Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Long form quote of the day

I sure wish I could write like this:

     "I looked at my watch and this high-powered publisher was already twenty minutes late. I would wait a half an hour and then I would leave. It never pays to let the customer make all the rules. If he can push you around, he will assume other people can too, and that is not what he hires you for. And right now I didn't need the work badly enough to let some fathead from back east use me as a horse-holder, some executive character with a paneled office on the eighty-fifth floor, with a row of pushbuttons and an intercom and a secretary in a Hattie Carnegie Career Girl's Special and a pair of those big beautiful promising eyes. This was the kind of operator who would tell you to be there at nine sharp and if you weren't sitting quietly with a pleased smile on your pan when he floated in two hours later on a double Gibson, he would have a paroxysm of outraged executive ability which would necessitate five weeks at Acapulco before he got back the hop on his high hard one.
     "The old bar waiter came drifting by and glanced softly at my weak Scotch and water. I shook my head and he bobbed his wine thatch, and right then a dream walked in. It seemed to me for an instant there was no sound in the bar, that the sharpies stopped sharping and the drunk on the stool stopped burbling away, and it was just like after the conductor taps on his music stand and raises his arms and holds them poised.
     "She was slim and quite tall in a white linen tailormade with a black and white polka-dotted scarf around her throat. Her hair was the pale gold of a fairy princess. There was a small hat on it into which the pale gold hair nestled like a bird in its nest. Her eyes were cornflower blue, a rare color, and the lashes were long and almost too pale. She reached the table across the way and was pulling off a white gauntleted glove and the old waiter had the table pulled out in a way no waiter ever will pull a table out for me. She sat down and slipped the gloves under the strap of her bag and thanked him with a smile so gentle, so exquisitely pure, that he was damn near paralyzed by it. She said something to him in a very low voice. He hurried away, bending forward. There was a guy who really had a mission in life.
     "I stared. She caught me staring. She lifted her glance half an inch and I wasn't there any more. But wherever I was I was holding my breath."

From Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye." I swear the whole book is like this. I am convinced that Chandler just had some kind of innate genius or labored over each pronoun like the screws on the space shuttle. See? I can't do what he does. But I am enjoying the hell out of reading it.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

5ive-larious

Just had to share this one...

On the Lollapalooza Lineup

One of the hardest things about living abroad is missing Chicago's amazing music scene. It's something that kind of hums in the background. I notice when I bother to think about it, but most of the time, I'm busy with other things and don't realize that nobody swings their tour this far south. But the Lollapalooza and Pitchfork festivals are big reminders that tend to stick out. Lolla just released their lineup, and here's how it looks.

Headliners are Eminmem, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, and Muse, none of which are exactly groundbreaking artists at this point. But let's run down the entire list, grouping (the bands I know) by category.

Washed up nostalgia acts: Big Audio Dynamite, Foo Fighters, Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley & Nas, The Cars, Ween, Flogging Molly

Foofy mainstream mediocrity: Coldplay, Muse, A Perfect Circle, Eminem

Lollapalooza meta nostalgia acts: My Morning Jacket, Cage the Elephant, The Kills

On the list of today's popular indie-rockers, but not exactly cutting edge. Also including bands you may like, but I would prefer to be at the snack bar: Mountain Goats, Black Lips, Bright Eyes, Arctic Monkeys, Best Coast

Interesting acts who most would pay to see play in a club: Rival Schools, Imelda May, Titus Andronicus, Deftones, Cee Lo Green, Explosions in the Sky, Ratatat, Crystal Castles, OK Go, Beirut

Desconozco - bands I know nothing about: A ton of others. And here's where the big problem lies. Obviously, I'm out of touch these days, but I'm not the only one. Over the last several years, Lollapalooza has demonstrated an inability to bring worthwhile acts to the side stages. My last time in town for the festival was 2008, and I discovered precisely three new worthwhile acts thanks to the festival. Contrast this with Pitchfork where pretty much every band on the lineup brings something interesting to the table. In sum, the festival has no street cred.

I'm fairly certain that even if I was in Chicago, I would definitely not be visiting Grant Park this time around. I mean seriously, Coldplay? That's actually a band that came to Argentina and I still didn't bother to see them. Would it be worth listening to their Joe Satriani-inspired fluffrock while getting jostled by sweaty masses that actually want to see Coldplay?

No thanks.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Top Ten Sidney Lumet Movies

I'm on my honeymoon, so no blogging. But wanted to let anyone who may be following here that I wrote another Top Ten list for Scene Stealers. Click here for the Top Ten Sidney Lumet Films. Rest in peace, Sidney. You're greatly missed already...