Citizen Action
Current mood: accomplished
Category: News and Politics
I am a monthly doner to Greenpeace, but up until a few seconds ago was never anything more: I looked upon their numerous emails announcing letter-writing campaigns for and against this or that cause as a nuisance, and finally ended up automatically deleating them whenever they came. Admittedly there was shame on my part for doing nothing more than contribute $15 a month. Maybe hurtling myself between the whistling harpoon of a Japanese whaler, and a proud, grandly flopping whale minding its own business of devouring plankton is not my style, but I can write so why could I never manage to even do that?
Today's letter-writing-plea-email title piqued my curiosity: Offshore Drilling and Hurricanes Don't Mix. It so happened that only a couple of days prior, this had been a topic at the dinner table. One side had been for us doing more drilling for oil on our land so that our transition from an oil-based energy economy to a more clean and renewable one would pass more smoothly. Today's technology renders worries about spills, leakages, and other possible related disasters obsolete. Afterall, the drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico had survived the massive assault of Hurrican Katerina without incident. Furthermore, it was argued, the greater supply of oil would reduce our gas prices.
The letter from greenpeace refuted all points, and is more like mine own opinion. Here is what it said:
Dear Jeremy,
Just three years after Katrina, Hurricane Gustav has hit the Gulf coast, leaving a great deal of damage in its wake. My heart goes out to everyone affected by this storm, and I hope the recovery efforts will be swift for those in the storm's path.
I was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina to document the environmental destruction it caused: the oil spills, chemical spills, and wetlands destruction.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused "six major, five medium, and over 5,000 minor oil and hazmat" spills, according to the U.S. Coast Guard (link). An estimated nine million gallons of oil were spilled, and that estimate does not even include the 5,000 minor spills. I saw many of the oil spills Katrina caused first-hand, and I know there is a serious risk of ecological devastation in the wake of Gustav, which plowed through more than 4,000 offshore drilling platforms and 33,000 miles of pipeline in the Gulf.
Along with its human and environmental impacts, the trashing of oil rigs in the Gulf can have economic consequences, too, as an interruption in production can lead to a spike in gas prices.
But despite the obvious risks that offshore drilling pose to our nation's beaches, our economy, wildlife, and ecosystems, there is a major political push for more offshore drilling right now in Congress. Even if we didn't learn our lesson from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Hurricane Gustav and the hurricanes following in his wake should demonstrate once and for all that offshore drilling is not a secure energy plan for America. We don't need more drilling (take-action link) in the Gulf of Mexico or off the coasts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, which are also frequent targets of hurricanes. California's earthquake-prone coast isn't a good place for offshore rigs either and the threat to wildlife and pristine oceans in Alaska is reason enough to ban drilling there, too.
Offshore drilling isn't a solution to our dependence on foreign oil and high energy prices. Our oil addiction can only be cured by changing the way we find and use energy. The only energy investments we should be making are in clean, renewable sources like wind and solar that we can produce right here in the United States. We'll need an automobile fleet with much higher gas mileage and a move toward electric cars. All of this is possible today if there is a will in Congress and in corporate board rooms.
Right now, the U.S. Minerals Management Service is accepting public comments on its new 5-year drilling plan that would open up more of our coasts to oil drilling. Tell the government to keep our coastal waters safe and oppose new offshore drilling.
You can help lead the charge for real solutions, not false remedies that waste precious time in the fight to curb the most serious impacts of global warming.
Sincerely, Mark Floegel Senior Researcher
So, possibly inspired by frequent mentions of men-of-action in a short-story I was reading, called "The Three Horsemen of the Appocolypse" by G.K. Chesterton in his final such collection entitled The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, I clicked on a link and wrote the following letter to the U.S. Minerals Management Service:
I oppose the MMS' newly proposed 5-year Outer Continental Shelf leasing program for 2010 to 2015 for the following reasons:
1) Any promises of new oil supplies will only stall the now essential transition to cleaner, renewable sources of energy.
2) Despite all technological improvements in oil-drilling techniques, there will inevitably be spills caused by the undeniably superior strength of nature (earthquakes, hurricanes, erosion, etc.) that harm the surrounding environment. More sites = more damage.
3) Energy prices will not decrease.
I thank you and all those related in such decision-making for your consideration of this opinion. Below is the generic argument provided by Greenpeace for its members, like myself.
- Jeremy Butterfield
-------------------------------------------
I am writing to express my opposition to the Minerals Management Service's (MMS) new 5-year Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) leasing program proposed for 2010 to 2015.
First, the U.S. burns close to one-quarter of the world's oil, yet we only have about three percent of the world's oil reserves. We will never be able to drill our way to lower gas prices or energy security, even if we drilled every last drop of oil out of the OCS or from onshore resources. When President Bush opened eight million acres to drilling in 2007, prices continued to skyrocket. Even the U.S. Energy Information Administration agrees that new drilling will likely amount to a price difference of mere pennies per gallon, and not until as much as a decade from now. The MMS supports this new 5-year lease sale program with a false and misleading argument that more drilling will lower gas prices. This is a tremendous disservice to the American public who deserves true relief from high gas and energy prices.
