the terrific Like Anna Karina's Sweater (who remembers "Puzzle of a Downfall Child"!)--has a list of film blogs... 

Robert Quine
"I play with singers/songwriters and one thing that's crucial is that I LISTEN TO THE LYRICS. Like with Lou Reed's 'Waves of Fear,' if it had been about making an egg cream, my solo would be different than a guy having a nervous breakdown. It's really obvious to do this but it's important."

Pasticceria... 

A place in the sun: "Lampedusa's book has become a morbidly seductive guidebook to the island, its glamour and despair; the sensual revelling in decrepit palaces, burnt landscapes studded with temples, sugary pasticceria (Lampedusa spent a lot of time in cake shops) and the magnificent ball in a gilded Palermo salon that is so gloriously visualised in Visconti's just re-released 1963 film of the book, make you breathe Sicily." 

Robert Quine 1942-2004 

"House" by Andrea Baker, sections on Scalapino and O'Sullivan, etc in new HOW2 

Alterman in 2000--Where's the Rest of Him?
"Reagan showed a similar indulgence toward the terrorists in El Salvador. The President and his equally immoral advisers consistently behaved as if they were hired public relations agents for the murderers of children, nuns, priests and peasants. Not long after these killings reached the amazing level of more than 200 per week--in a country with just 5.5 million people--Reagan mused aloud that they were not the work of 'so-called murder squads' on the right, but of 'guerrilla forces' who think they 'can get away with these violent acts, helping to try and bring down the government, and the right wing will be blamed for it.' In fact, only days later, Vice President Bush flew to San Salvador to insist that 'every murderous act' committed by 'right-wing fanatics...poisons the well of friendship between our two countries,' and that 'death squad murders' could cost the killers 'the support of the American people.' Didn't Reagan know what Bush knew? Does anyone care? After the war, the Catholic archdiocese in San Salvador documented the number of killings on each side. The tally: military and government-assisted death squads, 41,048; left-wing guerrillas, 776. Reagan was off by almost 5,500 percent. Liar or moron? You tell me."

Laura Sinagra on Alanis 'n Avril
"Yes, it's a special kind of labored playfulness that births lines like 'You make the knees of my bees weak.' (She has bees??) "

The Leopard on DVD
" If at times he seems remote, not fully present in the life swirling around him, it's simply because he suffers, as the great 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi did, from a too acute and too constant awareness of transience. 'We were the leopards, the lions,' he tells an earnest politician, and 'those who take our place will be jackals, hyenas.' But even that bitter-sounding statement isn't offered as a defense of his class, for he continues: 'And all of us--leopards, lions, jackals and sheep--will go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.'" 

Chuck D & Hank Shocklee
" A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that's sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It's going to hit the tape harder. It's going to slap at you. Something that's organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer."

How the bee got his knees
"'Bee's knees' is actually one of a set of nonsense catchphrases from 1920s America, the period of the flappers. You might at that time have heard such curious concoctions as 'cat's miaow', 'elephant's adenoids', 'tiger's spots', 'bullfrog's beard', 'elephant's instep', 'caterpillar's kimono', 'turtle's neck', 'duck's quack', 'gnat's elbows', 'monkey's eyebrows', 'oyster's earrings', 'snake's hips', 'kipper's knickers', 'elephant's manicure', 'clam's garter', 'eel's ankle', 'leopard's stripes', 'tadpole's teddies', 'sardine's whiskers', 'pig's wings', 'bullfrog's beard', 'canary's tusks', 'cuckoo's chin' and 'butterfly's book'. "

a stubborn lover of green hues: "Sir George also once asked the young artist whether he found it difficult 'to determine where you place your BROWN tree' in a painting. Constable's reply, wrote Leslie, was: 'Not in the least, for I never put such a thing into a picture.'" 

Dave Frieder's New York Bridges (thanks Metafilter) 

Reagan's death seems to have knocked D-day off the front pages.

Ronald Reagan, Party Animal - The man who taught Republicans to be irresponsible.
"Today, what does it mean to be a Republican? It means you can cut taxes indiscriminately and needn't worry about the debt you're piling up. It certainly doesn't mean that you want to shrink the federal government. Indeed, government spending under George W. Bush has increased faster than it did under Bill Clinton. Before Reagan, pandering was principally a Democratic vice. Today, it's principally a Republican vice. Ronald Reagan performed that transformation, and it remains his most enduring legacy."

Glen Baxter (thanks Bifurcated Rivets) 

dancin' Transformers 

Larry David, Nature Boy
"And nobody ever went hiking in Brooklyn. The only time you took a hike was when someone told you to go fuck yourself. Then you took a hike. Then you got the hell out of there in a hurry. 'You're right, sir. Perhaps it is time for a little afternoon stroll. I think I'll be moseying on.' There was nothing in nature we appreciated. Sunsets were mocked. The moon, in particular, held no fascination for anyone. I don't think I ever heard anyone even use it in a sentence. Nobody ever said, 'Hey, check out the moon!' We never gazed at it. We didn't do any gazing. Well, people never looked up in general. We were too busy traversing a minefield of dog excrement. That's why, to this day, I can't look anyone in the eye, because, after spending many an afternoon throwing my sneaker away and hopping home, I became fixated on looking down.

So as a result of my background, I've never done anything outdoorsy. I don't hike, I don't ski, I don't fish . . . I would if you could catch conservatives. I wouldn't throw them back so fast, either. I'd let them flop around on the deck for a while. 'It was wrong to lie about Saddam having nuclear weapons, wasn't it?' 'Yes, yes.' 'In fact, the whole war was a big mistake!' 'Yes, maybe.' 'No, not maybe! It was a mistake!' 'OK, it was a mistake. Throw me back. Please!'"

Kiki Smith (thanks gmtPlus9) 

Limecat says go to bed! 

Steve Lacy 1934-2004

"Not everyone, of course, likes to live 'on the edge' like that, and there have been very great defensive players, but the musicians that have made the music really move and grow have all been masters of 'brinkmanship'. Some like it hot."  

Alexander Mackendrick's unmade Mary Queen of Scots film. 

Meteor lights the sky above Snohomish
"The Hupe brothers are waiting for either a confirmed find from this local space invader, or else a fairly precise estimate of its trajectory after the explosion.
'As soon as we can get that, we're there,' Greg Hupe said.

Malone said further analysis of the seismic signal, along with whatever other evidence is out there (such as the meteor's velocity), might produce a trajectory for hunters such as the Hupe brothers.

'It's possible,' Malone said."

Good Luck Smarty! 

Double-Tongued Word Wrester: "A Growing Dictionary of Old and New Words "