This isn’t going to be a great year for Scientology. First the Tom Cruise divorce, and now this movie, which promises to do for L. Ron Hubbard what There Will Be Blood did for oil tycoons.
“So I thought I would have a go at exploring this world, setting it in a time and a place I knew and could evoke very well – my Norfolk teenage years. I happened to turn 16 in 1984, the year of the Miner’s Strike and the most recent Civil War in Britain, the workers versus Margaret Thatcher. Although the landscape I lived in was very different to the besieged North – all around the coast, like the flickering candles of a black mass were the flames of the oil rigs drilling North Sea Oil, which enabled the Witch Queen to keep herself in power. Because of the echoes of the past Civil War of 1642-1651 – when Norfolk was staunchly Parliamentarian, and riding on the coattails of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army came the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, who was said to have tortured and murdered 300 women in the Eastern Counties, including many in my hometown Gt Yarmouth – the year of 1984 had that resonance. In that year, one of my favourite records was Vengeance by New Model Army, which still seems to cast the clearest and most prophetic eye over what was happening then and what would come next…”
New York City a century ago, as chronicled in photos from the city Department of Records. The images range from disturbing (two would-be robbers who met their end at the bottom of an elevator shaft) to beautiful (an unidentified man looking at Manhattan from the George Washington Bridge). Most have never before been publicly available.
“I defy any writer to move to Paris and not be posing like Hemingway in a café within the first few months. I had that kind of Lost Generation love when I first moved to Paris. Actually, I wrote about this in an essay for the Huffington Post years ago, about the way that hanging out in cafés and pretending to be a writer like Hemingway actually did make me a writer. I wouldn’t necessarily have self-identified as a writer before I studied abroad in Paris. I was more of a reader than a writer. But I guess if you pretend to do something for a while, you realize that, oh, wow, that was just a way to do get to something that I guess I secretly wanted to do.”
“Eric Danville, author of The Complete Linda Lovelace, and a technical adviser on the Amanda Seyfried film, once asked Lovelace: ‘Why did you join up with feminists trying to ban porn instead of feminists trying to fight domestic abuse?’ Lovelace’s response? ‘The people fighting domestic abuse never approached me. Catherine [MacKinnon] was the first person to really approach me’ says much about how she led her life. Dance with the one that brought you.”
In which the pioneering rapper talks up a Los Angeles architectural landmark. Learn more about the Eames House here. Some of Ice Cube’s best raps here, here, here, and here. NSFW, unless you work at Death Row Records.
You know you want to hear Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” So what are you waiting for?
In which Frederik Pohl reminisces about the Battle of the Douchebag, the Battle of the 4-Color Border, and the night spent with Harlan Ellison on Long John Nebel’s talk show.
I couldn’t care less about the Emmy awards, but the nominees for “Outstanding Main Title Design” were pretty amazing. The design for Game of Thrones is my personal fave, but The Art of the Title has a rundown on them all. Beware: This beguiling site is one of the most fiendishly irresistible time-sucks on the Internets.
What All My Childrenhas in common with the Icelandic sagas.
“I don’t recall all the particulars of my first [science fiction and fantasy convention], but it was held in Baltimore at some point in the early 80s, I believe, and coincided with Poe’s birthday. I attended with a friend of mine. One high point was watching Fritz Leiber read ‘The Raven’ at Poe’s grave. One expected him, when finished, to open up a casket and crawl inside. Another was attending a panel that featured Stephen King, among others. He sat down with a brown paper bag, opened it, and pulled out a six pack of beer, which he proceeded to drink from as the panel progressed. I’ve often thought in the years since, when I’ve been trapped on hijacked or just plain boring panels, that I should have followed his example.”
So far this summer has been regrettably short on stories about killer sharks or giant squid. Fortunately, this 18-foot saltwater crocodile will suffice for the time being.
“The relationship between fathers and sons is always very competitive. I’m jealous of my kids too. As you get tired and get older, you see these kids having a great life, you think: fuck them. You’re furious. This is part of the difficulty of the relationship. Thinking about how much you hate your own children as much as you love them, and how much they hate you sometimes, and why all these things are intertwined is a crucial part of parenting. My Dad was very annoyed at my success, which he thought was undeserved compared to his own genius and brilliance. It was very smart of me to not take any notice of that and carry on working and allow him to live with his own failure, which was very difficult for him.”
When people say they don’t like Ernest Hemingway’s work, they usually mean they don’t like his carefully cultivated man’s man image. That’s understandable, but it’s not exactly fair to Hemingway’s work — or, for that matter, to Hemingway himself, as Clancy Sigal reminds us.
“The real problem is the dickishness of our mainstream political analysis, especially from the ‘savviest’ practitioners. Back during my days as media critic, I argued in Breaking the News and a related Atlantic cover story that the laziest and ultimately most destructive form of political coverage came when journalists seemed to imagine that they were theater critics or figure-skating judges. The what of public affairs didn’t interest them. All they cared about was the how.”
When I heard the premise of the new “children’s book,” Go the F*ck to Sleep, I laughed long and loud, which was appropriate — the book is a steam-release valve, as anyone who’s raised children will recognize. Unfortunately, the book is out in the world now, and as such becomes fodder for columns by the humor-impaired.
“I imagined taking a knife and cutting into the earth, opening it up, an initial violence and pain that in time would heal. The grass would grow back, but the initial cut would remain a pure flat surface in the earth with a polished, mirrored surface, much like the surface on a geode when you cut it and polish the edge. The need for the names to be on the memorial would become the memorial; there was no need to embellish the design further. The people and their names would allow everyone to respond and remember.”
“Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken.” No, dude, how about you imagine it and leave the rest of us out of your sexual fantasies. That sentence, penned by NYT winger columnist David “Babbling” Brooks, is only one of a selection of genuinely weird observations taken from Brooks’ new book, The Social Animal.
