Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the 27th of November, 1978, a good-looking weenie named Dan White changed the face of San Francisco politics forever. Stupid, short-sighted, self-centered little creep. Never use family duty as an excuse to act out unjustly or destructively. Never . This clip is the NBC news from City Hall. The assassinations of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk were heartbreaking, but the non-stop demonstration of rage (The White Night Riots) after the verdict came in (seven years!? for two murders!!? Twinkies !!!?) was like a revitalizing tonic. The ancient philosophers taught us that if we must rage, that we rage correctly. Put that in your box when you’re packing up your office, Richard Raddon . SUBSCRIBE TO MY OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER. CLICK HERE. _____

Now that Illeana Douglas is my Facebook friend, I’ve been keeping track of her new web show Easy to Assemble . This is how it looks like you work the new web show thing: Your production company makes a short series using its own money (apparently for her that was Illeanarma , which has a bouncy-quirky Comedy Central feel to it, catch it here if you haven’t already), and you use it to attract investors for your new series. This time around, she/her production company attracted Ikea. The upside of it is that you do get funding, but of course the downside is that you’ve got to create material that incorporates/interpolates your sponsor as closely as possible. Like that BMW-sponsored action webshow with Clive Owen a couple of years ago (don’t remember the name, too lazy to look it up). I don’t know what else is out there, but I really prefer Illeana’s comedy vids because they can be enjoyed on a more intimate scale. Funding and distribution for webshows are still unfamiliar territorie...

A post ago I mentioned a book that was on my mother’s “adult” bookshelf, The Big Love by Mrs. (note the Mrs.) Florence Aadland, As Told to Tedd Thomey. This is the first line, which has stayed with me ever since my first trembling pre-pubescent encounter with this tome: “There’s one thing I want to make clear right off—my baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.” Wow. Take that, Call me Ishmael. Eat dust, Happy families are all alike. Apparently finer minds than I were taken by this Hollywood Babylon memoir, for none other than William Styron wrote a nine-page(!) introduction to the 1986 reprint, declaring it to be “a work of such striking originality...that one may declare it a masterpiece without hesitation.” What did I miss? I only read it for the sex.

Today marks the forty-fifth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, and there isn’t a great deal I can add to the dialogue at this late date—my feelings at the time were pretty much the same as any other eight year-old . But there is this: I remember a few weeks later one afternoon I was home alone during the holidays, when I was looking through my mother’s semi-forbidden “adult” bookcase for something to read (for a Catholic woman she had very strange reading tastes: The Big Love , Florence Aadland’s tangy account of her teenaged daughter’s affair with Errol Flynn, was on her shelf, as was A History of Orgies and Milton’s Paradise Lost ) and found her entire collection of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! paperbacks. I have to explain that they weren’t really books, simply compilations of the newspaper feature that the superb illustrator Robert Ripley made so famous. The books were mass-market paperbacks and old even in ’63, practically crumbling around the edges, I re...

I was a day player on one of this director’s films; he was the only one in the business who took me aside and gave me some encouragement and sage advice. Thanks, Mr. Damiano ! SUBSCRIBE TO MY OCCASIONAL NESLETTER. CLICK HERE. _____

Oh God, she did it. She threw him out for keeps .

A pre-euro memory: Saturday morning at the Marché de Montreuil, the vendors at the used-clothes booths crying out “Quartre pour dix!” This is how I kept my closet full during my and Michael’s La Boheme days living in the 20th, or “Red” (red for Communist) arrondissement of Paris. Quartre pour dix—four for ten in English. Four items of clothing for ten francs! Could you beat it? Every frosty Saturday morning Michael and I would walk across the bridge over the monstrous peripheral highway ( La Route Nationale Périphérique ) and travel from a quaint little rundown neighborhood of cobblestone streets and mansard roofs to a huge cacophonous bazaar filled with shouting Arabs. I miss plunging my hands into the heaps and heaps of old clothes. Clothes that made the circuitous route from volume dealers in the US to volume dealers in Haiti—yes, Haiti , the used-clothes capital of the world—to the volume dealers in Europe, to the very bin I was forcefully rummaging through, elbowing out my spa...