Category: inspiration

Bill & Nada’s was an unassuming Salt Lake institution, a 24-hour diner [“we never close”] that sat on a downtown corner for decades, providing eggs & brains, pancakes with coconut syrup, hot coffee and a haven for folks who didn’t care for the uptight, corporate-flavored fuss of Denny’s or Village Inn.
While it’s been years since Nada passed away, Bill and his second wife ran the place until a few years ago; it closed down as giant bigbox retail stores moved into the neighborhood.
The December night Bill & Nada’s closed, I went through with my DV camera, documenting what details and ambience I could, for later reference. [I have a script somewhere about the restaurant]. I wanted to be able to recreate the counter, the booths, the big wheel, the murals [like the one above, Bill outfitted for a parade. He showed and rode horses a lot over the years.]
Far more interesting is longtime customer Bert Singleton’s Bill & Nada’s tribute website. He’s been collecting pictures of Bill & family, and of as many of the regulars at the counter as he can round up. He also has a picture of the place as it looks now. Apparently, the business that was set to take the restaurant site over never took off. Rather than being razed and erased from the map as people figured, the building has stuck around, now never open, a sad jog to the memories of the family of strangers who grew around it.

Bert’s page is always open. [billandnadas.com]
Previously: Bill & Nada’s Cafe

UCLA Medical Center is the epicenter of the Los Angeles basin or something. Robert Wise died there this week at 91.
In between editing Citizen Kane and flacking for Scorsese’s Gangs of New York [Scorsese was a big fan, so I’m sure it’s fine], Wise also directed The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Star Trek: The Motion Picture…
Not a super-auteur-y guy, but in a good way. The Hindenburg,he directed The Hindenburg….
NYT Obit / imdb / previous greg.org fawning

UCLA Medical Center is the epicenter of the Los Angeles basin or something. Robert Wise died there this week at 91.
In between editing Citizen Kane and flacking for Scorsese’s Gangs of New York [Scorsese was a big fan, so I’m sure it’s fine], Wise also directed The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Star Trek: The Motion Picture…
Not a super-auteur-y guy, but in a good way. The Hindenburg,he directed The Hindenburg….
NYT Obit / imdb / previous greg.org fawning

Finally, the business model for the ostensibly-aspiring-to-a- Subway-sized-franchise-empire rice pudding boutique on Spring St, Rice To Riches, is explained in a way even an MBA like me can understand: it was founded with proceeds from a $21 million sports gambling operation and used to launder the ring’s money.
[update: Amy at newyorkology spotted Rice to Riches as a location in Hitch, which may have been the shoot Lockhart Steele saw last May.]
Rice To Riches (and back to rice, I’m betting) [NYPost via TMN]
Lockhart Steele, the longtime Eliot Ness of Rice To Riches [google]

I’ve admired Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films since seeing Maboroshi at New Directors/New Films in 1995. His 2000 film, After Life and Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I were what finally stoked the fire under me to get me finally start making movies myself.
Of course, After Life‘s got much more recommending it than inspiring my ersatz film forays. It shows the development of Kore-eda’s highly evocative documentary approach to narrative fiction, for example, a technique he refined in the understated–and underdistributed–Distance.
This, combined with his expert direction of non-professional actors, resulted in the masterful–and Cannes-winning–performances by his child actors in Nobody Knows, which will be released in the US in January.
Anyway, it’s all reason enough for The Reel Roundtable to invite me to introduce a screening of After Life on Monday, December 6th, at the Millenium Theater. It’s part of the Roundtable’s Blogs and Film series, which is organized by the incisive and intrepid Elizabeth Carmody.
When: Mon., December 6, @7:30pm
Where: Millenium Theater (66 E. 4th St, betw. Second and Bowery)
How Much: $5
More Info: Reel Roundtable [Reelroundtable.com]
Who’s Crazy Enough To Ask My Opinion: Elizabeth’s blog at IndieWIRE
Related links:
Midnight Eye’s interview with Kore-eda.
Kore-eda’s official site.

