Why Raymond Chandler is better than you

From The Big Sleep:
-I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it
-I work at it lady. I don’t play at it
-Shake your business up and pour it.
-The general spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of work showgirl uses her last good pair of stockings.
-Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to how I came in, although only one of them was dead.
And, not Phillip Marlowe, but a lady who sounds just like us, but better- You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record.

Brad Diggler

Things wrong with this poster
1) Steve Zahn is not a nerdy 14-year old
2) Steve Zahn is wearing a flesh colored t-shirt
3) Steve Zahn is further forward than Penelope Cruz
4) The cargo pants. Should not exist. Especially in triplicate.
5) Not included in the poster, but also wrong, Matthew McConaughey plays a man named Dirk Pitt
6) Pitt is an agent of NUMA, the National Underwater Marine Agency, operating in the... Sahara?
7) Tagline reads,"Dirk Pitt: Adventure Has a New Name." Instead of, "Dirk Pitt. Porn has a new star."

Ferris Bueller plays the clarinet too

I've started considering blogging all the events I go to for work, but I'm a) not sure that's allowed, either by work or whoever's in charge of the events, and b) I can't quite figure out the right tone. Because on the one hand, it's pretty fun I get to go to these things, but on the other they are so, so silly, and a waste of money, a waste of time, and not really all that fun while I'm actually at them. They're these big parties where I don't know anybody and I spend the whole time trying not to look too awkward, drink too much (it's work, after all), and not think about how I really need nicer shoes than the ones I currently have on. Meanwhile, I'm either imposing on someone or being imposed upon. It's a weird scene. One that'd it'd be simple to be snarky about, which, besides being the easy way out, as it usually is, wouldn't capture the utter bizarreness that is a room full of people partying because their job requires it.
I'm going to work on the tone, and in the meantime include this transcription of a mini-interview I did with WoodyFAllenB at the premiere of his latest movie. As set-up, and an excuse for the questions, we were in a very crowded restaurant and his publicist had just scared the shit out of me. He's wearing a crew neck sweater and khakis and there's a circle of space three people deep all around him.
Me: Where did the idea for this film come from?
WA: Just on the street. The ideas for all my films come very randomly. And it just occurred to me one day and I made it into a movie, which I do with a lot of ideas I have and some come out better than others.
Do you think this one is better than others?
I never rate them, because what I think is irrelevant. It's really what other people think.
[At this point I was apparently supposed to say, what about "Broadway Danny Rose?" What about "September." But he's very fragile looking, I didn't want to give him a hard time]
So do you talk to people about your movies to get feedback?
I don't really get any feedback because I live such an isolated life. I rarely get any feedback. I'm just very quiet. If you're a writer... I'm home in my room alone all the time writing. And practicing the clarinet, also alone in my room. So you know, I don't have a lot of contact with people.
You're so prolific, how do you produce so much material?
I like to write, I always find myself writing, so if I’m not writing a movie, I might be working on a play or a piece for the New Yorker. I just like to write, and most of the time it turns out to be a film.
With this movie, are you trying to say life is life tragic or comic, or both all the time?
Well, on stage I try to be funny, in the movies, but in life I tend to be gloomy, so my perception of life is quite tragic with some amusing moments in it, and not comic with some tragic moments in it.
How do you cast your films?
Well I give the script to Juliet Taylor and she reads it and makes suggestions for all the parts. She suggests many people and then we go over all those people. Sometime I know who she's talking about, sometimes I don't and she has to introduce me to them, but eventually between the two of us we narrow it down.
Do you go to the movies a lot?
Not a huge amount, but a reasonable amount. I see most of the pictures that most people see.

Her name was Lola

There are show girls in the building. Seriously, there are two women here promoting Casino and Gaming TV, a cable net, decked out in full-body, bright pink, Vegas show girl outfits, complete with fishnets, feathers, and cleavage. In the swag bags they're handing out are a pair of big dice, fake eyelashes, fire-engine red lipstick, a glass, a t-shirt, some bizarre fluid called shoe stretch, shoe insoles, and a doll even more anthropomorphically incorrect than Barbie. Plus, fake, plastic pieces of ice. What company makes those? And why are shoes so important for gambling?
Most excitingly, I got the biggest, fakest diamond ring you've ever seen. It's so big and fake that it's hollow. It's so big and fake and hollow that you could fit a very fat bumble bee or 10 quarters or G.I. Joe's head inside of it easily. It interferes with picking up the phone.
In other news, Michiko Kakutani has no soul. Oskar rocks.

