Bad Behavior

If you’re looking for something compelling and quirky to watch, I recommend “Bad Behavior.” It stars Jennifer Connelly, Ben Whishaw, and Alice Englert, who is the writer / director and Jane Campion’s daughter. The story concerns itself with a conflicted mother, her equally conflicted daughter, and what happens when you lose it at a semi-silent retreat. Connelly’s performance is a marvel. If you like stupid, you won’t like this movie.

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Ravaged

“Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

—Marguerite Duras, The Lover

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PEN15

If you haven’t seen “PEN15” on Hulu, you really should. In theory, it sounds like a series that would never work. Two adult actors play grade school versions of themselves alongside young actors. But it’s genius. It’s seriously cringe-worthy, endearingly revealing, and LOL hilarious. Watch it. Season 2 is coming soon.

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Waves

Watch “Waves.” It’s atmospheric af and beautifully shot in Southeast Florida.

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Lovecraft Country

If you’re not watching “Lovecraft Country,” you really should be. It’s brilliant.

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Toni

I’ll read anything by Hilton Als, and this 2003 profile of Toni Morrison is why.

“‘I know it seems like a lot,’ Morrison said. ‘But I really only do one thing. I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.’ What Morrison has managed to do with that job—and the criticism, pro and con, she has received for doing it—has made her one of the most widely written-about American authors of the past fifty years. (The latest study of her work, she told me, is a comparison of the vernacular in her novels and William Faulkner’s. ‘'I don’t believe it,’ I said. ‘Believe it,’ she said, emphatically.) Morrison—required reading in high schools across the country—is almost always treated as a spokeswoman for her gender and her race. In a review of “Paradise,” Patricia Storace wrote, ‘Toni Morrison is relighting the angles from which we view American history, changing the very color of its shadows, showing whites what they look like in black mirrors. To read her work is to witness something unprecedented, an invitation to a literature to become what it has claimed to be, a truly American literature.’ It’s a claim that her detractors would also make, to opposite effect.”

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Outcry

“Outcry” on Showtime is fantastic. Watch the whole thing. It’s worth the journey.

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Baseless

This book looks amazing: Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker. Available for pre-order.

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My Favorite Firearm

My favorite firearm is Cabot Guns The Icon. It’s Frank Gehry-esque. A 1911. “Meticulously transformed entirely from block stainless steel,” and elegant af. A work of art isn’t cheap. It’s $4,995.

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Image via Cabot Guns

The Annex

So happy to find this last night 💚

6 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "So happy to find this last night 💚"

I used to live in Los Feliz. Now I live in Burbank. Every so often, I go back to Los Feliz, and the other night I went to Skylight Books. My favorite thing is the bookstore's Art Annex. It's a few doors down on Vermont and stocked with graphic novels, art books, screenwriting books, photography books, and chapbooks. It's like the creative, mutant, smaller twin to Skylight. While there, I happened across a new book by Dave Cooper, a longtime favorite artist of mine. He's a maker of what could be called comics and a kind of psycho-surrealist. I first fell in love with his work through Ripple, which is a crazy magical work that forces you to think about the body, and sex, and human relations in all kinds of mind-bending new ways. A few weeks ago, when I was at Wacko, I spotted an Eddy Table doll, so I figured something was afoot. In any case, I was delighted to discover the latest work by Cooper at the Art Annex: Mud Bite. What's Mud Bite? It's hard to say. It's the story of a guy with bulging eyes, and a girl with a skin problem, and a river of mud. And there are scary bugs, too. It's a joy to encounter -- filled with curious and awful things, moments of bizarre beauty and strange twists, and oddly enlightening to your soul. Check out the trailer for "The Absence of Eddy Table." Holy cow!

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Last Weekend

My buddy @young_em_see with his incredible and inventive memoir of his multiple Iraq War deployments: EAT THE APPLE. Read it! 🍎 #usmc #marines #eattheapple #eattheapplefuckthecorps #semperfi #memoirs #bookfest 📷 by Maggie Waz

27 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "My buddy @young_em_see with his incredible and inventive memoir of his multiple Iraq War..."

Last weekend, I went to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I'd been to the FoB before, but when it was at UCLA, and it's now at USC, which I'd never been to before. USC is sprawling and nice, but there's something sort of flat and banal about it. Although there is some interesting architecture. I was there to see my friend Matt Young sit on a panel and discuss his new memoir, EAT THE APPLE, which is an amazing and experimental memoir that explores what multiple deployments do to a young Marine's mind. I highly recommend it. I got to meet BLACK HAWK DOWN author Mark Bowden, who was on the panel and discussing his new book, HUE 1968; read his rave of Matt's book in the New York Times. We didn't stay long at the FoB, because there were amazing shrimp tacos to be had at the appropriately named Best Fish Taco in Los Feliz. That inspired choice was thanks to Maggie Waz, a great young, talented, and hilarious writer who has an alter ego that is going to Mars.

