Category: Uncategorized

greg and the rest of the .org gang are on a bit of a trip this week, back on Monday. You can stare at the screen all you want, but there are no bloopers, and there’s no silly coda after the Kodak credit fades.

I’m going to be traveling in Japan for a couple of weeks, with no computer (^o^) that’s a Japanese shocked emoticon. If they have the “internet” over there, and it doesn’t involve a lot of phone-typing, I’ll keep in touch.
In the mean time, keep reading and re-reading the Gabriel Orozco thing, I guess.

Three may be a trend, but four makes it a regular feature. I’m going to start collecting protest tips, fashion, and celebrity profiles in the runup to the RNC. Come September, greg.org could become a veritable InStyle magazine of Republican Convention protesting, the must-read bible for the protesting lifestyle.
Today’s installment is a 2-for-1.
How Russell Simmons would protest: Let photographer Glen E. Friedman post Linkin Park and Bronski Beat lyrics in the windows of a loft he owns overlooking the WTC site.
how boingboing’er and NPR-jockey Xeni Jardin would protest the Republican Convention: by promoting another event as an alternative, like, say, a phonecam photo exhibit she curated.
Other How’d They Protests:
Louis Malle
Me

Three may be a trend, but four makes it a regular feature. I’m going to start collecting protest tips, fashion, and celebrity profiles in the runup to the RNC. Come September, greg.org could become a veritable InStyle magazine of Republican Convention protesting, the must-read bible for the protesting lifestyle.
Today’s installment is a 2-for-1.
How Russell Simmons would protest: Let photographer Glen E. Friedman post Linkin Park and Bronski Beat lyrics in the windows of a loft he owns overlooking the WTC site.
how boingboing’er and NPR-jockey Xeni Jardin would protest the Republican Convention: by promoting another event as an alternative, like, say, a phonecam photo exhibit she curated.
Other How’d They Protests:
Louis Malle
Me

You know how, in The World According to Garp, Robin Williams buys a house right after a plane crashes into it, because, hey, what are the odds of that happening again?
If you ascribe to a Garpian worldview, I invite you join me on Server30 at totalchoicehosting.com, where you’ll now be safe from DOS zombification and 5-day reconfiguration of all your websites.
Of course, then your mother would only five years older than you, and that s#*& is just (%!$ed up, man.

— and crying, because we bought the last bottle of Kosher for Passover Coke at the Safeway.
Why? Because on Saturday morning, while all the Jews slept in their beds–with their appliances turned off–NPR broadcast a story about the little batch of Coke made with actual sugar instead of the Archer Daniels-Midland-preferred corn syrup [note: creepy link], and, in a fit of manufactured nostalgia, all the goys in town emptied the shelves of this sacred beverage.

A Wednesday night visit to the West 46th Street spa supported both the guidebooks and the women’s accounts. Face down on a massage table, a reporter found it hard to even notice whose hands were at work.
But when asked in Spanish, the masseuse said her name was Rosa, she was 19 and from Ecuador, and she had lived and worked there for a year and a half, seven days a week, for $300. That day, she had started at 10 a.m., and said she might finish at 2 a.m.
“It’s hard,” she said.

—Women Complain of Hellish Life at Upscale Spa, by Nina Bernstein, NYT

The Japanese word for neighborhood is kinjo, which transliterates as “place nearby.” Did Nick and Meg and co. have this in mind when they launched Kinja? Who knows?
I’m trying out Kinja Digests as maps to online neighborhoods where my site and my attentions can be found: film and filmmaking weblogs and the mutually admiring community of (mostly New York) weblogs who introduce me to much of my news.

