pterodactyls asked: If you were given a radio program, what would it be called and what would the format be? Where would it be broadcast? Be as detailed as you please.

I’ve never had a program of my own, but I used to occasionally sit in with my friend Anthony, who had a show on college radio station CKUT every Wednesday night at midnight. Though I wouldn’t want to take on the responsibility of a weekly show, I really loved doing it (and I have been doing non-radio DJing for something like, good lord, almost 10 years now. Holy shit? 10 years? 10 years! That’s right, I first ever played records to a party full of people on my birthday in the year 2000. And I’m actually DJing a party pretty much on my birthday in a couple of weeks, which will make it sort of a 10-year-anniversary thing. I remember that first time really well—it was at a joint birthday party for me and a friend who shared the same birthday. I don’t hang out with her too much these days, but I’ve somehow replaced her with a couple of other friends who also were born on September 1. Weird, eh? It was one of those jerry-rigged “DJing on a home stereo” thing and I can remember how I was sort of instantly hooked on the idea that I could put on a song and make people dance, just like that. The memory is so vivid. 10 years, man. Holy shit! I’m so old! Wow, time just turns into a blur as you get older, doesn’t it? It’s terrifying.)

Sorry, what was the question again?

•  19 August 2010  •  2 notes

Just for funny, I put together a list of stuff, or “vault,” if you will (and you won’t), of older stuff I’ve written or shot or recorded and published here that you might find “neat” or “cool” or whatever. You can find it here.

•  17 August 2010  •  1 note

I spent last weekend at my family’s cottage in Muskoka. My cousin was visiting with her two young sons and on Saturday afternoon and it was nice to hang around with them for a few days—we live in different cities and I don’t see them very much. They are hilarious little rascals. My cousin had apparently told them that they could ask me anything, ANYTHING, and I’d be able to answer their questions. I was game, but all they seemed interested in was asking math questions like “What’s a hundred million zillion times four hundred and thirty-two?” Not as fun as I had hoped. The point is, if you want to ask me a question—no math, please—you can do it here.

•  17 August 2010

A few years ago I developed a fear of movies. I was working as a movie critic at the time (as I still am), so it posed a problem. I was then the Listings Editor at my paper, writing about films on my days off and at night. I was still making my bones in the film section, which meant I had to go to a lot of movies my higher-ups didn’t want to see themselves, often just for a “blurb,” the short, 75-word reviews that appeared in the movie listings. I would often have to see these after the films opened, with a general audience, as some companies wouldn’t screen films for us in advance. I always put these off until Monday or Tuesday night (the deadline was Wednesday), so I would end up having to go to the movies straight from work.

This doesn’t sound that bad, but in the dead of winter, when you’re tired from data-entry all day (which my job basically was), trudging up the steep, icy hills from Old Montreal to downtown, eating in a food court, and then going alone to see Angel Eyes or Pokémon 2000 or something else that the world has by now justifiably forgotten, felt like a grim labour. 

This was where the fear, which had emerged quietly out of the shadows, was at its height. As the lights would go down I would start to feel nervous, jumpy, irrational. I would feel panicky, like I was on the verge of being overwhelmed, being physically hurt, or drowned somehow, by what I was about to see.

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•  17 August 2010  •  28 notes

What movies have I liked so far this year? I used to keep a list on Facebook until Facebook stopped letting people list things they liked without linking to their promotional pages (so, so lame).  I liked The Ghost Writer a lot; I’m looking forward to seeing it again. Mother, by Bong Joon-ho, unquestionably one of the best of the year. It aims for something so specific and weird and sad and funny and hits it perfectly. Exit Through the Gift Shop was a great art prank. Inception, yeah, I don’t really want to add to the billions of words on the internet that have been written about Inception, but I liked it. And I’ll totally stand up for Shutter Island, for the opening scene, Max von Sydow by the fire and Mark Ruffalo saying “boss” alone.