How to lose your job in Hollywood

1) Saying things every one knows to be true*:
- The Grudge "takes our client Sarah Michelle Gellar, who now is nothing at all, and it makes her a star, potentially. Suddenly the Sarah Michelle Gellar space is meaningful."
- Halle Berry "will give up a little money to get a good director or co-star- thereby essentially buying insurance for her career, which needs burnishing after "Catwoman."
2) While being an agent
3) Even, a "different" kind of agent
-Not ever wearing suits, being friendly, or going to parties
-But still saying things like "They'd be happier, we'd be happier, and we'd be richer" about a "synergy" between J.J. Abrams and Ford.
- And greeting other agents "Are you a man or a mouse?"
- Followed by, this pitch "is indeed mouse, not man." Indeed.
- And using words like space, environment, universe to say, "The musically capable girl-band space inhabited by The Donnas'
4) To a magazine of reputation
5) As though you, and not your clients, were of interest.

*about people who pay you millions of dollars a year

Hotnett

Mozart and the Whale: love story between two savants with Asperger's syndrome, a kind of autism, whose disabilites sabotage their budding relationship.
Starring Josh Hartnett.

Not Stone Temple Pilots

Got up early this morning to go to Nickelodeon's upfront, which is a TV/cable staple where networks reveal their shows for the upcoming season. So at 8:45 in the a.m., after watching a man wipe-out on the ice, I show up with 700 other people at a Roseland tricked out to look like a middle-school cafeteria. Complete with women wearing blue aprons and hairnets, lunch ladies, handing out donuts and chocolate milk. So the presentation starts, we're sitting in the "gymnasium" with big orange banners reading "Nick is # 1" and "The Future Is Now" at plastic lunchroom tables as they parade every top level executive past us. The VP of ad-sales even dresses up like a coach, and has his staff dress in warm-up suits, so he can scream and make them do push-ups while talking about their sales approach ("50% is us talking and 50% is us waiting to talk"). And then, after the last speaker, they push out two risers that have one guy sitting on each in a big, headless animal suit, and say, "Here's our surprise musical guest, The Flaming Lips."
Holy shit.
The FL sing a song about SpongeBob, which is the connection, and apparently Nick got Alanis Morissette last year, so maybe one should expect a big time musical act. Still. I think that there were maybe 7 other people in the crowd who knew who they were. The guy across from me, a TVLand guy, was like, "He sounds like Adam Sandler." And I smiled and said, "But they're great," and then he got embarrassed/pissed, so I smiled some more, and he felt renewed confidence and said "If you close your eyes, exactly like Adam Sandler."
Half the people left before the second song. It was really so surreal, all these suited up business people, sitting in a gymnasium, staring without reaction, as enormous balloons drop from the rafters and bounce around the room, while Wayne Coyne’s pretending he's ever done a show this early in a morning, sporting a three piece suit and throwing confetti into the motionless crowd, while a number of extras jump up and down in animal costumes waving flashlights, as close-ups of band members' faces and nostril hairs screen behind them. The show ends as Coyne inflates a yellow balloon with a helium machine until it's bigger than any balloon I've ever seen that's not in the Thanksgiving Day Parade and then it bursts.

I'd like to thank all the little people

Omigod! I am so the one writing this article (all the way down to "Side Dish). I guess when you deal with gossips they, well, gossip.

It's springing

outside and it's made everyone feisty. I just witnessed two screaming matches in a 20 minute stroll down 23rd street. The first took place in the library between a dirty man and a librarian, and then another librarian, and then a security guard. The screamer kept asking if they worked for Ms. Kent and threatening to call his congressmen. And then the librarian said she felt sexually harassed. And then the security guard kicked him out. Having spent as much time in the library as I have in the past year, I know people really don't whisper, but they also don't scream. I hid behind the history books watching and trying and failing not to laugh.
Then at Starbucks the barista (baristo?) got in a fight with a customer about the bathroom; she was sick of waiting and it wasn't his problem. Then I think I accidentally took a bigger mocha frappuchino than what I’d ordered. The whip cream on frappuchinos is, to my mind, one of the most egregious examples of the "Super Size Me" problem. How is that whip cream necessary? Or even tastier?
Another uninteresting thing, I saw my least favorite couple of all time on the subway this morning. A mid twentyish guy, dirty blond, fully bearded, sweater over button down in a lumberjack-nerdy way, and his girlfriend, a little (lot) fatter than chubby, wearing pink sneakers, and a huge dirty purple puffy coat to her knees that was inexplicable zipped, but totally off one shoulder. One arm was out of the neck hole of the jacket and the other, still in the jacket. Their arms were wrapped around one another as they poignantly leaned against the door and she tried to sleep on his chest, only to look up every so often and make kissy lips at him. I can't quite explain why they, she particularly, were so horrible except to say, it was a crowded train, it wasn't that early in the morning, they seemed like they were performing "couple in love," and they were inescapably loserish: like the couple that found each other Freshman year and is so happy and horny because they cannot believe their luck.

