October 29, 2013 Look Eyes Have It By Sadie Stein My high school had a volunteer program with a local children’s home, and periodically we would throw holiday parties and carnivals. For some reason I was usually working the craft table and we always had the kids make sock puppets. It wasn’t that anyone was under the illusion sock puppets were especially fun, and after the first few, the kids could hardly have wanted more, because it was always the same group of kids. But one of my schoolmate’s fathers had a line in sock manufacturing and donated them, and in the grand tradition of gift horses, we didn’t look these in their gaping, sock-puppet maws. We didn’t have very good glue; sometimes you could sort of get a clump of yarn “hair” to stick to the top of the sock, but more often than not the Elmer’s-stiffened skein would fall off immediately and somehow manage to adhere to the table or your fingers. Because the googly eyes were self-adhesive, they were the best accessory. So we would force them to take home dozens of glue-smeared socks festooned with the rolling eyes of maddened stallions, and that was the community service requirement, and I suppose college admissions people looked at that, and thought something, or would have were it not there. Here are classic books with googly eyes on them.
October 29, 2013 At Work Stranger than Fiction: An Interview with Tom Bissell By Hope Reese Ten years ago, Tommy Wiseau produced, wrote, directed, and starred in one of the best worst movies of all time. The Room, a six million dollar endeavor, was conceived as a “Tennessee Williams-like” drama, its insight into human relationships sure to place it in the running for an Oscar. The film, however, was not received as the auteur intended. Instead of winning accolades, its hilariously inexplicable writing, cinematography, and performances have earned it a devoted cult following. But even stranger than the film itself is the story behind The Room. How did Wiseau, whose age, past, nationality, and financial means are shrouded in mystery, create this spectacular catastrophe? To begin unraveling the mystery, journalist Tom Bissell (who first wrote about the film in a piece for Harper’s) teamed up with Greg Sestero (costar of The Room and close friend of Wiseau) to write The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. Their book pieces together anecdotes from Sestero’s friendship with Wiseau with the story of the production (the entire crew was fired four times over, for example). With insight, appreciation for the bizarre, and genuine humanity, Bissell has helped create a book almost as hilarious as the film itself. Bissell is best known for his long-form nonfiction on subjects ranging from Chuck Lorre, the creator of popular TV shows, to the video game Grand Theft Auto, to the films of Werner Herzog. He now writes scripts for a video game company and is working on a book on early Christianity. I spoke with him over Skype from his office in Los Angeles. It’s a bizarre experience watching The Room for the first time. What was it like for you? I’d just moved to Portland. I was sitting in an empty apartment on an air mattress waiting for my girlfriend and all my stuff to arrive in a U-Haul. I spent the day looking on the Internet for something to occupy myself. I stumbled across clips of The Room and watched them in various states of amazement. It’s unlike any movie I’ve ever seen. Through a stroke of coincidence I’ll never understand, it turned out that the movie was premiering in Portland that night at a theater five blocks from the apartment I’d rented. What’s really funny is that someone was recording an audience-reaction documentary there that night, so on YouTube there’s a clip of me being interviewed before I saw it for the first time. I felt so exhilarated by the movie, by its combination of complete incompetence and utter confidence. It swept me up, and my aesthetic life has never been the same since. I’m obsessed with it. I love it. Whether you want to call it outsider art or bananas art or disaster art, the movie has something that movies made with infinitesimally more precision and expertise will never have. It has a big beating heart. Read More
October 29, 2013 Bulletin Or, the Modern Prometheus By Sadie Stein Anyone watching the CW’s Hart of Dixie last night will have noticed, at the 1:40 mark, an unexpected cameo by our very own digital director, Justin Alvarez. (You may know him as the mind behind our Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, among many other things.) Allow us to set the scene. Dr. Zoe Hart (Rachel Bilson) and Joel Stephens (Josh Cooke), in the Rammer Jammer, pass a poster for a one-man stage adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Joel: Oh my—[laughs] I have to send this to my friend Justin at The Paris Review. He is going to flip out. Also, we must go. Dr. Hart objects, on the grounds that said production is some four hours long and features a third act in German. But this proved to us that the writers of the show know what they’re talking about; Justin (who has an MFA in playwriting, a fact we imagine will figure in his character’s trajectory) is indeed a fan of experimental theater with an enviable attention span. Our in-office research has informed us that the character of Joel is supposed to be a New York intellectual, and is apparently not a fan favorite.
October 29, 2013 On the Shelf Literary Vigilantes, and Other News By Sadie Stein Seven haikus for failed hip-hop clothing lines. Lionel Shriver: “I have grown perversely nostalgic for my previous commercial failure—when my focus was pure, and the books were still fun to write, even if nobody read them.” An ode to literary siblings. “It became crystal clear that some piece-of-shit scam artist was preying on aspiring writers just hoping for a wisp of recognition. I considered this an added insult—nobody deserves to be swindled, but it took a particular kind of cruelty to bilk sweet, earnest, well-meaning writers, especially the ones who’d worked hard enough to actually finish a book and were now struggling to get it out there and read by people.” Davy Rothbart on literary vigilantism. Spanking may be bad for vocabulary.
October 28, 2013 In Memoriam Sit and Cry with the Door Closed By Brian Cullman How do you say good-bye to Lou Reed? For many of us, he’s been unavoidable, not just as a musical touchstone but as a cranky éminence grise: walking his dog, sitting in cafés with Laurie Anderson and berating waitresses (“Oh, c’mon, you know how I like my eggs.” “No, sir.” “The fuck you don’t!”), turning up at tribute concerts at St Ann’s, Tibet House, and Town Hall. For a while, he and Laurie Anderson could be found at Les Deux Gamins, on Waverly Place, every morning around nine A.M. After Laurie left, Lou Reed would continue reading the New York Times, then look around the café to see if there was anyone who hadn’t noticed him. If there was, he’d slowly get up, saunter over, and tap them on the shoulder. “Hey. Hey listen. You got a cigarette?” The casual no, no, sorry was then followed by a visible HOLY SHIT! IT’S LOU REED, as he leaned over them with solicitous menace. If they looked sufficiently disturbed, he’d whisper, “Could you go get me one?” They sometimes did. The tenderness and mercy and wonder of songs like “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Pale Blue Eyes” and “I’m Set Free” wasn’t always easy to find in the geezer who seemed to have more ways of saying fuck you to well-wishers and critics alike than Eskimos have words for snow. But if you could get him talking about Doc Pomus or Dion or Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, the light of the true believer would shine in his eyes. At Jenni Muldaur’s birthday party last year, she had an old Victrola set up, and I brought a box of forty-fives—the Bobby Fuller Four, the Drifters, the Hombres, the Shirelles, Nervous Norvus. Lou Reed started looking through them admiringly. He stopped when he got to the Jaynetts’ “Sally Go ’Round the Roses,” holding it up like you would the Holy Grail. “I love that record,” I murmured. He tilted his head and gave me a look equal parts who the fuck asked you? and me too, me too!
October 28, 2013 Quote Unquote Vile Bodies By Sadie Stein INTERVIEWER Whom do you read for pleasure? WAUGH Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner. INTERVIEWER And Raymond Chandler! WAUGH No. I’m bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don’t care for all the violence either. INTERVIEWER But isn’t there a lot of violence in Gardner? WAUGH Not of the extraneous lubricious sort you find in other American crime writers. INTERVIEWER What do you think of other American writers, of Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner, for example? WAUGH I enjoyed the first part of Tender Is the Night. I find Faulkner intolerably bad. —Evelyn Waugh, the Art of Fiction No. 30