http://sf.eater.com/archives/2009/12/08/cha_ya_sunset_already_doneski_msf_toasts_the_industry.php  THE MISSION—Courtesy of a commenter, some reckless rumormongering about the next possible location of Ike's Place: "From what I was told, a larger, sit-down location was being scouted out in the Mission." Take it as you will. [~ESF~]
THE MISSION—This Thursday's serving of Mission Street Food is a notable one. Not only is offal on the menu, but following the normal dinner service, Anthony Myint and company will stay open for an industry happy hour from 11PM to midnight, complete with food and drink specials and everything. [MSFWire]
THE SUNSET—Grubz started the rumor earlier today, and now Cha Ya has confirmed that it will shutter its -old location next week. Per Lady Hopstess, moving in will be an Indian restaurant called Curry Village. [EaterWire]
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5422022/bringing-scandal-to-sesame-street  Nicole suggested sexing up Sesame Street; Debbie Gibson LOLed at a Krispy Kreme employee; and Susan Orlean's mind was controlled through the mail. The Twitterati got their kicks, one way or another.
 Just a taste, here, of how Salon's Scott Rosenberg rolls, w/r/t Bay Area females. Line forms to the left, ladies.
 Did Nicole Richie just call fracking Big Bird a "has been?" Yes, yes she did. But at least the reality TV starlet offered to basically hook BB up with a three-way, or drugs, or whatever, while she was at it.
 A low-income donut worker trying to eat healthy played a starring role in Debbie Gibsons' personal irony opera.
 Philip "Fuckedcompany" Kaplan is starting to feel self-conscious about his oral fixation.
 The New Yorker's Susan Orlean is, presumably, frantically adding books on nirvana and emotional euphoria to her Amazon wish list. The war histories are right out.
Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.
http://sf.eater.com/archives/2009/12/08/sandbox_don_pistos_manor_west_and_still_more_openings.php Smuggler's Cove isn't the only newcomer so far this week. As always, send your sightings of any and all hot new openings to sf@eater.com.
1) Bernal Heights: Sandbox Bakery has been making some noise this week. Opened yesterday, the combination French bakery/Japanese deli is the brainchild of Mutsumi Takehara, who boasts quite the resume: she worked at Chez Panisse, then Rubicon, and for the last decade, Slanted Door. 833 Cortland Avenue, between Ellsworth and Gates; 415-642-8580, website [EaterWire]
2) SoMa: Down in Clubland, Manor West rolled out last Thursday and proceeded to notch its first full weekend on the scene. The focal point of the plush room—it's the old Boss space—is the giant photo installation of a lady in fur. In case there's any confusion, pictured above is Manor West, not Sandbox Bakery. 750 Harrison Street, between Third and Fourth; 415-240-7558, website [EaterWire]
3) Polk Gulch: A new sushi joint is up and running on the Polk corridor by the name of Yamasho. It serves food until 1:30AM, but the bigger news is that, according to a Yelp review, there are about ten private, themed karaoke rooms downstairs that allow booze too. 1161 Post Street, between Polk and Van Ness; 415-346-2222 [EaterWire]
4) North Beach: Plywood vet Don Pisto's had a soft opening over the weekend, offering $3 tacos and such to the neighborhood crowd, late night included. Word on the street is that the soft opening will continue next weekend too; stay tuned for details on a proper launch. 510 Union Street, near Grant; website [EaterWire]
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/021120.html Woman, staring at the train subway map: Excuse me, how do you get to the 1 train?
Large black guy: Number one, you get an education.
Woman: No no, how do you get to the 1 train?
Large black guy: Number one, you get an education. Number two, you look at the map. Number three, don't talk to strangers.
--Uptown NQRW
Overheard by: Knows which strangers not to talk to
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AnilDash/~3/1YZjWrbE-mw/fact-check-britney-spears-3.html Recently, it has come to our attention here at Dashes.com that the lyrics to Britney Spears' single "3" contain some inaccuracies and poor decisions, and as a result, we'd like to offer some corrections, as a public service to Britney and her staff.