Buy "The Tumor" -- a new digital short story that's been called "a masterpiece."

Read This Book

My friend Matt Young's memoir, Eat the Apple, which has been called "the Iliad of the Iraq War," is on sale tomorrow. It's an amazing book that I was lucky enough to read while he was working on it. Today, the NYT proclaimed it "inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining," and NPR says it's "brilliant and barbed." I strongly recommend you read it. You will love it.

Buy a copy of my digital short story "The Tumor"! It's been called "a masterpiece."

Listen

I've been loving listening to KCRW. Great stuff. This is Kyle McNeill's "Suzanne."

SMILF

Great new show on Showtime: "SMILF." Tough girl, complicated life. Great acting, and writing. It's like "Girls" on truth crack. Unexpected, gritty. Sexy and charming.

Rats

I went to Jim Ruland's Vermin on the Mount reading series this evening and ended up listening to Lol Tolhurst read about the early days of The Cure, so that was pretty cool. The reading took place at Book Show in Highland Park; it's a curious place, filled with sideshow art, amusing zines, and general curios. I particularly enjoyed hearing Ben Loory read "The Writer" from Tales of Falling and Flying. It's a really beautiful story. Buy a copy of the book. I did. You should, too. Sometime next year, I'll be reading in the series. I'll post the when and the where when I know. And Book Show is a really curious place. Check it out sometime.

Buy This Book

I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of my buddy Matt Young's EAT THE APPLE: A MEMOIR.

It just got a starred review in Publisher's Weekly!

"In this bold memoir, ex-Marine Young examines how war transformed him from a confused teenager into a dangerous and damaged man. Fresh from high school and with no direction, Young walked into a Marine recruitment center in 2005 and sealed his fate. Soon he was suffering the indignities of basic training before being deployed to 'the sandbox' in Iraq, where he sweated, masturbated, shot stray dogs, and watched friends get blown up."

The Must-Read on Trump

If you haven't already, make sure to read David Roth's "The President of Blank Sucking Nullity." It's my favorite thing I've read on Trump thus far, and it really gets to the ... uh, heart of the man. 

"To understand Trump is also to understand his appeal as an aspirational brand to the worst people in the United States. What his intransigent admirers like most about him—the thing they aspire to, in their online cosplay sessions and their desperately thirsty performances for a media they loathe and to which they are so helplessly addicted—is his freedom to be unconcerned with anything but himself. This is not because he is rich or brave or astute; it’s because he is an asshole, and so authentically unconcerned. The howling and unreflective void at his core will keep him lonely and stupid until the moment a sufficient number of his vital organs finally resign in disgrace, but it liberates him to devote every bit of his being to his pursuit of himself. Actual hate and actual love, as other people feel them, are too complicated to fit into this world. In their place, for Trump and for the people who see in him a way of being that they are too busy or burdened or humane to pursue, are the versions that exist in a lower orbit, around the self. Instead of hate, there is simple resentment—abject and valueless and recursively self-pitying; instead of love, there is the blank sucking nullity of vanity and appetite."

More of This

I've been doing more pilates lately. It seems to do all good things. I'm standing up straighter. My muscles are longer. And I'm working on getting my alignment realigned. It's certainly a curious practice, and I can't say I understand how it works, but you might want to try it if you haven't. You can start by going to a mat pilates class. It will tone up your core in no time flat. Promise. 

Mr. Diamond

Don't miss "The Architect Who Became a Diamond." There's some really fascinating stuff about what art is and who delivers it and how. What does it mean to own a legacy?

In 2002, as an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie, in Amsterdam, Magid began noticing the large number of surveillance cameras in the city—anonymous gray boxes, mounted on everything from the corners of buildings to coffee-shop awnings. One February morning, she went to the police headquarters and explained that she was an artist interested in decorating the municipal cameras with rhinestones. She was directed to the appropriate police administrators, who told her that they did not work with artists. She thanked them and left. A few weeks later, Magid returned, armed with business cards and a corporate-speak sales pitch, presenting herself as the Head Security Ornamentation Professional at System Azure, a company that she had made up. The police not only allowed her to bedazzle the cameras but even paid her a couple of thousand dollars. “I realized that they could not hear me when I spoke as an artist,” Magid later said. “This had nothing to do with what I proposed but with who I was.”

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Movie Recommendations: "Love"

If you haven't seen Gaspar Noe's "Love," please do. I watched it on Netflix, I think. Not in 3D, unfortunately, which means I missed the extra impact of that shot where the guy moneys at the camera, but one does what one can. Sure, some uptight assholes thought it was gross, meaningless, and perverted, but they say that like it's a bad thing. I found it to be beautiful, brave, and unblinking. It's about a guy and two girls, and there's lots of sex. What's not to like?