/via Ish (aka where I get all the material for my blog)

Reason No. 368 to Love Kristen Wiig

These photos from V

/via USA Today

Daily What

The Notebook: Changing Fashion History

A word on Ryan Gosling's beard (and other style moments on film from the decade past) on the T Magazine blog

Muppets Ringing of the Bells

The Stephen Colbert Effect

"Colbert covers sell quite well, according to data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. He boosted Wired’s newsstand sales by 38 percent, Esquire’s by 17 percent, Newsweek’s by 16 percent (according to unaudited numbers), and GQ’s by 6 percent. New York’s sales of its Colbert-fronted issue were about average, and Rolling Stone has not yet reported the numbers for its August 14, 2009 issue, with Colbert on the cover."

-- "Should Vanity Fair Put Stephen Colbert on the Cover?", Vanity Fair

A Christmas Miracle

NYMag got word from a reviewer at the The Vertex that MacGruber might be the best SNL movie since Wayne's World:

You might not believe me when I tell you this, but there’s no doubt: 'MacGruber' was amazing.

A bold statement but I buy it. After all, could a movie with Bill Hader, Will Forte, Maya Rudolph, and Kristen Wiig possibly bomb? The answer is no. End of story. I'm excited.

Macgruber. April 2010.


The Vertex review

Jing! Jing!

This will never get old

Celine, Queen of Canadian music

It's like throwing myself under a train right now, what I'm doing - blogging at 11:18 PM when, for tomorrow morning, I need to read a 50-page book contract and about 70 pages of a dense manuscript.. But for you, my beloved mystery Internet friends, I have two videos.

This Saturday, I attended the Ambleside Summer Sessions featuring Sarah MacLachlan, Neil Young, and Sheryl Crow. Holy Lillith Fair, (wo)man! I began yearning for the girl-power mania of the 90s. Someone, take me there so I can wear my armpit hair long and sway to the vocal stylings of the Indigo Girls and Jewel!

Naturally, I was reminded of the showy counterpoint to Lillith Fair: Vh1 Divas Live. Aretha! Shania! Mariah! And how could we forget Celine, queen of Canadian music. Too far? Here, I'll prove it to you:



This video was compiled by Vh1 blogger Rick Juzwiak, who incidentally, also put together the following mega-mix of reality television's golden line, "I'm not here to make friends."

Miyazaki vs. Andy Samberg

Ok Larry David, you win.

I've missed the last 5 seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. After recommending the show to friends and asking them to watch it with me, I was completely embarrassed and felt really uncomfortable (especially when I asked someone to come over and watch the episode where Larry makes a tasteless affirmative action joke in front of a black dermatologist; Cheryl needs skin cream for a itchy situtation. It makes you want to die.). Adding more awkwardness into your life is really too much when you're 17 years old. So I abandoned it.

Long story short, all is forgiven. I'm totally won over by this promo for season 7.

OH MY GOD, SUMMER IS ENDING!

I am moving at turbo speed, trying to fit in more books, friends, music, fresh air, sunshine, drinks, dancing and all that good stuff as the start of the school year approaches, like a old high school nemesis on a desolate street (You can't avoid them! You must make uncomfortable small talk!). That being the case, I have been negligent of this little blog. To the handful of people who read this regularly, I offer my thanks and sincerest apologies.

Moving on...There are a couple of things I've been reading but few I will highly recommend. In the interest of documenting and sharing, however, here goes:

• This is David Cross's author bio for his new book, I Drink for a Reason. That's Amber Tamblyn's dad in the author photo.
  
  

• Vanity Fair's September Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett covers advertise juicy insider scoop on TV's best show, Mad Men. While the accompanying Annie Liebovitz photos are quite good (some are better than others), the Bruce Handy article is sloppy and blogger-like (in the worst way possible). I don't get the sense than Handy is a fan of the show, never mind the maniacal obsessive that should be writing about a show of this much complexity and richness. For fans of the show, however, some of the cast and crew share some easter-egg type trivia, like this bit:

  [Handy] asked David Carbonara, the show’s composer, about a lovely piece of music he used to score a small but key scene in the second-season opener (Episode 201, by the production’s accounting), in which Don, intoxicated for once by his wife, watches a mink-clad Betty descend a hotel’s grand staircase as she arrives for a night out in the city. This was Carbonara’s answer, by e-mail: “It’s a piece written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov called ‘Song of India’ from his opera Sadko. Tommy Dorsey had a hit with an up-tempo version in 1937. Matthew Weiner wanted a harp in the hotel lobby to be playing the song, then have the arrangement become larger for scoring Betty’s entrance.… But my favorite use of ‘Song of India,’ and sadly I don’t think anyone noticed, was in episode 211, ‘The Jet Set.’ This time it’s played as a jazz samba in yet another hotel bar as Don thinks he sees Betty! It’s played as source music with a bit of score overlaid on top hopefully calling us back to the previous hotel lobby in episode 201 [which had aired 11 weeks earlier in the series’ initial run], when they were very much in love. I admit it was a bit subtle, but maybe (hopefully!) it had an effect in the viewer’s subconscious.”

