pseudopodium: In production

Search for word or phrase:

In production: Caesar Salad, a controversial look at the fascinating Coppola family, starring Nicolas Cage as Nicky Coppola and any L.A. film school graduate as a stocky egotistical guy with a beard.

In production from MSNBC and Disney: Turner in the Rye, or Gone with the Windows. Reporting for duty are Martin Mull as Ted, Ernest Borgnine as Rupert, and lovable "Jane-Bo" courtesy of Pixar Animation Studios.

In production: Sexy thriller Wait Until Proximity, in which a nearsighted woman is trapped by thugs in her apartment.

In production: Homer's Ulysses, with Homer as Leopold ("Hello. Why am I Mr. Boom?"), Marge as Molly, Bart as Buck, Lisa as Stephen ("Usurper."), and Maggie as Milly.

In production: MGM returns to musicals with Ben Stiller's remake of Lost Weekend, starring an unshaven Jim Carrey, a shaven Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Dalai Lama as Joe the Barkeep. Andrew Lloyd Webber's score packs such potential VH-1 hits as "The Brandy Man," "Tomorrow (I Guess I'll Clean Up My Act Tomorrow)," and "Sink":

Sink,
Sink till sunk.
Life is simple
If you live it drunk.
Don't worry if you're not good enough
To manage a goddamn thing.
Just sink,
Sink till sunk.

In production: The recent news that Christopher Walken will star in a musical version of James Joyce's "The Dead" made me thankful once again that Dubliners hasn't gotten the Andrew Lloyd Webber treatment.

Picture the second act curtain: Bernadette Peters in old(er)-age makeup bellowing "I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls" to a lambada beat while the Titanic hoists gigantic sail for Buenos Ayres....

On the other hand, Joyce's much-expressed love of cornball music would give Randy Newman a shot at his best Disney score yet, albeit at the cost of turning all the characters into mice:

Conley ran his tongue swiftly along his twitching pink nose.
-- O, the real cheese, you know....

Three good years in Cincinnati, Ohio:

He was born April 27, 1996, the day of the Bad Religion show....

If Lassie was a cat:

"What is it, Lassie? What is it, girl? Little Timmy has fallen into the bottom of your food dish? And he needs more food?" (dedicated to Carol Jameson)

In production: The Tin Ear

Ethan Hawke stars in this nightmarish urban fantasy about a teenage boy with a shaved head who skateboards, tries to pick up sixteen-year-olds, and plays keyboard in a really stupid band, and who, thirty years later, still has a shaved head and still skateboards, tries to pick up sixteen-year-olds, and plays keyboard in a really stupid band.

With Winona Ryder as "The Grrl" and poet Anselm Dovetonsils making a special appearance as "Street Cred."

In production: Gladiola, starring Russell Crowe, with Julianne Moore as The Empress and Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Loneliest Eunuch

Twenty-four hours (condensed through movie magic to only a little more than four!) among the fashionable yet tormented lays of Ancient Rome, building to a big F/X finale face-off between silver-screen legends Charlton Heston and Kermit with the soul of an Empire hanging in the balance.

Hollywood Insider

The troubled Eyes Wide Shut production continues to suffer delays, according to sources within a dream I had last night:

"First, there's no sex. Second, it's being directed by some woman I never saw before who got into a long argument with the production designer over how a plywood box should be painted.
"After that, I had to spend hours trying to figure out the most efficient path to take across the park and back.
"And when we were finally ready to start filming, the news came in that Zimbabwe had declared war on the Republic of Ireland. At first I thought it must be a joke, but a number of cast members had relatives in Eire and were pretty upset about the situation.
"That's when I quit in disgust. Years later, I ran into one of my fellow extras in a bar and wanted to ask her how things had turned out, but something else happened and I forgot."

The cultural hegemony which brought you Like Water for Chocolate and Kolya proudly presents

From a place you've never heard of...
with people you'll never meet...
comes a story you've heard before.

A story...
of forbidden passion...
between attractive actors...
fully-clothed on a table top.

A story...
of three children...
and Grandpa...
dancing...
and laughing or crying or quietly smiling or with their incomprehensible gibberish drowned out by music...
in a land of peace...
and landscaping...
in the shadow of broken glassware...
and of the secret that will forever change their lives...
forever.

Responses

Yap. Our American Pie equivalents [or our Animal House equivalents if you want to be really nice about it] -- the "Lemon Popsicle" series films -- are marketed in the U.S as art-films. Peli

And the closest thing the USA has to a high-culture broadcast network showed endless re-runs of Are You Being Served. Because any inanity turns intellectual in a British accent.

Twenty Years of Hot One-on-One Action cum grano salis

The first photograph showed a naked ameba, fat and replete with food vacuoles, splashing lazily and formlessly at the bottom of a metal tank in the completely relaxed state that precedes reproducing.
The second was like the first, except that a trickle of salt water had begun down one side of the tank and a few pseudopods had lifted toward it inquiringly. To leave nothing to the imagination, a sketch of the sodium chloride molecule had been superimposed on the upper right corner of the photograph.
In the third picture, the Gtetan was ecstatically awash in the saline solution, its body distended to maximum, dozens of pseudopods thrust out, throbbing. Most of the chromatin had become concentrated in chromosomes about the equator of the nucleus. To an ameba, this was easily the most exciting photograph in the collection.

