Thursday Morning Grab Bag, and a little bit of Gross

Discombobulated:

• I will get this out of the way: as someone who had only once in his life ever ice skated for the grand total of free, I have to give a rousing endorsement to The Pond in Bryant Park. That is, at 8 a.m.
  
  
• I have had to twice defend my position of disliking Terry Gross, and I didn't even have last night's episode for an exhibit. C.I.P. In a conversation with Lena Dunham, the director of Tiny Furniture, she could not keep away from the middle brow catnip of "So how much of this story is really you?", stretching it to an infuriating half of the interview; in an interview today with Marc Ribot, jazz and avant-garde guitarist, she was a) puzzled that contemporary classical, jazz, etc. has a strong aversion to lyricism (which has been the case at least since the death of the big bands, and had its foundation in Schoenberg twelve-tones, and b) couldn't wrap her mind around the concept of a musician taking a song and approaching it while jettisoning the tune.
  
  Terry Gross, you are my antithesis. You are my arch enemy, my bane and bile and wholly antagonistic inferior. You are banal, you are trite and lazy and largely dull and vapid and unresearched or at least uncultured. You heighten conversations to the stoop of little minds, disguised by the veneer of your betters (i.e., your guests).
  
  You. Are. A. Grade-A. Fraud.
  
  I fucking hate NPR, and it isn't for its politics. Or its news.
  
  
• Carlos. The miniseries. Olivier Assayas. I will admit. I pulled my own Terry Gross, what with showing up to the theater having never seen a film of his, and also entirely too hungover for this 5.5-hour marathon. Was it good? Quite. Was it exquisite? No. The narrative structure was pretty much a wreck, to the point that the demarcation points between the three sections felt more dictated by a stopwatch than any natural arc. So be it. However...
  
  ..even the use of simple jump cuts to break up such an otherwise static scene of somebody bending down to pick up keys brilliant the acting brilliant the camera work and the sound... Mr. Assayas, can I work on your next script?
  
  
• Finally: Your Thursday morning funny, embed below. The funny? A friend of mine worked for this dentist. Never trust a starfucker dentist (or star-fucker, in general. You do not get a photo today, and all I can say for that is that I was taking off my skates when the woman with the bear hat stopped looking at the skaters. The caption: "Look at all that upright tuna."