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Sandi Tan

@_sanditan_

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SHIRKERS (Netflix) 🛵 LURKERS (Soho Press) 🦊 THE BLACK ISLE (Grand Central) 👻 🖋️🎥🇺🇸

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On the occasion of the launch of the Los Angeles Review of Books’ next magazine issue, Scene, a special screening and collection of readings from magazine contributors and readers will be held on Saturday, October 10. The program will include introductions and critiques of select scenes chosen by Sandi Tan, Eduardo Martinez-Leyva, Sophia Le Fraga, John Tottenham, Jose Hernandez-Diaz, and more.

For those unable to secure a ticket to the screening, we invite you to please join us for the issue's launch party taking place in the Now Instant Bar and Bookstore from 8:00–11PM. Copies of the magazine will be available for attendees at no additional charge.

Please note: entry to both the screening and launch party is ticketed for the general public and free RSVP for LARB members. Seating for the screening & reading is limited.

Please email membership@lareviewofbooks.org with any questions about the member ticket discount.

Guests who were unable to either purchase an online ticket to the screening, or make an online reservation may add their names to the standby list upon arrival. Online tickets will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime; at that time, any unclaimed seats will be released to those in the standby list on a first-come, first-served basis.

All screening attendees are welcome to attend the launch party at no additional charge.

All tickets purchased solely for the launch party will be honored pending capacity limits.

Tickets available at now-instant.la

939 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012 by @_sanditan_

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13 days ago

Thank you for inviting me to the funnest (and funniest) time last weekend with the divine @guy.maddin *GUY MADDIN* programmed by @kj__relthmiller at @academymuseum 🙏 And so nice to finally meet @_barlowbarlow_ and @courtcolt in the flesh!

Guy kept us all laughing the whole time! With me after CAREFUL, he told an unforgettable story about licking Greta Garbo’s old dress in a museum (and leaving behind a hole the size of a coin). With KJ after MY WINNIPEG, he told many more outrageous stories, mostly about his mother. The guard on duty said it was the best Q&A he’d ever seen (I think he was too shy to tell you, KJ)! I’m sorry to have missed @m.severson1967 Matt Severson’s convo with Guy on Monday because I had tix to see HUDSON HAWK (thanks, @hollyw00dentertainment 📽️) Moviegoing in LA is alive and well, even if moviemaking isn’t! It was so great to see SO MANY young people, new to the Academy Museum’s programming, at the Maddin movies.

I got first pick of the collages that Guy decided on a whim to give out (after announcing his retirement from collages at dinner). He advised Graham and me to pick the scary Black Narcissus one, so we did. And now we’ll have nightmares forever.

PS. I will never stop telling whomever will listen that MY WINNIPEG is one of the greatest movies ever made. A flat out masterpiece. So glad to have seen it again in 35mm in a perfect theatre.

Photos by Randy Shropshire ©Academy Museum Foundation taken in Academy Museum of Motion Pictures by @_sanditan_

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2 months ago

The singular GUY MADDIN @guy.maddin will be in person at the @academymuseum on Saturday July 11 at 7:30 pm to present CAREFUL (1992), his “mountain fever” picture, in dazzling 4K. There’s an old print of it on Kanopy but that one’s faded and decrepit—nothing at all like the lurid new restoration, so don’t see it that way!

Minute for minute, it’s still one of the most inventively staged movies of the 90s (you’ll see early echoes of his 2007 masterpiece MY WINNIPEG in it). Gawk at the gorgeous madness he managed to create with pennies because he had close co-conspirators, pliable locals, warehouse space, a snow machine, trusty prop masters, and the financial participation of Telefilm Canada and local arts councils. (And of course, genius!) Does he have advice for the broken dreamers of this town? Should we never dare climb the crumbling mountains anymore?

I’ll be asking him questions after the movie. Come with love! Come with envy! (Tickets are just $5!) taken in Academy Museum of Motion Pictures by @_sanditan_

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3 months ago

This is my great-grandfather, a Mr. Hong (as in red). Variously described as a scholar in the Manchurian court, a teacher, a calligrapher who penned couplets for his friends. He fled (eventually) to Singapore with his teenage daughter (my grandmother) after the Japanese invaded China in 1937. He’d been widowed; his ex-wife (my great-grandmother) was a Shanghai stage actress who knowingly OD-ed on opium after their divorce. Upon arriving in tropical, laissez-faire Singapore, Mr Hong the scholar turned into a different man—he got suits tailored, got a much younger girl (the woman in Slide 2 is his new wife, not my grandmother!), while my teen grandmother (Slide 3) worked as a dancer in a prominent cabaret (this was never even whispered about until my grandmother was in her 70s—to the world she was a private woman who bred/collected orchids).

We don’t seem to quite know what my great-grandfather’s name was, or where he was born (maybe Anhui province). There’s no ancestry.com for semi-incurious Singapore people who don’t write fluently in their (grand)parents’ language. When you move countries in a hurry, everything becomes strange—strangeness is the point! (No complaints!) Anyway here are pics of him in his Mao jacket, after he returned to his beloved communist China, post-1949, and would not be seen again except in these photos, growing older.

