Ooh, a weekly feature! I should get one of those.

Sunday, cigarette #3
Au Bon Pain, 10:35am

Paper Cuts does a thing every Wednesday that calls itself Living with Music, and this week they did it with Jack Pendarvis:

12) No Return, The Kinks. The Kinks are my favorite rock band, so it’s hard to pick just the right song. If we’re pretending that this is an actual playlist, a traditional 12-song album like they used to make in the old days, I think we should end with the gentle, melancholy samba “No Return.” Barry Hannah once described the American South as (I’ll paraphrase) a place where we’re taught to be nostalgic by age nine. The suburban England of the Kinks is a similar place. All of their songs have a certain ache. Sometimes it comes in an outburst of blistering guitar, sometimes in a sound like an abandoned music hall. And once in awhile, as in “No Return,” they just lay it out there plain and quiet.

If you think this guy sounds funny (and he is), you could read his blog. I guess. Or you could read his review of Elia Kazan's Baby Doll instead:

The smarter, better Southern writers, the great ones like Barry Hannah, have an instinctive desire to lay waste to the past. Early in Geronimo Rex, Hannah’s narrator takes out a peacock: “I caught him on the head, and his beak swerved like plastic. He dropped on the bricks like a club, his fantail all folded in.” That’s Hannah killing off the ghost of [Flannery] O’Connor, so he can get on with things. [...]

With Baby Doll, [Tennessee] Williams had the foresight and good humor to preemptively assassinate his own oeuvre. Every ingredient we’ve come to expect is there in the funhouse mirror. Stanley’s manly screaming for Stella is reduced to Archie Lee’s impotent, laughable cries of “Baby Doll! Baaaaabbbyyy Dooooooolllllll!” And when Baby Doll emerges, it’s not with Stella’s smoldering grace but the distracted air of a clerk at the DMV. [...]

In The Glass Menagerie, the rituals of courtship well and brim over with loss—the gentleman caller, the chaperones, the sad refreshments, the sweet sentimentality withering before our eyes. Our hearts break as we witness the false and innocent appropriation of all the traditional symbols of love. The great seduction sequence in Baby Doll contains all the same elements, played this time as a sublime, sick joke. The courtship plays out in front of a pigpen, and in a decimated car in the yard, a trashy parody of a Sunday drive. Many of Baby Doll’s lines should be single-entendre camp classics, as when she wonders if Vacarro has “enough energy to work that old pump.” When, in lieu of candy and flowers, Vacarro offers her a pecan he has opened with his teeth, she says, “I wouldn’t dream of eating a nut which a man has cracked in his mouth,” to which he replies with the equally classic, “You got many refinements.”

In other Paper Cuts news: Stephen Fry has a blog? And he riffs on the opening lines of Love's Labour Lost ("Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,/Live registered upon our brazen tombs...")? By saying things like this?

Lord Reith, founder of the BBC, legendarily fired off an angry memo to his staff after a broadcast in which someone or other was described as “the famous lawyer”. The memo went like this: ‘The word FAMOUS. If a person is famous it is superfluous to point out the fact, if they are not then it is a lie. The word is not to be used within the BBC.’ Way to tell them, Scottish guy. [...]

Is [fame] fun? Or, as student journalists always ask, what’s it like? ‘What’s it like working with Natalie Portman, what’s it like doing QI, what’s it like being famous?’ I don’t know what it is like. What is being English like? What is wearing a hat like? What’s eating Thai red curry like? I don’t believe that I can answer any question formulated that way. So, student journalists, tyro profilers and rooky reporters out there, seriously, quite seriously never ask a ‘what’s it like’ question, it instantly reveals your crapness. I used to try getting surreal when asked the question and say things like ‘being famous is like wearing blue pyjamas at the opera. It’s like kissing Neil Young, but only on Wednesdays. It’s like a silver disc gummed to the ear of a wolverine. It’s like licking crumbs from the belly of a waitress called Eileen. It’s like lemon polenta cake but slightly wider. It’s like moonrise on the planet Posker.’ I mean honestly. What’s it like?? Stop it at once.

Did I wake up in the wrong universe? Who else has a blog in this one?