Over at Narratively, Shannon Firth profiles our man, Michael Popek (aka “unmoderated”):

Michael Popek remembers visiting his grandfather’s four-story home in New Jersey, where anything that could be collected, was—stamps, toy train cars, cap guns, autographs, baseball cards. “There was a standing order not to touch any of the WWI grenades,” Popek says. As far as his grandfather knew, these were still live and active.

Those visits happened long before Popek, now 35, started gathering his own assortment of collectibles: things left between the pages of books, or as he calls them, Forgotten Bookmarks. It seems destined to happen, given that Popek comes from a family of collectors. He grew up in an old farmhouse in Oneonta, a small town in upstate New York. His father, Peter Popek, a former UPS deliveryman, started a book business in the mid-eighties, but only after coming upon a too-good-to-be-true deal at a local auction.

The offer was 5,000 books for $10. He paid an additional $10 for delivery. According to the elder Popek, no one wanted these books, including him. “We had no interest in books. We didn’t know anything about them. But we didn’t want to waste ‘em,” Peter Popek says. Within a few years, Michael’s father had filled a barn in the backyard with over 20,000 books. The Popeks also bought and sold antiques and owned a small shop in town, not far from their house. Slowly, though, the book collection muscled its way into the antique shop and took over much of the space.

[Photo Credit: Jessica Bal]

Minced pork salad is just one of the dishes featured in Saveur‘s Thai-inspired feast.

[Photo Credit: Penny de los Santos]

Held over until next Tuesday is the Film Forum’s run of Intolerance.

Here’s Glenn Kenny:

If you have not seen D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance since film school, or film appreciation class, or years ago on public television, etc., or worse yet (or maybe better yet, as it happens) have never seen it at all, get yourself down to Manhattan’s Film Forum starting tomorrow and catch it, in a stunning new restoration released by The Cohen Film Collection. It is nearly one hundred years old and I will put money down that it will be the most spectacularly vital film running theatrically in the five buroughs as of its first screening.

Why? Well, it’s not just the structure: in making this ostensible “answer picture” to the (completely justified) protests pertaining to his 1915 The Birth of a Nation, Griffith conceived four tales of this movie’s title theme, each set in a different age and place, and interwove them cinematically, with one of the key effects being, as Kevin Brownlow has so memorably described, a sweeping up of the viewer into four separate and equally engrossing climaxes in the film’s final third. This was/is admitedly a daring storytelling gambit, and not a whole lot of conventional narrative filmmakers have tried to meet this challenge since (although in a mildly ironic coincidence, noted Griffith disapprover Quentin Tarantino has performed structural tricks that Intolerance certainly set a kind of precedent for, in both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown). That’s the thing I absorbed pretty well on my first screening of Intolerance long ago, so it didn’t knock me out this time around. Nor, for that matter, did the content, although it is quite fascinationg. The discursive “modern day” story finds Griffith wrestling with his inner Victorian to concoct a condemnation of priggish reformers. The conception of the fall of Babylon has an interesting proto-feminist component in the person of a character named “Mountain Girl.” And so on. All good stuff. Pauline Kael has noted that the film contains the seeds of every kind of silent and then sound studio film that came immediately after it. And more than that: the movie has surprising scenes of nudity, quasi-nudity, and extreme violence and gore. There’s a beheading or two; the effects for these are not particularly convincing, but hey, they were in there pitching. In this respect, and given the movie’s still staggering scale of spectacle and set-construction (it’s almost impossible to believe that Griffith conceived, produced, shot, edited, and released such an elaborate movie in a mere year after his prior one), what Kael says still goes.

R. Crumb drawing, 1964 via The Bristol Board.

Wonderful post about NYC record stores over at Flaming Pablum.

Over at Egotrip, dig this:

[Photo Credit: Malik Sayeed]

My pie. Smitten Kitchen eats a peach.

Bop.

[Photo Credit: Andrew Gallo]

Clyde Haberman talks to the Film Forum’s directory of repertory, Bruce Goldstein:

“ ‘Million Dollar Movie’ was VHS before there was VHS,” Mr. Goldstein said.

That childhood experience led him, with Ms. Cooper, to create Film Forum Jr., an attempt to acquaint today’s children — generally, age 5 and up — with the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and great musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain.” His own first movie, at 5, was “Pal Joey,” in 1957. “I didn’t know how sexy it was till years later,” he said.

“You can’t talk down to kids,” he said. “Kids have taste.” On Mother’s Day, he screened Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much, which involves an assassination plot and a boy’s kidnapping.

“Someone said, ‘That’s not for kids, it’s too scary,’ ” Mr. Goldstein recalled. “I said: ‘Yeah, it’s scary. But it’s not as scary as ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ The Disney movies are really scary.” So he showed the Hitchcock film and “the kids loved it.”

For Mr. Goldstein, nothing compares to watching a movie with others around.

“You focus on the film,” he said. “You don’t focus at home or on your iPhone. Second, you get the benefit of the other audience members picking up on things you might not have noticed.” While it is not a phrase he likes, he added, there is such a thing as “communal experience.”

“Some films don’t work on video at all,” he said. “Silent comedy doesn’t work on video, as far as I’m concerned. You need an audience to laugh with you and to pick up on the gags you may not notice at home because you’re distracted in 20 different directions.”

[Photo Via: Gothamist]

“Falling in Love” via Loui Jover.

Last week Derek Jeter was on the Jimmy Fallon Show. The Roots and Fallon tried out some new theme music for Jeter’s at bats.

Here’s the winner:

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

“Clementine”–Duke Ellington

[Photo Via: Sea Dollar]

Saveur gives apricot tarts with pistachios.

[Photo Credit: Penny De Los Santo]

Woody, in the current issue of Esquire:

What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it’s the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don’t think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I’ve said. And I laugh at it, because I’m hearing it for the first time myself.

I never see a frame of anything I’ve done after I’ve done it. I don’t even remember what’s in the films. And if I’m on the treadmill and I’m surfing the channels and suddenly Manhattan or some other picture comes on, I go right past it. If I saw Manhattan again, I would only see the worst. I would say: “Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. I could have done this. I should have done that.” So I spare myself.

In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you’ve left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It’s the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that’s crippling you when you’re trying to write.

Picture via Magnificent Ruin. 

I remember walking into The Sound Library, a boutique record shop in the east village in the late Nineties and hearing something special. It was a short cut off a white label Lord Finesse promo. Rare. Finesse chopped-up and looped a famous Marvin Gaye record on an SP-1200. Man, it was cool. I eventually got a copy of the beat and when I passed it along to my pal Alan, he dumped it in Pro Tools and cleaned it up.

Years later, I got married and made a mix for The Wife. Little Miss Sunshine was and is one of her favorite movies so Alan and I cut up dialogue by Alan Arkin and fit it over the Finesse-Marvin Gaye beat.

Enjoy.

And smile: it won’t mess up your hair.

Oh, man, real good stuff on Robert Towne over at Cinephilia and Beyond. And even more at Screenplay How To.

Food 52 gets elegant. 

“Value Restored” by Michael Cumming (2010) via Like a Field Mouse.

Grand Groove.

[Collage by Katrien De Blauwer via Kateopolis]