1. “On the Tip of Creative Tongues”
“The word ‘curate,’ lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. In more print-centric times, the term of art was ‘edit’ — as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully. But now, among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for ‘I have a discerning eye and great taste.’”
2. “First the Gym, Then Tea in Bed”
“I put on some crisp, clean pajamas, make my bed and get back in it. I have these Turnbull & Asser pajamas, they’re really very WASPy, tweedy kind of plaid men’s pajamas. I make a big pot of tea, in one of those big Chinese teapots I got in Chinatown, the white ones with the goldfish on it. I’ll make what’s called a bed picnic. It’s usually two or three types of sandwiches. It can range from anything as low-rent as a vertically sliced hot dog inside toast with Mexican hot sauce and mustard, to something as gourmet as grilled cheeses I got at Artisanal. I have a big California King bed. My bed is like a stage.”
3. “Hollywood Hotels Are Hubs for Deal Making”
“Hollywood hotels have long played a role in how the gears of show business grind. They are where the moguls show off (Harvey Weinstein conducting multiple meetings simultaneously at the Peninsula), where publicists monitor interviews (the bar at the Four Seasons) and where pretty young things are discovered poolside (the plucking of Robert Evans decades ago from obscurity at the Beverly Hills Hotel).”
4. “Will Books Be Napsterized?”
“Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.”
5. “The Polanski Case: A Gallic Shrug”
“France is a nation that worships aesthetes and philosophers, and some moral tension arises from this. Art and philosophy test boundaries. Artists demand their own social compass. Taken to its extreme, the argument implies that simply being an exceptional artist or intellectual can mitigate even criminal behavior.”
“What shall we do with the orphans? Orphan works are all those Brats whose copyrights are still active but whose parents cannot be found. There are millions of them out there, and they are gumming up the world of publishing.”
“Stanley Kubrick was nothing if not meticulous. Every detail of his movies had to be absolutely accurate; anything less would not have been convincing. He shot interior scenes of his 18th-century romp, Barry Lyndon, by candlelight, and the lugubrious War Room in Dr. Strangelove seemed so realistic that when the newly elected President Reagan moved into the White House, rumor had it that he asked his chief of staff to take him there.
“Even by Kubrick’s standards, the design of his 1968 sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was excruciating. Creating movie sets that look as though they belong to the future is an art director’s nightmare. Kubrick obsessed over everything: from the names of the extraterrestial brands (Hilton Space Station and Howard Johnson’s Earthlight Room) down to the zero-gravity toilet. For the props, he took his pick of futuristic 1960s designs, like Olivier Mourgue’s sleek Djinn seating in the space station’s lobby. But when it came to the knives and forks that Discovery One’s astronauts used to eat their space food, Kubrick went further back in time and chose cutlery designed in 1957, not by a pop design hipster but by a portly, pipe-smoking grandee of Danish architecture, Arne Jacobsen.”
