LORNA SORE

NY to DC: Eight hours, pouring rain, seated next to woman named Bertina who suffered from nasal blockage or something that compelled her to constantly suck snot into her throat.

DC to NY: Four hours, seated behind a woman who vomited into a plastic bag for fourty-five minutes.

Total: $35

Here it is…

1.) Became a corporate blogger.

2.) Discovered Cafe Gitane.

3.) Started reading Sweet William by John Hawkes. I’ve been avoiding Hawkes for some reason, but this is a super realist memoir from the point of view of a self-described misanthropic racing horse.

4.) Watched the cops wrestle to the ground and handcuff two different men in two different subway stations on two different mornings. Both before 8AM.

5.) Produced an interview with Mike Huckabee and watched him defeat Luke Burbank at ping pong.

Saw Rescue Dawn yesterday — and it’s fantastic — especially Jeremy Davies. I don’t think I’ve been excited about an actor or actress since Philip Seymour Hoffman in 1999’s Magnolia. Davies (born Jeremy Boring!) blew my fucking mind away with his performance as Gene, a POW in a Pathet Lao prison camp. He and Steve Zahn both rule. Davies has had an interesting career but I don’t think I noticed him until now.

I remember this too-long article on the making of the film from the New Yorker last year and read it again recently. It’s way too long and boring but here’s a good part:

In what Herzog called a “signal of solidarity,” he was dieting with Bale and Zahn. (By the end of the shoot, in October, he had lost almost thirty pounds.) It was an ethic for Herzog: anything he asked the actors to do, he volunteered to do as well, including eating maggots and handling snakes. If he established a raw, physical mood on the set, Herzog believed, Bale and Zahn wouldn’t feel self-conscious. The crew members, by and large, saw this credo less generously. Herzog, they felt, was unwilling to accept the fundamental paradox of filmmaking: creating a gripping movie often requires weeks of boredom. In their view, Herzog was intent on undergoing his own survivalist drama. A half-dozen crew members shared a jest that Zeitlinger had made: “Werner’s not really a filmmaker. He’s a little boy.”

And if you’ve seen Rescue Dawn or Little Dieter Needs to Fly, this part is interesting, too: “Herzog became close friends with Dengler, who died in 2001. He said of him, “All that I like about America was somehow embodied in Dieter: self-reliance and courage and loyalty and optimism, a strange kind of directness and joy in life.”