If taxes aren’t your thing, at least take a break from the elections with this, which might as well be one of David Simon’s rejected story ideas:
After Mr. Cintron recently died, Mr. O’Hare, 65, and another friend, David Daloia, also 65, whose last known address was in Queens, tried, without success, to cash a Social Security check of Mr. Cintron’s, the police say. They realized that they needed their dead buddy’s help.
So on Tuesday afternoon, the police say, they dressed Mr. Cintron’s corpse, carried him down a flight of stairs and heaved his body into a computer chair with wheels. Outside, they rolled him over the uneven sidewalk, pulling the chair toward Pay-O-Matic, a check-cashing shop on Ninth Avenue.
But as the men turned the corner, trying to steady the floppy corpse, they ran into the law. (more…)
There are fish in the water, but when they are not hungry, there is no way to catch them.
se fosse amico il re de l’universo,
noi pregheremmo lui de la tua pace
Wendy Doniger, circa On the Road.
Wendy Doniger makes a cameo in a Time article about Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie Youth Without Youth:
One friend who sent Coppola encouraging notes on his Megalopolis script was Wendy Doniger, the first girl he had ever kissed and the one who gave him On the Road when they were students at Great Neck High School in Long Island, New York, in the ’50s. (Coppola has optioned the book.) He flew his private plane to Chicago to pick up Doniger, now a University of Chicago professor of Hinduism and comparative mythology, and bring her back to Napa to discuss her ideas with him and his wife Eleanor. Over the house wine and Coppola’s cooking, they talked about his career. “He was stuck,” says Doniger. “For the first time in his life, he could finance a movie, and therefore he didn’t have to do what anybody else said, and that paralyzed him. He had no excuse this time if the film was no good. What froze him was having the power to do exactly what he wanted so that his soul was on the line.”
Hoping to help him with some of the themes he was struggling with on Megalopolis, Doniger gave Coppola some of Eliade’s works, including Youth Without Youth. (more…)
With characteristic lucidity, and allowing himself more righteous anger than his print persona normally lets in, George Packer goes after Brian De Palma’s new movie Redacted on Interesting Times, his blog at The New Yorker:
So “Redacted” doesn’t merely offer a frisson of Godardian self-consciousness; this is irony with a revolutionary point, a return to De Palma’s origins in the New Left cinema of the late sixties. And what is the point? That we’re all the same, Zarqawi, Lynndie England, the rapists in Mahmudiyah, CNN, Ashley Gilbertson, the readers of the Times, yours truly—we’re all accomplices in the great act of violation that is the Iraq war. The distinction between perpetrator and witness, crime and its documentation, has been obliterated. And you thought you were just trying to find out what’s happening over there? Pas du tout! Hypocrite lecteur—mon semblable—mon frère.
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“Redacted” is an act of voyeurism that becomes a part of the thing that it claims to denounce. If the pictures from Abu Ghraib and Zarqawi’s homemade videos are war porn, “Redacted” is film-theory porn—a stylized snuff film inside a meta-critique of the media.
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