Driving up the foothills to my mother’s house in Salt Lake City, you pass a nearly unbroken carpet of lawn, with the thickened, careful edges at the sidewalks that only result from successive generations of earnest teenage entrepreneurs. A couple of segments may be slightly paler than others, whether from mild chintziness, drought guilt, or extended vacation, but the pride everyone takes in their expensive land and expansive valley views is apparent.
Right before the turn, though, is an anomaly. A stunning–but not harsh, not at all–break in the manicured monotony. Technically, it’s in front of a house, so it’s a yard, but in place of the grass, there’s a riot of wildflowers and waist-high plants. A couple of old fir trees tower over the field, and yes, there’s a house, a driveway, a garage, all well-kept. There’s a feeling of wildness, randomness–and beauty, sure, amazing beauty, but dubiously uncontrollable–it looks, well, natural, which is unsettling.
And understandably so. Lawns–especially front lawns–are the verdant metric for judging your suburban neighbor’s wealth, values, community spirit, their character, their worth. And how are you supposed do to that if they don’t even have one?
Clearly, I had to ask my mom. Turns out the elderly couple had lived in that house for years. They were still listed as members of the Church (i.e., the one on the corner, to which well over half the neighborhood belongs), but they hadn’t been in years.
“Someone said she’d become a Zen Buddhist, or was studying Zen or something. They’re both in their eighties. She would be out there, working in that yard all the time,” my mom said. “Pulling out trees, digging out roots, rocks, I mean she worked to clear that soil.
“She was out there almost every day for more than two years. This is the first year it’s finally looked like that.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Then in April, she died.”
Laying up treasures on earth vs. treasures in heaven, etc. The Mormon in me recognized the sad lesson to be learned. But to a Buddhist, I thought, it’d be just fine.

I remember at college in 1989 a friend proposed to his girlfriend my singing her Depeche Mode’s “Somebody”. At the time this seemed supremely lame to me, mostly because it was from like 1984, three albums earlier. It was a high school song.
Now, though, and for several years, I’ve found “Somebody” to be quite a touching song. Touching, but not unaware that overly romantic notions of love can “make you sick”:

…But when I’m asleep
I want somebody
Who will put their arms around me
And kiss me tenderly
Though things like this
Make me sick
In a case like this
I’ll get away with it.

Of course, this is on the same album as “Master and Servant”; I guess what Martin Gore is trying to tell us is that relationships can be complex.

And when I’m awake
I want somebody
Who will put a ball gag on me,
whip me mightily,

I remember at college in 1989 a friend proposed to his girlfriend my singing her Depeche Mode’s “Somebody”. At the time this seemed supremely lame to me, mostly because it was from like 1984, three albums earlier. It was a high school song.
Now, though, and for several years, I’ve found “Somebody” to be quite a touching song. Touching, but not unaware that overly romantic notions of love can “make you sick”:

…But when I’m asleep
I want somebody
Who will put their arms around me
And kiss me tenderly
Though things like this
Make me sick
In a case like this
I’ll get away with it.

Of course, this is on the same album as “Master and Servant”; I guess what Martin Gore is trying to tell us is that relationships can be complex.

And when I’m awake
I want somebody
Who will put a ball gag on me,
whip me mightily,

Vladimir Nabokov’s son and translator Dmitri has sold his collection of his father’s books and memorabilia at auction. The Times has a poignant story about it. Many books contained marginalia from the author himself; most prized were those containing Nabokov’s expert and beautiful sketches of butterflies.
A few years ago, Roth Horowitz, a rare book dealer in New York, exhibited part of this collection. I bought a personal paperback copy of Pale Fire, one of the greatest books ever. No butterflies, though.

Since relaunching their website, Harper’s has been posting selections from their 140+year archive. For example, “Battle Gossip,” an 1861 column by Charles Nordhoff. In addition to vivid accounts of women in combat, Nordhoff writes about Napoleon III’s use of balloons for battlefield surveillance; correspondence with the enemy; and animals in war:

There are many instances of worn-out cavalry horses, sold out of the army and used in menial employments, remembering and obeying, years after, the sound of a regimental trumpet. At the battle of Waterloo some of the horses, as they lay on the ground, having recovered from the first agony of their wounds, commenced eating the grass about them, thus surrounding themselves with a circle of bare ground, the limited extent of which showed their weakness; others were noticed quietly grazing in the middle of the field, between the two hostile lines, their riders having been shot off their backs.