May 23, 1934
This day in 1934 Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow was shot dead by Texas officer Frank Hamer and his posse on a back country road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.
It probably weren’t much like in the movie.
Cooper’s and my friend Allen was just writing to tell about the 1936 Texas Centennial, staged in Dallas.
“One of the attractions which impressed my father, who at that time was 13, was the bullet-riddled death car of Bonnie & Clyde.”
How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.
Disney applies for ‘Seal Team 6′ trademark
The Walt Disney Co. has applied for a trademark on the name “Seal Team 6,” the name of the unit of specially trained Navy SEALs that killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Pakistan earlier this month.
(Eh, thanks, Allen.)
The cfsiii Fight Card
in conjunction with
SMITH AND SMITH PUGILISTIC ENTERTAINMENT
are proud to present the
BIGGEST SUPERCARD SINCE SLICED BREAD!
(which is a very long time)
Come one come all to
CLUSTERSTOCK
heavyweights |
|
East Anaheim Junior High Spelling Bee Finalist Telephone, TX |
Frank Sinatra Look-Alike of the Year ’82 Hoboken, NJ |
bantamweights |
|
FBI’s 23rd most wanted El Paso, TX |
Eunuch Singer Ypsilanti, MI |
super welterweights |
|
Poops at will Kingston, RI |
Colo. Brazillian Jiu Jitsu champion Fort Collins, CO |
featherweights |
|
Little Miss Panhandle ’92 Tallahassee, FL |
Presidential Physical Fitness Award Winner Fort Wayne, IN |
cruiserweights |
|
Bareback rodeo clown Schenectady, NY |
Canadian Canada |
Dick Cavett Interviews Lance Loud (circa 1973)
Rick spoke of Lance Loud, made famous by An American Family, a cinema vérité series shot in 1971 and broadcast by PBS in early 1973. Here is Dick Cavett interviewing Lance not long after the series aired.
unless you want it on vinyl
A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?
Made, pt 3.
A small casting room in a casting studio in Hollywood. 30 or so girls per day, (Update: culled from over 1,000 submissions.) Three hours in a row, three days of casting and one day of call backs, next week. Girls come in, hand the casting director their headshot/resume stapled together. I smile encouragingly and try to say something nice about their shoes. They all tell me where they bought their shoes, and it helps a little bit. A few girls are incredible. Some people make my mind wander. They all try, and I feel for them. I can’t imagine being an actor, given 2 minutes to impress a host of people you don’t know, who can’t know who you are.
Watching 18 people in a row do a scene about my dying grandmother was more internally upsetting than I had anticipated. As was the scene I wrote about the boy who never loved me in college. As was the scene about how vastly different the lives are of the girls I went to school with. I watch these girls be me, to me. I wonder if they are a lot like me, as they talk. Is she as sad as I felt? Does she understand? I hardly can decide before we have to move on, but it’s okay, all on film, all ready to be seen again, a steady stream of possible me’s, to talk to the three other me’s in the movie, to be directed by me. It seems silly to feign ignorance of process at this point, but I had no idea.
I laugh at my own jokes, every time. It’s funny to me, every time. I turn to the line producer and ask her when it’ll stop being funny. I sound like a jerk.
you cannot experience it all
Seriously, you can’t, it’s impossible, so just stop trying, and surrender to the goodness you do see:
Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.
Let’s do you another favor: Let’s further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we’ll assume you’re willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.
Of course, by the time you’re 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you’re dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You’ll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory … I hope you weren’t planning to go out very much.
Photo Out of Context
Rearranging The Bookshelf
Bravo.
Two Weeks with Love
It was fun today having lunch with a friend at the suburban lesbian bar and watching part of Two Weeks with Love (1950), starring Jane Powell, Ricardo Montalban, and Debbie Reynolds.
The Robinson family, father, mother and two daughters, are spending two weeks of summer vacation at a resort in the Catskills. Older daughter Patti vies with her friend, Valeria, for the affections of Demi Armendez but Patti is at a disadvantage because her father thinks she is too young for boys. But with Patti singing at an amateur show and a dance, her adventures in quest of Armendez end happily.
Note to Deron: Two weeks of summer vacation at a resort in the Catskills.
Speaking of weird
The Iowan remembers numbers. Someone will say, “What was my address and my number on the Upper West Side in 1985?” He remembers. “Okay, what about Jill’s parents’ number when we were living in London in 1977?” Same result. The funny thing is the Iowan is not very good at math. I do better calculating the everyday stuff in my head.
But it gets weirder. As a grade schooler, Mr. Boudreaux had a password for something I was helping him with, an online computer game maybe, I can’t remember exactly. I asked him for the password. He reeled off a long list of numbers. “Are you reading those from somewhere?” I asked him. No. Okay, make up another one. He dictated something, which I wrote down, then had him repeat the sequence. He did it easily. “Are you seeing those numbers in your mind?” I asked. He said no, it was just something he could do. This aren’t special numbers, birthdays, etc. His laptop, for instance, has a password that is a long list of random numbers.
I can barely remember my own telephone number and address. I’m not sure I have a specialty. How about you?
stay classy Rush
The Japanese have done so much to save the planet. He’s right. They’ve given us the Prius. Even now, refugees are still recycling their garbage, and yet Gaia levels them [laughs], just wipes them out. Wipes out their nuclear plants, all kinds of radiation. What kind of payback is this? That is an excellent question. They invented the Prius. In fact, where Gaia blew up is right where they make all these electric cars. That’s where the tsunami hit. All those brand new electric cars sitting there on the lot. I like the way this guy was thinking. It’s like — it’s like Gaia hit the Prius in [inaudible]. It’s like they were in the crosshairs, if we can use that word, it does. What is Gaia trying to tell us here? What is the mother of environmentalism trying to say with this hit?
