“What we set out to prove is what the music industry failed to learn. Give people what they want when they want it and at a good price and they won’t steal it.” -- Kevin Spacey
Friday, April 26, 2013
Rocket Science
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Retro casting gossip...
Still reading my way fitfully through Ian Rankin-- one every couple of years, now on "Black and Blue" -- I came across an interesting note about the original first choice to play Rebus on telly. Vetoed by the suits because he wasn't famous enough. Anyone who's been watching "Top of the Lake" will have an inkling of what might have been.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Clive on atonal music...
An episode called “The Popular Age” was a welcome development in Howard Goodall’s vast yet neat Story of Music (BBC Two), but he was uncharacteristically mealy mouthed when he allowed himself to suggest that atonal music was “a jagged and discordant reflection of a changing world.”The world was changing just as fast in Beethoven’s time but he wrote melodies. Some of them were difficult but they all appealed to the alert ear eventually, whereas the plunks and bloops of late Schoenberg still appeal to nobody except musicologists.
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Skoda Felicia
Herewith, the terminally cute euro-retro automobile favored by protagonist Marco "The Alligator" Buratti in Massimo Carlotto's crisp Italian crime novel "Bandit Love"
."
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
As discussed...
"To all beginners, I give credit for being writers already, since they intend, for better or worse, to risk exposing their emotions, their quirks, their attitude toward life, to public scrutiny."
"I believe in individuality, in being oneself, in using the maximum of one's talent. That is what the public finally loves -- something special and individual."
-- Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, St Martin's 1983.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Friday, February 8, 2013
Deeply concerned...
In her first-rate review of the just-launched second season of "Girls" the great Emily Nussbaum passes on a wonderful expression, new to me: "'concern troll'—the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry."
Monday, January 28, 2013
Archive: "Film Preservation at the Digital Crossroads"
Written in 2000 for FILM COMMENT.
"She was so old that she could still remember when they called that kind of work 'films.' Films--long strips of plastic printed with darkness and light. The memory of film, the sense and the substance of the medium of film, brought her a nostalgia as sharp as broken glass."--Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire (1998).
The name of this magazine will be an anachronism within a decade. Two at the most. The definitive art form of the 20th century will be lucky to survive even a few years past its widely celebrated 100th birthday. Fifty years from now there may still be public exhibition events that we will chose to call movies, but there will be no more "films" -- not outside museums, anyway, where antique persistence of vision devices, carefully preserved and maintained by university-trained specialists, will still be used to throw beams of light through perforated strips of celluloid, emitting a shadow-spectacle for dwindling crowds of cultural antiquarians.
This, at least, is what some people within the community of souls dedicated to keeping those films viable for a few more years, the archivists and preservationists, are saying.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Amanda Palmer
Single from 2012 albume "Theatre is Evil," production costs collected on Kickstarter. (NSFW, God bless her.)
Monday, January 14, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Archive: Yuen Wo-ping
Martial Artist
Action cinema’s wirework puppet master
LA Weekly, December 15-21, 2000.
“Imagine you’re an actor putting on a corset,” says James Schamus, co-writer and executive producer of Ang Lee’s martial-arts fantasy "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." It’s “a heavy canvas corset with a bunch of metal cables attached to it, and you’re getting strung 75 feet up in the air while hanging from a crane. The crane is just an arm supporting wires on pulleys that are being manipulated by five guys wearing construction gloves. They have to maneuver in sync, both with the other cranes and with a team that is pulling another set of wires, attached to another actor who is whipping through the air only a few feet away. One slip-up, just two or three steps in the wrong direction, and someone could get really badly hurt.”
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Epigraph
========== Howards End (Classic Literature) (E.M. Forster)- Highlight Loc. 450 | Added on Saturday, December 29, 2012, 07:09 AM
Her conclusion was, that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any organisation, and from this she never varied.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Archive: "Ghost in the Shell"
The Soul of the New Machine
Film Comment, September, 1996.
"Then she got into the lift, for the good reason that the door stood open; and was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through he air; I listen to voices in America; I see men fly---but how it's done, I can't even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns." ---Virginia Wolf, "Orlando."
