It’s very sad that Warner Brothers is yanking everything ‘Inception’-related off YouTube with great zeal-it’s a reasonable copyright claim on their part, sure, but it’s a shame in particular that this video has gone missing-it was an in-theater recording of the audience’s reaction to the last scene of Inception. (Obviously people who plan to see Inception and haven’t yet should not look read on.)

This description is pretty good:

It’s a sound being heard all around the country right now, an audience reaction quite unlike any other you’ve probably heard after any other film. It’s the sound of people, who are in on what’s going on, and happy to walk out the door without getting all the answers spoonfed to them. It’s the sound of smart moviegoers laughing and groaning all at once, the sound of frustration and delight colliding together in one cacophony

I was actually surprised that people were this invested by the end-the movie begins with quite a lot of talking and we all know how American movie-goers hate the talking.

Also enjoyable: this interview with Dileep Rao, where he makes at least three very smart cases for an specific interpretation of the ending.

I will now never, ever listen to the “mainstream media” (am using that semi-ironically, yes) talk about “the sanctity of editorial” or how “weblogs are destroying church v. state journalism” or “Chinese walls” after Conde Digital put this ad for Smart cars on the New Yorker website. It’s an ad that literally covers and then obliterates the entire content of the website. This is something that web-only, newfangled publications like those of Gawker Media would most likely never do, as much as their ad honcho would enjoy it. (I mean, we might do it! For the right price! Inquire within! Heh.) But I’m not sure that the New York Post would even go for it; to see Conde do it is astounding.

“He tried to make a conventional film and would up with something so inexplicable and casually surreal that no practicing surrealist could ever convincingly ape its form, except by exact imitation. It is the movie that an alien who has never seen a movie might make after having movies thoroughly explained to him.”
-If you needed an excuse to subscribe to Harper’s, the Tom Bissell article in the current issue on Tommy Wiseau’s camp classic The Room is as good as any. The pure strangeness of The Room is almost impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t seen it, but Bissell’s piece is absolutely the most sympathetic yet clear-eyed examination of the phenomenon surrounding the film that I have read so far. Highly, highly recommended.

It’s the new nightmare job: ‘content screener’ at one of the outfits hired by MySpace and Yahoo! and Microsoft and the like. Someone’s gotta screen out all that homemade porno and true crime and wife-beating. You get paid between $8 and $12 an hour; somehow, you supposedly click by 80,000 images a day, if you work at Telecommunications On Demand. (Um, that’s 166 images a minute per employee, by the math, which is impossible, but they do claim that their staff of 50 review 20 million images a week. Maybe it’s in big thumbnail batches! But with thumbails big enough so that you can see if any of the pictures are of children being stabbed!) The Internet: destroying lives, one person at a time.

It’s that time of year again! Chaucer put it best in his original draft for the Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Auguste, with his percing sonne,
July’s warme whither makes neerly donne
And every tanke-toppe be drenched in swette,
And odour no bodie spray can maks’t forgette;
Sleeping Zephirus no wind provides
Tis best to sit and drinkke St. Ides
Or the ice of the Russian, Smirnof he be called
Than ronne the risk of a methlab scald,
The hour commes round where folk longen goes
To the Gathering of the Juggalos

Yep, it is time for the 11th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos! (Mark your calendar, it’s August 12th-15th.) This video is practically parody-proof, because these people know exactly what they’re doing. Feel free to dip in and out, although I suggest giving the first five minutes some serious attention-I’m particularly curious about these promised seminars. What topics do you suppose they’ll be discussing? In any event, the announcement that comedians Tom Green and Gallagher (“the original Gallagher! Not that fake ass Gilligan motherfucker!”) will be performing adds a certain level of gravitas to an already impressive line-up. Have a grand time, juggalos and juggalettes, you’ve earned it.

