The Howling Fantods speculates on the possible Brief Interviews with Hideous Men movie. John Krasinski, who plays Jim on The Office, is reportedly using his series hiatus to get the movie prepped. Krasinski is writing the script for a possible November filming date.
Month / July 2006
Vollmann Talks Death on NPR
William T. Vollmann appears in today’s edition of The Best of Our Knowledge, discussing violence and morality. You can listen to the show here. (Click on “06-27-23-B” RealAudio link.) Vollmann notes that the death of his journalist friend (chronicled in Rising Up and Rising Down) was an act of war and that “he has no hard feelings toward them.”
What’s particularly amusing is how the interviewer is astonished by Vollmann’s calmness. When asked about his own death, Vollmann responds, “If it happens to me, it will be…okay, I hope. That’s how you have to look at it.”
He also puts the Israel-Palestine conflict on the Moral Compass.
RIP Jack Warden
Right now, I have the world’s worst leak in my bathroom. We’re talking mushy bulbous protrusions in the wall and ceiling with occassional showers of brown murky liquid. Calls have been made and, at least for today, my shower was creatively taken, with deft acrobatic movements across dry areas of the floor birfurcated by an orange bucket and a sporadic downpour. Couldn’t happen to a shadier guy.
All this is a great inconvenience and it means that the hours I have set aside to relax this weekend will instead be spent contending with maintenance men. But instead of panicking, I’m thinking to myself: What would Jack Warden do? RIP Jack. You played a fantastic S.O.B. with a heart of gold.
PBS is Sexist and Spineless
PBS has fired Melanie Martinez, host of The Good Night Show. Her crime? Appearing in this amusing thirty-second video, which doesn’t feature Ms. Martinez naked but has her making fun of “technical virginity.” If this Puritanical move is what it takes to get fired, to (in PBS’s words) “undermine her character’s credibility with our audience,” current American society is about as unenlightened as the Dark Ages. Not only was Ms. Martinez fired, but, in a Stalinistic move, her segments are being replaced by “short-form content.” It will be as if Melanie Martinez never appeared on PBS.
Here’s the question: if a male children’s television host had mentioned some passing remark about oral sex ten years ago, would he be let go like this?
Love for Matheson
Stephen King champions Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, noting that Matheson “single-handedly regenerated a stagnant genre, rejecting the conventions of the pulps that were already dying, incorporating sexual impulses and images into his work as Theodore Sturgeon had already begun to do in his science fiction, and writing a series of gut-bucket short stories.” (Thanks, Ms. Bashful!)