. . . go shopping for a turkey.
Monthly Archives: November 2012
LA DOLCE VITA
Jae, suit, Harley — the frontiers of Las Vegas style.
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LLOYD’S MODERN LIFE: OMELETTE
My friend Jae took off his suit coat but not his tie to make some omelettes for dinner last night. He takes omelettes very seriously and is an expert at preparing them.
In this thrilling video footage he rejects a first effort because the eggs weren’t setting right. He went on to produce two sublime examples of the dish, with chives, shallots, spinach and cheese.
AND GOD CREATED WOMAN
ZOMBIE WATCH
The Church Of England voted this week not to allow women to serve as bishops. This is the church’s way of saying, “We are a rotting ambulatory zombie corpse — someone please put us out of our misery.”
Kindle pricing by the publishing industry is the industry’s way of saying, “We are a rotting ambulatory zombie corpse — someone please put us out of our misery.” (With thanks to Ray Sawhill . . .)
I just paid a premium price of $17 to see a moderately entertaining movie on a modestly-sized IMAX screen. This is Hollywood’s way of saying, “We are a rotting ambulatory zombie corpse — someone please put us out of our misery.”
AN LP COVER FOR TODAY
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200,000
Just passed 200,000 visits to the blog since it rebooted on 3 April of this year. Thanks to all who’ve come by to have a look.
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SUITS
My friend Jae arrived last night from New York for Thanksgiving. He said he had decided to wear a suit the whole time he was in Las Vegas and got off the plane wearing one. This is probably the weirdest outfit you can wear in Las Vegas, unless you’re a card room manager. Naturally I will be wearing a suit while he’s here, too.
We headed straight from the airport to my local, McMullen’s Irish Pub (above), for some food and some Newcastle Brown Ale on draft (eat your heart out, PZ.)
Just got a message this morning that Jae was out at EagleRider, renting a motorcycle for his stay. This marks the official start of his traditional Thanksgiving dream vacation in Las Vegas.
SHOCKING
A LINCOLN KIRSTEIN QUOTE FOR TODAY
People say they want to be happy. I’ve never been happy, I’ve never known anyone who was happy. What are they talking about?
TRY A LITTLE TENDERNESS
He is gentle, as all real men are gentle; without tenderness, a man is uninteresting.
— Marlene Dietrich on Ernest Hemingway
AN LP COVER FOR TODAY
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FARMER’S DAUGHTER
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VIEW FROM THE REAR WINDOW
Fellow blogger Tristan Forward sent this amazing time-lapse conflation of all the shots in Rear Window taken from the protagonist’s rear window. It reminds us that Hitchcock didn’t just go to great lengths to make his protagonist’s apartment an interesting space to inhabit, cinematically — he went to equally great lengths to vary and enliven the POV shots looking out from that space.
BLU-RAY
Blu-ray is to DVD what vinyl is to CD — that is, it offers an incremental increase in quality that somehow takes the viewing or listening experience into a new realm. Vinyl sounds more like live music than a CD can, Blu-ray looks more like a projected 35mm print than a DVD can.
The Blu-ray quality is more important for some films than for others — beautifully lit films with shots composed in depth, like The Searchers, take your breath away on Blu-Ray.
It makes a great difference with a film like Rear Window, much of which takes place in a single room. Hitchcock works hard, through lighting and composition, to make that room seem like an interesting place to be confined. It feels bigger and more inviting when seen in a Blu-Ray presentation, offering the compensations Hitchcock counted on for limiting his male star’s presence to one relatively small space.