“With greater direction (which is, I admit, a byproduct of basing it on a series of novels) than The Wire or Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones is showing us how plotlines create character, not just reflect it. Events in Game of Thrones are like living things that die and leave their bones inside of characters, slowly fossilizing and then being ground into the shale and coal and oil that become a character’s fuel. Although it doesn’t do everything exactly right, it does this thing better than any other show I’ve ever watched.”
—The New Gods vs. the Old: Is Game of Thrones Better As a Show or a Series of Books?
June 2013
“As long as you demand that working for free is the price for admission to an industry, you cut out a lot of talent at the start.”
—On Working for Free – this ain’t livin’
“The characters are young enough to waste a day camping out in an unclaimed parking space, old enough to know better, and yet bored and directionless enough to do it anyway. It’s the friction of all that free time that fuels the comedy and adds a grace note of yearning to all the carefree boning. Unlike more prurient sitcoms of the past, on New Girl — original title: Chicks and Dicks — sex isn’t something you save for when you’ve got things figured out. It’s one of the very best ways to do the figuring.”
—New Girl and the sitcom One True Pairing problem
Play
“Here is how it goes: Paul Pierce gets the ball and squares shoulders that are broader than you’d think. Arms that are less-defined than the NBA norm hang with ball in hand as he lowers his 6-7 frame. There is a look on his face that suggests maybe mild indigestion, or that his feet hurt. Then he flinches, head and shoulders and arms at once, and whoever has been tasked with defending him—a decade and a half’s worth of defenders, at this point in his NBA career—flinches with him. They bite, because they always bite.”
—Why We Watch: Paul Pierce, Fake-Out Artist
May 2013
“[Nicole] Holofcener specializes in female antiheroes who dare to be unlikable and are obliviously self-centered, but end up being appealing despite their awful qualities. They are the grown-up versions of the girls on Girls. Holofcener is the rare director who makes movies for and about grown women. Her characters are caustic, angry, and passive-aggressive, just like real people.”
—Veep Season 2 and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Legacy of Likable Unlikability
“As for the Monoprices, they belong in a league of their own. Put simply, they live up to the hype. Highs were clean, mids sounded full and life-like, and the bass was punchy and clear. When I closed my eyes and listened to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, it was like hearing it for the first time all over again. I had always thought “soundstage” was just a term audiophiles threw around to confuse laymen but now I understand. It really sounds like there are instruments playing at you from different positions on a virtual stage.”
—Best Headphones Under $30
“Gerwig didn’t set out with a thesis about female friendship, but sometimes when she watches movies, she wishes “we’d spend a whole movie on the two friends as opposed to whatever plot machinations are going on.” For Frances, she drew from her relationship to a high-school best friend. “I always felt I loved her more than she loved me,” she says. “There was a very painful period where she got a new group of friends. They dressed as a pack of crayons for Halloween. I was like, ‘Fuck you, I’m dressed as Prince.’”
—Salad and Girl Talk With Frances Ha Stars Greta Gerwig and Mickey Sumner
“It’s always the seriously coupled up people who seem to think dating is easy as pie, having conveniently brainwashed themselves about what it’s really like to be single.”
—Mad Men, Episode 3: The Ketchup Incident
“But I also think about why I don’t keep a regular blog. I already log many hours in front of the screen. Blogging is also a performance, and like in the physical world, women are expected to conform to certain roles. I don’t need the anxiety of constantly monitoring my online persona. Sometimes withholding is more powerful than disclosure.”
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Teow Lim Goh, Lost and Found: A review of Kate Zambreno’s Heroines
Also, Kate Zambreno’s blog: Frances Farmer is My Sister
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He was struck by [Gerwig’s] combination of “über-intellectual” and “every-girl connectivity,” he said, “which I find is very rare.”
“She intellectually understands what a lot of her problems are, as her characters, and yet is still incapable of overcoming those problems, which is something we all share and understand,” he said, “and she embodies that very naturally.”
” —Greta Gerwig Stars in ‘Lola Versus’ (2012)