Obligatory birthday post. Scene from The General.
Category: uncategorized
After us they’ll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they’ll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, “Oh! Life is so hard!” and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.
Reminds me of an excellent trio of recent Florida real estate journalism… In Harper’s, from Paul Reyes, Paradise swamped: The boom and bust of the middle-class dream and Bleak houses: Digging through the ruins of the mortgage crisis. And from George Packer in the New Yorker we have
The Ponzi State: Florida’s foreclosure disaster. All three are pretty darn good.
Leonard Bernstein’s score of former Philharmonic music director Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, which Alan Gilbert conducts next week at Avery Fisher Hall on September 29, 30, and October 1.
Norman Einstein’s Sports & Rocket Science Monthly #17: October 2010. “Movies. Music. Media. This month the Einsteins are digging into on our sporting stories, why they are told and how they unfold.” One reason Norman Einstein’s has grown on me is that the monthly gap from issue to issue is kind of a nice change from usual RSS trickle from the rest of the web. *Surely* there is an untapped market for more online periodicals.
http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.1.swf
Coffee Break. A 1958 film about lost time in the workplace. From the Prelinger Archives.
(Source: http://www.archive.org/)
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Steamboat Bill, Jr.. Brilliantly funny movie. I had the great pleasure of seeing it with a happy crowd and live piano accompaniment. It’s easy to find online, though. The hat scene and the jail scene about 45 minutes in were my favorites. Highly recommended. But then, I love Buster Keaton.
Kind Hearts and Coronets: Decadent Dennis Price | Clothes on Film. Storytelling through clothing! Lots of great stills from Kind Hearts and Coronets.
As Mazzini slowly murders his way up the social ladder, his manner of dress, starting as a humble store clerk in a lounge coat, becomes increasingly extravagant and dandified, in keeping with the growing hubris of the character.
Shall we talk about the weather? « pecanne log
Truth:
We Southerners get super sensitive about snow and ice in the winter but we LIVE for the first full weekend of zero percent humidity. Everyone breaks out their wool blazers and favorite argyle items as soon as temps dip below 87° – it’s a fact! That’s why it’s so sad when inevitably a three-week humid heat wave comes in October and no one wants to put sensible cotton short-sleeved attire back on. Lots of moist people in sweater vests and Glen plaid dragging themselves through the dying strains of Atlanta summer – it’s just embarrassing for everyone.
Doorways in John Ford’s The Searchers
Are you going in or are you staying out? In the world of The Searchers you must choose. You can’t have both. In this movie, everyone is on the threshold of that choice. And for some, it isn’t a choice at all, it’s just the way things work. Everything you want, everything you search for, is “out there”, or, on the flipside, everything you want is “in there”. There is a giant gap between in and out. Characters are seen standing a bit away from the house, with people clustered in the doorway, and it seems like anything, anything can happen in that gap.
I was reminded of this by the True Grit shot.
Great, great article. Liminality, my friends. And while we’re on the topic, I tumbled a doorway shot from The Outlaw Josey Wales after I watched it a month or so ago:
Constraint in everyday life. A lesson learned as I spent a couple weeks dog- and house-sitting barely a mile from the office. In theory my time not-on-a-train in the mornings and afternoons could have converted to reading time like usual. In theory. If I had any discipline. And thus I remind myself that less important than the amount time I have–a shit-ton, if you know where to look (as in, let us say, around lunchtime; before, during and right after breakfast when I’m usually just kind of sighing and limping around the house; and pretty much every day from 6pm to midnight)–is the structure I give it.
Condos of the Living Dead | Culture | Vanity Fair
“It’s not that these new Manhattan buildings don’t look very good. It’s that they look lazily derivative, and they’ll make New York look like every other grubbily transparent financial hub in the world.”
Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer shows that animals are often set up to succeed
“Palmer’s book underscores the fundamental challenge of wildlife filmmaking: Nature is frequently boring. Wild animals prefer not to be seen.” Fascinating. We’ve been faking the natural world for the sake of narrative and/or efficiency and/or profit. See also.
Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer shows that animals are often set up to succeed
Palo Duro Canyon – Wikipedia
The second-largest canyon in the United States. I’d never heard of it.
I ain’t that particular. Between Scotch and nothing, I’ll take Scotch.
What’s It Like to Be a Tourist in North Korea? – Foreign Policy
One of the commenters has some interesting photos from a North Korea trip earlier this summer.
What’s It Like to Be a Tourist in North Korea? – Foreign Policy
Overcoming Bias : Opinion Warning Signs
“Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth.” (via)
Thirty days as a Cuban: Pinching pesos and dropping pounds in Havana – By Patrick Symmes (Harper’s Magazine)
A journalist experiences a month of eating on the official rations and the black market. Probably my favorite from this month’s issue. [$]
Recent juxtapositions
A cluster of articles that came up in life and/or the RSS reader within the span of a couple days, without my looking for them. There are no coincidences:
- Caglia on Gaga. [sigh]
- A friend was semi-outraged by the NPR review of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”. “Singing in a clear, strong voice about how exhilarating it is be clear and strong about what you want.”
- American Electra: Feminism’s ritual matricide – Harper’s Magazine. [$] The generational divide in the feminist movement(s).
- Critic’s Notebook: Lady Gaga, sexuality and 21st century pop. “Pop is where sex lives most openly in our culture, and that it’s not just a matter of surfaces, […] but of the depth and breadth of desire, frustration, satisfaction.”
(via)
http://videos.nymag.com/embed/player/?content=KWN4D022280LSM25&widget_type_cid=svp&title_height=24
Acting School With Will Arnett: His Video Tips for Playing an Arrogant Idiot. The Mickey Rourke look-away is brilliant.
(Source: http://videos.nymag.com/)
Mark Larson 