In tonight's unbelievable traffic mess. I was one of the lucky ones who made it out of McLean in about half an hour and was home in Arlington in about an hour. The Northwest Passage and going backward helped. Right through the mall, people. Any one know what caused it tonight?
Yesterday's lede on Charlie Meyerson's Chicago Tribune Daywatch. I'm sure the production ROI isn't there, but I hope Daywatch lives forever.
Of two barbershops set in a small Argentinean town, which one would you visit? The shop where the bashful barber's beautiful wife stared at you lustfully yet scornfully, or the other one? Explain why, and tell us what you think would happen next. Nothing or something?
The amount of story packed into Guillermo Martinez's two-and-half pages of "Vast Hell" is worth your time today (if you didn't read the piece when it was first published two months ago) if you in any way love barbers or women or mystery. The story's title is explained in its epigraph, "A small town is a vast hell. –Argentinean proverb."
"It felt desperate, it felt like need, desire, and want all sprouting up from the cold earth. It was to me, very much what it is to have a deep, wounding crush. There was something very human about it, those look-at-me fruit begging to be taken."
Ada Limon's poem "Crush" appears in the New Yorker summer fiction issue, and it's a good one. "For starters," she writes at one point, "it was all / an accident, you / the right branch / and a sort of light / woke up underneath / and the inedible fruit / grew dark and needy. / Think crucial hanging. / Think crayon orange." Just as cool is that Googling her leads to her Blogspot blog, where you find her happy over the publication and then linking to a thoughtful S.F. Examiner interview about the poem. That's where I found the opening quote here, with Limon discussing the persimmon tree metaphor in the work.
Same with this one: "Yes, it is very much a love poem. It is, however, not a traditional love poem. I wanted to convey desire, physicality, sensuality, but then I also wanted the poem to have a sense of denial of touch, of distance. In the final lines, I wanted the poem to move beyond the great uncomfortable 'want' of love and move more into the love of letting go, the love that goes beyond desire and opens into that universal hum. I wanted the tree/speaker to start to move on, to move away, but with that one last offering always remaining."
Over and over again. Louis Menand on creative writing workshops, with a lesson more widely applicable to creative process explorations, such as innovation: "I don't think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make."
The NYT uses one strange metaphor about Karl Malden.
His finest, strangest and most heartbreaking performance came in "Baby Doll," in which he plays Archie Lee Meighan, the dull-witted, sexually frustrated (to put it mildly) proprietor of a decaying cotton plantation who is driven around the bend by the caprices of his child bride (Carroll Baker) and the machinations of a wily business rival (Eli Wallach). The film, like "Streetcar" a collaboration between Kazan and Tennessee Williams, is a pungent hothouse, ripe with free-floating eroticism and Southern Gothic motifs. That Mr. Malden seems so manifestly out of place in this environment — baffled, earnest and sweaty, a can of tomatoes dropped into a flower garden — is exactly what makes him so perfect in the film, which depends on his anxious, uncomprehending discomfort.
… write about toasters. Be the guy in England who's making a toaster from scratch. How from scratch? He starts by mining the materials, with the aid of an old miner and an abandoned mine. Then he has to smelt. "For example, my first attempt to extract metal involved a chimney pot, some hair-dryers, a leaf blower, and a methodology from the 15th century…" This attempt fails, so he uses a microwave. The tale goes on, at one point prompting the question, "So are toasters ridiculous?"
Not as ridiculous as writing a NYT column titled "Attack of the Toaster Oven" when no such thing happens in that column. So disappointing.
If you missed the cool story in Saturday's Post, don't miss the video.
I've never been to a ballet and I'm not sure how I would like one, but I love this quote from the Bolshoi's Natalia Osipova, 23, about breaking away from her stylistic typecasting in Don Quixote: "I danced Kitri, Kitri, Kitri all the time. I could dance this ballet now if you were to wake me in the middle of the night. I wanted to do something diametrically different… I desperately want to suffer on stage."
It comes to The New Yorker from Ballet magazine, which got it from an interview on a Russian ballet site's message board. Incorporating but in a way going beyond ballet's specificities, the entire original makes for an interesting deep-dive into a professional's craft. A great part:
You showed a very naturalistic heart attack, and your mad scene was truly frightening…
I received four text messages during the intermission, one of them from my mother. They were all asking if I was alright. I was really hysterical in the mad scene. I don't quite remember what my arms and legs were doing. In the final moments, just like Giselle, I couldn't see anything anymore.
Sony digital media team, way to expose yourselves.
I'd wondered whether the Springsteen camp would use actually use @springsteen after taking it from a quality-tweeting and clearly-not-impersonating fan. The camp impressed me some in June by managing a few tweets. While viewers knew it wasn't Bruce — fans with common sense instantly ruled that out — the feed made no first-person claims.
But we learned today through a screw-up that it's not even the Bruce camp doing the tweeting. This afternoon brought a fresh tweet, "The pre-sale for my added Honolulu show starts tomorrow…come and see us! http://bit.ly/180eHX Password: Evolver" and I immediately clicked. Springsteen in Honolulu? I'd never been to Hawaii, and Bruce would've been a great excuse to go. The short link, however, brought viewers to the pre-sale for John Legend's Honolulu show. I clicked around TM's site to see if there was a different pre-sale and the link was mistaken.
But no. @springsteen immediately updated, "Sorry folks…please ignore that…I'm not coming to Hawaii soon…!" and deleted the mistake tweet.
A slightly different version appeared in Legend's first-person Twitter three minutes later. Sony #fail. While I'm a huge fan of both artists, I was disappointed and not surprised. The Bruce pre-delete screencap:
