absolutely. He’s said in interviews that he begged you to executive produce the album, but you were like, “No. It’s your vision.”

Large Professor: Yeah, nah, like I was on some… We were cool. We would be in the crib, and we’d be recording, and then we’d take a break, sit out on the terrace and just chill. We would be talking about the world like, “Yo, if this planet…” We would just be wandering in thought and just all kind of stuff like that. So, to have that kind of relationship, and then just one day come and say, “Just sign this contract.” Nah, I couldn’t. That’s not who I am. I’m not a sign this contract kind of guy.

[Image via: Complex]