| Fantastic Mr. Fox |
[30 Nov 2009|05:34am] |
Went to see Fantastic Mr. Fox with some folks last night and enjoyed seeing it and them.
It was. Fantastic, that is. I liked it way more than I expected (and perhaps even out of proportion to what it deserved); but the clever miniatures, close attention details, (Mr. Fox sits down in an armchair with a desktop, just like Roald Dahl's desk!) and the overall message: that despite the suburban trappings, (or a relatively sedate age) we are all wild animals doing our best to survive... well I just liked it. (Even if all the animals were from the American South while the villains were clearly British.)
Also, I'm thinking I need a Latin name that tells people a little more about who I am or what I do.
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| Ella: Twelve Nights in Hollywood |
[29 Nov 2009|11:52am] |
This article in the Times about a new release from Verve of live recordings of Ella Fitzgerald.
I fell in love with Ella when I lost my voice at fifteen; I quickly discovered there were at least two Ella's: the saucy live Ella at clubs and festivals with jazz legends of the day and the schmalzy studio Ella with the mawkish (and overly string-laden) sound of the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.
By way of disclaimer I can't stress enough how influential the American Songbook recordings (with Nelson Riddle) were in preserving the great standards of pre-rock-n-roll pop; but in my mind it's not jazz. (And it's not really Ella, either, whose greatness is not as a balladeer, but as a bonafide jazz singer. Her best music is when she speeds up ballads and swings them instead of letting them fall into the valium-soaked tempos of easy-listening: even if it's the Riddle era recordings that remain popular today.)
That's why it's so thrilling to have some new recordings, even if the manic edge and the blistering tempos in some of these songs suggests either:
1. Someone really wants to get through the set quickly.
2. Amphetamines.
By way of comparison here are links to Caravan on her Live @ Rome recording and the new Twelve Nights in Hollywood. They are similar interpretations, but Hollywood shaves 35 seconds off the song and the entire combo struggles to keep up with the tempo:
Rome
Hollywood
Anyway, all this is making me nostalgic for my vinyl. I might head to Brother's place to listen to records today.
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| Puritan Icon! |
[25 Nov 2009|06:56am] |
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Just in time for Thanksgiving, the long-promised Puritan icon!
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| Hobbes in Hebrew |
[17 Nov 2009|06:10am] |
Is it possible that the Times took a cue from the Onion in these 'Room for Debate' columns? I keep expecting to see one of the Onion's ludicrous career labels, "Executive Bottle Washer" applied to the pictures.
I love these, they are like little cultural/intellectual snapshots highlighting the invisible players in the world of ideas.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/hobbes-in-hebrew-the-religion-question/
Brother has just finished reading Leviathan so there has been a lot of discussion of Hobbes, lately. I think what sticks with me most is the easy extension of the idea of 'covenant' with to contemporary politics.
Hobbes against the background of the English Civil War seems especially appropriate these days as we see not just a polarization of political viewpoints, but parties trying to lay claim not just to covenant, but to the god-given right to power the idea suggests by wrapping themselves in the flag of righteousness.
That being said, I for one am not shocked that Hobbes has never been available in its entirety in Hebrew. A resurrected language, used primarily as a second language by a small number of persons whose first languages already had scholarly translations... The most interesting thing about this article is the idea that there is enough of a market now to merit such a translation.
Regardless of how you feel about Israel and Israeli politics, it is a fascinating experiment.
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| Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan |
[15 Nov 2009|10:42am] |
I just finished a book that many of you would like, called Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan. Shaun Tan is an Australian author whose book on immigration The Arrival made a big splash a few years ago. His books are published in a kind of picture book format, occasionally going for an even artier design with stories integrated with the text as in his story 'Distant Rain' about what happens to all the unshared poetry in the world: It collects in a big ball that floats in the sky and eventually disintegrates in the rain showering everyone with bits of 'accidental verse.'
Barely visible, but undeniably present/To each reader they will whisper something different: something joyful, something sad, truthful, absurd, hilarious, profound, and perfect./No one will be able to explain the/strange feeling of weightlessness/or the private smile that remains/Long after the street sweepers have come and gone.
This story is presented with the pictures integrated with the text pasted together in different fonts and handwriting, almost like a ransom note.
( On steel-toed wedding boots, and consulting the buffalo... )
Shaun Tan also has a beautifully designed website containing his books and some of his other work, the suburban landscape seems to be one of his regular themes:
http://www.shauntan.net/
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| Cantelowes: Toumani Diabate |
[14 Nov 2009|10:30am] |
Brother sent me a recording of the following, because the opening theme from Ennio Morricone's score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly caught his attention and made him think of me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5s_3PGzIaM
Toumani Diabate is an internationally known Malian kora player. You've probably heard his work before, but don't know it. He's worked with Bjork, among other artists.
