January 2011
19 posts
wolfe with an e
It is late December, the last few days before Christmas, and I’m staying at The Jane hotel in New York for four nights while we shoot the ending to a film that we worked on in LA over the summer. It’s called Wolfe With An E, directed by David Zuckerman, produced by Michael Hekmat, written by DZ and Mandy Kahn. It’s about the musician Henry Wolfe, but he’s a mysterious...
starlings
“An introduced species is a species living outside its native distributional range, which has arrived there by human activity, either deliberate or accidental. Famous examples include the introduction of starlings to North America by an Englishman called Eugene Schieffelin, a lover of the works of Shakespeare, who, it is rumoured, wanted to introduce all of the birds mentioned in ...
overheard in hollywood
RUNYON CANYON
Four young women out for a gentle hike; one is a white nanny with a pushchair containing a brown baby. The other women coo over the child and ask, “So, is this her second baby?” “Yeah,” says the nanny. “So, what, did she like RETURN the other one?” “Yeah.”
A young white guy, maybe about 25, has been monologuing at his female friend...
levellers
Many years ago I started having singing lessons from a wonderful kind-hearted woman. I was younger and shyer then, and was immediately attracted to her generous philosophy. She told me that everybody has a voice, everybody can sing, and if they don’t sing in tune, well, maybe they’re singing a different tune, and that’s fine. I had lessons for some time and she taught me well....
Drew Barrymore on phone sex
“It was just a thing you try, like wearing orange for a while”
a tommy cooper joke for you
And the back of his anorak was leaping up and down, and people were chucking money to him, and I asked, “Do you earn a living doing that?” He said, “Yes, this is my livelihood.”
why is the dog called lucky?
Midge Ure’s house on the island of Monserrat had to be rebuilt after a termite infestation, after which it was promptly blown away by Hurricane Hugo. He restored it a second time but it was then destroyed by a volcano which had sleeping for 400 years. He bought his parents a thatched cottage in Devon, which caught fire. Twice.
Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN What an appalling philosophy that sounds! To attempt to classify you, Mrs. Cheveley, would be an impertinence. But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays. MRS. CHEVELEY Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both...
GOOD HAIR DAY
A few years ago, Hillary Clinton stepped onto a podium before Yale’s graduation class to make a speech. “The most important thing I have to say,” she told her eager audience, “is that hair matters. Pay attention to your hair. Because everyone else will.”
(Here she is making the speech)
IT'S NOT EVEN WRONG
The nuclear physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say of unsolicited student theses: “It’s not even wrong”, as if to suggest that being wrong would at least mean it was in the approximate area of being right.
recent readings
Just finished a novel called Room by Emma Donoghue, written in the voice of a five-year-old child trapped in one room with his mother all his life - no, honestly, it’s amazing. I was claustrophic at the start, but not by the end. He makes the spaces wider. Also recently finished Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which taught me everything I ever wanted to know about New York in the 60s and 70s,...
the loneliness of the long-distance GPS user
My lowest point of 2010: When I had been on so many flights for so many days that I had completely lost track of which city I was flying to. So I got off the plane, walked into the terminal with the other passengers, and then panicked internally. As they headed for baggage reclaim I instead dived straight into the ladies loos, locked myself in a cubicle, sat on the bog, and got my Blackberry...
September 2010
1 post
dead men's bones
I spend a lot of my life in what Brits call charity or junk shops, and what Americans call thrift stores. In England you go to Oxfam or the British Heart Foundation; here in LA you go to Goodwill or Out of the Closet, (which my friend Ki and I call The Aids Shop, because we are five.)
Anyway, I’ve been a repeat offender in charity shops since I was about 13 and developed an obsession with...