For the past ten years or so, I’ve made it a habit to carry a small notebook in my front pocket. The model I favor is called the Europa, and I pull it out an average of ten times a day, jotting down grocery lists, observations, and little thoughts on how to make money, or torment people. The last page is always reserved for phone numbers, and the second to last I use for gift ideas.

MEMENTO MORI, by DAVID SEDARIS | The New Yorker

I had seen you before, too many times to count, but a farewell that my family threw for yours, at our house in Inman Square, is when I begin to recall your presence in my life. Your parents had decided to leave Cambridge, not for Atlanta or Arizona, as some other Bengalis had, but to move all the way back to India, abandoning the struggle that my parents and their friends had embarked upon. It was 1974. I was six years old. You were nine.

ONCE IN A LIFETIME, by JHUMPA LAHIRI | The New Yorker

For anyone who missed The Proposition in the cinema recently, I’d seriously recommend it. It’s released in various US cities over the coming weeks (if anyone reading this is based there) and there’s an excellent interview with Nick Cave, who wrote it, on Salon this week. The DVD is set for release on this side of the Atlantic in July.

The Sigla Blog » Blog Archive » The Proposition

You know it's hard out here for a pimp. It's even harder, let me tell you, for a whore.

Los Angeles Times: A writer unblocked

On first viewing, Atanarjuat is perplexing. The opening is elliptical, stirring a nagging sense that readers of subtitles are being left out of the whole picture.

Unlike the typical foreign-language film-viewing experience, the number of syllables uttered by Atanarjuat's actors doesn't correspond with the basic sentences printed along the bottom of the screen. The actors are inexpressive compared with those in mainstream movies, particularly in the close-up, the shot that lifted the cinematic form from carnival curiosity to mass entertainment. Indeed, the whole film defies classical shot structures: typically, there is no establishing master shot but rather one continuous shot that is broken by jump-cuts and cutaways. As for what is actually happening, no one gets it the first time through: Something bad is taking place but you're not certain what it is. Yet the rhythm, once established, is mesmerizing. It's like listening to Kunuk speak, like being there.

The Hunter Who Happens to Make Movies

Starring as the ultimate pinup in The Notorious Bettie Page, Gretchen Mol sheds her clothes, her inhibitions, and her flash-in-the-pan image

THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT GRETCHEN MOL: GQ Features on men.style.com

The divine dark comedy of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu | LA Weekly

Nick Cave talks about writing, morality and his tough new movie.

Beyond the Multiplex

Nobel laureate Jose Saramago returns to the scene of his haunting last novel to satirize the incompetence of government hacks.

'Seeing' | Salon.com Books

The western may be lost to us as any sort of sustained tradition, but as the titles Unforgiven, Dead Man, and A History of Violence suggest, it intermittently returns as an unquiet ghost—this week in an Australian variant, The Proposition.

Village Voice on The Proposition