September 2011
1 post
WatchHuh?
August 2011
3 posts
“Hollywood people are remarkably susceptible to fantasy. The same people that...”
– Producer Richard Roth, in a nice profile of old-fashioned maître d’hôtel Dmitri Dmitrov.
“Persueco. It’s Italian Champagne, homie.”
– INFY
June 2011
3 posts
“It is a strange thing to love a city. In the end because no city is entirely...”
– Junot Diaz, reflecting on Tokyo
1 tag
We had another absinthe
Bill: Where do you suppose he went?
Jake: Up to Paris.
Bill: What do you suppose he'll do?
Jake: Oh, to hell with him.
Bill: What do you suppose he'll do?
Jake: Pick up with his old girl, probably.
Bill: Who was his old girl?
Jake: Somebody named Frances.
May 2011
5 posts
WatchThe illest. Better get that ankle insurance, kids.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
—Robert Frost
April 2011
2 posts
“Few of us want to see Los Angeles as it is or what it should be; we’ve let...”
– D.J. Waldie, “The Foster City” (file under: #realtalk)
Breakfast of Champions →
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt with a brilliant recipe for a breakfast banh mi.
March 2011
1 post
“Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good—whether it’s what...”
– Robert Gottlieb, in “The Art of Editing”
February 2011
4 posts
Labatt Blue
KP: It's really good, and I got these for $6.99 for a six-pack. Not bad for an imported beer.
IRB: Yeah, but it's imported from Canada.
“No one appreciates anything when it’s going on.”
– Kobe Bryant, in an interview with Woj
January 2011
5 posts
“When you sit down to write, there is only one important person in your life....”
– The first of Tim Radford’s 25 commandments for journalists
The Hidden City →
Alan Feuer explores New York’s subterranean tunnels, sewers and storm drains, glimpsing the city’s skeleton.Crossing back into Manhattan, it occurs to me I’ve lived in New York City for 20 years but literally only seen its surface. What this trip has revealed: a wilderness below.There’s also a slide show. Previously on IRB (and closer to home): downtown L.A.’s underground...
December 2010
9 posts
“It embodies the classic American combination of offhand style, swagger, and...”
– David Wondrich, in Esquire, on the old-fashioned
Real-world Editing →
Carol Fisher Saller, of the University of Chicago press, on what’s most important in editing:
The manuscript does not have to be perfect because perfect isn’t possible. As I say in The Subversive Copy Editor, there’s no Platonic ideal for that document, one “correct” way for it to turn out, one perfect version hidden in the block of marble that it’s your job to discover by endless chipping...
“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by...”
– James Joyce, “Araby”
“GQ says your socks should match your trousers. I think socks should freelance.”
– Glenn O’Brien, aka GQ’s Style Guy
Last Call for Max Fish →
After 21 years, the Lower East Side bar Max Fish is closing. Having never been there, I come to bury, not to praise, though it sounds like a place I might have liked.How does a grimy watering hole inspire such indelible loyalty? For two decades, the bar affectionately known as the Fish was a hub for downtown intellectuals, creative types, skateboarders and assorted derelicts. It was the type of...
“They became black rectangles because their designers chose to make them like...”
– Alice Rawsthorn on German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic’s exhibition of black rectangular objects (via Kottke)
Checkmate
Joe: What's the deal with coconut water?
Jeremy: It rehydrates you.
Joe: I don't think anything can rehydrate you better than water.
November 2010
6 posts
“Who digs Los Angeles is Los Angeles!”
– Allen Ginsberg, “Footnote to Howl”
Blunt Ambition →
Frank Bruni goes long on the L.A. dining scene:Uncommonly ambitious cooking in unconventionally blunt, humble, even improvised contexts: if a single theme captures the arc and essence of dining out in America right now, that’s it. And if you had to pick a single place to study and savor it, you could do no better than L.A., a city in unrivaled tune with the restaurant times.Co-sign.
“Your family is whoever you sit down to eat with.”
– Laurie David, in defense of the family dinner (via Sifton)
Considering the Old-Fashioned →
A toast, of sorts, to a great drink.It is essentially the original cocktail—the no-frills combination of liquor, sugar, bitters, and water that 19th century Americans would have had in mind when they ordered a capital-c Cocktail (and which old timers eventually found themselves having to ask for by a more specific name as bartenders became more fanciful with their concoctions). They’re doing...
October 2010
2 posts
“If you set out to engineer a booze delivery system that is as cloying, deceptive...”
– Frank Bruni, in the New York Times
Ciclavia a Success →
On Sunday, the inaugural Ciclavia shut down 7.5 miles of Los Angeles streets for biking, walking and other non-automobile fun.Streets normally clogged with cars and SUVs became two-way thoroughfares of the self-propelled. People of all shapes and ages turned out — weekend warriors rode swiftly on their fine-tuned bikes, young kids on training wheels labored to keep up with their parents, an...
September 2010
3 posts
“When we move to New York or Paris, it is tacos that haunt our dreams; when we...”
– Jonathan Gold waxing poetic on tacos in his review of Tinga
“A lot of writers write intuitively; editors have to anatomize the parts and make...”
– John McIntyre has some advice for aspiring editors
August 2010
5 posts
The Long Goodbye →
Practice, practice, practice might get you to Carnegie Hall, but it won’t keep you from being ousted by a $200 million development project.Ms. Sargent, a poet, answered an advertisement to “live and work in Carnegie Hall” 46 years ago and moved in with a recommendation from the literary critic Malcolm Cowley. Half a lifetime later, on Thursday, she was the last resident to move out of the...
How to Iron a Dress Shirt →
So you know.
“When we cast aside even our vices, how can we hope to preserve the very fiber of...”
– Margaret Mason, “The Case for Cocktails”
After the opening salvo comes the retaliation....
Here’s a new diss track from Devin, the...
July 2010
1 post
