"I know a guy — he collects unemployment even though he’s employed — who just had his teeth veneered bright white, with ceramic laminates."

"I ran into him recently, and he dropped to his knees to coo over how my puppy has grown. As he went to kiss her freckled nose, he flashed his crocodile smile. That same week, I heard from another guy — last I knew, he was a real mess, drove his marriage off a cliff, with his kids in the back seat — letting me know he’s now a life coach and focus counselor. He wants to help me live my best life and was offering me a 20 percent discount."

I just think it's funny that those are the first 5 sentences of an article about artichokes — "Don’t Fear the Artichoke. Cook It Whole."

Vegetables have gotten so meaningful lately. There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez politicizing cauliflower and yearning for "yucca" (presumably yuca).

By the way, for a meaningful dose of artichokes, you might want to see the revival of the Sam Shepard play "Curse of the Starving Class," which is off Broadway until June 2. They throw a lot of artichokes around in that play. I literally got hit by artichokes, sitting in the front row in 1978. I can't remember what the artichokes meant, but they were important. I remember getting hit and I remember the line "So that's what artichokes smell like" but I don't remember what they were supposed to mean, though of course they had to mean something, since everything in a play means something.

The artichoke is the most fearsome vegetable. All those points, and if one sticks you, it might still hurt the next day, as if those stickers are venomous.

I was going to punch up this post with other vegetables in pop culture (other than those artichokes in "Starving Class"), but it was hard to Google. I thought I had something in "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables," a 2011 NYT article, but it's about watching movies and TV shows that are supposed to be good for you (i.e., metaphorical vegetables).

In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”...

A friend messages me: “Oh, you have to see ‘Mildred Pierce,’ ” and she’s right: I do have to.... But that doesn’t mean that, as Kate Winslet bakes yet another pie, I won’t sometimes wonder if those five hours might be more profitably spent aspiring in a different direction: exercising, maybe, or reading a book or just watching 10 episodes of the hilarious (and not at all contemplative) cartoon “Bob’s Burgers.”...

Yes, why watch something long if you prefer reading or exercising, both of which are at least as good for you as some aspirational film or TV series? Lately, the only TV I watch is "Jeopardy!" Do you think James Holzhauer has had his teeth veneered with bright white ceramic laminates?

Eddie Vedder sings Tom Petty for the Oscars

Most #MeToo noncompliant 3 seconds:



"You're a movie star now. You give them what they want, you can get anything."

Shockingly close to "And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."

"He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be..."

"... but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.... Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own country. But Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a debilitating affliction. He eventually stopped picking up and leaving.... Long, slow days passed.... Sam walked to his bed and lay down and went to sleep, a stoic, noble sleep.... I was far away, standing in the rain before the sleeping lion of Lucerne, a colossal, noble, stoic lion carved from the rock of a low cliff.... A long time ago, Sam sent me a letter. A long one, where he told me of a dream that he had hoped would never end. 'He dreams of horses,' I told the lion. 'Fix it for him, will you? Have Big Red waiting for him, a true champion. He won’t need a saddle, he won’t need anything.'..."

Patti Smith writes about Sam Shepard (in The New Yorker).

It was interesting reading that today. I love both Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, but I was just reading — also in The New Yorker, the July 31st issue — an essay called "Can Poetry Change Your Life?" by Louis Menand that said something pretty mean about Patti Smith's writing:

A writer with a playlist of culture heroes must also have a list of the undeserving, the fake, and the fallen, and [Michael Robbins, in "Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music."] does not disappoint us. He writes of the poet James Wright, “It is easy to feel that, if fetal alcohol syndrome could write poetry, it would write this poetry.” He suggests that Robert Hass “has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery.” Of Charles Simic: “If the worst are full of passionate intensity, Simic would seem to be in the clear.”

He calls Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” “wimpy crap.” He says that Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” is “highly acclaimed despite her apparent belief that serious writing is principally a matter of avoiding contractions.” His reaction to Neil Young’s memoir is “It’s depressing to learn that one of your heroes writes like a composition student aiming for the earnest tone of a public service announcement.”

