Crazed Teacups

Stevie G. Kicks Ball, Ass

He may be the captain of Liverpool.  He may be the vice captain of the England squad.  But nothing Steven Gerrard has done has ever impressed me as much as this 20 second clip.  (And I don't care if he tried it 100 times and they're only showing two tries in the video - it's still cool.)

To see it on a bigger screen, click here.

"Bananas, as Weapon against Hitler"

I just finished a book called Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler.  It's the first in a series of books about Detectives Bryant and May in present day London, looking back on the beginning of their careers when they were solving cases during the London Blitz.  The plot is outlandish, and I got tired of hearing how unorthodox one of the detectives was, while only getting to see his alleged unorthodox methods in action a handful of times.  But the author seemed to be having so much fun that I couldn't help but enjoy myself.  I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but I will try the second book to see if Fowler worked some of the kinks out from the first.

At the end of the book is an alphabetical list of notations made by the unorthodox detective about the case.  Every entry refers to a line or an incident in the book, and encapsulates some of the wit and silliness that made me like this book, despite its many absurdities.  A sample:

Abyssinians, for purposes of ventriloquism

Architect, incomprehensible explanation by

Armitage, Maggie - price charges of ectoplasm clearance

Ability to use harpsichord as boiled egg-slicer

BBC, hilarity caused by bombing of

Davenport, Farley - emotional constipation of

Dwarves, gigantism of

Landladies, unlikely swordmanship of

Lithuanian botanists, incidence of vampirism amongst

Thwaite, Olivia - floral solution to prominent nipples by

Perhaps if I ever get my own customized fortune cookies like the ones I wrote about in the previous post, I'll ask for all of the above to be inserted as fortunes.

Confucius Says

According to an article from Serious Eats, below are some actual fortunes that elementary school kids wrote and stuffed into custom fortune cookies for a school fundraiser. 

A big whale falls from the sky and squashed you until you’re pretty much dead. Not completely dead, but pretty much.

In five minutes, you will be attacked by a pear. It will eat you because you were going to eat it.

There’s a lake with a unicorn sitting in short grass. The unicorn will sleep; you will get dragged deep in the forest.

You are a donkey.

Shaquille for Real

Here's a great story (thanks, David) about two people who followed Shaq on Twitter, answered his tweet to meet up at the '5 and Diner' in Phoenix, and found him there alone.

Returning to our hushed whispers I asked Sean, "Should we go talk to him now?"
"I don't know, should we?"

"Yes, you should" a very deep voice entered our conversation from 2 booths over.

You know what's even better?  The story Shaq's waiter had to tell:

"He ordered like 20 dollars worth of food" the kid stammered out, obviously thrilled to be talking about it, "And he left me a 160 dollar tip. Then he asked for a Sprite and gave me forty bucks for it."

 

"A Mass of Histrionic Gingerbread"

Tonight I happened to catch the end of East of Eden, a movie that I probably haven't seen in 15 years.  For a while, I preferred it to Rebel without a Cause, but the more I watched Rebel, the darker and more powerful it became. 

I love James Dean.  My most beloved shoes in college were a pair of Jack Purcells that I bought just because he wore them in the photo above.  But I haven't watched one of his movies in a few years, so this was kind of fun.  (I've seen Rebel quite a bit; East of Eden a few times; Giant only once, because of its length and Dean's comparatively minor role.)

I know that Marlon Brando is his obvious predecessor, but Brando's emotion expressed itself in too much anger and violence for me to relate to - or, in a sense, even want to be near.  The energy he brings to the screen makes me nervous in the same way that being out on 6th Ave and 8th St in the Village late on a Friday night used to make me nervous - there's a hint of something wild.  You just get this feeling that anything could happen.

Montgomery Clift was an emotional actor, too, but in a different way.  Although similarly expressive, he was less animalistic, more calculating than Brando.  Where Brando might've punched someone, Clift would've plotted revenge.  But Clift had an actorly polish, and a more formal bearing than Brando or Dean. 

Dean came down in the middle.  He had the physical looseness of Brando - his movement in films that are 55 years old still looks like the way lots of kids walk and talk today - and like Brando, his characters (all three of them) struggled against their circumstances, caged, unable to progress or articulate their needs.  But Dean, like Clift, navigated his confusion internally and tried to plot a way out.  Dean was a lover, not a fighter, but like Clift, he had no problem rising to the occasion if he had to.

