PicoBlog

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.

I was in Vermont this weekend and had a lot of good feelings. I signed books, and even did a reading (something I usually avoid), at the American Museum of Fly Fishing. It’s a fantastic place with gorgeous old flies, bamboo rods, sporting art and an amazing library. (Thank you to everybody who came, as well as to the Filson event—it really is nice to meet you all. I’m very impressed with Contender subscribers, though you would expect me to say that!

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. - Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners A few years ago, a software engineer at Google named James Damore published an internal memo—in response to a mandatory diversity training program he attended—titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.

The 8-story Viceroy Hotel, built in 1967, occupies a long-term ground lease on City of Santa Monica land on the corner of Ocean Ave and Pico Blvd. In 1958, based ostensibly on the need for Civic Center parking, the City of Santa Monica acquires the property on the North East Corner of Ocean Ave and Pico Blvd through eminent domain proceedings. In 1960, the former Santa Monica Elks lodge (1811 Ocean Ave), the only substantial building on the property, is demolished.

We know from the opening scene of Beckham, the Netflix documentary about David Beckham’s life and career, that Victoria is the true hero of the four hourlong episodes. The Beckhams keep bees in a smattering of hives in a field with white flowers, presumably their country home, a scene so lovely that it could be the setting for a Jacquemus fashion show. Only, David Beckham is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, so he doesn’t need to rent out his bees’ field for Instagram fashion.

Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real. This story necessarily begins with a brief recap: director Todd Haynes recently made a movie called May December (producer Natalie Portman brought Haynes the script, written by Samy Burke, which made the Blacklist), in which Natalie Portman plays an actress who travels to Savannah to study for her role as the tabloid famous woman who left her husband for a middle schooler in the 90s.

With another very commercialized holiday nearly upon us, and plastic eggs being readied to hatch all manner of kid-centric trinkets, I thought I’d round up a non-exhaustive, but still-robust list of delightful trinkets that you are very likely to find at your neighborhood thrift/vintage/antique shop. I can’t guarantee that all of these items will be beloved or that they’ll offer anything more than a momentary bit of delight. They could just as likely end up at the bottom of your kid’s treasure box as a brand-new plastic trinket, but I can guarantee that all of the trinkets on this list will long outlast the godforsaken lint-covered mochi destined for a landfill before the end of next week.

Now, who will light up the darkness? Who will hold your hand? Who will find you the answers, when you don’t understand? -Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks Greetings from the Tortured Metaphor Department. Violence is plummeting in the United States. All available data from 2023 show a decline in homicide that is so large that it is near the top of all-time, one-year crime declines. Now, crime data from the first quarter of 2024 are becoming available, and they show a homicide decline almost twice as large as in 2023.

9/10 Die Hard is an all-time Christmas classic, but after enough repeat viewings, one can’t help but yearn for an alternative holiday action movie. Enter Violent Night. Directed by Tommy Wirkola, written by Pat Casey and Josh Miller, and starring David Harbour as a grizzled, hard-drinking, ass-kicking Santa Claus, the film takes the Die Hard template and amps up the Christmas elements to the max. This is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers everything an action fan could hope for, with Christmas-themed kills and one-liners galore.