We can’t seem to agree either on my grandmother’s name. She went by a pseudonym all her life in Singapore—Dawn Breeze, Little Breeze or Small Phoenix (my aunt says her Grandpa would never have given her a name “as banal as” Small Phoenix). What we know is she was to appear in a Shaw Bros movie in Singapore around 1940 (when she would have been 17 or so) but “chickened out” (per said aunt) even though her wardrobe was already set. My grandparents continued to socialize with the Shaws, pre- and post-war, but the name of the movie and the glamor photos of my grandmother are lost to time (she burned all her glamor shots so Japanese soldiers wouldn’t find them during WWII).

Lastly, a slide of Mr Hong and my Florida cousin Jonathan (as a teen in the 2000s), randomly placed together by me in 2024. by @_sanditan_

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3 months ago

Was about to mail this Spring 1961 issue of FILM QUARTERLY (published by UC Berkeley) (picked up at Grey Matter Books @greymattersouth in New Haven) to a friend about to embark on a project set in 1961, when she was a teenage girl forced to go on a cruise in the Aegean with her parents so she’d forget about a boy (and on that boat with her were the world’s most notorious antiquities dealer/looter and his blueblood pal at the Met!)… but then I opened this issue and started reading. 1961 suddenly seems not so far away… One imagines these young writers and editors (with such old-man names!) arguing about movies and moviemakers in secondhand tweed jackets with leather elbow patches as Berkeley morphs around them.

(Last slide suggests the trajectory of founding editor Ernest Callenbach, whom Google describes as leaving film criticism (after editing FQ for 33 years!) to become a “simple living adherent.” He tried to champion independent, personal filmmaking while he could, and he’d later self-publish a novel called “Ecotopia” about California and Oregon seceding from the US to form an eco-state where sexual promiscuity, marijuana and electric cars were everywhere.)

Anyway this is going out in the mail, possibly to disinterested eyes, so I’m preserving a few pics of its pages here.

PS. The cover image is from Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide! taken in Grey Matter-New Haven by @_sanditan_

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3 months ago

June 2026: Northeast sampler platter. The objective was to travel to places and people best accessed via car, with NYC as reward at the end.

Findings: the Vanderbilt mansion upstate is dead boring; Frederic Church’s Olana is superb (if you, like me, love a fantastical Persian palace with gobbledygook Arabic perched on a hill overlooking the Hudson); the oldest street of continually-inhabited homes in the US is Huguenot St in New Paltz (the sweet guy in the gift store will be stunned into blundering ineptitude if you try to buy anything); Kingston NY has a bookstore in a 17th C stone building that will sell you $28 magazines and IPAs but will have no local guidebooks beyond an ironical Scat Identifier; Schenectady’s Stockade district (oldest historic district in NY) is wayyyyyy spookier than Salem (we met a little boy on Washington Ave we still can’t decide was real?); the passive-aggressive bridge-trolls of Ontario’s Tim Horton’s drive-thrus is a true phenomenon (they will try to prevent you from leaving the province by wrecking your car if need be); honestly tho, Tim Hortons > Krispy Kreme; the Nat Gallery of Art in Ottawa has many truly stunning European paintings (Ensor, Degas, Sickert, Vallotton) but will place signage to trick you into thinking those galleries are shut so you’ll be forced to view “Women Carvers of the Northwest” instead; Salem’s Peabody-Essex museum has the nuttiest 18th C East-West luxury artifacts I’ve seen, as well as the most matter-of-fact yet most moving descriptions of the Witch Trials; New Hampshire 🦞 are hard shelled delights (like their people?); the framed paintings of politicians in Montpelier’s state capitol (Vermont) look like they’re props for a twee, gently-satiric sitcom of the type they don’t seem to make anymore; New Haven (do not try to visit its museums on Juneteenth!) has a dangerously good used bookstore called @greymatterbooks; I was glad to no longer hear the women’s ghost choir I heard in the converted Shaker church I last slept in in Westport MA 30 years ago…ping-pong exorcism?

Also: never not stop in Manhattan. It will make you ecstatic to visit; it will also make you relieved to go home. taken in Central Park Zoo by @_sanditan_

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3 months ago

Newly-discovered pleasures of midtown NYC include the Dalmatian waiting room at MoMA, the lobby of the Chrysler building (80% empty these days, I’m told), the air-conditioned bathrooms at the NYPL (not pictured), the whispering gallery at Grand Central, and a surprisingly authentic-looking (but wrong-tasting) Hokkien mee (prawn noodle) at Urban Hawker. Plus @leahgiblin’s car (CLRDENIS) giving Murray Hill some ⚡️ . taken in Midtown Manhattan by @_sanditan_

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3 months ago

In a few weeks, on June 23, I’ll be joining this lot at @booksoup to chat about Eve Babitz’s @evebabitzofficial unsent letters, which @nyrbooks is publishing in a really handsome (and huge) volume called TOO L.A., edited by Lili Anolik, who also wrote a great intro (her book DIDION & BABITZ btw is one of the best books I’ve ever read about female frenemyship and the different ways LA creative women survive). Babitz’s unsent letters are full of bold-face names unaware they’re being observed and recorded by a superb observer posing as a flibbertigibbet—the fact that she wrote but never sent them makes them more intriguing still….