It is well known that polygamists were big fans of healthful eating. Thus, this recipe from the Seven Wives’ Inn in St. George, Utah* for the most excellent granola I’ve ever had:
8 c. old fashioned oats
1.5 c brown sugar
1 c almonds (or more, to taste)
1 c raw cashews (or more, to taste)
1 c coconut
1 c sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, or a mixture of both
1.5 c wheatgerm
0.5 c water
0.5 c vegetable oil
0.5 c honey
0.5 c creamy peanut butter
2 t vanilla
1-1.5 c raisins or craisins (optional)
Directions: Stir to blend: oats, sugar, nuts, seeds, coconut, wheatgerm. Combine water, oil, honey and pb in saucepan; bring to boil, stirring until pb is dissolved. Pour over oat mixture, stir to coat thoroughly. Place in a single layer on 2- sprayed 10×15 pans. Bake at 200F for 60-70 min. Cool. Stir in vanilla and raisins. Store in airtight container or freeze for longer term storage (e.g. Second Coming, Apocalypse, etc.).
* In southern Utah, locals call the readily identifiable polygamists on the street or in the store by the vaguely pejorative “polygs.”

Yeah, Jimmy Fallon said so, too, but dude. Bill Murray.
[Morning-After Correction: upon review the tape, Mr. Murray’s full quote should be, “Well, I thought you were funny. I laughed at all that stuff that no one else got.”
…
Did I tell you I met Jimmy Fallon?]
Related: Gawker’s clearer-eyed play-by-play.

GreenCine finds a hi-larious pair of entertainment news stories on IMDb Friday: A new biography of Robert DeNiro tells about his unsuccessful pursuit of the young Whitney Houston, but that’s not the half of it.

Horseshoes and hand grenades? Feh. These days, some people think close counts in WMD’s and the war on terror. Alls I know is, after a week of editing in 15-minute stints (interspersed with crying and diaperchanging and bottlefeeding), close counts on stylesheets, too.
Beyond the cleaner integration of long-form Features and filmmaker interviews, MT brings addition of categories, which will make recurring themes and topics a little easier to follow.
Chief among these: production diaries, development notes, and news for each film project
Whether it pays for yachts for my coke-head grandchildren, gets my ass sued by Conde Nast, or prompts simple UI improvements on the magazine’s website, one feature I’m interested in watching is This Week in The Magazine, aka New Yorker Magazine Database. If you’ve ever wanted to write for the NYMDb, your chance is coming soon.
Anyway, let me know what’s wrong, what’s missing, etc. And if you have particular expertise with 1) archive pagination and 2) category-specific template tweaking, don’t be shy. I’ll be here.

What with this excellent batch of folks joining Persistence of Vision (whose August 2003 posts earn her the Irving Thalberg Award for Lifetime Achievement in Blogging), Typepad is fast becoming the go-to URL for film-related weblogs:

Out of Focus

Cinetrix’s Pullquote

Filmbrain

The deceptive losers of last weekend’s national elections in Spain are now threatening to sue Pedro freakin’ Almodovar for “slander and calumny.” Apparently, Almodovar told a movie audience that, yes, he’d heard the rumors flying around the country’s mobile phones that Pres. Aznar might stage a coup if he lost.
Related: Deceptive loser Richard Perle finally backs down from his threat to sue Sy Hersh for slander, climbs back into his spiderhole even though it might generate publicity for his book. [look it up yourself. I’m not going to link to it. Psycho.]

Finally, a conflation of religion and commerce I can believe in: St. Eric of Blacktable’s The Cult of Diet Coke.
A glorious bit of Good News, indeed, but it’s an incomplete testament. Sure, they mention those voices crying in the Diet Coke-ist wilderness, the “fine folks at AspartameKills.com.” But Blacktable insidiously omits any mention of the Great Satan of Aspartame, the CEO of pharma-giant Searle who lobbied for FDA approval of the WMD we now worship as Nutrasweet, Donald Rumsfeld. All hail our new Aspartame overlords.
On a more personal note, Diet Coke (in the less patriotic, French form known as Coca Lite) played the role of comic relief in my first film, Souvenir (November 2001). [pause that refreshes] The protagonist’s search for a WWI memorial runs parallel to his search for Coca Light in the countryside of northern France.