My sister dreamed she was being chased by giant fish-sticks or Self-Indulgence

I had a dream last night that I had to go back to high school because they'd added another year to our curriculum. I argued to my dean, "We graduated, you let us graduate, I'm doing other things now, I don't live here, I haven't been going to class, you can't expect me to do this again!" and he was just like, "Sorry. Calculus is meeting across the hall."
I had a similar dream a couple months after I graduated from college; that I hadn't been going to a class I was registered for and needed to pass.
Straightforward anxiety dreams are funny, in the morning anyway. I (kind of) wonder why they don't just present as my actual anxiety, me trying, and failing, to get a good job and be successful at this very moment in my life. Though there'd be no relief when I woke up from that. And you have to figure school is still the symbol for success just by virtue of it having 17 years experience in that position, to a job's year and a half.
Like all dreams, this can't interest anyone but me, though recently I've been thinking the reasons dreams are so boring is because we tell them very badly; we refuse to subsume what interests us most to the demands of storyline. For example, this: "I was in this room and it looked like my bedroom in my parents house, except then it was the same classroom I had soc in, and the teacher was the guy who served ice-cream to me 4 weeks ago, but he wasn't, because really he was my gym teacher and then he had a gun" is much worse than "I had a dream last night that my gym teacher tried to shoot me." That will at least elicit, a "that's weird," instead of the super glazed look. The problem, of course, is that the first version, the tangents, morphs, connections, is what's really interesting to the dreamer, though tedious as hell to everyone else. The streamlined version is basically like saying, "I read an article in the Post today about a kid who got shot by his gym teacher." Which, really, is much more interesting, even if totally made-up and not the point.

Non-English words mean something too

I've been having a bad run with authority figures lately. I got "not hired" at the Hamburger Shack, which is totally funny and a little expected. I really didn't like the manager and usually those things are reciprocal. He was fake nice. He was very easily embarrassed, but obviously angry when he got to that state. If you asked a question he didn't know the answer to he'd be overly apologetic and very flustered, while shooting you death stares for showing him up. So he told me that they'd hired too many people (true) and that it was "nothing personal." Except given he'd known us all about 2 days, it was entirely personal. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying that. (It reminded me of that, pretty bad, speech from "In Good Company" where Dennis Quaid tells the bad guys not to fire someone by saying "We're letting you go" as though it were a favor.)
This happens to me sometimes- completely horrible interactions with men who can give me a job. Like the time I applied for this summer teaching program and had an absurdly comic interview that went something like:
Interviewer guy: "You know that you talk really fast?"
Me: "Yeah. It happens more when I'm nervous."
IG: Are you nervous now?
Me: No, not really.

IG: Do you think you're 100% responsible for what you're students learn?
Me: I think you have to approach teaching that way
IG: But if you had to say how much was on you, what would you say?
Me: That I'm responsible for what my students do and do not learn.
IG: But how much?
Me: 100%
IG: You sure? It took you three tries to give a straight answer.

IG: Do you know what a nebbish is?
Me: Yes [for some reason I had, unrelated, been using Yiddish words all interview long. I think I was purposely channeling a pushy Jewish woman at this point]
IG: How would you describe it?
Me: Uhm, a nebbish is someone who is physically and personally small, unattractive, whiney, like Woody Allen.
IG: That's so interesting. Everyone I ask that always comes up with Woody Allen. Do you like him?
Me: Yes.
IG: Me too. What do you like the best?
Me: Actually I just saw Annie Hall, and Manhattan, for the first time, a week or so ago. I liked them both.
IG: For me, nebbish means, nit picky, critical.
Me: Alright.
IG: And for this job, you're going to have to let me be a nebbish, criticize you, constructively of course, and for you just to listen. Do you think you'd be able to do that?

IG: Any questions?
Me: No. (Laugh).
IG: What was that laugh about?
Me: I just thought this interview was strangely hostile.
IG: Really?
Me: Yeah, that we got off on the wrong foot.
IG: Really. Well, it wasn't hostile from my end, but you know, I'm the one in charge so...
Me: Yeah, I guess that's it. Thanks

Now I'm teacher training at Kaplan and I have the sinking suspicion things are going down this route with there as well...