Blue Monday

How about a subdued start for the week? That’s guitar prodigy Julian Lage, and while his sound is a bit more smooth-jazzy than I normally go for, I found his debut album Sounding Point  a very listenable and likeable piece of work.

Now that’s off the wall

Michael Jackson may have been nutty as a Planters warehouse, but at least he wasn’t doing talk radio broadcasts from Neverland. Leave it to Rush Limbaugh to put these things in perspective.

The ‘zilla from Wasilla

When GOP national chairman Michael Steele talked about “the storm that is Sarah Palin,” one assumes he was not trying to evoke the image of a vacant area surrounded by a vortex of howling winds that dissipate and disappear, leaving behind a lot of wreckage. Which is pretty much the picture of Palin one gets from reading this already famous Vanity Fair piece by Todd Purdum.

Hoboken Saturday Night

Pretty extraordinary fireworks over the Hudson River for the Fourth of July. And because prime viewing areas were right next to the Hoboken train station, getting in and out to see the show was largely hassle-free.

 There was a bit of a jam as thousands of people unfamiliar with train schedules jammed the station once the fireworks were done. NJ Transit could have done a better job there.

On board the Suffern train, riding it to Secaucus Junction, we found ourselves next to a family of Monty Python buffs, which made for an appropriately surrealistic close to the night’s fun.

Profound

“Only dead fish go with the flow.”

The defining quality of Yogi Berra’s one-liners is that they start out sounding ridiculous but turn out to be pretty shrewd when you think about them. The defining quality of Sarah Palin’s utterances is that they start out sounding ridiculous, then get even more ridiculous as you think about them.

Meanwhile, Palin’s status as Mrs. Chauncey Gardiner is confirmed as wingnut pundits pretend to believe there’s actually shrewd calculation behind Caribou Barbie’s meltdown.

First drafts are tough

The Federalist Papers

All here in searchable form. An argument begun with one of the oldest forms of Old Media now continues via New Media. Pretty cool, huh?

Early fireworks

A volcanic eruption as seen from the International Space Station. Utterly hypnotic.

Friday finds

Illustrator blog site Drawger presents The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, some of which I still use regularly. (You can take my Rapidographs when you pry them from my cold dead fingers.) Others bring back dread memories of the days when newspaper pages were assembled on flats, with stories and veloxed photos printed as blocks and strips of paper and fed through waxers by pasteup artists. This hand-held waxer, for example, was enough to give Torquemada nightmares: that little red plug was often loose or missing entirely, allowing hot wax to splash across the hand of an unwary paster-upper. How about this Freddy Kreuger manicurist set used to cut and transfer itty-bitty strips of type? Hard to believe I used to enjoy working with this stuff — I even became quite a dab hand with the proportion wheel pictured up top.        

David Bordwell has some advice for scholarly authors.

Where would Pulitzer Prize-winning music writer Alex Ross go if he had a time machine?

“The bus ride up is not for cardiac patients. I nearly shat myself four times in 20 minutes, what with the switchbacks and the crumbly one-lane roads with buses running two directions. Several times we inched painfully close to the ravine to allow another bus to pass, and I could stare straight down several thousand feet at the rusting carcasses of previous, less lucky buses. I can only hope the folks aboard died on the way down.”

Author and cult figure Ayn Rand was a huge fan of Charlie’s Angels. In fact, she wanted Farrah Fawcett to play Dagny Taggart if a movie version of Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged ever got off the ground. 

Frederik Pohl on the hazards of chemically assisted writing.

“Photographs of the novelist Kingsley Amis, taken between his fiftieth birthday in April 1972 and his death in October 1995, sometimes show a resplendent sheen on his forehead, nose, and cheeks. This is what some people call ’sweat alcohol,’ a common problem among heavy drinkers of shorts and beer. On both of the occasions on which I had the pleasure to meet this funny and distinguished man, he drank whisky throughout lunch and by the afternoon was wearing that slightly bewildered, slightly aggressive, slightly penitent expression known as the ‘Scotch gaze,’ a look familiar to all who have walked the streets of Glasgow or Aberdeen at closing time on a Friday night. It is an expression curiously unique to whisky drinkers. You can often tell a man’s tipple just by looking at him.”

Now that you know what bully sticks are, how do you feel about giving one of them to your dog?

Hanif Kureishi on the rigors of adapting his second novel, The Black Album, for a stage version.

Are you a female debut author whose book will be released from a major publisher between September 2009 and September 2010? Then you might want to join The Debutante Ball class of 2010.

There goes your afternoon

As time-sucks go, this list of The 50 Greatest Movie Trailers of All Time is formidable, even potentially lethal. Aside from Where The Wild Things Are, I can’t disagree with any of the choices. In fact, the trailers for Independence Day, The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield are textbook examples of trailers that create movies in the imagination that far exceed the actual films themselves. And am I the only one who thinks the trailer for Alien has a certain David Lynch quality? Right up to the moment the egg cracks open, the trailer looks like an outtake from Eraserhead.