Roundup: Menomena, David Sedaris, Jonathan Lethem, etc...

Menomena teamed up with director Stefan Nadelman to create a beautiful, creepy video for their song, Killer Bee.



Basic Instructions: Cartoonist Scott Meyer explains how to deal with a rash.

The New Yorker: David Sedaris talks about food.

One of the things they promise when you quit smoking is that food will regain its flavor. Taste buds paved beneath decades of tar will spring back to life, and an entire sense will be restored. I thought it would be like putting on a pair of glasses—something dramatic that makes you say, “Whoa!”—but it’s been six months now, and I have yet to notice any significant change.

Part of the problem might be me. I’ve always been in touch with my stomach, but my mouth and I don’t really speak. Oh, it chews all right. It helps me form words and holds stuff when my hands are full, but it doesn’t do any of these things very well. It’s third-rate at best—fifth if you take my teeth into consideration.

Entertainment Weekly: Karen Valby interviews Jodie Foster.

What do you think is the larger social commentary of The Brave One, which in some ways plays as a straight-up Dirty Harry revenge movie?

Here's my commentary: I don't believe that any gun should be in the hand of a thinking, feeling, breathing human being. Americans are by nature filled with rage-slash-fear. And guns are a huge part of our culture. I know I'm crazy because I'm only supposed to say that in Europe. But violence corrupts absolutely. By the end of this, her transformation is complete. ''F--- all of you, now I'm just going to kill people with my bare hands.''

Then why is it called The Brave One?

That's a really good question! [Laughs] That's many, many memos ago. The whole time we were like, ''You guys, this title is bad, this is misleading.'' I don't really know how to explain it except that it's the first title the script ever had and [producer] Joel Silver really believes that it has a strong feeling to it. Which it does. It's not wimpy. It would be a beautiful title for another movie. My only defense is that there are a lot of really good movies that have bad titles. Gone With the Wind. That was a bad title. The Way We Were. Terrible title!

The Guardian - Jonathan Lethem compares writing with dancing. Yes, dancing.

The height of my dancing - the apogee, as I like to think of it - came in a club called Berkeley Square, in 1990 or 91. It was a day I'd spent free of my retail job, a day I'd spent at home discovering some new level of what my words could do - at the time I was writing a novel called As She Climbed Across the Table, a book I associate with my learning to take command of my sentences, to make them dance the way I wanted them to. In the evening, I went out dancing with some friends. In the middle of a strenuous sequence of songs, Prince's "Kiss" came on, and in letting that song take me over, course through my body like a drug, with my dancing perhaps perfectly poised between savvy intention and callow frenzy, I found myself pretty sure that I was dancing just about as well as anyone ever had. In fact, I had the thought at that moment that there might be my equal at sentence-writing roaming the earth, somewhere, and that the same could be said of my dancing, but that there was no one alive who could both write and dance the way I had that day. And I'm still almost convinced of it, I am.

And that's the roundup.

Download:
Menomena | Wet and Rusting [MP3]