Where the Bad Bitches? Huh? Where y'all hiding?

“When you’re a girl, you have to be everything. You have to be dope at what you do but you have to be super sweet and you have to be sexy and you have to be this, you have to be that, and you have to be nice,” she says. “It’s like, ‘I can’t be all those things at once. I’m a human being’.”

- Nicki Minaj

The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark:

1.) Edgar Wright  on  An American Werewolf in London
2.) Rian Johnson on Annie Hall
3.) Danny Boyle on Apocalypse Now
4.) Bill Condon on Bonnie and Clyde
5.) Richard Kelly on Brazil
6.) Peter Bogdanovich on Citizen Kane
7.) John Dahl on A Clockwork Orange
8.) Henry Jaglom on 8½
9.) Brian Herzlinger on E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
10.) Alex Gibney on The Exterminating Angel
11.) Kimberly Peirce on The Godfather
12.) Steve James on Harlan County U.S.A.
13.) Austin Chick on Kings of the Road
14.) Guy Maddin on L’âge d’or
15.) Michel Gondry  on Le voyage en ballon
16.) Michael Polish on Once Upon a Time in America
17.) Arthur Hiller on Open City
18.) Pete Docter on Paper Moon
19.) Atom Egoyan on Persona
20.) Gurinder Chadha on Purab aur Pachhim and It’s a Wonderful Life
21.) Richard Linklater on Raging Bull
22.) Jay Duplass on Raising Arizona
23.) John Woo on Rebel Without a Cause and Mean Streets
24.) John Landis  on The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
25.) Kevin Smith on Slacker
26.) Chris Miller on Sleeper
27.) Neil LaBute on The Soft Skin
28.) George A. Romero on The Tales of Hoffmann
29.) Frank Oz on Touch of Evil
30.) John Waters on The Wizard of Oz

 Currently Reading. Its a good book.

I can tell I'm going to be watching and rewatching A LOT.

My advice? You probs should too.

“I think a cynic is just a crushed romantic.”

- Jeff Bridges

“Sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested”

- Hunter S. Thompson

Woody Allen "Sounds from a town I love"

Woody on JD

“
It has always had special meaning for me because I read it when I was young – 18 or so. It resonated with my fantasies about Manhattan, the Upper East Side and New York City in general.
It was such a relief from the other books I was reading at the time, which all had a quality of homework to them. Reading The Catcher in the Rye was pure pleasure. The burden of entertainment is on the author. Salinger fulfils that obligation from the first sentence on.
Reading and pleasure didn’t go together for me when I was younger. Reading was something you did for school, out of obligation. It was something you did if you wanted to take out a certain kind of woman. It wasn’t something I did for fun. But The Catcher in the Rye was different. It was amusing, it was in my vernacular, and the atmosphere held great emotional resonance for me.
”

- Woody Allen on J.D. Salinger

I had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere

“I had this idea that there was a whole world of marvelous golden people somewhere…Sort of super-heroic people, all of them beautiful and witty and calm and kind, and I always imagined that when I did find them I’d suddenly know that I belonged among them, that I was one of them, that I’d been meant to be one of them all along, and everything in the meantime had been a mistake.”

- Richard Yates, ‘Revolutionary Road’

Song

“I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life

mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves
must lovers of Eros end up with Venus
muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you

how I hate disease, it’s like worrying
that comes true
and it simply must not be able to happen

in a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us, tell me”

- Frank O’Hara,

The Blow – “Ask Me” (demo)

SUMMER 2011: The Blow (ASK ME demo version) by Melissa Dyne + Khaela Maricich from Dyne + Maricich on Vimeo.

The Blow – “Ask Me” (demo)

black and white and beautiful

Dream Baby Dream

Bruce Springsteen covering Suicide - Dream Baby Dream.

Possibly one of the best covers of ALL TIME (definitive, yes).

Woody Allen's Favourites

My Favorite Movies

by WOODY ALLEN

When I awake during the night, to quell my existential panic I make lists in my mind. This sometimes helps me fall back asleep. Almost always the lists are of movies - adding and subtracting titles, substituting. My tastes seem to me unremarkable except in the area of talking plot comedies where I seem to have little tolerance for anything and certainly not my own films.

