WE'VE GOT TO BE ARTISTS OF SOME KIND

I've feel I've experienced, with my small, woman-centric film festival, an odd time capsule of America's present this weekend: the stories are different, but they share some singularities - a concern with the media, about public and private, about the constructing of a public persona for art and 'self-expression' (Aura) or to feel onself better than others (Mavis) or simply to survive (Katniss). A reticence to reflect the economic and cultural complexity of the America we live in.Only Katniss - and barely, at that - looks beyond her own concern to the wider world of "America" - increasingly impoverished, and locked in brutal war - two facts that don't exist in Aura or Mavis' America. - Jen Paton 

Werner Herzog on John Waters

““For me a chair is a chair — and I do not reference to other possibilities … For me, a man is a man. I cannot distinguish a gay man from a straight man. I just cannot distinguish … After 35 years of knowing John Waters I turn to my wife and I said to her, ‘I have the feeling that this man is gay.’”…which is in a way wonderful, because I took him as John Waters,” Herzog shared. “And I love the man, I love him dearly, he’s a wonderful … he’s the boldest of the bold filmmakers. I wish I had the guts of this man, and he’s very, very dear to my heart — but for me this is a man. Yes, a man is a man.” Herzog went on to add, “How vaz I to know zat ziss man, who directed Hairspray, vas a gay? I had no clue. Now, if it vas za Hairspray remake, anyone could see zat ziss ist gayer zan Elton John blowing za unicorn. Not zat it matter, uff course, a man eez a man, gay or straight. As long as he ist not a cheekan, a filthy, idiotic animal I murder mit mein bare hands vissout remorse. Eez poetry.”

 - Werner Herzog on John Waters

My love for Bruce Springsteen knows no bounds, so no big surprise that I love this. Its a long video, so I copy-and-pasted a highlight below, as incentive.

“Open your ears, open your hearts. Don’t take yourselves too seriously and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron clad confidence. But doubt! It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town and you suck. It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well in your heart and head at all times. If it does not drive you crazy it will make you strong. Stay hard, stay hungry and stay alive.”

Jonathan Ames at the 2012 Writers Guild Awards

Seriously Jonathan, you are my new hero. Can you come to my next birthday party, please?

Karl Lagerfeld is the new Andy Warhol

Azelia Banks performing 212 at Karl L's house. Iron curtain, say what?

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

“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

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’

black and white and beautiful

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)

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)

Babies are so Punk Rock

Children of Marx and Coca-Cola

I don't know what it is with me and tote bags. Slap a photo of Karl Lagerfeld or a Sonic Youth album cover on it, and I'm literally shoving my money into your hand.

So far (and god knows how) I've resisted the Woody Allen and Winona Ryder ones. Methinks nothing worthy as yet perhaps? Although I couldn't resist a throwback FREE WINONA if one ever surfaced.

Long story short - I bought the 1st tote bag. I also bought it cause I wanted to post about it but was scared the "hundreds" of people who read my blog might buy it. Logic!

I also had had to physically restrain myself, from also buying the second - in a MOST practical shade of black. Why do we so rarely see black totes? Creamy totes get super-dirty super-quick yo!

To surmise - more black totes and Godard tote bags in general pls.

PS you can buy me the black one from here.

PPS can someone do a Woody Allen one in his signature font pls?

That's okay. See me, I'm kinda into ugly... But only if it's sexy ugly.

Danny McBride

Louis CK

Mark Duplass

Maybe ugly-sexy actually means "not conventionally beautiful but very funny and charismatic".

He's Saying Life Is Bullshit and It Is So What Are You Screaming About?

Network



Five Easy Pieces

Are you angry?

PS A guy once rang me 3 weeks later and said he found my number when he was doing his laundry. Not super important but I just remembered why I don't give my phone number out any more - and it made me angry.

My Speech to the Graduates

"We are a people who lack defined goals. We have never leaned to love. We lack leaders and coherent programs. We have no spiritual center. We are adrift alone in the cosmos wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain. Fortunately, we have not lost our sense of proportion.

Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock." - Woody Allen

You can read the whole speech here.

I'm living a Teenage Dream

Hairspray

Gas Food Lodging

Beetlejuice

Teenage Dream

We're not here to fuck the band! We are the band!

hey i wrote this thing to do with books about women AND music AND the 90s AND teenagers ....you already love it right?

Knickers, Panties, Undies, etc

OK so I'm sure I'm not the only girl obsessed with this opening shot of Scar-Jo's bum in Sofia Coppola's 'Lost in Translation'. So obsessed in fact that I tried to find me own high waisted semi-sheer peachy pink cottontails - but y'know we always want the real thing right? Turns out they are Araks underwear brand and Sofia's been buying them ever since - there you go!

FYI these John Kacere paintings are what inspired the shot. Now all I need is to go to Japan and don a pink wig!

(via so much to tell you)