Meaningless chi-chi and a climate

It's difficult to explain how good Mickey Rourke was before his scheduled disassembly commenced circa 1987. His Celebrity Big Brother casting was as redundant as the footage of the wreckage of the OceanGate Titan: the proof of how it ended gives no clue to how the pieces ever fitted together.

Over the New Year, Rourke was evicted from his La Jolla home which of course – of course – once belonged to Raymond Chandler. Between that alcoholic and this one, the house has collected black mould and US$60,000 in back rent.

Chandler famously was suspicious of La Jolla's "meaningless chi-chi and a climate" but promised his wife Cissy Pascal they would move to the coastal town above San Diego when he could afford it. That time came in 1945 after an onerous year of screenwriting for MGM which included $1000 a week to adapt his own novel The Lady In The Lake. (He despised the latter commission and quit after three months.)

Chandler is often quoted as saying La Jolla was "no place to live. There is no one to talk to, just old people and their parents" but conceded to The New York Times that it did have "the finest coastline of the Pacific side of the country, no billboards or concessions or beachfront shacks, an air of cool decency and good manners that is almost startling in California. One may like a free and easy neighbourhood where they smash the empty bottles on the sidewalk. But in practice it's very comfortable."

After Cissy died in 1954 Chandler fell into even heavier drinking. Following blackouts and a shooting incident reported as attempted suicide (he fired a gun into the ceiling) he sobered up long enough to instruct an agent to sell the house to the first bidder.

No one cares about these people now. You can read more in Tom Hiney's Raymond Chandler: A Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1997) and Raymond Chandler Speaking, edited by Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Hamish Hamilton, 1962).

Charlene

Ashley Judd talks about filming Heat:

'I remember in pre-production, there were these bank robbers, hustlers, formerly convicted people who hung around and who were hired consultants. I assume they were remunerated. They certainly should have been. They were lending their lived experience. And I remember this one in particular — I don't remember his name, but I remember his physique, his physical presence. He was gregarious and friendly. He wasn't overbearing, but he was lively and engaged. He and his cohort were the teachers, discussing the loyalty code within the crew. I remember, and I shared this with Michael [Mann] this morning, him kind of pulling me aside, and I wouldn't use this language today, but he said, "They're sociopaths."'

Tangerine nightmare

Daniel Lopatin's score along with the floating camera is the reason why watching Uncut Gems makes you feel like you're having palpitations. He got his start making music for ads:

"The consulting firm that hired me was always like, 'You're the man, do whatever.' I'd be like, 'Okay, cool.' They'd ask me to be myself. And then the brand would go, 'What is this? This is insane.'"

Baud

I spent Christmas painting a white ceiling white. Often when I'm redecorating I have the preemptive self-critical thought, so this is what I went to art school for. But this year as I was daubing matt white on matt white over white primer, I thought, actually, yes: this really is what I went to art school for.

"Fuck."

'What many now interpret as Kubrick’s exposé of elite perverts was, in fact, mostly [Arthur] Schnitzler’s doing. Eyes Wide Shut is an extremely faithful adaptation of Traumnovelle.'

The kids are rediscovering Eyes Wide Shut in the most stupid way possible and Lane Brown at NYmag.com is patient with them. It's an opportunity to come together (sic) over Uncle Stanley's Christmas gift to us all: Nicole at her hottest, Tom at his best, over-long sex ceremonies, and Nick Nightingale.

Refugees

Fred Vargas talking to The Guardian's Nicholas Wroe in 2008:

"Rousseau was my first love when I was 15. He was so criticised at the time when compared to Voltaire, whom I never liked. But in the French language, his writing achieved the most beautiful music." Since the 1970s, Vargas argues, serious literature has regarded stories as "slightly silly", forcing them to become "refugees" in the crime novel. "It has been a literature of narcissism about 'me and my family', 'me and my problems', 'me and my lover'. I'm sick of it, especially as Proust did this perfectly all those years ago. But when he spoke of himself, he spoke of the whole world. Most writers today just speak of themselves. And Hemingway's language is precisely the opposite of Proust in that it feels rougher, and while Proust could deal with the infinite smallness of life, Hemingway has the infinite hugeness of it."

Dream interpretation of a library

'AI models not only point some users to false sources but also cause problems for researchers and librarians, who end up wasting their time looking for requested nonexistent records, says Library of Virginia chief of researcher engagement Sarah Falls. Her library estimates that 15 percent of emailed reference questions it receives are now ChatGPT-generated, and some include hallucinated citations for both published works and unique primary source documents. "For our staff, it is much harder to prove that a unique record doesn't exist," she says.'

– Scientific American: AI Slop Is Spurring Record Requests for Imaginary Journals

'I have spent many pleasant nights imagining ghost books, those phantom texts of possibility and wonder. Their unprintable Dewey Decimal classifications divide them into (at the very least) three basic categories: books that can only be read once, books that cannot be read in one life time and the largest, aforementioned group, books that don’t exist.'

– Samantha Hunt, A Brief History of Books That Do Not Exist