One-third of the houses in Nantucket are $1-million-plus, and these days, when you have a local economy that is based on the until-recently rich, you know they’ll take you down with them. Good news (?) then that allegedly (?) the upswing is back on: “Wall Street vacationers are spending money freely once again, especially since July 4th weekend, when the super rich seemed to have finally returned, wallets open.” Fortune’s example of that? “That week, ex-Goldman Sachs honcho Jon Winkelried finally signed a contract to sell his property for just below the new asking price of $29 million — an island record and a figure that has some island residents shaking their heads in wonder: What year is it, again? Of course, when Winkelried put the waterfront property up for $55 million in 2008, that was an asking price no one took seriously then, either.” We call that “bargain-hunting” but considering he bought it for like $7 million in 1999, you can call it some kind of return to the glory days of bloat, sure! Still, Fortune’s conclusion that “optimism is rising” is pretty hilarious.

by Liz Colville

To whom it may concern:

It has been exactly five years since I graduated from a prestigious-if interchangeable with many that are similarly-named-university in New England called Wesleyan and moved to the capital of the world. Though apartment living is but one aspect of life, I should warn you that this letter consists primarily of fond memories of slipshod landlords and asbestos-ridden antechambers. If this is not something that interests you, you will surely perish in New York and ought to make a U-turn on the George Washington Bridge as soon as you can. Over the course of the past 1,825 days on this island-Long Island, that is, and if you think you’re going to be living in Manhattan, there’s still time to make a U-turn now, unless of course your papa is a generous man and you intend for him to indefinitely ride on your lease and for you to ride on his insurance policy (and I should add right now that if you intend to move to New York, any borough, you might consider signing a sort of prenup-type agreement with said pa to ensure that five years into your business-class flight of a spiritual journey, he is still willing to be generous when the occasion calls for it. Those with generous mamas have essentially won the lottery and need not draw up any kind of written agreement).

It was a hazy, hot evening punctuated with fireworks when I arrived at my first abode, a sublet in a vinyl-sided row house in a vaguely gentrified subsection of the popular yuppie neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I have spent much of the past five years. I was greeted by a one-eyed Dachsund, who would spend the remainder of my stay-28 days-alternately using my mattress as a trampoline and a toilet. My roommate was arguably the best of the diverse bunch I’ve had over the years, even to this day, though I fear the adrenaline-fueled emotions of those first few weeks in New York gelled in my long-term memory as something more verdant and pacific than life truly was or is.

Why I took to Park Slope like a four-year-old to Disney World or a fourteen-year-old to a mall, I cannot say, but I verily skipped down 7th Avenue (that’s Brooklyn, lest you forget) that first evening as if I had just woken up from a dream to realize that capitalism and its attendants did not really exist and I could spend my days among the faded, stained hippie pillows of Tea Lounge typing alongside other aspiring novelists like one of Steve Buscemi’s brothers.

In actual fact, the next day I would be failing a test of my Excel skills at a temp agency as I tried to create a formula that came out something like “C4+!!#*(@E8=A1!!?!?!@#*($@#=F14?” instead of the desired “2.” I was given an average grade and herded into a corral with other livestock deemed capable of answering phones and typing names, addresses and integers into data-entry systems. In two days, I would have two whole days of temp work under my belt.

I would also receive a call at 2 a.m. from my Abercrombie model of a boss who wore a baseball cap, Rainbow sandals and a Bluetooth earpiece at all times, who was calling me to slurrily ask if I wanted a full-time job at his executive staffing agency, if only I was free to discuss it over drinks. Oh, the things that passed for flattering at 22.

In one week I would be standing in front of Bloomingdale’s, tearily describing the monotonous conditions of my new full-time job subbing for a pregnant woman in the customer service department of Ralph Lauren Home, a job that did admittedly have its material perks: a window of a wall through which to marvel at a naked man who plastered his body against his windowsill each morning in a kind of light-well salutation; my six-foot-one female coworker’s never-ending collection of four-inch heels and silk scarves; the alarm clock radio that eagerly surged toward five o’clock day after day for nine months as DJs consoled us through the work week with thrice-daily plays of Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together”; the bottomless bin of snack-size Oreos; the do-not-touch exclusivity of the furniture show room; the library of pretty fabric swatches; the promise of being given one of the company’s famed hurricane lamps at cost.

Before my predecessor went off to have her baby, she christened me Gizmo, after the Gremlin that has an aversion to natural light, since once the naked man left the window and the sun came up over his building, I shrank away from the light, mostly because it carried a reminder of the life happening outside SYSPRO, the computer program with which I spent the hours of nine to five. I only broke away for our department’s accountant, a wonderful Peruvian woman with perfect skin and everything else who confessed to owning 200 pairs of shoes. She spent 12 hours a day fixing the mistakes of her predecessor and thus deserved every last shoe.