- from "Party of the Two Parts" by William Tenn (AKA Philip Klass)

* * *

Gosh, I like the Internet: Mr. Waggish surveys the past twenty years from a different vantage point (and incidentally alerts us to two new translations of the Musil work I reread most often). Jessie Ferguson shares lovingly bitter gleanings from a twenty-year gaze into Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina. Two Dutch translators present a convincingly anti-scholarly argument for a revised Finnegans Wake (which was published eight years later, very affordably, by Oxford). My favorite institutionally-funded "blogs" (nasty jargon for "weblogs," which one would have thought nasty-jargon enough as is) compare swallows and strangles among Ibsen translators. At the Public Domain Review, Jé Wilson relates the long history of French male delight in female decapitation and skull-hammering. Justin E. H. Smith considers the beaver. The Neurocritic triggers a bloom of cognitive sparks. Matt Cheney knocks around one of those west/burst years. Michael Peverett hits the road and British rails with Paul Simon and Terrance Hayes. ("America" is one of the three Paul Simon songs I like, but it always embarrasses me too. Puerility well-conveyed remains puerile. [PULL IN YOUR HEAD - WE'RE COMING TO A MISE EN ABYME])

* * *

Big business monkeys: Hoping to get lucrative stock options from a computer science degree is like hoping to get rich parents from an M.B.A.

* * *

A Valediction of his carbon footprint

Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath,
Whoe’er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other’s death.

* * *

Our Motto: If you build it, they will route the highway around it.

* * *

In production: Leopold & Loeb: The Birth of Modernist Epic from the Classicism of Amateurs

* * *

She's only a bird in a feathered cage.

* * *

Theme from The Vanishing

He was a grave digger
One way passage, oh
It took me so long

To find out
But I found out

(The best story in the anthology which published my first story was a "don't believe in Beatles" affair. I guess that's not very interesting but at least the story was.)

* * *

Errata

Sir,
Your link to "I buried Paul" on pseudopodium.org on your "Bobbettes" page of 2003/04/28 must be changed to the official site for Paul and Jane Bowles as the site janebowles.com is NOT accurate and does not have the endorsement of the official site, www.paulbowles.org which also serves as the official Jane Bowles site. The janebowles.com site is but one of numerous domains bought up by an English couple who never even wanted to meet Bowles during the 20 years they have visited Morocco. No one who knew the Bowleses personally, nor any other authoritative site, links to janebowles.com

Thank you for changing this to www.paulbowles.org, which was established by the literary and musical heirs of the estate of Paul Bowles.

Best wishes,
administrator and webmaster for paulbowles.org

We regret any inconvenience.

* * *

Ba-lue Mun-deii Ur-rah-tah: Reggie Hall says Perry Mason sold shoelaces. But that's not so. He sold Sweetheart Soap.

* * *

I've at least ensured that my wasted life was no great loss. If 'tweren't done, 'tweren't best done cheaply.

* * *

Critics rave

Hi! Hope you’re having a great day! My name is Cristina and I’m with the USA Drinking Team website. We’re a one-stop shop for all party needs, offering fun and cool stuff, from unique clothing, accessories, and other party products. We also have a blog where our readers can find cool ideas for get-togethers and all kinds of celebration. Party animals like us can get really creative when it comes to throwing parties, you know!
To give you a quick peek, here’s an example of the kind of content that we create: [...]
I realize we could work together at promoting both of our sites. Your site, pseudopodium.org, seems like it could be home to some of our articles as we may have similar audiences. I feel like your readers would enjoy our tips and articles and appreciate all things fun and festive. If you’d be willing to share our articles on your site, we would be more than happy to share your content, as well as any promotion or announcements that you may have, with our followers. Let me know if you’re up for something like this. Happy to answer any questions, so just shoot me an email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Cheers,

"Pleasure is no fun."

So much lost from 1980s New York but I still have to think about this asshole?

Peli Grietzer put a question to the Twitter floor:

There is no fact of the matter about whether Trump really believes the election was stolen, right? It's some kind of category error to describe him in those terms at all?

Since that seems to me an underdiscussed aspect of our dear Queen's ascent, I succumbed:

Yes, "belief" in the sense of "truth-valued proposition" doesn't fit. He only recognizes performative speech acts. Every impulse, no matter how contradictory, is "right" and anything that thwarts it must be motivated by "wrong."

"Willfully blind faith" comes closer: an evangelical fundamentalist of self. Burdened by a purportedly static gospel-or-whatever-the-market-will-bear, the religious fundamentalist can face accusations of hypocrisy. (Generally charges are dropped once the accused claims a fresh rinse-and-wax by Jesus; still, what a nuisance.) The Trumpian can instead tailor his impulse to context, can at most be accused of lying, and can always deny the accusation sincerely.

That sincerity is key to the sociopath's success. We're predisposed to take certainty as admissible evidence, and social and cultural development depends on an occasional performative delusion: "I am a hunter," "I am a poet," "I can make Americans' lives better," or, as blushing badge of sanity, "I feel like a fraud." A good sociopath will ignore questions of scale or consequence, and exploit any ambiguity.

The extremes are plain enough, though, to anyone willing to forsake the contact high.

* * *

Speaking of the Great White Weight, whoever or whatever still shambles toward Broadway has a treat in store....

In Production: Pal Ubu!

Introducing Miss Betty Hutton as "Ma":

He says Merdre, he says,
Kicking off the farce.
He says Merdre, he says,
Talking out his arse.
He says Merdre, he says.
Is that the language of state?

(Tip o'the toilet-lid to that host with the mostest coastes, the pride of Essex and joy to the world, David Collard.)