Solitary Man was a real surprise; I had no idea I’d enjoy it as much and I’d forgotten how much fun Michael Douglas can be when he’s totally wired. I liked Greenberg at the time but it hasn’t really taken up residence in my consciousness. Marwencol was a really super documentary. I think about it a lot. I can’t say I loved Cyrus but it had some terrifically funny and awkward moments. I was down with Winter’s Bone’s feminine-fronted family noir vibe (it sort of shared that with Mother—one woman against an intimately hostile town). MacGruber—my god, MacGruber. Didn’t see that one coming; funniest film of the year. Liked not loved Vincere, but some scenes really stuck with me (Mussolini Jr.’s deranged impersonation of his father (both played by Filippo Timi). Un prophète had some great, really inspired stuff, but was 30 minutes too long. Fish Tank was like the badass version of An Education, a bit heavy-handed with the symbolism but I liked the actors so much. Revanche lived up to most of the hype.

Seeing Alamar again made me happy; I hope it gets a proper release somewhere, anywhere, in North America. Half-nature doc, half-something else, it might be the most purely pleasurable film I’ve seen all year. Finally getting to see La Mujer Sin Cabeza was also great, though I feel like I need at least one or two more viewings for it to seep in fully. Seeing Historias Extraordinarias again was as inspiring as ever; I’ll stand up for that movie until everyone finally catches on.

•  11 August 2010  •  3 notes

“Certainly I was delighted, when we had dinner once in New York (the only time I met him), that in person he was as quietly funny as his writing. He said that one of the elements of English life he most liked was English humor. ‘What is German humor like?’ I asked him. ‘It is dreadful,’ he said. ‘Have you seen any German comedy shows on television?’ he asked. I had not. ‘They are simply indescribable,’ he said, stretching the word in his lugubrious German accent. ‘Simply indescribable.’”

— From James Wood’s entry in the Threepenny Review’s W.G. Sebald Symposium, published the spring after his untimely death.

•  11 August 2010  •  2 notes

Something I don’t take advantage of nearly enough as a New Yorker subscriber is the ability to sift through their 85-year-strong archive on the magazine’s website. The other day, I was reading Roger Angell’s great essay/memoir “Dry Martini” in Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink (a book that combines many of my interests) and I thought I’d look it up online so I could send it to a friend.

Sadly, the article wasn’t available for non-subscribers (you can read one of their incredibly detailed abstracts though—who writes/edits these?), so I checked out the original issue itself, via my magical subscriber powers. It’s pretty cool; you see the issue as it was printed, with original layouts, ads, and everything. (Incidentally, it’s amazing how fast print ads look incredibly dated.)

What struck me though, was how great this Aug. 19 & 26, 2002 “Food Issue” was. I mean, this is an epic issue. First off, there’s the Angell piece, which veers from King George VI and F.D.R. sharing martinis on the eve of WWII to Angell himself, sipping one at the same time, then aged 18, to watching The Philadelphia Story in the movie theater during its first run, to the Pacific theater of war where Angell was a pilot, to “entire families, two or three generations, who seemed bent on destroying themselves with booze,” to Angell’s own great recipe for the cocktail.

You should read that piece; it’s fantastic. So what else? John Seabrook’s fascinating “The Fruit Detective,” about mythical ex-heroin addict and eccentric fruit hunter David Karp, a story that would go on to impact my life in ways I could only have imagined when I first read it (and which I’ll explain some other time). Alma Guillermoprieto’s story about Diane Kennedy.

There’s also Calvin Trillin’s hilarious “The Red and the White,” about a possibly-apocryphal study indicating that most people, and even wine experts, couldn’t tell the difference between red and white wine. And last but not least, Bill Buford’s “The Secret of Excess,” his profile of celebrity chef Mario Batali that would turn out to be the seed of his great book Heat, about a year he spent working in the kitchen of Babbo.

Rediscovering this was like finding a Holy Grail of modern food writing. Best single New Yorker issue ever?

•  11 August 2010  •  1 note

The mysterious, subterranean “Snack Bar Kino” in Karlovy Vary’s labyrinthine, Communist-era Hotel Thermal, which I wrote about here.

•  9 August 2010  •  1 note

According to a friend of mine who is shooting a movie over there, this website is now banned in China. What’d I do?

•  7 August 2010  •  1 note

Tumblr is really, surprisingly anonymous. Very few people seem to fill out an “About Me” box. For the most part in Tumblr-land, unless your name is in your Tumblr URL, I have no idea who you are. I wonder how many people do this on purpose—whether they really want to stay anonymous, or whether it’s an oversight. And whether this is by design on Tumblr’s part, or not.

•  5 August 2010  •  9 notes