Scorsese on the weird dream passages in the underrated Eyes Wide Shut, gorgeous build of Barry Lydon, mania and open of The Shining & severed heads of Full Metal Jacket, and on the man himself.

Being underrated is overrated; being overrated is sad; Being John Malkovich was okay; Being and Nothingness was on my shelf unread for five years; Five years by Bowie is great; greatness is overrated, not that I would know; knowledge is not knowing; knowing is stupid, you know?

This should have thrilled, but rather bored. I think it’s the use of “luminaries”? More about the shop’s history than the actual festival? And the closing quote by Pullman? I’m grumpy?

When I first took a job as stripper, I had no sense that my decision to do so would have any real, far reaching effects on my life. To the contrary, I found in sex work a solution to very nearly all my problems at the time. No longer homesick or lonely, my new job not only remedied the un-belonging I’d experienced as a foreigner, but— as a product of a broken, working-class household, the first in her family to go to college, let alone study abroad– through sex work I discovered in myself a seemingly unending source of power and autonomy relating but not only having to do with my newfound ability to make money, and lots of it, anywhere in the world. And yet…

– from “Not Safe for Work,” an essay by my friend, Melissa Petro, about the lasting stigma associated not with being but with having ever been a sex worker. It is on the front page of the Rumpus today, and despite its title does not actually contain anything that will get you in trouble at your job. Which is just one reason why you should go read it now.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

International opinion has battered Israel in the aftermath of its commando raid on the flotilla of aid trying to break the Gaza blockade.

I had to read it twice, because I thought there was no way they’d allow so much slant rhyme in an editorial. Should journalists write rap lyrics more often or less rarely?