Arthur C. Clarke was the another wise person who noticed that technology, sufficiently advanced, would be indistinguishable from magic. The master Japanese manga creator Shirow Masamune shares this view: "Science," declares a character in Shirow's early cyberpunk graphic novel "Appleseed," "is the new black magic."
In "Ghost in the Shell," the animated film version of a later Shirow work, a gifted director, Oshii Mamoru, invests the author's futurism with a quality of the uncanny, as if our awe before technological advancement has gone full circle and become, instead, indistinguishable from superstition.
Archive: Tamil Cinema's Rathnam, Rahman and Hasan
When Gods Walk the Earth
This was the first article I wrote about Indian popular cinema. It appeared in the January-February 1995 issue of Film Comment, with the fairly presumptuous sub-head "Idiom and Archetype in Indian Cinema Today." The piece is transcribed here almost exactly as it was published, gaffes and all. Some updates, upgrades, and second thoughts have been tacked on as footnotes.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
A few words...
...about the creative process:
"Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things."See also: "Whatever talent I have for writing lies in being friends with my head."-- Russell Hoban, "Afterword," "Riddley Walker: Expanded Edition" (Indiana 1998).
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Now you tell me...
"It's tempting to give up on our liberal studies before even making the attempt, the better to continue on our merry way, fighting, drinking, and all the rest. At least, then we we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate."More excellent Smith here. I've been shying away from this writer for years, fearing either the Second Coming of Rushdie (Multi-Culti Magic Realism) or a new addition to the Hitchens/Amis Patronizing Smarty Pants School. But I've loved a couple of her recent essays.-- Zadie Smith, "Some Notes on Attunement," "The New Yorker," December 17, 2012, 30-35.
My other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—”other people’s faces.” A red-headed girl, with a marvelous large nose she probably hates, and green eyes and that sun-shy complexion composed more of freckles than skin. Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, above which, a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose, and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self.As a paragraph written by a novelist this is promising. Last week I dug out the copy of "White Teeth" I've owned for something like fifteen years. Any day now...
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Covers
These cool clips are being posted around to celebrate the publication of a book that looks like an HBO series waiting to happen.
Est-ce Que Tu Le Sais - Scopitone Sylvie Vartan by samandari
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Baxter on Black and Banville
The author of "A Feast of Love" on the novelist who is both the literary eminence John Banville and the would-be thriller purveyor Benjamin Black, who each have new books out.
A reading of the two books, the Banville novel and the Black novel, might inspire in some readers a consideration of the way that plot on the one hand and eloquence on the other have taken their leave of each other and have set up separate realms, if that is indeed what has happened. But the real mystery at the center of these books has more to do with the question of how to freeze time so that it partakes of the eternal, which is Banville’s true subject, and with the problem of consequences of actions in the here and now, which is Black’s. Eloquence is not the point of [Black's] "Vengeance," though it contains passages of verbal legerdemain, and plot is almost irrelevant in [Banville's] "Ancient Light," although it contains a surprise ending.A larger distinction can be inferred between literary novels that seek to "freeze time so that it partakes of the eternal" and entertainments, which exploit a sense of time rushing onward to generate excitement. While there could be cases in which the merely stiff or frozen is mistaken for the timeless, the association of the temporal and the contingent is pretty well locked in; a key issue for us OG liberal artists.
UPDATE: I think the distinction between stop-time novels that seek stasis and/or the eternal and "temporal" plotty ones is too suggestive to be reduced to an art vs. entertainment squabble. Slowing time down to an extreme close-up crawl or speeding it up to gets hearts racing aren't the only alternatives. Some of our favorite books, from "War and Peace" to "A Suitable Boy," somehow manage to evoke the exact, flowing, forward pace of life, without hype in either direction.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Uplift...
He almost gave up [bicycle riding] after a week. But then Doc Barkhuizen gave him the "five-minute" tip. "This is what I do, Benny. If I'm not in the mood I tell myself, 'just five minutes,' and if I don't feel like going on, I'll turn around and go back home." He tried it -- and never once did he turn around. Once you were going, you went on.-- Deon Meyer, "Thirteen Hours" (Grove Press 2011)
Saturday, December 1, 2012
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