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Tuesday, July 22, 2003
When I lived in LA, I often passed lovely summer evenings just driving around - up the coast, to the Fairfax district, anywhere really. There's something so seductive about gliding through that time of day just after the sun has gone down, when the sky is still just light and there's that sudden delicious few degree drop in the temperature. Tonight, on the way to the Safe-Way (see below) I realized I don't do that much here. Part of it's just circumstances. There's the hellacious commute - after 80 miles on 880, I'm not much up for gliding. And it's year round: in LA, my work schedule was erratic and there were weeks at a time with little to do (and little money to do it with). And then there's the LA thing.
But part of it has to do with how different my relationship to the world is here. Working on a film, you're outside a lot. Except when you're shooting on a sound stage, a substantial part of your day is liable to be spent outdoors - you not only shoot outdoors, you stand around a lot outdoors, you often even eat outdoors, even if the set itself is inside. And you're all over the place. In the course of things, all these different places you shoot acquire a kind of solidity - the world is your office and you're out in it. Driving around seems a normal extension of that: in a weird way, all of this belongs to you.
People sometimes ask me if I miss working in the movies. I miss that.
posted by jeev |
9:47 PM |
 
Okay, there was that flirtation with purple ketchup a while back. I wasn't pleased, but it was ketchup. Now, however, they've gone too far. I was just at the Safe-Way and right at the end of the ice cream isle where anyone could see it there was a display of Hershey's chocolate syrup. Green Hershey's chocolate syrup.
Have they no shame?
posted by jeev |
9:22 PM |
Sunday, July 20, 2003
I'm not a huge fan of Michiko Kakutani (more of a Margo Jefferson kind of woman, actually), but she really nailed A. Scott Berg's weird "part biography, part memoir; part hagiography, part pathography; part affectionate tribute by a friend and fan; part name-dropping exercise in voyeurism" Kate Remembered. Apparently Berg started out to write a Hollywood novel, but then decided instead to cast his material as a memoir of Hepburn alone. The result, as Kakutani points out, is a mess: The confusion over exactly what Mr. Berg would do with all the material he'd gathered as Hepburn's confidante is very evident in this volume. The remnants of his Hollywood novel � reportedly based around the idea of his friendships with both Hepburn and Irene Selznick � can be seen in this book's odd, self-dramatizing digressions that seem to have little to do with the subject at hand and that are reminiscent at times of David Plante's memoir "Difficult Women" (about that author's relationships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer). Mr. Berg rambles on about his relationship with Selznick, discussing what she liked to eat for dinner and her determination to die on her own schedule. The fact that Berg has a Pulitzer and a National Book Award made me hopeful about the quality of this book, despite the unseemly haste with which it was released. Then I read it. I am hopeful no more.
Read the whole review (if you don't want to register, use "formyfriends" for login and "writethis" as password).
posted by jeev |
3:30 PM |
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