The Los Angeles Dodgeball Society and Ralph Macchio Fan Club's "1986 Ultimate Jr High Winter Dance Re-enactment and Ricky Schroeder Appreciation Night" was totally bitchin'. Especially the jello shots and the humpty hump.

Time for a Montage

LA Blogs asks L.A. bloggers to create a photo montage of their favorite places using the new A9 photo yellow pages.
Book Soup on Sunset

Susina's Bakery

The Huntington Library and Art Collection

The Arclight Cinema

The Greystone Mansion

Bar Marmont

The Biltmore Hotel

Farmer's Market

Merchant of Venice

Director Michael Radford's essay on "Shakespeare and the Jews" (FILM magazine)

Indie 103.1 Needs a Webmaster

This would be a fun gig. To apply you have to design an e-card for the Chemical Brothers.

Live Badly Drawn Boy

Stereogum has links to mp3s of BDB's set at a tsunami benefit.

Fiennery

I can't find a pic of it online, but the latest issue of Angeleno magazine has Joseph Fiennes on the cover. And something about him taking the high road to Hollywood. Mostly true, but for one exception.

At London's National Portrait Gallery

Goddesses and Others: Photographs by Madame Yevonde In the 1930s, Yevonde photographed society women as mythical Roman and Greek figures.

Crafty Cliffhanger

The always entertaining and insightful Michael Chabon writes about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Part 1 of his article Inventing Sherlock Holmes.(NYRB via Gawker.com)

"Awesome"

Work has me keeping posts short and sporadic (and nonsensical?) today... In Good Company is sweet and sappy and well worth seeing.

The Kumars at No. 42

Tomorrow night's episode features Helena Bonham Carter and Ismail Merchant. (BBC America)

Out of the Past

Luxury condos rise from the ashes of a haunted castle. ("Shadows on the Wall," NYT via The Morning News)

If you're having a bad day today

...it's not your fault. "Cardiff University tutor Cliff Arnalls says his formula proves 24 January is the grimmest day of the year." (BBC News via Ready Steady Blog)

Tsunami

A co-worker is working with a group of people in Sri Lanka to help the children who have been orphaned there. Here's the website.

Romancing the Tome

Love literary adaptations? From Horatio Hornblower's tricorn hat to Darcy's dip in the lake at Pemberley, Romancing the Tome is an extension of our obsession with the literary adaptation. Find out who bought the screen rights to The Lovely Bones and which hunky Scottish ghost will be starring in Beowulf.

Now We Are Here In Xanadu

Whitney Matheson (Pop Candy) interviews Michael Beck (who incidentally looked an awful lot like Heath Ledger) of the cult classic Xanadu ('80), which starred Olivia Newton John. My sister and I LOVED this movie. Memorable quotes from the movie include:

Sonny: I've come to take you out of here.
Kira: It can't be done. No one's ever taken anyone out of here. Not in the whole history of... the whole history!
Sonny: I'll make them let you go. Zeus! Zeus, you hear me?
Kira: Oh, God.

Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant?

So I watched the witty and wonderful film The Philadelphia Story again recently and I can see why it made sense at the time to have Katharine Hepburn's Tracy Lord choose ex-husband C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant) over writer Mike Connor (Jimmy Stewart). The film was released in 1940 and Cary Grant's dashing and wealthy C.K. Dexter Haven was a more appropriate and convenient (they'd already been married once) match for heiress Tracy Lord. I prefer the more passionate and complex Mike.

Film Trivia via IMDB:
Playwright Philip Barry based the character of Tracy on Katharine Hepburn's public image at the time. She'd left her previous studio, RKO, on bad terms, which only worsened her (temporarily) unpopular image.

James Stewart had no plans to attend the Oscar ceremony the year he was nominated for this film. Just before the ceremony began, he received a call at home "advising" him to slip into a dinner jacket and attend the ceremony. He did and he received the award for Best Actor. This was in the days before an accounting firm kept the Oscar voting results secret.

From Today's Writer's Almanac

"Le Misanthrope is widely considered to be Molière's greatest
achievement. In it, the character Alceste says 'I have the fault of
being a little more sincere than is proper.'" (Writer's Almanac)

Forget Skiing

These are the books I'm hauling to Mammoth this weekend:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ..."

