‘Calvin & Hobbes’ On Christmas
I’d say about 75% of the genesis of my sense of humor can be traced directly back to obsessively reading C&H as a child.
Merry Christmas.
/via this isn’t happiness
Shitter Was Full! An Oral History of ‘National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation’ →
Galecki: One day John Hughes, Jeremiah, Chevy and I were sitting around waiting for a scene to be set up, and Chevy said, "There's always been kind of a man-to-man scene between Clark and Russ in the previous films — a coming-of-age scene. But there isn't in this one." John mentioned that he had something like that in an initial draft, and Chevy said, "We should consider putting that back in." So they asked what I thought and I said, "I don't think there's any point. Somebody thought it was worth taking out at some point, so even if we shoot it, it'll probably get taken out again." I literally talked myself out of what could have been a classic scene with Chevy Chase. Now that I'm a jaded Hollywood fuck, I realize the error of my ways. I still kick myself in the ass for this everyday.
Chase: Now Galecki's making 100 million a year and I'm sitting here.
A little something to get you in the mood for Christmas Eve.
/via Daring Fireball
How a Homeless Man Spends $100
I don’t know who Josh Paler Lin is, and part of me is certain I’ll feel like a fool in a few days when this video is exposed as a fake, but you know what? It’s a couple of days before Christmas. I’m going to just choose to be a believer for once in my wretched life.
/via Devour
‘Up North’ by Charles D'Ambrosio →
Charles D’Ambrosio, The New Yorker:
Caroline brushed her hair free of a few tangles and clipped it back in a ponytail that made her look a decade younger—say, twenty years old, taking her back to a time before I’d met her. Perhaps in reflex I remembered the sensation I’d had the first night we slept together, thinking how beautiful she was, how from every angle and in every light she was flawless, like some kind of figurine. Now she examined herself in the small round mirror she’d pulled from her purse, grimacing. The shallow cup of the compact looked to be holding a kind of flesh dust, a spare skin. She dabbed powder around her cheeks, the set line of her jaw. She took a thick brush and stroked a line on either side of her face, magically lifting her cheekbones. She traced her lips lightly with a subdued shade of red and suddenly she was smiling.
“Up a ways there’s a fork,” she said. “You want to stay right.”
Before I could start the car again, two men in orange caps crossed in front of us, rifles slung over their shoulders. They stopped in the road and waved, the ears beneath their caps like pink blossoms in the raw cold, and then they bumbled into the woods. I stared at their fresh footprints in the snow.
“You know them?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
Technically, this is a Thanksgiving story, but I think it works equally well if you’re looking to wallow in the overall despair of the holiday season.
‘Serial’ Sucked and Wasted Everyone’s Time →
Diana Moskovitz, The Concourse:
I know what it feels like to run out of reporting, because I have run out of reporting. It happens to crime reporters all the time. Your boss tells you they've saved a 15-inch hole on 1B for the story, but you've only maybe six inches of copy. The witnesses aren't talking (this happens to Koenig). The cops aren't talking (this happens to Koenig). The victim's family won't speak (this happens to Koenig). Here's the backwards relationship of all crime stories: The minute it happens is when most people want to know everything, but it's also when you know the least about what happened. So you plug. You describe the people crying, the blood splatter, the evidence strewn across the ground, the sounds of the tears, the tagging of the bullet shells, the sheet strewn across the body, how wide an area the cops taped off, even the weather. You talk about what you don't know: the questions the cops won't answer, the stoic silence of the family, the open-ended questions that naturally exist in these situations. The fancy term for this is "reporting with your eyes." Sometimes, these details do come in handy later. Other times, you look back on the story and go, "Yeah, I just had to fill."
I don’t quite agree with Moskovitz; podcasting as a medium got a big bump from Serial. But other than that, I couldn’t agree with her more.
Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State →
Matthieu Aikins, Rolling Stone:
Back at Hekmat's house, I ask his uncle Mirza Khan if he'll show me the results of his harvest thus far. He returns with a polyurethane bag the size of a soccer ball and hefts it onto the carpet. He unwinds a thick rubber strap, and a sour, vegetable odor fills the room. Inside is a mass of raw opium, with a rich brown color and a moist texture, like pulped figs. It's about 10 pounds, a half-acre's yield. "If I'm lucky, I might get 60,000 kaldar for this," he says. That's about $600.
