My Name Escapes Me: If I had a Tumblr

...it would be called
"Other People's Inspiration"

or

"A Catalog You Can't Order From"

Funny Things about Serious People: Dear Guitardealer

I didn’t really see him too much after that, although I sold him a couple of guitars along the way during the ’60s. That 1930s Gibson Nick Lucas Special he played in “Don’t Look Back” had belonged to my sister. It was in mint condition when I sold it to him, but it got a little wrecked. He had that guitar for a long time. Later, probably in the early ’70s, I drove up to Woodstock to sell him a really nice late-’60s Martin. He was a tough guy to do business with, though, because he didn’t have any idea what the guitars were worth.

-Marc Silber, "Long Ago, Far Away," from Encounters with Bob Dylan

Something Like Something: Jewish people are good at music and film

I have now seen three movies with Mélanie Laurent. In all three she portrays (secretly-) Jewish women. Can Jewish actors in France only play Jewish people?

Stranger with You: Cultural Expatriation

What is the deal with "Downtown Abbey" that everyone's talking about and why does Steve Inskeep sound like he's saying "Doughton Abbey" when he mentions it?

Something like Something: Did you know Woody Allen was once a famous comedian?

"And then I told him how there were a lot of times i couldn't bring myself to care about my friends when something bad happens to them, but he didn't understand. We talked more, and then we watched Annie Hall for awhile."

-from "Adrien Brody," by 'Marie Calloway'

"After a strange period of not fitting in with any of the cliques I’d tried to join freshman year – straitlaced nerds whose nerdiness was not the intriguing kind, sad pretty girls whose habit of eating meals together was forged around what I realized belatedly was mutual avoidance of actual eating – I was finally finding the people with whom I could take bong hits and watch Annie Hall repeatedly."

-from "Our graffiti," by Emily Gould

Woody Allen was kind of a genius at one point, but then people started calling him a genius in writing, and he thought "genius" meant "someone who makes philosophically weighty art" and so he started making lots of movies where people analyze their feelings constantly while referencing Ingmar Bergman and/or e.e. cummings.

The first quotation is from a 'short story' which is examined in a blog post in which the second quotation appears. Reading them, I get the feeling both authors indulge the Allen-esque pleasure of never having a good time and making sure no one else has a good time, either.

(P.S. Thanks to Will Redden for alerting me to the existence of this whole 'Marie Calloway' morass. Never send me anything again.)