PicoBlog

What’s better than a single Russell Crowe movie? A double, no make that a triple whammy of Russell Crowe movies! So first off, on Holy Saturday I went to see, not The Pope’s Exorcist, but the recently released Sleeping Dogs, a sleepy little crime drama, that is almost saved by Crowe’s charisma.  Directed by Adam Cooper, Crowe plays Roy Freeman, a former cop suffering from memory loss due to Alzheimer’s disease, but also undergoing experimental treatment involving electrodes in the back of his brain, which turn him into Frankenstein’s monster - no strike that and replace it with - which allow him to dive back into an old murder case.

Those who knew the composer Ruth Gipps often describe her as a “difficult” personality. She saw herself as an “outsider”, and she wore that badge with pride. Unafraid to cause offence, she penned scathing poems poking fun at musicologists and was outspoken about her religious beliefs. She gained a certain amount of notoriety by writing a public ‘Credo’ denouncing modernism and pop music when modernism and pop music were very much in favour.

I'm what you call a made actress. You know Carrie Nye? Oh, she's great. I saw her early in her career and said to everyone 'Get her!' and I did. We worked together several times. She's a born actress--she came out with all the necessary goods. I had to make myself into an actress. I'm like Kate Hepburn, another made actress. The two of us are tough women of strong intention who made it happen, and now it's impossible to imagine us doing anything else.

A note to Fight Freaks Unite readers: I created Fight Freaks Unite in January 2021 and eight months later it also became available for paid subscriptions for additional content — and as a way to help keep this newsletter going and for readers to support independent journalism. If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription please consider it. If you have already, I truly appreciate it! Also, consider a gift subscription for the Fight Freak in your life.

For today’s post I had the pleasure of speaking with Mark Avery, a longtime set costumer and stylist who’s been working with Ryan Gosling since 2015. Ryan Gosling’s superpower might be that he is simultaneously one of the most talented (and, of course, handsome) dudes alive, yet retains an uncanny everyman charm people can’t help but feel connected to. After all, there’s an entire meme economy built around the fact that he can imbue even a plastic doll or a robot in a dystopian near-future with such a sense of genuine humanity that people would gladly adopt them as their entire personality.

Welcome! If someone forwarded you SKYLINE, sign up here to receive it weekly. Fall is upon us, and with that the conversation around architecture heats up again. We added more than 120 events to our list over the weekend, including the full fall lecture schedules of Yale, SCI-Arc, Harvard and MIT. See this week’s offerings below, and the full list here. This morning, I am sharing a polemic I penned for #19, ‘Cancel the Corridor.

Chewy on the inside, crispy on the outside, and filled with chocolate and goey marshmallows. What else could you ask for in a campfire-themed cookie? These cookies took some trial and error, but the end result is a cookie that’s hard to say no to. They begin with a graham cracker square, a layer of chocolate chips, and a whole marshmallow, all of which is covered with cookie dough. Don’t feel like you need to bring the cookie dough all the way down to the parchment paper; as long as it covers the marshmallow and chocolate it should be good.

Hi, welcome back to BarBalkans, the newsletter (and website) with blurred boundaries. There are existential questions that inevitably require us to find an answer. BarBalkans has already tried to do it a few months ago, wondering what Balkan music is and where this obsession comes from (by the way, a huge surprise is coming...). Almost after three years of this newsletter, today we take a step further. Why are Balkans called Balkans?

Once you notice a sad beige child in the wild, you see them everywhere. I noticed one for the first time this summer on the beach, a girl of maybe six or seven, wearing dark cutoffs and a brown sweatshirt. Her clothing was so grown-up — no bright purple, no glitter, no rainbows — that she stood out immediately. She was walking in the sand on a cloudy day with her sad beige mom, also dressed in neutrals.