I don't know what you think of that writing in Smith's tribute to Shepard, but I think there are about 13 contractions in that short essay. If I were in the mood to imitate Smith's lofty, arty style, I'd blithely, slyly drift from talking about contractions of the 2-words-are-one-word type to an earnest metaphor involving the contractions of childbirth. But I'm just about never in that mood. I'm more in the mood to look up "the sleeping lion of Lucerne" and see if I can get it in Google Street View.

Yes. Here it is:

Goodbye to Sam Shepard.

"Sam Shepard, the celebrated avant-garde playwright and Oscar-nominated actor, died at his home in Kentucky on Thursday of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a spokesman for the Shepard family announced on Monday. He was 73," the NYT reports.

One of the most important and influential early writers in the Off Broadway movement, Mr. Shepard captured and chronicled the darker sides of American family life in plays like “Buried Child,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, and “Curse of the Starving Class” and “A Lie of the Mind.”

I remember sitting in the front row for “Curse of the Starving Class" at the Public Theater in 1978. I got hit by water and an artichoke. From the Wikipedia article (artichokicle) on the play:

Act I... Weston enters, drunk, with a large bag of groceries. Weston talks to the lamb briefly, and then begins putting the groceries, which turn out to only be desert artichokes, in the refrigerator. Wesley enters and they discuss Weston’s laundry and the best way to help the lamb with the maggots.

Act II... Wesley and Emma then argue over who is going to go add water to the artichokes that are boiling on the stove. Wesley doesn’t want to do it because he is making the door and Emma doesn’t want to do it because she is remaking her posters. Wesley says that Emma doesn’t want to do it just because she’s “on the rag,” so she throws down her markers and gets up to add the water.... Ella returns with groceries that Taylor has bought for the family and throws out the artichokes....

I remember a lot of throwing of artichokes and one rolling off the stage and into my lap.

ADDED: Sam Shepard co-wrote a song with Bob Dylan, "Brownsville Girl":

It’s... an 11-minute narrative... [about] a long-lost love and his standing in line to see Gregory Peck in a classic Western film ["The Gunfighter"]. No one knows who wrote which lines in the zany masterpiece... but the tale fits squarely within Shepard’s canon with its use of Old Western themes, Mexican-border drama, mysterious women, and general disenchantment as an understated rumination on the myth of the American Dream.... At one point during the song, Dylan shifts from nostalgic reverie to directly inserting himself into the very film he’s standing in line to view. “Something about that movie though, well I just can’t get it out of my head / But I can’t remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play,” he sings, almost as if to suggest he is unable to separate his own unparalleled fame from that of Peck’s character Ringo, the fastest gunslinger in the West deeply troubled by having become a magnet for every two-bit desperado looking to make a name for himself by besting the top gun....  The song was performed only once by Dylan and is rarely, if ever, mentioned in retrospective analysis of his most essential works.

Here's the text of the lyrics. Excerpt:

Well, I’m standin’ in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck
Yeah, but you know it’s not the one that I had in mind
He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about
But I’ll see him in anything so I’ll stand in line

I can see why he was vague about Peck's next movie. It was "Captain Horatio Hornblower." Try writing a quatrain about that.

"He's trying to be Dennis Hopper... and failing miserably."/"Or Sam Shepard. Especially the shot with the finger to his brow."

"Immediately I thought, 'Please Unicorn Jesus, don't let this man make a remake of Easy Rider.'"

That's set-of-comments #1 about the Rolling Stone pictures of Owen Wilson, featured at Tom & Lorenzo (who say: "Owen, Sue them. Sue them all. Make everyone who did this to you pay in blood, money and tears of regret").

Set-of-comments #2 is: "Yikes! It's like the photographer was doing everything he could in order for you to see David Spade's version of Owen's nose."/"There should be a censor bar across that thing."/"That's ALL I can see."

I do not need to Google what did David Spade say about Owen's nose to know what they are talking about. I Googled it anyway, and I see it's not something he said, it's a prosthesis he wore on his own nose. I also found this:



Hesitating before hitting "publish," I wonder if this post would fall within Lena Dunham's definition of the kind of threat that the corporate gatekeepers should filter out of the internet.