The money was good, being both a usable currency and my own, and the spending of it was even better, because I had a knack for finding $400-a-month caves in which to sleep, leaving me ample money to buy overpriced lunches from Café Metro and work clothes from Forever 21. After my sublet ended I took over the room of an up-and-coming playwright in another dingy pocket of the same cushy neighborhood, across the street from a Chinese import-export facility. The playwright’s room did not have a door, or rather, at night you would simply lean a door-sized plank of wood against the doorframe.

The playwright had a unique, classy name that was part Shakespeare character, part French, and I hoped that some remnants of her creative spirit would remain in the room. She subscribed to a doctor’s office amount of magazines, and they kept coming for weeks after she’d gone. I wondered how these magazines fit into her prolific day-to-day life. The apartment had neon yellow kitchen walls. Outside in the garden were a functioning washer and dryer caressed by ivy, protected from the rain by an awning. Charming, but the house gradually became filled with small children connected in some fashion to the girlfriend of my roommate. Every day it seemed there was a new child. Perhaps there were thirteen at my last count.

I moved out after a month, upgrading to a basement room with no window and a six-foot-high ceiling. The room had its own closet! Going inside this closet and closing the door felt like being inside the core of the earth, only mildewy and cool instead of a fiery ball of metal. As soon as my alarm went off in the morning, a light would switch on, thanks to a little plug-in timer I’d bought that looked like a thermostat. Otherwise I could have stayed in there for an entire season, as a bear. Once awake, I would ascend the narrow stairway to the kitchen like a mummy out of a tomb.

My first few months in New York I spent my nights in a Starbucks, working on a ghastly and eventually 400-page document that I’ll simply refer to as juvenilia. Unfortunately life-that is, exterior life-began calling to me like a phone ringing in the night. It got louder, more insistent, more grating as the pleasant coma of the creative interior life gave way to a more sociable wakefulness. One can either answer the phone of life or throw it across the room, unless it is an iPhone (in which case, why on earth do you have an iPhone, young recent graduate?). As the pressures of professional life increased, everything else in New York became far more interesting than job listings, including the smell of Chelsea on a hot summer day. I joined an artsy group on Craigslist, whose members conveniently wanted to spend as much time together as possible, going on weekend retreats to the Catskills, each other’s birthday parties, barbecues, starting literary journals, staying up all night and dining at Fairway for breakfast.

And when this group could not provide me with dates (ever), I created an online dating profile that I perfected day after day into an ever-smaller and ever-more esoteric core sample of myself, applying the same dedication formerly given to the 400-page manuscript. Life became less like a course of study and more like a video game.

The two men from the Internet that I actually met in real life conveniently both fit under my six-foot ceiling, but they were awful creatures who used dating sites the way moms use FreshDirect. My confidence and bank account hovered around the same double-digit number. If only I could have told myself that everything I was doing would pay off, but it all looked very bleak in winter, winter being something New York City ought to be spared. I had begun the previous summer reading two books a week. My reward for finishing a book was a book. I wrote thousands of words a week.

As my first year in New York clicked over to my second, I wrote less and read less. But slowly my temp career was being replaced with a writing career, and I might add that it was largely because I accepted unpaid positions that accrued in professional value over time. There would always be a place for unpaid gigs, I realized. That place would get smaller and smaller over the years, but it would never-and should never-disappear. A paid job has infinite horrors to taunt you with: bad bosses, bossy coworkers, long hours, dull assignments, ancient computers, Excel, meetings, paperwork, errands, frigid air conditioning, expensive lunch habits and endless, boring wardrobe needs. But doing what you love for no money is simply doing what you love for no money.

