livelymorgue:

Feb. 28, 1966: This image of the Penn Station wreckage in Secaucus Meadowlands, N.J., was published several times, and helped create a law establishing the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Ada Louise Huxtable of The New York Times described the Secaucus graveyard, containing 25 centuries of debris, as a “pretty classy dump” of classical culture, style and elegance — “a setting of macabre surrealist vérité.” Photo: Eddie Hausner/The New York Times

I would know that face anywhere. Thanks for telling me to get back to work, Lively Morgue.

“It seems to me that the writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected, for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive, something that if we made room for it would undo something else we want to keep, so we force it away—literature as a catalogue of rejected thoughts. For the way they can hold onto what the rest of us would put away as dangerous, they become heroes, the ones who emerge with the one thing we hoped to keep secret, but know we need. When I say to you James Salter is one of my heroes, that is what I mean.”

— “Sex and Salter,” by Alexander Chee. Click on the piece, be prepared for some grade-A writing about sex, and writing about writing about sex.

The influence of Gregory Crewdson and Edward Hopper on Pretty Little Liars →

Really great blog entry by a Pretty Little Liars director about the thought that goes into their teen noir staging.

Profile of Winona Ryder in her 26th Year →

From the age when Us Weekly wasn’t a tabloid!

“Lana Del Rey may be from a place called Lake Placid in upstate New York, but with an intense schedule of performances, shoots, interviews, and parties, her life of superstardom is anything but placid.”

— A groaner from the Lana Del Rey piece in the fall issue of H&M Magazine.

I interviewed photographer Gregory Crewdson for The Paris Review Daily, where we talked about the movies (Lynch, Hitchcock, Malick), the pursuit of things that are perfect, digital versus film, and Mad Men, of course. In the “good news” category: Wes Anderson is finally working at a quicker pace. Hooray!

Fun fact, I don’t know if this remains in the final piece: Mr. Crewdson watches Mad Men on his iPad, because it reminds him of looking through the ground glass on his 8 by 10 camera, which makes a lot of sense.

The Dum Dum Girls covering Big Star’s “September Girls” is a recipe for maximum dreaminess.

Went to Bodega Bay, California for a wedding. It’s a small town probably best known as the filming location for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Most of the locations have burned down but the church is still there, and the Bodega General Store has loads of Hitchcock memorabilia, and a Hitchcock figure stands watch over the entrance, giving mad #shade to anyone who comes by.

It is absolutely irresistible to take many, many photos of oneself screaming and running from birds. There is Tippi Hedren wine available for thirty dollars.

It’s heartbreakingly beautiful there, in particular by the ocean and the bay. The church is a little bit inland, in the town center where it feels like the west.

I drove out to Santa Rosa to visit my aunt, listening to bad satellite radio the whole way, but at one point the new Jens Lekman came on, “I Know What Love Isn’t,” and it was pretty perfect. Jens Lekman really works when you’re driving through wine country, winding back and forth down dusty roads, looking at flora and cows.

I am not going to try to be eloquent on why I like The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud; needless to say, it manages a really tricky balance of very funny satire and real emotional devastation and grows in my estimation as I reread it, year by year. It also gets a little bit creepier when you’re closer to a Danielle than a Bootie. (Even if arguably you should not be a Bootie, but it is so easy to understand a Bootie. Philosophically, however, in life I am not going to be a Bootie anymore.)

Thank goodness that the film version by Noah Baumbach never got off the ground, and thank goodness Jonah Hill is getting too old to be Bootie (although I sort of imagine him as Bootie, a little). I couldn’t imagine him getting the cold harshness of upstate New York right, the way that it’s diametrically opposed to everything in New York City. I don’t feel like a lot of Baumbach’s films are sympathetic and empathetic to people, particularly the ones in his “fancy director” period, they’re simply sour.

Last I heard the guy who did Crazy Heart, the Jeff Bridges got an Oscar movie, may do it, and Rachel McAdams may be in it, but whether it happens, who knows. I wonder whether it could be a good movie - it would need the right tone of empathy and irony, following often silly people, but serious enough to make Bootie into a terrifying phoenix. It would be very tricky to get right, but if you did, it could be a classic (that will likely never be better than the book), which has to be irresistible.