Fifteen of Woody Allen's Favorite American Films In No Particular Order

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Double Indemnity

Shane

Paths of Glory

The Godfather: Part II

Goodfellas

Citizen Kane

White Heat

The Informer

The Hill

The Third Man

Notorious

Shadow of a Doubt

A Streetcar Named Desire

The Maltese Falcon

Twelve of My Favorite European Films And Three Favorite Japanese Films

The Seventh Seal

Rashomon

The Bicycle Thief

The 400 Blows

Grand Illusion

Rules of the Game

Wild Strawberries

8 1/2

Amarcord

Throne of Blood

Cries and Whispers

La Strada

Breathless

The Seven Samurai

Shoeshine

(Note: If we take Citizen Kane from the top list and put it in the second list, this would be my list of the best films ever made.)

Silent comedies are all taken up by Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

I put comedies in two categories - comedian's films which can be awful save for the comedian's work and comedy movies that have plots. Of the comedian's films or broader sillier films that I always laugh at are:

Duck Soup

Monkey Business

Horse Feathers

A Night at the Opera

A Day at the Races

Monsieur Beaucaire

You Can't Cheat an Honest Man

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

Casanova's Big Night

Airplane!

Of talking plot comedies, I'm hesitant to say my list because my taste is eccentric and there are any number of comedies I love that would make me seem foolish or should I say, foolish in the eyes of the world. Plus there are any number of iconic comedies that never have and never will give me a laugh and I don't like to hurt the feelings of anyone who turns such a tough dollar making screen comedies or even their descendants.

I will admit my list is always topped by The White Sheik, and when I think of American comedies my conviction is that no finer ones exist than Born Yesterday and Trouble in Paradise. Also The Shop Around the Corner is pretty damned good (I get a lot of fishy looks when I tell people I think Born Yesterday is the best all-time American stage comedy but it's the way I feel. A close second is The Front Page, the play.) After the above four, my insomnia list gets dicey for public consumption with a few predictable choices but many very personal ones. Incidentally, my list never includes my own comedies.

From a note to Eric Lax.

(from This Recording)

All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely

I'm not the biggest Bob Dylan fans- because if you know anything about music, you know Bob Dylan fans aren't your average bear - but I do like this song a lot. FYIslers - its mentioned in Spalding Gray's movie Swimming to Cambodia too.

A country beyond my imagination and much too far to swim to

"I would say that my major problem with Hollywood is this—I sometimes paraphrase Bob Dylan—Bob Dylan says 'I may look like Robert Frost, but I feel just like Jesse James.' I say 'I may look like a gynecologist, an American ambassador's aide, or a lawyer, but I feel like Woody Allen.' ...

"My insides are not what my outsides are. I'm not who I appear to be. I appear to be a Wasp Brahmin, but I'm really a sort of neurotic, perverse New York Jew. When I was performing one year ago at this time in Israel, a review came out in Hebrew about Monster in a Box, and it read, 'Spalding Gray is funny, sometimes hilarious, wonderfully neurotic for a non-Jew.' Only the Jews can say something like 'wonderfully neurotic.

- Spalding Gray (video from Swimming to Cambodia)

Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit

This is amazing for so many reasons (most of them explained by 90s woman)

Favourite Boys.

I'm Goin' Down is my favourite Bruce Springsteen song.



One of Us Cannot be Wrong is my favourite Leonard Cohen song.



Oh Yoko! is my favourite John Lennon song.

Three of my favourite men.

I`ll never be able to do a sequel to Pink Flamingos (1972) because it would have to end with Divine taking a shit and the dog eating it.

Sooooo theres a DIVINE movie and I didn't know about it until now?! WTHELL?!

I'm honestly shocked. Being the ridic JayDubya fan that I am, I of course love everyone involved in his movies - from Melanie Griffith straight through to Edith Massey - but all us J.W. fans hold a special place for Divine.

I couldn't be more psyched about this movie - unless it came to TIFF, and then John Waters came with i,t and I was given the job of hanging out with him 24/7. Something like that anyway.

love a good semi-sad love song

Diana Ross & the Supremes - My World Is Empty Without You



Holiday - Bee Gees



Norwegian Wood - The Beatles

I'm trawling through the back catalog of Jarvis Cockers Sunday Service - always so many gems. Must make more mixtapes ASAP.