the smoking bop gun

Read my review here.

Read the interview here.

Read the interview here.

Q: I like the credit titles very much.

Woody Allen: What is that?

Q: The squiggly lines.

W.A.: Oh yes, I liked that too. But I like anything squiggly.

Foster’s Bighorn. Rio Vista, California. Established in 1931, Foster’s Bighorn was designed to be a trophy haven where the public could view the many animals of the world caught by bootlegger Bill Foster. Making many visits between 1928 and 1952 to Africa, India, Greenland, Alaska, Mexico, and around the United States, Foster caught record size game including a 13 foot elephant head considered to be the world’s largest trophy animal ever caught. Other rare specimens include the mounted head of a giraffe, a moose that Foster claimed was the largest in the world with an antler spread of 76 inches, and an extremely elusive Himalayan snow leopard. Rumor has it that he met Ernest Hemingway on his first trip to Nairobi. Many of the animals were stuffed by taxidermist John Jonas. Foster passed away in 1963 and the restaurant is now owned by a resident of Rio Vista who maintains Foster’s collection as a monument to the man’s lifelong interest in wild game. Soundtrack is “Wildlife Analysis” by Boards of Canada.

“Thurston Moore broke into the underground rock scene almost thirty years ago with his noisey, distorted, strange, dissonant, and intense rock band Sonic Youth. The sound they created was both incredibly singular-no band could make its guitars squeal quite like theirs-and yet sounded perfectly comfortable among the various scenes and sounds that ebbed through the American underground like glacial flows.”

“I have just finished my latest opus, “Memoirs of a Mangy Lover”. Most of it is autobiographical and very little of it is fiction. I doubt whether it will live through the ages, but if you are in a sexy mood the night you read it, it may stimulate you beyond recognition and rekindle memories that you haven’t recalled in years.”

Groucho Marx to T.S. Eliot, from their epistolary correspondence.

Labor organizer turned Kennedy School of Government Professor Marshall Ganz on Public Narratives. Or you can read his classic lecture here.

“The Shaky Hands, a four-piece rock outfit out of Portland, indulge in the musical equivalent of an In-N-Out Double-Double, i.e. fast, tasty, reliable American comfort rock, blessed with the divinely scratchy vocals of founding Hand Nicholas Dellfs.”

You can read the interview here, if you’re feeling it.

From “Preface to Three Plays” by Thornton Wilder.

The prestige of the aristocracy is based upon a dreary untruth, that moral superiority and the qualifications for leadership are transmittable through the chromosomes, and the secondary lie, that the environment afforded by privilege and leisure tends to nurture the flowers of the spirit. An aristocracy, defending and fostering its lie, extracts from the arts only such elements as can further its interests, the aroma and not the sap, the grace and not the trenchancy. The middle class… they distrusted their passions and tried to deny them. Their questions about the nature of life seemed to be sufficiently answered by the demonstration of financial status and by conformity to some clearly established rules of decorum.

The air was loud with questions that must not be asked…