Hustler of Culture
The Eastern Columbia Building in Los Angeles figures prominently into the pilot episode of Moonlighting, which I was watching this evening with my friend Amy. We were both enamored with it’s gorgeous facade so I set about looking it up and stumbled upon the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles which doesn’t seem to give tours even though I might insist. The San Francisco Art Deco Society has regular tours as does Chicago.
How about your town?
Prom Night in Kansas City (2002): "Proms are the first institutionalized attempts we get in live to mythologize ourselves."
Notes: Documentary about a Kansas City filmmaker who returns to her hometown and follow a roup of high school students as they prepare for their proms. Short but well executed and exquisitely researched (who knew the prom was created as a Debutante Ball for the common folk?). Accomplishes a lot in 60 minutes.
"I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks."
—Daniel Boone (via The Writer’s Almanac)
The New York Times’s Holiday Movie guide got me thinking:
I haven’t seen nearly enough movies in the theater, nearly often enough.
So I’ve got half a mind to see a movie every day in the month of December. Crazy, perhaps, but I just might.
One of the most brilliant articles I’ve read on our reading future in quite a long time.
The technology boosters think of themselves as saviors of a hopelessly
backward humanity, while grim-jawed Luddites are bracing themselves for
an apocalyptic cultural collapse involving “the death of literature”
rather than simply the death of print’s dominance. Both camps in the
Print Wars rely on a similar and false sense of crisis. Human beings
crave and adore absorption in narrative. The delivery mechanism for
thinking entertainment can be pressed into clay, carved in stone,
repeated from memory around a fire, incised on scrolls, illuminated,
printed, typed, Xeroxed, acted out, filmed, animated, YouTubed, Second
Lived, IMed, blogged, or beamed from Earth to Mars and back again on
handheld screens. The problem for short fiction is that novels grab
what’s left over after the movies, cable, and online media.
Yes, yes and more yes. Much to think about as I prepare for an upcoming presentation. Also, who is J.M. Tyree and can I be his new best friend?
Political humor, my main man Baratunde notwithstanding, ain’t really my thing. But I think this has a certain kind of lite genius to it.
And because I’m not very smart, I thought the singer was Jill Sobule (via Buzz, Balls and Hype).