_by Liz Entman Harper_
A sharp-dressed private eye can’t escape corruption in 1930s Los Angeles.
There's nothing about the cream linen suit Jake Gittes wears in the opening scenes of _Chinatown_ that suggests he's a private eye. It's 1937 Los Angeles, and he's showing graphic photos of a couple having sex in the woods to a distraught husband, but Gittes is just a string tie away from looking like a wealthy plantation owner.
Credit: Glam Amor
For a guy whose job it is to dig up dirt, he seems awfully clean--and for a guy whose working-class client can't pay him, he seems pretty flush. He has a nicely furnished office with three employees, drinks coffee from a china cup and saucer, and drives a shiny new convertible. No schlubby trench coats for Jake--he's always in three-piece suits (double-breasted, with belt backs, pleats, and perfectly coordinated pocket squares), expensive Florsheim shoes, and, of course, a fedora.
Credit: Glam Amor
Later, hints about his past come to light--he used to be a cop in Chinatown, and it's implied that he stumbled across and maybe tried to expose some corruption there. Whatever it was, it seems, it ended his association with the law. I like to imagine that he quit the force in disgust, but that he was savvy enough to sell his silence for a tidy sum.
Now he makes an honest, if not exactly innocent, living stalking cheating spouses, like Hollis Mulwray, a top official with the Los Angeles Power and Water Department.
Credit: Glam Amor
Hollis's wife, Evelyn, is as incongruous a femme fatale as Gittes is a private eye. A glacial beauty with sharp cheekbones and razor-thin eyebrows, Evelyn is partial to mannish suits and never shows much skin. She's wearing a turtleneck the first time she appears and the closest she ever gets to cleavage is a slice of sternum revealed by a deep v-neck. The only time we see her legs she's wearing jodhpurs and boots for polo, and there's nothing come-hither about them. Like Gittes, she sticks to neutrals; the costume palette is so desaturated, you could almost forget the movie was filmed in color.
Credit: Glam Amor
Chinatown won an Oscar for costume design--which is maybe an odd distinction for a film shot so closely that you almost never see the actors' legs, but not an undeserved one. I won't spoil the mystery, but it's a complicated knot of real estate fraud, water rights, murder, and incest. The further Jake and Evelyn get pulled into the case, the darker their clothes seem to get. By the end, she's in black and he's in dark gray. And they're back in Chinatown.
_by Jonathan Bell_
Micro-living is no longer just for the very poor and the very bohemian. But how much space do we really deserve? Tracking down the minimum square-footage below which no one should be forced to endure.
_by Liz Entman Harper_
Indie, Indian, and all points between: stories about folk music.
I've spent much of the past week and a half stuck in much-worse-than-usual traffic, and thinking about Kevin Fanning's pitch-perfect meditation on commuting: How the Dead Live. "Thinking about the clock of my life ticking away every day while I'm sitting there, just waiting to be somewhere else, I feel the gulf between my body (where I am) and brain (where I want to be) widening," Fanning writes. "The two growing further apart, until I'm only aware of the distance between them."
The culprit is two major music festivals taking place a week apart, both in their own way celebrating country, folk, and Americana. While my body is sitting in a line of cars through green light after green light, my brain wouldn't mind taking a few days off work to catch some shows. This week, stories about roots music, ready to read here on TMN or in an e-book you can export to your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, etc.
_by Giles Turnbull_
As we progress from smartphones to smart toasters, our things are becoming increasingly connected. Soon they'll be on Facebook alongside us. From there, it's only a few steps to tactful beds.
_by Giles Turnbull_
As we progress from smartphones to smart toasters, our things are becoming increasingly connected. Soon they'll be on Facebook alongside us. From there, it's only a few steps to tactful beds.
_by Liz Entman Harper_
A 17th-century dandy’s wardrobe rises and falls with his fortunes.
Although the jingle-belled codpieces of the 1540s and the disco suits of the 1970s were something special, my vote for the silliest decade in Western men's fashion is the 1660s. It was an age of voluminous pirate shirts, elaborate, waist-length wigs, high-heeled shoes, enormous feathered hats, and yard upon yard of candy-colored brocades, silks, and velvets.