First, the chorus:
1, 2, 3
Not only you and me
Got one eighty degrees
And I'm caught in between
Countin'
1, 2, 3
Peter, Paul & Mary
Gettin' down with 3P
Everybody loves [labored moan]
Countin'
 
The "180 degrees" reference here works, and we congratulate you for avoiding any unfortunate "69" references in a such a number-heavy song. However, the "Peter, Paul & Mary" reference here is inexplicable. First of all, we're pretty sure one of them is dead, and the other two are close, and while the "threesome" concept tests well with focus groups (and is great for ranking in Google!), "necrophiliac threesome" is considerably less popular. Also, this reference is to a group that peaked roughly 40 years ago, putting the target demographic somewhere in their late 50s or early 60s — not the image you should be shooting for. Finally, while information about Woodstock is hard to find on wikipedia due to it having happened about half a century ago, we're pretty sure that two of these folks are dudes and that is, again, something that doesn't test as well.
In lieu of the "Peter, Paul & Mary" lyric, here are some suggested replacements featuring younger protagonists and the preferred MFF arrangement suggested by public polling and a series of very systematic Twitter searches:
- "1, 2, 3 / Jack, Janet, Chrissy" - While a "Three's Company" mention also predates your lifespan, the target audience could be as young as 35, and therefore constitutes an acceptable target demographic for a pop culture reference.
- "1, 2, 3, / Velma, Scoob, Daphne" - Everybody loves Scooby-Doo. Some might balk at the inclusion of a dog in the lineup here, but this is still clearly better than an old person, let alone an old dead folk singer.
The "3P" is a nice touch, and a video game reference feels a lot more contemporary than the rest of this Summer of Love stuff. "1, 2, 3 / Princess, Toad, Luigi", perhaps? Continuing on, we have the pre-chorus after the initial verses:
Are - you in
Livin' in sin is the new thing (yeah)
Are - you in
I am countin'!
Here we have another factual error. "Livin' in sin" is not the new thing, unless this is supposed to be a period piece taking place around the same Woodstock timeframe in which Peter, Paul & Mary is a relevant reference. More importantly, the concept of "living in sin" seems to have been completely abandoned by our culture at some point around the turn of the millennium -- is this another one of those Louisiana things? Let's get some folks to tight this part up. It's sort of nonsensical for a twice-divorced single mother of two to be using this line as seduction, at any rate.
Finally, the bridge:
What we do is innocent
Just for fun and nothin' meant
If you don't like the company
Let's just do it you and me
You and me...
Or three....
Or four....
- On the floor!
We have a conceptual issue here. While the beat to this song is certainly insistent, and the bridge has a profoundly conventional boom-chik backing track, the outro/vamp that follows this section actually don't use a traditional four-on-the-floor drum pattern. Clearly, this is just sloppy songwriting (or this was written to a different track, while the final one was still rendering in ProTools), so it's not your fault this wasn't caught in pre-production. I suggest letting this slide, as it'll be a useful snippet of "vocals" for producers to use on the club remixes. No harm, no foul!
Thanks again for your time, and we hope you've found this bit of fact-checking useful. We appreciate the effort you've made to simplify your lyrics to ease our task (although we do miss the good old days, where "Womanizer" only used 6 different words and no complete sentences!) and hope all's well with you.
"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken." So true. What really killed Jane Austen? - CNN.com
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/021119.html Guy in moose costume, sarcastically, on Halloween: Like people are really gonna remember a random-ass character from Sesame Street...
Guy in Yip Yip costume: So you'd rather be a fucking moose?
--Rivington & Clinton
Overheard by: TR
http://sf.eater.com/archives/2009/12/08/hottest_chef_round_1_skenes_maldonado_chiarello_accarrino.php 
Ladies and gents, the first upset of the Hottest Chef in the Bay Area competition is in the books, as Luce's Dominique Crenn defeated Hubert Keller and Jason Berthold down the stretch to guarantee a spot in Round Two. Today, Saison mastermind Joshua Skenes squares off against Aziza's second entry in the contest, Louis Maldonado, Napa Stylist/silverfoxman Michael Chiarello of Bottega and SPQR's mohawked Matthew Accarrino. May the hottest chef prove victorious.
Our polls require javascript -- if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your javascript-enabled web browser.