Some thoughts on books

Remember that old Chinese curse, “May you live in extraordinary times?” I was reminded of that when I looked for Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, at the bookstore. It is a hefty book, a 600-page document on that time that a fatwa was placed on Rushdie’s head, all because of his work, The Satanic Verses. Now, in this case, I was in a Barnes and Noble, and Joseph Anton was shelved in biography next to the new biography by former Bachelor-finalist Melissa Rycroft, My Reality, in bubblegum-type with lots of pink trim. It seemed, sort of, to be kind of the embodiment of the times: amazing, crazy things and stories are happening, and then there’s the weird surrealism and mundanity right next to it, of manufactured celebrity stories and how boring they are. It seemed like a particularly evocative and efficient juxtaposition. We live in extraordinary times; we live in boring times.

Of course, this is also why you should support your local independent bookstore, as they do you the favor of not stacking the horrible march of brainless celebrity tie-in books. If you’re a celebrity with a reality show, or a middling comedian with a twitter feed, you are, basically, the legacy application of getting a book deal, right? Other people writing, other people who’ve spent years working on being a good writer, just aren’t in your category or cohort. It sucks that these books are fairly unavoidable and very few of them are worthy reads. Worth spending any bit of time on.

Also, there’s a Shit Girls Say book, speaking of stuff that’s not funny. I feel like that has to make Shit My Dad Says seem like Chekov in comparison.

(I thought this NYT op-ed did a good job of explaining how the current unrest in the Middle East relates to Rushdie’s experience. It’s also interesting to note that despite how ugly free speech can be, banning those ideas would give them an illicit power and allure. How strange is it that a gross - and most importantly - fringe video no more competent than The Room is the chosen flashpoint for conflict?)

Someone more experienced than me probably has an idea of where the bookstore is going to go in the future - I know that I would be gutted if it were to go the way of the record store, but I suspect that, despite bad business models, that shouldn’t be the case, really. E-books to physical books aren’t a 1:1 in some ways and the idea of reading something longer than Gone Girl on my e-reader is semi-horrifying. (The world will always need a print copy of Infinite Jest and other behemoths.) And bookstores function as community centers as well, a place for ideas and learning and curiosity.

I just read Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, and it’s very funny at points and if Lauren Graham isn’t cast in the film version, I will eat my hat. You could make her a movie star with that role! Plus, she’s one of the few actresses who could pull off being depressed and hating a town and making it funny.

How is Joseph Anton, anyways? 

Fall is my favorite season, perhaps due to having a birthday in October, but also, I think, because the weather is finally perfect and I can think again (when I last saw my mother, she noted “you’re terrible at writing in the summer,” and after a summer of heat waves, of a vacation in California during a heat wave, yeah, she’s right and I forget it all the time). I’ve had cider donuts and coffee for breakfast two mornings in a row and I plan to attend all the fall festivals I possibly can, depending on the weddings I have to go to (there are too many this fall).

PS. One of the places in these photos was mentioned in last week’s US Weekly because Taylor Swift and her Kennedy were spotted there. If this glorious treasure is clogged with Swift-fans forevermore, I will be so sad. And mad. Smad. But she has great taste on where to get coffee with her dates. 

“You know, my philosophy is hire the best, and then let let them do what they do so well. The auteur theory is always a very flattering one. People say, “It’s an auteur show!” And I love it! (laughs) On some egotistical, vain level, I love hearing it. But having said that, I’m going to be honest. This has always been very much a group effort. And as much as it personally serves me, and as much as I love hearing the auteur theory bandied about, I’ve never really bought into it. I’ve always thought that no one talks about the auteur theory of the Brooklyn Bridge, for instance. It’s like one guy designed it — except that he had a team of people helping him with the math, and then hundreds or thousands of people who built it.”

— I think the word auteur is bandied about way too easily (a la artisan), partially because it is French and sophisticated, down to the point that it doesn’t mean anything and is used incorrectly, and as a theory, it’s kind of the great author big man thing and it diminishes the contributions of others, often women. (Not for nothing did young men create this idea … ) So, uh, to read Vince Gilligan giving credit to the people that do Breaking Bad - a crew that often has women writing and women directing - well, it’s heartwarming. He seems like the nicest man!

“The directors of James’ favorite indie films - “Manny & Lo,” “All Over Me,” and “Tully” - essentially disappeared after their initial offerings. So he knows that he needs to get another project going fast, and it needs to pop.”

— Taken from Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Little Birds director Elgin James. What Friend is ignoring in this case, however, is that all four directors of said (very good and worth watching) films are women. Probably not that coincidental, in this case.