Credit: MoviePictureDB
This is the age of _Restoration_, a fun, hot mess of a tale starring Robert Downey Jr. as Robert Merivel, a remarkably gifted and hard-partying doctor who becomes the court veterinarian to King Charles's beloved spaniels and a husband of convenience to the king's mistress, before falling out of favor and being forced to practice his art among humbler company.
At the height of Merivel's favor with the king, he out-dazzles even the women at court. It can sometimes be difficult to tell where he ends and the palace's upholstery or drapery begins. And he's got so many clothes on, he can hardly keep up with them all: He can never seem to keep his collar closed or his stockings up; he's always juggling a walking stick and a hat and ribbons on his shoes; and he has enough fabric flapping around himself to clothe three men. He makes the word "fop" seem like onomatopoeia.
Credit: cinema.de
When he is granted a country estate and liberated from the exhausting task of getting dressed every day, he spends much of his time in rich, flowing robes that must have been the 17th-century equivalent of sweatpants. But even this is too much; Merivel always seems like he's drowning in lace.
Credit: MoviePictureDB
He doesn't really ever get comfortable in his clothes until much later, when he returns to London during the plague. By then he has lost the king's favor, worked for a while in a Quaker mental asylum, and lost the mother of his child to an emergency cesarean section he had to perform himself. His coats of many colors are long gone; now he's in sensible grays and blacks, in proportions that fit him. He settles into fatherhood and returns to his calling as a doctor at the plague hospital.
Credit: cinema.de
He does don a costume one last time, though, for an incognito visit to court to treat his ex-wife, the king's mistress. But there is nothing fanciful about what he wears: In addition to his newly sober dark clothes, he wears a historically accurate plague mask, a nightmarish combination of gas mask and bird beak into which purifying herbs were packed to filter the infectious air. If Merivel was a bird of paradise before, he's a raven of hell now. But although sin always seemed to come easily to Merivel, evil never did. In the end, he brings hope to the king, who in turn restores Merivel to Eden, or at least a suburb of it.
Experiencing a piece of art can be transporting, but the act of explaining it to someone else is an art form in itself. No wonder that docents, professors, even patrons get caught up in the act.
_by Kevin Fanning_
Tepid response to “Arrested Development” changes Amanda Bynes’s life forever.
A New York City cop was sitting alone in his apartment. He was watching the new season of _Arrested__ Development_, which he had been very excited about. After years of saying "I hope they make an _Arrested__ Development_ movie or perhaps another season of the show!" on his Twitter and his Tumblr, now, at last, he finally had that which his heart had been yearning for.
The light from the cop's laptop flickered across his face in the darkened apartment. He watched four episodes right in a row.
"What is happening?" he said, staring blankly at the screen. "I don't get it. What is this?" There was no one in the apartment to answer him. "These episodes feel so different! Why isn't this more like what I remember? Why aren't I laughing?"
The cop wanted the show to be as funny as he remembered. He wanted it to reveal itself more openly. He wanted it to make him laugh and not make him wonder what was going on. He slammed his Macbook Air shut and stomped around his apartment. He wanted to tweet about his frustration, maybe see if other people shared his feelings, but he didn't want to be accused of spoiling season four for other people who hadn't begun watching it yet.
"I'm so angry!" he said. He stopped and stood very still in the middle of his apartment. "Ugh! So mad!" he said. "I feel like I could ..." his mind scanned every file in its memory for the aptest word, the metaphor, the action that would properly convey the feelings he was experiencing. "I feel like I could slap a vagina," he thought.
Across town, Amanda Bynes was shopping for wigs on her phone. She had moved to New York City so that she could disappear into the crowds and live a normal life, but that had not happened at all. People harassed and judged her constantly in all three of her states of being: real life, print media, and on the internet. At least occasionally on the internet someone said something supportive to her. She retweeted those people and it made her feel better.
She slid her finger across her phone and purchased a shaggy blond wig. She was using the iPhone 5. Amanda hoped that the next time Apple updated their operating system they would abandon their reliance on skeuomorphic design. She also hoped they would come up with a more elegant solution for sharing between apps.
The next day a young celebrity photographer broke into Amanda Bynes's apartment. He was in a desperate situation. He was already deep in debt because of his outstanding college loans, and now his wife had contracted a terrible illness whose cure required very expensive hospitalization and prescription medications.