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| Roasted or Boiled?: Structuralist Claude Levi-Strass dies at 100 |
[03 Nov 2009|06:44pm] |
What does it say that he outlived Jacques Derrida by a few years?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html
Even if you have never heard of him, the work of Claude Levi-Strass had a major impact on 20C thinking. You are probably carrying around some of his ideas and you don't even know it. The obituary is a fantastic overview of his life and his work, btw, so check it and diagnose yourself on the structuralist spectrum.
I will let you know if the Beloved Professor (from whom I learned about Structuralism, though he's more a follower of Derrida, himself) has any comment. Lately he's mostly been posting about lawns, and elegies. (Including Blue Velvet if it's the only way to get people to click through to the post.)
It's this bit about elegies that really stuck over the past few days:
It's an elegy for a dying Poet, and a dying politics; and like any good elegy it turns into a horror movie where we know what's going to happen before it happens, and then it happens.
I think this is a great description of an elegy. I wonder if obituary-writing has a similar quality... especially since most of them are written before the death of the subject.
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| LMA: Concession and Depression? |
[30 Oct 2009|06:50am] |
A double X essay on LMA. Not particularly noteworthy except that it pushed that button that likes to rant about LMA:
http://www.doublex.com/section/arts/little-women-big-sacrifices
Regarding the lack of anger in her work: her journals were both required and read by her father who was constantly correcting his daughters' expression and inner-lives. Anger would not have been an allowed emotion. The constant contrition and sense of her own fallenness, her willfulness, her failure to behave as expected was the legacy she received from her father who often considered her (and her mother) demonic influences on the family.
( Read more... )
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| HDT: 10/27/51 |
[27 Oct 2009|06:27am] |
The obstacles which the heart meets with are like granite blocks which one alone cannot move. She who was as the morning light to me is now neither the morning star nor the evening star. We meet but to find each other further asunder, and the oftener we meet the more rapid our divergence. So a star of the first magnitude pales in the heavens, not from any fault in the observer’s eye nor from any fault in itself, perchance, but because its progress in its own system has put a greater distance between. The night is oracular. What have been the intimations of the night? I ask. How have you passed the night?
I wonder if he is talking about Margaret Fuller?
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| Vincent Price, Vincent Price |
[27 Oct 2009|05:44am] |
Since ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) frostmorn and I accidently watched William Castle's House on Haunted Hill with the deliciously creepy Vincent Price, I thought a link to Dave Kehr's DVD coverage of classic horror releases on DVD might be appropriate.
We thought we were going to be watching The Haunting, (based on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House which is one of those movies that is more disturbing than creepy, but I will admit to getting our titles mixed-up and too easily falling under the sway of Price's mellifluous tones. However, I am not sure that, "Any male ghost would love to haunt you!" falls under the category of successful pick-up lines.
I also think it's interesting that I mentioned Magnificent Ambersons last night, picking up, I suppose, on the atmospheric lighting. This isn't a horror so much as it's a drama about the fall of a family empire. But I had never thought of it in terms of horror or haunting; this really opens up the film. In my book it's just as (if not more) interesting than Citizen Kane and Joseph Cotton's monologue on the ways automobiles will change the country is prophetic, not just from the character's time, or the movie's time, but for ours.
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| Microworlds Part 1 by Thaddeus Phillips |
[25 Oct 2009|08:12am] |
We went to Microworlds Part 1 last night. It's excellent, though clearly a work in progress. The performance is powered entirely by human energy, using a step generator to power the lights and sound. The story is about a Serbian physicist living in Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Tower just prior to demolition. Thaddeus constructed a 3 x 3 x 8 capsule as his primary set piece. It rotates as well as hinging up and down becoming everything he needs for the play. He uses his reverse projection technique I've seen in his other plays, but also draws on one side of the capsule---a translucent wipe-board---to illustrate ideas.
( Perchance to dream... )
Also of pertinence to this post, da_lj's post on Stewart Brand.
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| Uncivil Society |
[14 Oct 2009|06:20am] |
Since it's 20 years since 1989, I will probably be posting a fair amount of these:
Uncivil Society: the end of Communism as the exhaustion of bureaucracy. I've been discussing this issue at length with Brother who has his own theory about total, social, exhaustion.
Also, I took down my other post, but still wanted to give Hermann Garden Gnomes a shout-out. This article cracked me up, even as I also think it has some very interesting points about German unification. As I mentioned in my previous, disbanded, post, Bismarck has passed my lips more often as a military leader than as a pastry in this past year, which suggests a dangerous possibility of obsession.
I didn't even know who Bismarck was (besides something that sank) before I read Jon Savage's Teenage, which is turning out to be one of the most influential books of the year. (No matter how amusing some of the other books have been, including, recently, Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lynell.)
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