Around the time that I started selling running shoes to middle-aged walkers with bunions and planter fasciitis to support a burgeoning career in music criticism, I moved from the Being John Malkovich set piece of a basement room to a two-room sanctuary with a fireplace and a fire escape, an illustrator roommate who played piano accompaniment for his burlesque dancer girlfriend (she being the fine print of this sweet abode), and a landlady who cried and hugged me for ten minutes when I moved out-way out, to a suffocatingly small, overpriced townhouse in Kensington, because I was fed up with the burlesque duo’s raging fights, make-up sex, tempestuous threesomes, terrifying Medusa-like wigs drying in the shower and walls decorated with my roommate’s tacky, exaggerated illustrations of naked girls. His artistic muse was his girlfriend, but over the course of my year and a half there, he appeared to fall in love with her more attractive dance partner, one of several guests invited into the fraught domain of their bedroom. One night while listening to two or three of them having sex, I turned on the TV to see the girlfriend strutting her stuff on some kind of competitive half-hour program on Fuse. Enough was enough.

But it could have been worse, and soon it was. I moved to a veritable dollhouse with two other women, all of us seemingly exceeding the height requirement to enter the building. We bonded over flying cockroaches, men, movies and interior decoration. We repeatedly consoled ourselves with, “But we do have a beautiful bathtub.” Irreconcilable differences over my cat soon did us in. My next destination was a luxurious rent-controlled apartment in the prime section of my old haunt. Upon meeting my much older roommate, she asked me my astrological sign and gave me a Tarot reading, and over the course of the next few months, recommended health supplement upon self-help book upon general divorcée-mom wisdom.

Once she came home to find me bashfully watching “America’s Next Top Model” on her tiny television, only to reveal over the course of the final half-hour of the episode that she knew the names of many of the proto-models and the plot twists of the season thus far. We got along better than any of the girls in the show’s seven-year history. Why we couldn’t live in peace is a question better posed to our cats, who hated each other.

The last move I made was, first and foremost, to accommodate a cat. She sauntered around the place like she’d lived in it for years. Being the more neurotic of the two species, I was full of trepidation, because this move meant graduating to a cohabitating class of New Yorker-just one class away from the madly humping rabbits who fill the general area where I’ve spent the past five years miraculously child-free-and a bit sooner than I would have elected to cohabit, had I not been in possession of a cat.

But cats must know something we don’t. I still live here. The move led to a couple of other difficult but worthwhile decisions. After five years, it was all very delightfully grown-up, an adjective I never thought I’d be able to use on myself as long as I lived in New York. But sometimes the hardest tree to climb bears the juiciest fruit.

Liz Colville welcomes, and cautions, you.

Photo, of New York in 1967, by John Atherton, from Flickr.

by Nate Freeman

Great news for people that love giving to charity. They’re auctioning off a dinner with Glenn Beck and his wife at their home in Connecticut. The proceeds from this opportunity will benefit the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, a non-profit that provides support for the children of Special-Ops personnel killed in training or military missions. Sort of! More specifically, the money will go to the Restoring Honor rally that will take place August 28th in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The winner will also receive a trip on a helicopter over New York City, during which Beck will “point out historical buildings and sights as you soar high above the Big Apple.”

To save you the money that you would otherwise be tempted to spend (the bidding has stalled at $70,000) here is the tour that Beck will most likely be giving to the lucky winners.

SCENE

(GLENN BECK, in a white starched shirt and red tie, walks onto a helipad. The sound of whipping propellers chops the air. LUCKY WINNER is standing with his wife, whose hair flails in the gusts. LUCKY WINNER approaches BECK, who embraces him with a hug and yells something into his ear. They step into the helicopter and shut the portal. As the pilot floats the machine above the helipad, and into the airways above Manhattan, BECK begins to point out his favorite “historical buildings and sights.”)

BECK

Look down, and you’ll see the monoliths of Midtown, where, in Times Square, American lives were nearly lost by a terrorist attack. I often walk the streets and see the common man struggling to make enough money to feed his family, and you know that he can still hold to his heart the American Dream. But when I’m walking to my radio show, I find myself scared for this man, because at any moment a Muslim terrorist could set off a bomb in Times Square. It almost happened! Obama’s White House let it almost happen! God, I hate this town.

LUCKY WINNER

[Opens mouth to say something and-]

BECK

Here, we get into the parts of New York I never go to, Greenwich Village, but I’ve heard that it’s a place where “fornication booths” are as prevalent as police stations, and there’s a guy on every corner offering abortions for chump change. What kind of a world is this? Same-sex incest and murder and the collapse of the American identity. I actually call this place Death Of American Values Village. And it used to be Green Card Village, where the European communists came and spread that disease to freedom-loving Americans. There was a communist office on every street corner, and it was a dangerous place. And now its morphed into the fascism that makes its way into every bill Obama signs into law!