  I also appreciated the praise for January Jones's performance as Betty Draper, which is widely underrated.
  
  

• With time to kill, I dropped off some books at a local library branch last week and ended up borrowing Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby and I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron, writer and director of Julie and Julia, When Harry Met Sally and other gems your girlfriend wants you to watch with her. I left the Hornby for a later date but burned my way through the Ephron with so much shame for enjoying some of it. It's a book that's written for mothers who have gone or are going through menopause. This New York Times bestseller is a collection of essays of varied length and style about New York and womanhood. The type was really big so people with poor eyesight can read it with ease, and the book is no thicker than 1 cm. I liked the feeling of rushing through a book. Also, there were a few essays on cooking and eatting. Other than that, there's little appeal for the 20, 30, or 40-something set. That said Ephron is funny and a gifted writer; she's the kind of journalist that's not necessarily erudite or well-read but loves and is skilled at the craft. Buy this book for your mom.

• Earlier this month, I had trouble sleeping so I took an iPod loaded with podcasts to bed. There are only two I listen to regularly: This American Life and Good Food on KCRW. These are only issued once a week but I was sleepless daily. The iTunes podcast directory was a Godsend. I discovered the Splendid Table, GQ Radio, TedTalks, Stuff You Should Know, and best of all, Slate's Culture Gabfest. I highly recommend a listen. After I had read a million reviews of Julie and Julia, the contributors to Slate actually added something new to the conversation - no small feat. I've since listened to the last four Gabfests and they continue to be funny, insightful, and intrepid.

• Oh, didn't True Blood get funny and touching again last night? (Ok, so they ployed us with Eric and Sookie again! and the Maryann bit is getting really old, but Jason with a chainsaw! A Lafayette we care about! Tara and Sookie are back together! And a fantastic cliffhanger!)

• Also on the go:
  Empire Falls by Richard Russo
  The Soul of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman
  The New Kings of Non-Fiction edited by Ira Glass

• One last thing: In June, the Atlantic asked, "What Makes Us Happy?" Author Joshua Wolf Shenk (what a crazy name!) interviewed George Vaillant, the long-time director of the Grant Study--a longitudinal study of 268 men who entered Harvard in the late 1930s. Shenk also looked into the troves of data at the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The Grant Study men were interviewed regularly throughout their lives for 72 years. Their lives were extremely varied (one even became president - John F. Kennedy); accordingly, patterns were near impossible to identify. In this thorough and intriguing piece, Shenk struggles with making any conclusions. Nonetheless, Valliant comes to a conclusion in this Atlantic video podcast: "Happiness is love, full stop."
  
  And with that, I am going to go out and see my friends and be happy.

"You're the President, not a rerun of Law and Order"

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
—Bertrand Russell

I'm lucky to have HBO at home but I can't stand Bill Maher's Real Time. But, I have to say that the comedian's speech about "Obama the Celebrity" on Friday night may have made me a fan. See it here:

Tragedy and Comedy

Remi Gaillard's videos are a fail-safe pick-me-up at all times:

Give a Kidney

A mind-blowing clip for last night's episode of 30 Rock.

Here, Jack tries to find a kidney for his newfound father, Milton Green (Alan Alda). Watch it now! It will disappear very, very quickly.

Kid tells mom he doesn't believe in God; mom goes with the ultimate threat. (Plus, keyboard cat.)

Last week, the New York Times reported:

Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years.

Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent. Not all the “nones” are necessarily committed atheists or agnostics, but they make up a pool of potential supporters.

But it's still true that you can be completely alienated from some American communities if you don't believe in God. Just witness this moment below (NSFW). It's both hilarious and totally frightening.



via BuzzFeed

NB: Currently reading: "God is not Great"
Up next: "The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster"

Happy Monday

Even before Freaks and Geeks

Big laughs

It's like sweeps week for magazines as a calvacade of new issues hit the stands, fighting for a dwindling set of readers. Vanity Fair brought out the big guns this month with an amazing portfolio of "Comedy's New Legends." I will be picking this up, if only for the shot below of Jason Segal, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and Paul Rudd as Tom Ford.

Annie Leibovitz pokes fun at her March 2006 VF cover (below)



Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, photographed by Patrick Demarchelier in New York

Also noteworthy and on newsstands: Madonna in a huge Steven Klein portfolio for W magazine.
(By the way, Steven Klein's website has a great opening video made from a Angie/Brad shoot).