The A to H of Anti-heroes
Witty and fun article by director Richard Ayoade, wherein he discusses the various anti-heroes that sprang to mind when making his film Submarine.
Three seconds later I’d decided upon a theme (antiheroes – because the main character in Submarine is sort of an antihero – thank you, muse!), scribbled it on a Post-it note, staple-gunned it to the pigeon and catapulted it back out into the world. Only later, as I watched the dear creature struggle to remain airborne across my moat, did I make a mental note to continue the rest of this correspondence by email. Within months the Guardian Elders had located an internet cafe, set up a Hotmail account, and successfully “logged on”. Needless to say, as soon as they worked out how to open my email, they were blown away by my antihero brainwave. After a lengthy back and forth about how much racism I could in principle use, I called in my regular ghostwriter and sank into a deep, erotic sleep.
You all should see Submarine when it comes out. I reviewed it here, and it has a June release date. (Also, Richard Ayoade is one of the nicest and most casually eloquent individuals I’ve ever interviewed, I remember beaming when he dropped the word “obstreperous” like it warn’t no thang.)
Salman Khan’s TED talk
I don’t usually post TED talks here, because if I did, then I’d be tempted to post all of them.
This is an exception, because it absolutely needs to be heard:
EDIT: The Khan Academy website can be found here. Just read through the course listing if you want to be stunned.
You are listening to Los Angeles
Okay. My 24/7 soundtrack. Ambient music and live LAPD police radio.
(Thank you, Mr. Ledgerwood.)
Guitar Ensemble: “Our Kindergarten Teacher” (Kindergarten of Ch’ŏngam-guyŏk [Ch'ŏngjin-si, DPR Korea])
I don’t know what to say about this.
Scott Thompson: Interviewed by Jesse Thorn on “The Sound of Young America”
Thompson on his KITH character Buddy Cole:
It was mostly really queenie guys that were most upset with me. They were like, I can’t believe that you’re always playing gay men like that; I think it’s very insulting and stereotypical. I would be like, why don’t you play your voice in a tape recorder and listen to it, because they’re ridiculous. People were in denial. It was such a polarized time. AIDS was ravaging the gay community, so there was no room for humor. Everything was so deadly serious and earnest and it was life and death, and I think I was seen by a large proportion of the gay community, particularly the Mandarins – - and I love to use that word – - who lorded over the movement as sell out, or the Uncle Tom, or the enemy. To this day it’s still painful for me, because for me I’m like, wait a second, what’s wrong with being effeminate, number one, and number two, lots of gay men are effeminate! It’s crazy! No matter how many weights you lift, you still carry your books like a girl. Grow up! Get a grip! Accept it! I think people were in such a – - it was such a terrible time that Buddy Cole was seen as the enemy. At least Buddy is sexual, he was not neutered, he was never a neutered gay guy. And he was smart! He’s smarter than I am. That queen up until then – - they were always stupid and you laughed at them, and you never laughed at Buddy, Buddy was always in control. He was an alpha queen. I couldn’t understand it; to this day I think they were dead wrong.
A great interview.
As Part of my Funemployment…
I’ve been watching this. I never knew this show existed until today.
Baby Trashes Bar
Oddly enough, this makes me want to have children.
Miss Lucy Foley, up-and-coming diva
Lucy (and Ross! and some friends of theirs) had a gig in NYC on Friday, at which they Tore. It. Up. I commemorated the occasion with a bunch of wobbly pictures. Fortunately, Lucy’s so gorgeous and has such poise that either of my cats could have taken a whole roll of good ones of her.
Once again, ladies and gents, you can hear and buy Lucy’s album, Copenhagen, at lucyfoley.com. So how about you go do that?
Image Out of Context
Actually, I’m not sure context will help anyone.
Mrs. James McLurdy
in front of a structure strung with small animal figures at White City amusement park. Chicago Daily News. 1905.
What more is there to know?
White City was located at East 63rd Street and South King Drive (formerly South Park) in the Greater Grand Crossing community area of Chicago, Illinois.
(Library of Congress/Chicago History Museum.)
Harry Nilsson: “Pussy Cats” Promo
Bored Enthusiasts
Or, rather, boredom enthusiasts:
Boring 2010 sprang to life when Mr. Ward heard that an event called the Interesting Conference had been canceled, and he sent out a joke tweet about the need to have a Boring Conference instead. He was taken aback when dozens of people responded enthusiastically. Soon, he was hatching plans for the first-ever meet-up of the like-mindedly mundane. The first 50 tickets for Boring 2010 sold in seven minutes.
“I guess the joke is on me,” said the laid-back Mr. Ward. “I’ve created this trap and there’s no way out.”
Proceedings at the sell-out event were kicked off by Mr. Ward himself, who discussed his tie collection at great length, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation He noted that as of June 2010, he owned 55 ties, and 45.5% of them were of a single color. By December, his tie collection had jumped by 36%, although the share of single-color ties fell by 1.5%.
“Ties are getting slightly more colorful,” he noted. Also, apparently, his taste was improving. By December, only 64% of his ties were polyester, down from 73% in June.
As a man who finds himself staring at a coffee shop wall with a book in front of him for more than four hours a week (when not on the internet), this, in particular, makes complete sense to me:
“We’re all overstimulated,” said Ms. Lee. “I think it’s important to stop all that for a while and see what several hours of being bored really feels like.”
