Snake America: Episode Two
Errata: AJ said Pauline Kael changed her mind about The Godfather II (1974, USA). ("She decided she liked it.")--but we were both wrong. She always liked it. And Ebert, who originally, thought Coppola couldn't make it work, concluded, years later, that the movie was pretty good.
Snake.
Thanks to everyone for supporting the Snake scene. Snake is a regular email (twice a week-ish) where I write about eBay auctions, videos I've come across, ephemera, errata, chili recipes...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/171393994877 Somewhere between a Russian nesting doll and the A&W Burger Family rests the Tolomeo. You can get this lamp design in like eight different sizes. The smallest is as big as a hummingbird and the largest is 9' tall with a 13" base. In the best tradition of Dieter Rams, they don't look like anything, The design is identical on all the models.
If we consider the lamp that goes on your bike handle as the smallest nesting doll, Lenin, then we see the hierarchy. Stalin illuminates your desk, Brezhnev does the bathtub, the above-linked item was subsumed by its own revolution and Boris Yeltsin takes up a swath floor, canopying the room like a dentist's monitor mount. Like Boris Yeltsin, the massive floor lamp is funny, but the best ones are the Micros that attach to a table with replaceable clamps. Unlike Yeltsin, the Tolomeo lamp resembles, at first, boring office furniture. It only gets an affect after about 1,000 looks. There's almost no design, but it eventually looks so good--the metal, the cables running up the lamp body, the black cord, the smooth cone of a lamp-head--that other lamps seem gaudy. But if you go too far down that road ... searching Craigslist for Miller or Eames leads not only to Lane trash but entire skeleton offices. You can buy one for a few hundred dollars which seems like a good prank. An old pickup truck near my place had plain, off-grey sliding file cabinets hanging out in its payload and it took me a while to notice. They were there all winter. After a few months of walking, I noticed a Knoll label. They'd still need a couple more winters exposed to the elements before they caught up to the label. At least the clamp Tolomeo lamp is different, and the other ones are different sizes. Taking Rams at his exact word hurts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuZsOvDjmJc - there are upsides and downsides to living in New York City. I'm told If you drink, it's easy to drink a lot and get home. The second-best thing is George Meyer's thought below:
On one occasion a few years ago, he became preoccupied by the thought that somewhere within the metropolitan area at that moment DEAN MARTIN was probably either waking up or eating breakfast-in his view a selling point for L.A.
where DEAN MARTIN can be replaced by ... CHARLIE ROSE or BILL LAIMBEER/LAMONTE YUNG (feel free to etc). It could be the food, but in Philadelphia you can get fresh soft pretzels for a nickel after midnight. They start cooling down around 1 a.m.: I went in June and got two and bran mustard and it might have been the best $0.45 I ever spent. So it's probably Charlie Rose. The downside: is you can't just put whatever furniture you think looks cool in your apartment because you think it looks cool. It won't. I desperately want this couch in my apartment. It was designed as a modular seating system--separate cushions--to be spread out like they did in the basement in The Ice Storm (USA, 1997). It's not really practical for my rat's nest. I guess you can put the cushions against the wall and hide it behind a couch. Like a wall. In a perfect world, four roommates go in on this couch. They put it in the biggest room. They put a home gym in the second one, and they all move in to the smallest. Guests--there'll be plenty--can stay in the fourth.
Thanks, again, for reading. Questions, hate mail, fanzines, chicken stock, Quest Nutrition products and tattoo guns can be sent at your leisure, discretion and whenever you want. Thanks again.
Snake