I’m rereading Babitz’s lightly-fictionalized memoir-in-stories SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY (also out from @nyrbooks) in anticipation of our bookshop chitchat—and it comes with an excellent intro by @matthewspecktor who I’m told is the person responsible for this resurgent wave of Babitzomania. Take it up with him if you don’t like it! I’m still surprised no one’s come up with Team Joan / Team Eve merch yet. taken in Book Soup by @_sanditan_

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4 months ago

New spaces (and some old ones), new friends (and some old ones). March-April. Thank you @hamrahrama (and n+1) for coming to town and luring me out of the house multiple times. I am glad I left the house! (I forgot to get a pic of @hatandbeardpress gorgeous new space in Filipinotown called The Loved One. So nice to finally meet @mrjcgabel who sold me a book that informed me that the faux-19thC photographer Stephen Berkman lives just FOUR doors from my house. But I had to leave my house to learn this.)

And to anybody who’s enthralled by Benjamin Labatut’s books “When We Cease To Understand The World” and “The MANIAC”: There was a magnificent new movie at the @lafestivalofmovies called CHRONOVISOR by @kvnwlkr and Jack Auen and DP Leo Zhang (all NYU film kids still!!) that you must see.

Anyway, CHRONOVISOR. @ghopperfilm has US rights taken in Los Angeles, California by @_sanditan_

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6 months ago

LOS ANGELES: Join me on WEDS MARCH 25 as I chat with the @nplusonemag cult-favorite film critic AS Hamrah @hamrahrama (or Scott, as he is known to his chums) in the plush green theater known as @now_instant 👀 We will talk about his two (!) new erudite-hilarious books (the man lives in a snow cave in the upper reaches of upper New York State, so yes, he is productive) LAST WEEK IN END TIMES CINEMA from @semiotexte and ALGORITHM OF THE NIGHT from @nplusonemag (the latter of which was long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle award).

Scott (can I call him that?) is not your typical film critic (slapdash movie summary, then some kind of thumbs-up, thumbs-down), even as typical professional film critics have become an endangered species these days. You can read his reviews and still have no clear sense if he “liked” a movie—not that his liking a movie is any indication you might like it. Or that “liking” a movie has anything to do with how good it is. He is brazenly Tomatometer-unfriendly, sometimes slippery to the point of frustration. But he gets you curious. Writing about a movie, he might mention three others (and maybe four books) you immediately want to check out. He makes you *desirous*. He opens your world up. I can’t think of any other critic working today who makes you as excited about the world of film, literature, art, the only things that matter and the only things that will keep us all sane.

Anyway, I am not your typical interlocutor either. I’m not poised. I’ve engaged with the worst (Leos Carax, Marcel Marceau, Errol Morris) and I know chatting with Hamrah will be quite the opposite: a delight. I promise you it will be an unboring, wide-ranging (and perhaps even inappropriate) conversation. We are both proudly Gen X. Our standards are different. We care about stuff, maybe too much. And it will almost certainly last longer than the advertised 60 mins!

Tickets 🎟️ at the Now Instant website! taken in Los Angeles, California by @_sanditan_

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7 months ago

(Needless to say) FOR NERDS ONLY: @talkhouse @thatnickdawson (🙏) asked me to do a Top Ten of 21st century movies so far, and I did that, then he asked if I’d write a few words about Mulholland Dr, so I did! But… but… the movie I’ve always thought of as “Mulholland Dr.” seems to have been standardized to “Mulholland Drive” over the years… And it just looks *weird* to me as “Drive” somehow. It looks, well, pan-and-scanned or something, or like a colorized version of Casablanca from the 1980s. It looks like the very definition of hmmm…. 🤔

Anyway I’m so glad I wasn’t being crazy! Others old enough to remember it as Dr. chimed in (swipe ahead) I mean, it’s not like we’re insisting on spelling Seven as Se7en or anything. We are not pedants or dorks, I don’t think. Well maybe just a little bit. But Id like to argue that we should remember it as Dr. now that David Lynch is no longer around to call in a correction. You see, “Mulholland Dr.” is spelled that way because like its namesake street, IT IS A PLACE. We can return to it over and over, whenever we need solace, wisdom, or awe. (My friend’s joke that the Dr. actually stands for Doctor isn’t that far-fetched!) by @_sanditan_

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7 months ago

Florida! taken in Sarasota, Florida by @_sanditan_

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9 months ago