An oldie but a goodie: Salman Rushdie interviews Terry Gilliam at the 2002 Telluride Film Festival.
SR: [...] When I was writing Midnight’s Children, I used to work two days a week at an ad agency and five days a week writing my book, and I thought of it, kind of, as industrial sponsorship.
Just in case you missed it—I did—here’s a New Yorker profile of James Cameron from this past October.
Hearkening back to Zak Smith’s illustrations for each page of Gravity’s Rainbow: here’s somebody who’s going to spend the next year and a half doing the same thing to Moby-Dick.
An elegaic essay by Richard Rodriguez:
In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers—the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle. I remark their thinness as I climb the stairs. The three together equal what I remember.
The new Black List is out. For those who don’t know, it’s described thusly:
THE BLACK LIST was compiled from the suggestions of over 300 film executives, each of whom contributed the names of up to ten of their favorite scripts that were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2009 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year.
Right or wrong, the Norwegian Sky Spiral appears to have brought renewed scrutiny to the Department of Defense’s disturbing, ionosphere-boiling HAARP Project. The accompanying gallery of pictures.
Soviet Russia had one too. It’s since been abandoned. Here’s some pictures of that.
With regards to the Norwegian Sky Spiral: NASA guy Tony Phillips—who runs spaceweather.com—postulates that it was a rocket engine from a secret Russian missile test spinning out of control. (via Wired)
Phillips put together a video explanation. A very convenient video explanation. . .
Here’s a video of the actual event that was uploaded by a Norwegian newspaper.
Something I can really get behind: in anticipation of every year’s Oscar season, more and more Hollywood studios are publishing screenplays for award contenders online for free download.
Rope of Silicone has been keeping a list of links.
You’ll recognize the following six films: 9, District 9, Napoleon Dynamite, The Evil Dead, Bottle Rocket and Boogie Nights.
You may not know, however, that they were all originally filmed as shorts by amateur filmmakers—all of whom began their professional careers by turning the short films in question into features.
Check out the roundup—with embedded YouTube videos—on Mental_Floss.
Research to take to heart. While slacking off may be pushing it, neuroscience suggests that, perversely, workahaulics can maximize their output over time by working somewhat less often.
Via The Morning News
See also: 30 Minutes a Day.
It’s never easy reading posthumous writing from writers who killed themselves. Your worst tendencies come out to play. Your brain works overtime looking for clues.
Here’s All That, a piece by David Foster Wallace that will be published in next week’s New Yorker.
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