What The World Needs Now Is… More of this, please. If you don’t know what this Goya riff is working from, behold: the future. From Eater: The owner of a café in the center of Madrid, Spain has become a hero of sorts and … Read more September 28, 2012 by Fred Gooltz
Thoughts on the Light At dawn and dusk, L.A. glows. There is this haze that fractures the light, scattering it in such a way that on many days the city almost has no shadows. The daylight is the most broad it can possibly be. … Read more September 26, 2012 by Fred Gooltz
What’s New in Hollywood Rarely is very much new. Of the 45 films Warner Brothers released in 1940, 15 of them were remakes including Bette Davis’ The Letter and Errol Flynn’s The Sea Hawk. Remakes, reboots and sequels have always been a big … Read more September 23, 2012 by Fred Gooltz
Hello To All That Today, I reread this essay by Didion called “Goodbye To All That.” I read it first in High School, with the guys I would eventually live with in New York, at around the time when I first knew I … Read more September 19, 2012July 22, 2013 by Fred Gooltz
That Jeff Buckley Movie Thing This one hurts. It’s not that they’re making a Jeff Buckley movie, nor that they’re making two – but it’s that one of them is the movie I always imagined. In 2002, David Browne’s dual biography of Tim Buckley and … Read more September 18, 2012 by Fred Gooltz
We’re On To Something A few years ago I wrote a 10 minute play with Chris from my old improv group that The Dare Project in NYC was kind enough to produce. Our play was about a video game character who is sick of … Read more July 2, 2012 by Fred Gooltz
“Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair… A nice image in that line. Which, since reading A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, has made me think of Treppenwitz. Literally, ‘the wisdom of the stairs’. The striking reply that … Read more January 12, 2012 by Fred Gooltz
#OWS as a Judd Apatow Movie What if Occupy Wall Street incorporated as an investment bank and an attached savings bank? And what if at #Occupy demonstrations around the country, protestors could walk up to a little table and sign up as board members of the … Read more October 19, 2011 by Fred Gooltz
Hyperdistribution Theory Mark Pesce, a media professor at the University of Sydney, lectures on his “Hyperdistribution Theory.” The theory is predicated on a few assumptions: the internet’s revolutionizing effect on content distribution has transformed how advertising must relate to content, and also … Read more August 10, 2011April 30, 2015 by Fred Gooltz
The Heart of Catch-22 “And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling over her objections. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God … Read more August 2, 2011 by Fred Gooltz
Tech and Self Fun art installation idea about how technology can obfuscate one’s projection of self: Cinemagram makes moving gifs of a few frames. There’s this feature where you can edit out a portion of the gif and overlay a static shot that … Read more May 8, 2011 by Fred Gooltz
Ira Glass and David Foster Wallace I immediately thought of itsasickness when I read this: “Almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting” – David Foster Wallace, ‘The Pale King’ Similarly, – Ira Glass on the art of the interview: “Most people aren’t great … Read more April 8, 2011 by Fred Gooltz
Departures Magazine: “The Coolest New Website on the Internet” This was nice of them to say: The Coolest New Website on the Internet By Eric Klinenberg, Sep-2010 The creators of the networking site itsasickness.com are betting our obsessions will be the Internet’s next big thing. Behind the scenes at … Read more February 1, 2011January 17, 2025 by Fred Gooltz
Slavoj Žižek on WikiLeaks Every lefty’s favorite Slovak philosopher looks into the WikiLeaks story and knocks it out of the park. First he dissects The Dark Knight movie in a way that basically seconds the general thesis of my Wild West script about … Read more January 14, 2011 by Fred Gooltz
Orwell’s “In Front of Your Nose” An excerpt from the master’s essay “In Front of Your Nose”: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, … Read more December 27, 2010 by Fred Gooltz
Chris Hayes, Roger Hodge, Ari Berman and Adam Green Have An Intelligent Conversation on Teevee So rare. It’s amazing. I can’t believe it happened. … Read more November 29, 2010 by Fred Gooltz
GOTV Soundtrack Memories The last week of GOTV election time always makes me think of the song that was playing on a loop in my head while I worked politics in the field at the end of 2004. It was the second part … Read more October 22, 2010 by Fred Gooltz
Against Ambient Awareness “Our suffering comes from the fact that we are attached to the outer form that something assumes in a given instant rather than the movable conversation that stands behind it. Keeping up with what is occurring rather than lagging and … Read more September 6, 2010 by Fred Gooltz
What Sick Is There are TV shows about illness. Those shows are about addicts with addictions. Those shows are about the imbalanced with obsessive disorders. Those other shows’ treatment of their subject matter ranges from clinical diagnosis to freakshow exploitation. My itsasickness project … Read more September 2, 2010February 19, 2021 by Fred Gooltz
“Litany” by Billy Collins You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker, and the marsh birds … Read more August 26, 2010 by Fred Gooltz
