Archives for August 2009

Happy Feast of the Decollation of John the Baptist, everyone!

(Photo, of course, is of the Mitsui original in my living room. Creepy Catholics!)

Amelia Lester, 26 Year Old Former Fact Checker, is the New Managing Editor of The New Yorker.

Sharp-eyed viewers will note that the sausage pizza shown under construction here is perhaps not as round as a hand-tossed pizza might be. The truth is that, while these photos do have the virtue of being unstaged, the dough-tossing shot is taken from a later pizza – there were six in all, made in honor of William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire, who had a birthday to deal with. The dough proved a bit sticky just out of the gate, and this first pizza was rolled only.

Story is here. Click to enlarge

“Mention art to a film magnate, and he will laugh in your face. ‘Listen, brother,’ he will say, after the guffaws have subsided, ‘the motion pictures are made for the square-heads out in Kalamazoo, not for the highbrows in Greenwich Village – and the square-heads want entertainment, not art.’ It is useless to argue that art may conceivably be entertainment; art, in Hollywood, is regarded as a dull, dry, esoteric and highly unprofitable property which is to be shunned religiously by all those who have the best interests of the exhibitor’s box office at heart. Charlie Chaplin is, and always has been, the living refutation of this absurd doctrine.”
– R.E. Sherwood, writing in Vanity Fair during the run-up to Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 film, The Gold Rush.

In other, rather more modern Vanity Fair news, the New Mexico Nurse sends word that the Summer of Death has claimed Dominick Dunne. Dunne was one of what is surely a dying breed – not just a journalist who covered celebrities, but a celebrity journalist.

At a certain point, sloth and self-loathing cease to be funny. Or as funny as they used to be, anyway. I’ve got a stack of things to read that has gotten silly. Gonna try to give a little of each evening to them. (He wrote, blogging at night…)

…but well, you see, Twin Peaks.

Me: If I lose my job, I think I’ll go to art school.

The Wife: How about business school?

For a person who ostensibly cares about language, I don’t read poetry as often as I should. It is difficult for me to pick up a volume of poems and say to myself, “Now I will read poetry.” I do much better when I happen upon it in somewhere – say, when the University of Iowa Press sends my wife a review copy of Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens, and I open the package while sitting on the steps in the front yard next to the herb garden and read one aloud to her as she picks tomatoes from the plants growing along the driveway. Oh, hey, here’s one by Robert Lowell…

…O that the spirit could remain
tinged but untarnished by its strain!
Better dressed and stacking birch,
or lost with the Faithful at Church –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
And now the new electric bells,
clearly chiming, “Faith of our fathers,”
and now the congregation gathers.

O Bible chopped and crucified
in hymns we hear but do not read,
none of the milder subtleties
of grace or art will sweeten these
stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square –
they sing of peace, and preach despair;
yet they gave darkness some control,
and left a loophole for the soul…

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.