"Would 'Clockers' even be published right now?" [Richard] Price wondered out loud. He told me he set the new novel in 2008 because it was a period in New York, and in the world, that he better understood: "There was less policing of language. There was less of a sense that you can't write about this. You have no right to write about this." He wanted to write about a time in which his impressions of Harlem were just forming. "It gave me a little freedom."
Richard Price's Street Life by Kevin Lozano, The New Yorker
(What does your instructions say about your purpose?)
My music player continues to be stalked by The Bear. Poker Face fell off in the second season because writing Columbo isn't as easy as the kids thought it would be and I still enjoyed it, but season four of the Chicago or whatever restaurant series fires the same crack pipe of emotion, story and soundtrack of the first three. There will be a fifth apparently, and it can be the same and that will be fine. 'Diamond Diary' and 'The Chosen One' in the same ep, fk srsly? All signs point to yes.
Ana Marie Cox runs the numbers on Substack:
The Substack bust will not just take out a few hot-take merchants and media dilettantes. It’s going to take down a lot of working journalists who’ve built modest, sustainable incomes as well as the fragile public sphere we’ve been piecing together in the ashes of Twitter and the twilight of traditional journalism.
Eloise Wood on authors getting voted down on Goodreads before they're even published:
"I had a one-star rating for a book that hadn’t even been seen by my copy editor."
Scientists have recreated the "lost" pigment of Egyptian blue, hsbd-iryt.
The human-created pigment made blue objects possible throughout the Mediterranean region. Ancient Greeks wrote about the varieties of the pigment, including natural philosopher Theophrastus (in his On Stones) and Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History). Later, Roman artists would also used the pigment in mosaics, frescoes, and architectural projects. But with the fall of the Roman Empire, the pigment fell out of use, and by the Renaissance, the recipe was all but forgotten.
So what do we do now? My argument is that you should be taking bets on these little lottery-ticket shows. I believe in my heart that no one can predict what the culture wants, so you have just as good a shot of having a "hit" with us as we've seen with something like Squid Game, which was a cheap acquisition, or Baby Reindeer, which cost nothing. We're seeing these things work.
-- The reliable Mark Duplass interviewed by Nicholas Quah at NYMag.com.
I just know that the world is going more insane. One consolation, one good part about getting much closer to the grave than to the cradle, is that the feeling of being a speck in the universe, which we all are, doesn’t bother me one bit. I never, ever thought I’d outlive civilization! Which I think I’ve already done. And it feels great!
-- The great Nick Tosches interviewed by Rob Tannenbaum for The Paris Review.
It was such a community back then. I felt like right when I got exposed, and the whole indie movement got exposed, it also got co-opted by the studio system, and then it became this other thing. All of a sudden, I wasn’t viable to get a movie financed, and it was such a head trip because I would have to audition for Hollywood movies when I’d carried the lead in independent movies that were shot in 23 days.
-- Parker Posey via a podcast and a magazine.
DUCHAMP: I think painting dies, you understand. After forty or fifty years a picture dies, because its freshness disappears. Sculpture also dies. This is my own little hobbyhorse, which no one accepts, but I don't mind. I think a picture dies after a few years like the man who painted it. Afterward it's called the history of art. There's a huge difference between a Monet today, which is black as anything, and a Monet sixty or eighty years ago, when it was brilliant, when it was made. Now it has entered into history-it's accepted as that, and anyway that's fine, because that has nothing to do with what it is. Men are mortal, pictures too.
-- Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne (Editions Pierre Belfond, 1967).
The Sounds is a new collection of six short stories out now on digital.
The title track which first appeared in Landfall was the germ of the idea for Blue Hotel. Osome would eventually become Departure Lounge. Dream Machine Winona is an on-the-road narrative about a painter who's feeling beat, told in flashes, as per the device in the title. Invisible is about a snowed-in crypto trader in Paris, whose friend disappears along with the rest of his world. The Dog is an idea I had for a horror movie: a sort of family camp Crystal Lake. Vacancy is about a crime scene technician, Georgia, and a motel resident who checks out.
All now available as a single unit you can carry around on your phone.
An indictment was unsealed today charging Malone Lam, 20, of Miami, FL and Los Angeles, CA, and Jeandiel Serrano, 21, of Los Angeles, CA, with conspiracy to steal and launder over $230 million in cryptocurrency from a victim in Washington, D.C. Lam, a citizen of Singapore who goes by the online monikers “Anne Hathaway” and “$$$”, and Serrano, who uses “VersaceGod” and “@SkidStar”, were arrested last night and are appearing in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida and the Central District of California, respectively, today.
"I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in."
"To me, art is not therapy, and there's no catharsis. It's not cathartic to do something like this film, for me... that's the reality: you will suffer, and it won't go away. Doing the movie was more because, as an artist, you tend to shape your experience of life into some kind of art, and that's your impulse to do that."
– David Cronenberg interviewed by Isaac Feldberg at rogerebert.com
"The idea that my filmmaking has always been cold was the critique of The Shrouds. I never felt that I was making cold films. I always wanted to avoid sentimentality and cliched emotional hooks, but cold? There are one or two critics who've jumped on that. And I ignore them, of course."
Jim Jarmusch's generous Interview Magazine interview with one of the greatest filmmakers of all time is here.