"Health care is so expensive!", the photographer lamented to himself. "Even with the changes to the system implemented by Obama, against great opposition. As I am a contractor, i.e. a non-full-time employee, my employer does not even offer me and my spouse health benefits! It is shameful, what these corporations do, but no matter. I will break into Amanda Bynes's apartment and take some very up-close candid photos of her, perhaps while she is sleeping, and then sell them to the highest bidder. I will be able to pay for my wife's medical treatments and probably have enough left over to repay my college loans to the Columbia School of Journalism!
"Who even knows," he thought, seducing a maid in the hallway and lifting her access keys. "Maybe I'll be so rich that I can live on an island somewhere. Maybe this will be such a big story that I will become famous myself! Imagine that! Me, a famous celebrity! Ha ha," he chuckled to himself, entering Amanda Bynes's apartment.
But he was not the first photographer who had tried to break into Amanda Bynes's hotel room, and she had set a trap for him. He tripped over a wire connected to a series of empty cans, which sent such a clattering and jangling across the room that Amanda immediately awoke. She leapt to her feet, her eyes wide and furious. She grabbed a large, empty glass bottle from the floor by her bed and smashed it against the corner of her nightstand. She brandished the bottle's jagged edges at the photographer.
The photographer was too freaked out to even take any pictures. He ran straight through the apartment and jumped out the window. He used parkour, the art of urban movement, to land safely on a rooftop three stories below, scampering down a fire escape to the street.
Amanda Bynes leaned out the window and screamed at him and threw the bottle down in his general direction. It missed him, shattering on the sidewalk without harming anyone. She immediately regretted throwing the bottle. You can't do things like that! But she had been so mad.
A group of tourists standing below heard the glass shatter and looked up to see Amanda Bynes shaking her fist out the window. They weren't sure what was happening but they felt they had better call the authorities. They tweeted an alert to the celebrity website TMZ.
A reporter from TMZ screeched up in a van and began to assess the situation. The tourists explained what they had seen. The reporter examined the glass shards on the ground. "From reports I have heard," he said, "this is what a drug bong looks like when it is shattered from a great height. We had better inform the New York City Cops about Amanda Bynes doing drugs and throwing the paraphernalia out the window." He thanked the tourists for doing the right thing and got set up to write some very lucrative reports.
The articles the reporter later posted to the internet had titles like:
"Top 10 Reasons Amanda Bynes Was Arrested for Throwing A Drug Bong out a Window"
"It Was Not a Bong! Says Insane Former Child Star"
"The 43 Cutest Pictures of Pandas Riding Bicycles, and Police Do Not Have Enough Evidence to Detain Amanda Bynes"
"One of the Cops Slapped My Vagina, Says Celebrity Girl Who Got Cosmetic Surgery and Posts Nude Selfies to Twitter"
"Slap a Vagina? I Would Never! Says Area Cop in $10M Tumblr Book Deal Proposal"
Amanda Bynes decided to leave the city and live somewhere quieter. Somewhere farther away from people. The only people she cared about were on Twitter anyway. "These days internet access is pretty much everywhere," she thought. "So there's no real benefit from being near people's physical bodies."
The cop decided he would take a break from _Arrested Development_ and instead finally give a listen to the new Daft Punk album. He hoped it sounded exactly like their earlier stuff. They were a great band and he loved their catchy dance music. Just imagining how it would sound relaxed him. He pressed play and the walls of his apartment began to contract, suffocating him.
The photographer was unable to pay his wife's medical bills, so she died. The photographer also died, just randomly, as happens to a lot of people. Their medical bills and college loans went unpaid, which made the people whose job it was to stare at a computer all day and be upset about this appropriately upset.
The update to Apple iOS eventually arrived but it was somewhat underwhelming. Some of it was really cool and innovative but there were still things that were annoying about iPhones, as a lot of people explained on their blogs. Apple got rid of some of the skeuomorphic design but not all of it. No one knew why.
The shards of glass from the bottle Amanda Bynes had thrown were photographed and then swept into a trash can, which was emptied into a dumpster, which was emptied onto a truck, which was emptied into a landfill. It took hundreds and hundreds of years for the molecules in the glass to decompose and be subsumed by the Earth. By then all the humans were gone, even the zombies.