So when I finished watching the end of East of Eden tonight, I looked up its entry in wikipedia and saw a quote from the NY Times calling Dean's performance "a mass of histrionic gingerbread."  I found the full review, and it appears that one Bosley Crowther said the following:

James Dean is a mass of histrionic gingerbread. He scuffs his feet, he whirls, he pouts, he sputters, he leans against walls, he rolls his eyes, he swallows his words, he ambles slack-kneed—all like Marlon Brando used to do. Never have we seen a performer so clearly follow another's style. Mr. Kazan should be spanked for permitting him to do such a sophomoric thing. Whatever there might be of reasonable torment in this youngster is buried beneath the clumsy display.

Oh, dear.  Since he died in a car crash not long thereafter, you can't really say that James Dean had the last laugh, exactly, can you?  But audiences certainly recognized the realism in all of that ambling and leaning and eye-rolling, so his legacy remains in tact.  So what, I then wondered, of Bosley Crowther?  His wikipedia entry is an interesting one, too, detailing his sensitivity to "movies with social content" and his opposition to McCarthy, HUAC and "stridently patriotic movies." 

This is the line that really killed me.  Of Lawrence of Arabia, he said it is a "thundering camel-opera that tends to run down rather badly as it rolls on into its third hour and gets involved with sullen disillusion and political deceit."

Lawrence of Arabia is, of course, another one of my favorites.  But I have to admit - this guy could turn a phrase.

Be Glad Your Commute Doesn't Pass Through Abbey Road

Photo of the Day

  Sage advice from jennysbakeshop

Can Herc Come to My House?

Feb. 16 is interesting in my word-of-the-day calendar:

 

Augean stable - a condition or place marked by great accumulation of filth or corruption

Used in a sentence: Ulysses S. Grant's presidency was marred by his failure to clean out the Augean stables of his own administration.

 

I'd never even heard this phrase before, but I like it, especially because they chose it for Presidents Day.  (By the way, Augean is pronounced with a 'je' sound, as though Augean would rhyme with 'dodgy and'.)  Here's their description of the origin of the phrase:

 

"The mythical Augeas, king of Elis, kept great stables that held three thousand oxen and had not been cleaned for 30 years before the job was finally assigned to Hercules, who caused two rivers to run through the stables.  The word 'Augean' is also sometimes used by itself with the meaning 'extremely difficult and usually distasteful.' We can refer to 'Augean tasks,' 'Augean labor,' or even 'Augean clutter.'"

Cinema Paradiso

Kim's Video once represented everything that I loved about New York - its diversity, its culture (both high and low), its ability to accommodate (and thus encourage) all sorts of interests.  It was the first video store I knew of to organize their titles by director, and their library seemed vast and overwhelming, but in the most pleasurable way.  

It seems that Kim's has fallen prey to the Netflix phenomenon (our own Videorama itself just closed for good on Friday), so it's had to close, but there's an interesting twist to the story.  According to the NY Times, Kim himself offered to donate the entire collection to someone who could:  "Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others." 

So where is the Kim's collection ending up?  In a small town in Italy called Salemi, where "an art critic and onetime anarchist" is mayor, a Benetto photographer is the "alderman of creativity", a prince was put in charge of town planning, and a "performance artist was officially declared alderman to nothing."  Follow the NY Times link above to read this crazy story.

Quote of the Day

When I was casting “Diner” in 1980, Mickey Rourke came in for an audition. He hadn’t done any films yet, and I was looking for certain characteristics: I wanted a guy who didn’t look like the “Grease” version of the ’50s but like a true ’50s man, like the guys I grew up with. Boogie, the character Mickey was reading for, was a hairdresser but kind of tough, and very smooth with women. I remember Mickey coming in and leaning against the doorjamb and, immediately, sensing this mix of toughness and vulnerability. There was a fragility that was part of Mickey’s nature, and that combination of strength and fragility impressed me. If you met him back then, you knew immediately that this kid had something very special, that he might define the next generation of actors.

- Barry Levinson on Mickey Rourke in the Sunday Times magazine.  If you were ever a Mickey Rourke fan, the phrase "Mickey coming in and leaning against the doorjamb" probably instantly conjures up a very recognizable posture.