July 2008
8 posts
I just went to see the revisited Brideshead Revisited and for the life of me couldn’t until halfway through place the actress playing Julia, until it dawned on me that she played the troubled sister in the BBC mini-series of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which was itself sort of a Brideshead Revisited for the Thatcher era, though it was political power rather than Catholicism...
As I’ve taken to rolling my own cigarettes again (times be hard!), I was kind of hoping that the usual shifty passers-by who try to cadge a smoke would, noticing me laboring over mine like a hobo or an itinerant ranch hand, be less inclined to pointedly pester me for one. I would be wrong. And this I suppose is why I’m an optimist.
The Fred Schneider Covers Project
I’m in the midst of rebuilding my iTunes library, and as such I ended up adding one of the more dismissed albums of Madonna’s post-millennial career — American Life. (Though, really, which album released in the last eight or so years that is the most reviled is debatable.) Anyhoo! Listening to the title track, I for a moment wished she’d outsourced that dreadful rap...
Apropos of Nothing...
I’m reading Kathleen Turner’s memoir/autobio Send Yourself Roses. It is everything you want it to be. (If everything you want it to be means that she references playing Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” throughout and dishes on her co-stars and generally comports herself like a screen icon from a bygone era: imperious, vainglorious, magnanimous and...
Pet peeves, I haz them! Number 1, 233: employees who feel the need to clean around you. Say you’re at a Starbucks or a Pret a Manger — establishments that would like you to buy into the delusion that they are more than mere “fast food” joints but come on let’s not pretend otherwise — and inevitably, as you are adding some cream and Splenda to your coffee or...
I was in the 7-ll trying to buy some sundries (cereal, milk, beer) and had to skate around a creepy guy blocking the register, with Dee Snider hair and Buddy Holly glasses and ripped jeans. He’d bought a Snapple and was arguing with the clerk about whether or not he could use the bathroom there.
He points to my beer. “Brooklyn Lager, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“They...