(They head further south.)

BECK

And here’s Wall Street-or, rather, Bernanke’s Playground, I like to call it. This stretch of waste and spending couldn’t be farther from the heartland, the small towns of America that this country is based on. Wall Street didn’t get drunk, Obama-it got wasted. Wall Street! Main Street! Wall Street! Main Street! CEOs and fat cats! With their helicopters and limousines! Gorging on the hard-earned money that blue-collar workers have to tithe over to the Obama administration, who then give it to the pigs, err, wolves, err, cats. The fat ones!

BECK

And now here’s Ellis Island-I like to call it Free Pass Island. And there’s the Statue of Liberty, now draped in the dark pall of fascism. And it’s this statue-given to us by those socialists in France-that is here, off the coast of New York, to mock us for slowly turning into that European-style country, a big government with a spending problem. Her face is pained with the look of a woman wronged! Wronged by the emergence of a Marxist state!

(As the helicopter turns around and heads back north toward Connecticut, there’s a long awkward silence. They land. The chauffeur opens the limo doors and drives them to BECK’S Connecticut mansion. Dinner is burgers with a side of freedom fries. Every burger has one American flag stuck in the center on a toothpick, except for BECK’S burger, which has three.)

Hoo boy, a very special update to yesterday’s I Was Not A Rap Video Ho: “I was the casting director that sent this call out…. The stipulations included ‘models with video girl bodies but high fashion model faces’ also bothered me along with Kanye’s request that the men in the scene not be ‘too tall or too handsome’ as not to make him look ‘GAY.’” It goes on.

by Ann Finkbeiner

Okay, Washington felt it too, probably more than Baltimore. It was the biggest earthquake in the history of recorded Baltimore/Washington earthquakes, meaning since the 1970s or something, and magnitude 3.6. Southern California doesn’t even roll over in bed for a magnitude 3.6. It woke me up at 5:04 a.m., the room was vibrating, a rumble moved through and on out, and by 5:05 I was asleep again. Of no concern, right? The east coast doesn’t get earthquakes, right?

The US Geological Survey, the font and origin of earthquakology, says no, the east coast doesn’t get earthquakes. Except for Charleston, SC, and the St. Lawrence River Valley, which have gotten some damn big earthquakes; and except that east coast bedrock is solid and fairly continuous so when one place gets an earthquake, the rest of the rock rings like a bell and we all get earthquakes. But the big earthquakes are separated by centuries and the rest of them are small, says the USGS. They know this because they keep track of the locations and sizes of earthquakes and you can look at a map [PDF] showing little earthquakes scattered around like measles.

Here’s what I think. Because east coast earthquakes are uninteresting, the USGS doesn’t know much about them. What they do have is a few seismometers-Maryland seems to have one (1)-and after that, they ask people to write in and tell them about it, which is not exactly the Richter scale but the Mercalli scale, which was set up before science invented seismometers. You fill out a little questionnaire, clearly going up the scale in seriousness: did things fall off shelves? did your furniture fall over? did heavy appliances fall over? did your chimney fall over? What the USGS doesn’t have is a reliable map of known faults. They have a number of good reasons for this, but the fact is, if you don’t reliably know where the faults are, then the only way to predict the next earthquake is to look at that map of measles and say, “well, New York City seems to have had a bunch, maybe they’ll have more.” What I think is, I think we’re sort of on our own out here.

Above: Detail of an 18th century woodcut illustration of the 1744 Southern Cape Ann, MA, earthquake. Courtesy Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. This event was followed by the much-greater 1755 Cape Ann earthquake. According to the USGS, “The earthquake caused considerable damage in Boston, knocking down or damaging as many as 1,600 chimneys and collapsing brick walls of several buildings.” And: “The shaking of the earthquake toppled the grasshopper weathervane atop Faneuil Hall.”

Ann Finkbeiner is a science writer. For several years now, she’s been mostly writing books. She’s just finished her last book, has no idea for another one and hasn’t a clue what to do next. She’s co-owner of The Last Word on Nothing.