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=8099 I’ve had a bunch of questions on the forthcoming movie version of mine and Cully Hamner’s graphic novel RED, which starts shooting next month (I think). Let me try to field a couple of them.
First off: RED, the book, is 66 pages long. If you were to film 66 pages of comics, you might, might just about get 40 minutes of film out of it. If you added a musical number. The comics-page to film-minute ratio is pretty bad. A straight adaptation of a 150-page graphic novel might, if you squint at it, get you a 100-minute film. But it’s unlikely, because comics and films use time so differently. One page with four lines of dialogue on it can be slowed to a crawl to the point where you have to spend several minutes digesting the information on it. In film, however, four lines of dialogue is four lines of dialogue, and you can’t just pronounce it very slowly for the same time consumption. Beyond filmic/dramatic effects like the pause or montage or whatever, film is timelocked.
So, yes, RED the film is very different. Not least because it needed to generate more material than the book itself actually constituted.
It is in fact best to consider RED as a short story being adapted into film.
Next, and related: RED-the-book is also something of a chamber piece. There are essentially only four characters. (And a lot of people who get killed.) Now, while you can perfectly well make a film with only four characters in — or even just one character — those films tend not to be massive commercial propositions. And Summit is in the business of making commercial films. Also, they needed to expand RED from a half-hour to an hour-and-a-half. So, yes, there are a lot of new characters.
The new characters are all in theme, all in the same line of work as (Paul in the book, Frank in the film) Moses. The theme being, in part (and also poked at in my other books GLOBAL FREQUENCY and RELOAD) the unexploded bombs of the 20th Century.
(This actually gave the Hoebers the excuse to have fun with old spy tropes like CIA Nutter Guy — there’s a lovely piece of business with him in the first half-hour that amused me no end.)
I don’t think any of them are bad. Also, did you see the goddamn cast list that’s signed on for those characters? Bruce Willis as Moses, yes. But also: Morgan Freeman, Mary-Louise Parker, John C Reilly, Helen Mirren, Julian McMahon, Brian Cox, Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dreyfus. It reminds me a bit of those 70s films like THE TOWERING INFERNO, that had in them everyone you wanted to see in a film, all at once. RED is a bit like that, only with more automatic weapons.
Bruce Willis: when you look back over his filmography, that man’s actually had an incredibly weird career. DIE HARD and all that, sure… but also FIFTH ELEMENT, TWELVE MONKEYS, PULP FICTION, an adaptation of a Harlan Ellison short story for TV and getting a film adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut book made by sheer force of will. Not bad.
The tone: no, the film isn’t as grim as the book. The book is pretty grim. But it’s also pretty small. When I sell the rights to a book, they buy the right to adapt it in whatever way they see fit. I can accept that they wanted a lighter film, and, as I’ve said before, the script is very enjoyable and tight as a drum. They haven’t adapted it badly, by any means. People who’ve enjoyed the graphic novel will have to accept that it’s an adaptation and that by definition means that it’s going to be a different beast from the book. The film has the same DNA. It retains bits that are very clearly from the book, as well as, of course, the overall plotline. But it is, yes, lighter, and funnier. And if anyone has a real problem with that, I say to you once again:
Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle.
I mean, if you don’t want to see a film with Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, I’m not sure I want to know you.
–
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=8092
- Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Fighting an Automated Bureaucracy
"When the Taliban arrive in a village, I discovered, it takes 96 hours for an Army commander to obtain necessary approvals to act."
(tags:war )
- California gives green light to space solar power – space – 08 December 2009 – New Scientist
"On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission gave its blessing to an agreement that would see the Pacific Gas and Electric Company buy 200 megawatts of power beamed down from solar-power satellites beginning in 2016. A start-up company called Solaren is designing the satellites, which it says will use radio waves to beam energy down to a receiving station on Earth."
(tags:space )
- UK man fears cult leader release
"Mehdi Zand, leader of the World of Yaad, a cult which claims to hold the secret to everlasting life, was jailed along with members Francesco Zand and Mohammed ?Javad? Kashefi for a total of 11 years, after attacking the restaurant owner and his business partner.[...] ?Mehdi Zand said to me, ?you have betrayed your god of 20 years?, then he ordered the others to kill me.?"