"Do you know how much this is worth on the streets of London?" I ask him. He shrugs, and I make a quick calculation. Ten pounds of opium can be refined into a pound of pure heroin. Cut it to 30 percent purity and sell it by the gram – that's 1,500 grams at a hundred bucks a pop. "This is worth over $150,000."
That's a 25,000 percent markup. We stare at each other for a moment, and Mirza Khan gives a chuckle. He shakes his head in amazement. A future hundred grand sitting in the living room of a guy who doesn't have plumbing, electricity or furniture. Someone between him and that junkie is clearly making a killing.
While Rolling Stone should—having committed many sins lately—be ashamed of their web design and the amount of ads and cookies that attempt to run in the background of their site, this story is too important not to link to. We’re at a very important point in history re: Afghanistan right now. It will be inviting, as new terrors emerge, to forget about what we spent more than a decade doing, and then undoing, there. This piece shines some light, tries not to let that happen. I heard about it during this Fresh Air interview with the author, which is also worthy of a listen.
Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’
It was with near-delirious joy that I realized a couple of nights ago that, despite the 1/6/15 release date of the Blu-ray, Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’ was now available for purchase ($15) through your V.O.D. portal of choice. I can’t recommend this film enough. If you’ve already seen it, here’s a couple-three neat links:
-On WhatSong, a complete list (and I mean exhaustive) of every bit of music played during the movie, with an option to play most tracks through Rdio.
-And speaking of Rdio, I compiled the sixteen tracks on the official soundtrack into a playlist.
-The above picture is from this NYTimes Magazine article.
A Simple Graphic Timeline That Totally Explains ‘Interstellar’ →
Well, when you look at it like that...
Slate’s List of the 25 Best Podcast Episodes Ever →
David Haglund and Rebecca Onion, Slate:
How exactly does one judge a carefully crafted story that took weeks to report and put together but is only 15 minutes long against a 90-minute two-man back-and-forth full of digressions and absurdity with no real point? Well, you just do, basically. Which is better, The Simpsons or The Wire? I have no idea, but they’re both TV shows, and that’s a fun argument to have. When it comes to podcasts, we’re 10 years into a vivid, crucial artistic medium. The time to have such arguments has arrived.
I find the idea of this list to be preposterous (the authors do as well; it’s the thesis of their introduction, in fact); I’m not even sure you can make a list of the twenty five best episodes of WTF (spoiler alert: the no. 1 episode on this list is an episode of WTF). But I’m linking to it because it might serve as a gateway for those looking to get into podcasts in general. I do, after all, regularly listen to eleven of the twenty five shows represented here, so I guess they got something right.
Except for Ricky Gervais, of course. Rick Gervais anything just plain sucks.
Livin’ Thing: An Oral History of ‘Boogie Nights’ →
Alex French and Howie Kahn, Grantland:
Philip Seymour Hoffman
A bunch of us visited a porn set one day.
Nicole Ari Parker
It was a female director running the shoot, really a tough cookie — a former porn star, I think. She was a real serious director in jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap giving the actors direction about positioning. It was a very authentic film shoot except for the two people having sex, doggy-style, by a pool.
William H. Macy
She looked like any director I’ve ever worked with. She had X amount of hours to shoot X number of pages, and she had that same frantic gait. And the actors are sort of la-di-da, having a grand old time, you know, not worrying about the clock. Looked like any other shoot. It could have been Masterpiece Theatre.
I know, I know. Oral histories. It feels like there’s a new one every week. But this is one you should make time for. I mean, you could quote from this thing for days:
William H. Macy
This is what happened. Ricky Jay stops me and I said, “Listen, do you mind, I’m a little distracted. There’s a guy with his dick in my wife’s ass.” And that was take one. And then a second take, I said, “My fucking wife has an ass in her cock.” And Paul said, “You said, ‘ass in her cock.’” And I said, “Oh, I did? Sorry. Ha, ha, ha.” So take three, I think I did it right. Take four, he said, “You said it again.” I said, “No, I didn’t. I didn’t. I’m sure I didn’t.” He said, “You did.” I said, “I didn’t. I’m pretty sure.” We did another take. And then when I saw the film, he’d decided to use the “ass in her cock.” And that’s the genius of Paul Thomas Anderson.