Sally Beauman's list of the top 10 novels with a powerful sense of place includes Wuthering Heights, Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, and Bleak House. (Guardian UK)

Vintage Vixen

I just love these vintage frames. We used a similar pair for a rock-a-billy themed photoshoot. Allyn Scura collects vintage frames at flea markets and sells them here.

Hack Your iPod

Engadget has instructions on how to hack the iPod firmware so that you can change the disconnect graphic to something a little more..."you." (via Stereogum)

Thank God for Caffeine

He loves Interpol too. (Maisonneuve)

And here's a link to Interpol's Evil video. (via Hip Clicks)

Donna Tartt shows True Grit. (Guardian UK)

Tonight take a break from mourning (if you're a romantic) or rejoicing (if you're planning to snag him on the rebound) The Breakup Heard 'Round the World, by checking out The Powerhouse Theatre's Monday night storytelling events. All the buzz just made me want to watch a Brad Pitt movie. Luckily one of the 700 cable channels obliged.

Spanglish was melodramatic and unrealistic, but actually better than I expected. I wanted to see Joseph Fiennes in The Merchant of Venice on Sunday, but I didn't have a canoe.

Breaking News: Rich kids get allowances and like to shop!

Coming to a Theater Near Me

The New Beverly Cinema presents Kill Bill Vol I and II on 1/9, 10, and 11, I Heart Huckabees on the 12th and 13th, The Third Man and Citizen Kane on the 21st and 22nd, and Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence on the 28th and 29th.

Speaking of The Third Man, UCLA's Graham Greene film festival runs through January 23rd.

Boldtype Book News

Novelist Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) names Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, and George Eliot as his favorite authors. (The Scotsman)

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes contains more than 2,000 footnotes. (NY Times)

Both items via Boldtype's January issue.

New Year's Eve

at the Anon Salon/Sea of Dreams '05 party in the renovated Park Plaza Hotel which was built in 1925.

Just Right

It's been raining here in L.A. for what seems like weeks now (maybe it has been weeks?). Not that I'm complaining. I actually like the weather as long as I'm inside and how can I grumble about our temperate weather when others have lost so much? So, maybe you too have been reading fiction and nonfiction, catching up on your Netflix backlog, drinking hot chocolate, and practically surviving on those individual packets of instant Quaker Oatmeal. If so, it might interest you to know that The Chronicle has a guide (with recipes) to porridge around the world, from Chinese jook to chocolate champurrado from Mexico. ("Morning Comfort," SF Chronicle)

Umberto Eco

Today is author and medieval scholar Umberto Eco's birthday. The Name of the Rose and Foucalt's Pendulum delighted me when I read them in college and this year's The History of Beauty is on my wishlist.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

I liked this film so much that I saw it twice over the holidays. Here's the Salon interview with Wes Anderson. Update: And here's an essay on n+1 arguing that Life Aquatic is just too hipster to be any good. Of course Anderson's work is always lovingly punctuated by pop culture references, but for me the movie is built on the sweet, dysfunctional connections between the various characters. Then again, I'm not the jaded Brooklynite with a trust fund that Lorentzen is so familiar with, so I don't have the dubious pleasure of viewing the world from that perspective.

Christopher Hitchens, Slate Magazine:

Susan Sontag passed an extraordinary amount of her life in the pursuit of private happiness through reading and through the attempt to share this delight with others. For her, the act of literary consumption was the generous parent of the act of literary production.

Musings

I attended a wonderful, small dinner party in Santa Cruz last week (7 courses over a 7 hour period) where we played a kind of game with the nine muses. We each drew a muse out of a hat and then told a story related to that muse. I randomly drew Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, but according to this quiz my muse is Melpomene.


~Melpomene~
Your muse is Melpomene, the Songstress, the muse of
Tragedy. Her symbol is the tragic mask. There
could be several reasons she is your muse. You
could be simply fascinated by the dark and the
plethora of emotions that accompany any good
tragedy. You could also be depressed yourself,
in which case you might try working on making
Thalia your muse...


Which of the Nine Muses is your muse?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ice Princess

Elizabeth at Cupcake Series explains how Bjork helps keep her motivated.