(tags:cult crime )
- Raelian leader from Iran seeks asylum in Turkey
"With their libertarian attitude to sex, and their belief that humans were created by extra-terrestrials, Raelians inevitably fall foul of the religious authorities in Iran. The crime of apostasy ? rejecting religious faith ? carries the death penalty there, and supporters of Negar Azizmoradi say that is what will happen to her if the Turkish government sends her back to Iran."
(tags:cult )
- BBC News – Nasa tests Aberdeenshire find for life on Mars clues
"Macaulayite is only believed to exist at a quarry at the foot of Bennachie in Aberdeenshire. Researchers think it could be the same mineral which gives the planet its red colour. "
(tags:space geo )
Committer: gariev LJ Shop: round price bugfixing U trunk/cgi-bin/LJ/Pay/Payment.pm
( diff )
I’ve had a bunch of questions on the forthcoming movie version of mine and Cully Hamner’s graphic novel RED, which starts shooting next month (I think). Let me try to field a couple of them.
First off: RED, the book, is 66 pages long. If you were to film 66 pages of comics, you might, might just about get 40 minutes of film out of it. If you added a musical number. The comics-page to film-minute ratio is pretty bad. A straight adaptation of a 150-page graphic novel might, if you squint at it, get you a 100-minute film. But it’s unlikely, because comics and films use time so differently. One page with four lines of dialogue on it can be slowed to a crawl to the point where you have to spend several minutes digesting the information on it. In film, however, four lines of dialogue is four lines of dialogue, and you can’t just pronounce it very slowly for the same time consumption. Beyond filmic/dramatic effects like the pause or montage or whatever, film is timelocked.
So, yes, RED the film is very different. Not least because it needed to generate more material than the book itself actually constituted.
It is in fact best to consider RED as a short story being adapted into film.
Next, and related: RED-the-book is also something of a chamber piece. There are essentially only four characters. (And a lot of people who get killed.) Now, while you can perfectly well make a film with only four characters in — or even just one character — those films tend not to be massive commercial propositions. And Summit is in the business of making commercial films. Also, they needed to expand RED from a half-hour to an hour-and-a-half. So, yes, there are a lot of new characters.
The new characters are all in theme, all in the same line of work as (Paul in the book, Frank in the film) Moses. The theme being, in part (and also poked at in my other books GLOBAL FREQUENCY and RELOAD) the unexploded bombs of the 20th Century.
(This actually gave the Hoebers the excuse to have fun with old spy tropes like CIA Nutter Guy — there’s a lovely piece of business with him in the first half-hour that amused me no end.)
I don’t think any of them are bad. Also, did you see the goddamn cast list that’s signed on for those characters? Bruce Willis as Moses, yes. But also: Morgan Freeman, Mary-Louise Parker, John C Reilly, Helen Mirren, Julian McMahon, Brian Cox, Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dreyfus. It reminds me a bit of those 70s films like THE TOWERING INFERNO, that had in them everyone you wanted to see in a film, all at once. RED is a bit like that, only with more automatic weapons.
Bruce Willis: when you look back over his filmography, that man’s actually had an incredibly weird career. DIE HARD and all that, sure… but also FIFTH ELEMENT, TWELVE MONKEYS, PULP FICTION, an adaptation of a Harlan Ellison short story for TV and getting a film adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut book made by sheer force of will. Not bad.
The tone: no, the film isn’t as grim as the book. The book is pretty grim. But it’s also pretty small. When I sell the rights to a book, they buy the right to adapt it in whatever way they see fit. I can accept that they wanted a lighter film, and, as I’ve said before, the script is very enjoyable and tight as a drum. They haven’t adapted it badly, by any means. People who’ve enjoyed the graphic novel will have to accept that it’s an adaptation and that by definition means that it’s going to be a different beast from the book. The film has the same DNA. It retains bits that are very clearly from the book, as well as, of course, the overall plotline. But it is, yes, lighter, and funnier. And if anyone has a real problem with that, I say to you once again:
Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle.
I mean, if you don’t want to see a film with Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, I’m not sure I want to know you.
(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.) |
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