August 2011
20 posts
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Franchising the Stones: a new thought experiment.
Like a lot of people, I believe the Rolling Stones would probably have been best served by breaking up sometime in the late 1970s, probably right after Some Girls. This isn’t a controversial statement, really — I am sure “Start Me Up” and “She’s So Cold” have their defenders, but there are not a lot of people that would mourn the sudden disappearance of...
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More of your neighbors and fellow citizens,...
“The day is coming soon when there will not be single person left in the Western world whose personal flaws and failings have not been used to photographically illustrate a concept on Wikipedia.”
“A male receiving a wedgie.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedgie
“These children, playing in a public space, vary in their proportion of body...
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“The plot of the German film is virtually identical to its American cousin. It...”
– My essay for A Bright Wall in a Dark Room on the secret East German origins of Top Gun is probably the silliest thing I have ever written and, therefore, the best.
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Encyclopedias and aptitude.
There was a short interview with me in City Pages this week, and they asked for some childhood influences. One of them:
Another thing was the Scholastic New Book of Knowledge Encyclopedia, which my parents bought from an honest-to-god traveling door-to-door salesman in the early 1980s; he was the last of his kind, I’m sure. Those kept me occupied for hours.
Prompting this email from my...
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Professional development.
As a person active in the world of visual art, you are often called upon to greet other art world acquaintances from New York City or Europe. This is usually really lovely, but there is often one minor difficulty: many times, they will want to kiss you on the cheeks.
Now, look: I like kissing people on the cheeks. I like kissing people, period. I am a supporter of kissing in all of its many...
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"At least 2007."
I was writing something the other night that required me to make up things about Revenge of the Nerds / Top Gun / E.R. actor Anthony Edwards (among other people), so I did the first thing you do when making up things about people that aren’t true but seem like they might be true, which is look up the person’s Wikipedia page. This way, you can ensure the things you’ve made up fit...
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Mountain food for French snobs.
My family update from several days ago failed to include any word on Nate. I spoke to him this weekend, and he recently told me about a high point he’d just achieved in his career as a cook. The restaurant where he works, in the half-gentrified, half-geriatrified Germantown neighborhood of Louisville, recently introduced a dish he developed, Georgia Brown pork trotters stuffed with bacon...
