November 24
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I relate to that, Noah Baumbach. (Ben Stiller still isn’t going to happen in drama though, except in The Royal Tenenbaums. Quit twitching, dude.) This is pretty exciting; I’m going to see Caitlin and Leach this weekend! And we used to watch Kicking and Screaming twice a week after high school. NB is like thirteen years older than we are in real life and like eight years ahead of us in movies, but we’re precociously cynical.

Oh, also, Hollywood, which I am so into lately! (The neighborhood, not the metonym for the film industry.)

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October 05
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September 16
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
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August 11
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TP narrates his book trailer. He sounds like Jeffrey Lebowski, yeah, and Chong, but he also sounds like what you think Zoyd Wheeler probably sounds like. I’m really looking forward to reading IV because I love LA, of course, and I’ve been so camped out in it lately (with my new job), and obviously my favorite time in history is America in the late sixties/early seventies, and I also recently finished Vineland. The southern California parts of that were so good, most were set further south in the OC and it’s a totally different scene, with giant statues of Nixon, but there were small parts, pages, in Gordita Beach. Those parts were good. Even if the whole book seemed like a first draft. A Pynchon first draft, granted.

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August 02
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Who wrote this terrible trailer (“His wife is fantastic…” [Cut to his wife being angry about something.] “Based on the book by the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” [Sorry Roald Dahl, JK Rowling has rendered you completely unknowable.] ”Forget about super…”), for this awesome-looking movie? Genius casting George Clooney. And Jason Schwartzman! “I can fit through there. You wanna know why? Because I’m little.”

I wonder whatever happened to Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon? It’s disappeared even off of IMDb.

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July 20
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July 15
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We’re doing a thing.

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  • Showalter: Yeah. I’m amazed that there’s anyone without the DVD, now. Like who’s left, to get a bootleg version of “The State,” would be my question? It’s been 20 years.
  • Black: I would agree, there’s probably very little that’s of decent quality out there. Anything that anybody would have would be copied off of VHS tapes, and it’s probably hard to get.
  • Back maybe in 1998 or so, Caitlin's boyfriend Gabe got a VHS of all of The State off of eBay. I think it was Kay who had two VCRs, so she made copies, and the first one we had was terrible, so the rest were almost unwatchable, but we watched them. I don't know, maybe I'm getting all the characters wrong. Anyway, when I think "college," like "What was my experience at college like?" I think of a little dorm room and a little bong and vending machine pies and The State rolling up a 13" TV screen. It sounds depressing, and it was, I was very depressed, but still I'm nostalgic for it.
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July 06
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Whatever you read about Whatever Works was wrong, by the way. Larry David was the weak link? Larry David playing Woody Allen in any context is some kind of mistake? Evan Rachel Wood was in fact not the one acting so hard all over every inch of this movie? No. Wrong. The movie is fine. It is a latter-day New York Woody Allen film. But Larry David was a delight. (And not just because he is a lot like my dad.)

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July 02
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Oh, I was just driving down Mulholland tonight after a hot, exhausting day and this song came on. (It’s really long, it lasted almost all the way from Coldwater Canyon to Woodrow Wilson.)

It’s been a pretty dreamy couple of southern California summer weeks.

Did I tell you we bought a grill?

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