That Mailer interview is one of my favorites, ever. Mailer is such an ass, but he's also used to people folding in front of him, so when he gets sliced open by Vidal, mocked by Cavett, pleasantly dismissed by Flanner… and then roundly laughed at by the audience, you'd almost feel bad for him if he weren't a violent…

Yeah, that's why I find it hard to hate him. I mean, I can find his acting wooden and unremarkable, but he doesn't seem like a genuinely sour human being, like certain of his castmates. Plus he's led a much more low-key public life, so I find him hard to hate on.

It'd be really great if nobody showed up. There is no Shia LaBeouf if there is no audience. He ceases to exist.

I dunno, I really like the fart at the end of Joyce's Sirens episode. It makes for a nice punchline to a music-obsessed chapter.

Oh god, you're not kidding. There's an excerpt posted here. Favorite line so far: "I felt a barf in my mouth."

For me the closest thing like it is at the midpoint of Gremlins 2, when the gremlins destroy the print of the film you're watching, and we're suddenly thrown into the theater with Hulk Hogan. Like this scene, it lasts all of 2 minutes and could be cut without anyone noticing, because no one internal to the film knows…

Absolutely. That's why he lied about the payment issue. Frank thinks it's just an art project.

I had mixed feelings about it. I think I'd be more impressed if he didn't leave because of Agustin's needling earlier in the episode ("he'll flirt with you and go home to his boyfriend"), which was accurate, but it makes me feel like Patrick's choice to leave played a bit like… jealousy? That's not the right word. …

Eff: Frank, without a doubt, and maybe Richie for good measure.

That's a very good way to put it. There's a crazy kind of historical confluence that the French leftists who adopted the color red would have no idea how deeply it resonated with Russians, for all the reasons you laid out.

I'm saying the Soviets adopted this as an intentional pun, knowing full well that "red" wasn't the intended meaning of the word in those circumstances. This is all over their writing in the 1920s. Trust me on this.

It was an easy pun to build off: you didn't even have to change the word to get from your krasny ugol (beautiful corner; here "krasny" is a Slavonicism) to your krasny ugol (red corner, in contemporary Russian), or from your "Beautiful Square" in central Moscow to your "Red Square" of today.

Looks not unlike a shot from The Conqueror Worm (aka Witchfinder General), and you'd be poorer indeed for avoiding that.

Eh, phone keyboard. Edited.

Heh, and now that I've typed that: funny enough, the Russian words are actually pretty close: красота/кролик

When Dostoevsky said "beauty will save the world", he really meant "bunnies will save the world." It's an easy translation mistake.

As she's Russian, I'd hold off of on the drunkenness one…

Nah… The title does say "How not to photograph your wedding", but that's about it.

Actually it was a really weird year for awards: Michael Lerner is the only cast member who got an Oscar nomination, Goodman the only cast member who got a Globe nomination, etc. The only person to win multiple awards was Judy Davis, and it was because of her body of work that year (paired with Naked Lunch and Husbands…

Agreed: I'm going by the standard of повесть, which both Kharms and Tolstoy use for those works.