Second, the U.S. must address its addiction to oil, whether the oil is produced domestically or imported is not the issue. MMS's 5-year leasing program will only continue to feed this addiction, not cure it, and will stall the transition away from oil and toward conservation and renewable energy. More drilling will also lead to more global warming, oil spills, environmental degradation, and loss of billions of dollars in revenue for states whose coasts will be cross-hatched with oil industry infrastructure, all without any benefit for the American public in terms of meaningful relief from high gas and energy prices.
Last, this new 5-year leasing program is illegal given the congressional moratorium on OCS drilling. MMS cannot promote drilling in areas that are protected by the moratorium. The moratorium was put into place for a reason and MMS is bound by the law to uphold it.
As a concerned citizen, I ask that the Secretary of the Interior cancel this leasing program and instead use these resources to invest in expanding and creating jobs in the renewable energy field.
After clicking on "send", I was then sent to a page that allowed me to write another letter, this time to Congress about a similar issue. It was so similar that I could reuse the same letter I had already written, merely having to alter the first sentence between the words "oppose" and "for" and keeping the new pre-written letter, instead of the old, at bottom.
It was all much simpler and quicker than the writing of this blog, which has further delayed me from the finale of that brilliant Chesterton story (which happens to be Jorge Luis Borges' favorite Chesterton short-story of all-time). But I feel very accomplished.
Surveys, quizes
Current mood: ditzy
Category: Quiz/Survey
"I've Had 23 of 38 Blonde Moments"
18 or lower means you're not stupid.
[] Gum has fallen out of your mouth when you were talking. [x] Gum has fallen out of your mouth when you were NOT talking. [x] You have ran into a glass/screen door. []You have jumped out of a moving vehicle. [x] You have thought of something funny and laughed, then people gave you weird looks.
total=3
[x] You have ran into a tree. [] It IS possible to lick your elbow [] You just tried to lick your elbow. [x]You never knew that the Alphabet and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star have the same rhythm. [x] You just tried to sing them. [] You have tripped on your shoelace and fallen. [] You have choked on your own spit. [x]You have seen the the Matrix and still don't get it. [x] You didn't notice that in the last question "the" was spelled twice [x] You just looked at it. [x]Your hair is blonde/dirty blonde. [x]People have called you slow.
total so far=11
[x] You have accidentally caught something on fire [x] You tried to drink out of a straw, but it went into your nose/eyes/cheek. [x] You have caught yourself drooling. [x] You've fallen asleep in class [] If someone says "fart" you laugh. [] You just laughed.
total so far=15
[x] Sometimes you just stop thinking [x] You tell a story and forget what you were talking about [] People are often shaking their heads and walking away from you []You are often told to use your "inside voice". []You use your fingers to do simple math.
total so far=17
[x]You have eaten a bug. []You are taking this test when you should be doing something important [x] You have put your clothes on backwards or inside out, and didn't realize it [x] You've looked all over for something and realized it was in your hand or pocket
total so far= 20
[] You sometimes post bulletins because you are scared that what they say will happen to you if you don't even when you know it won't happen to you. [] You break a lot of things. [] Your friends know not to use big words around you [x] You sometimes tilt your head when you're confused [x] You have fallen out of your chair before [x] When you're laying in bed, you try to find pictures in the texture of the ceiling
Who’s as Good as Gould? -or- Addiction
Current mood: surprised
Category: Music
Meet Glenn Gould, Canadian, hypochondriac; also indisputedly one of a handful of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. To my mind, he's the best pianist of classical music; at any rate, the best I've heard. Consistently creative with even the most canonized pieces, you could always count on him to unveil seemingly new meanings. His interpretation may have been unorthodox (as many still complain in our present day), but 99 times out of a 100, it worked on its own terms. For Gould's opinion was that after the, say, first 40 years of recording, all the standard interpretations had been set down brilliantly; therefore all that was left to do, recording wise, was to explore new possibilities. He made it a point to add that he wasn't in with exploring just for its own sake; what resulted had to have integrity.
Gould felt so strongly about this, that he made it his official excuse for retiring from public concerting at the unheard-of age of 34. To him, the concert pianist was always confined to a narrow selection of performable works: there simply wasn't enough time to learn many new ones while touring all the time. Of course one could point to a pianist like Sviatoslav Richter and object; but with the more-of-this-Earth pianists this does seem to be the case. Besides, Gould had a further sympathetic point: once played live, you could never revise; but with recording, not only could the performer revise, they could revision, which fit in perfectly with his exploration aspirations. And no one could hear the piece until perfected; then they could listen to it as many times as they wanted.
Gould's plan worked for him. He was a prodigious recorder, completing nearly all the keyboard works of Bach and Beethoven, all of Mozart's sonatas, much of Brahms and Schoenberg, and then various works from across the board from early Baroque to Modern works with the notable exception of much of the typical concert pianist's repertoire: Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, and Rachmaninov. He didn't like them; not even the more balanced Franz Schubert, despite being spellbound, during his 1957 West-Russian tour, with Richter's famously slow interpretation of the B-Minor Sonata. It should be noted that his not liking a piece didn't exclude Gould from playing it; he didn't care much for much of Mozart either, especially the more renowned works. But he had a lot to say about them, so he played Mozart his way, that is contrapuntally. It is unlikely that any other recording of Mozart's sonatas is so impregnated with new geneses. For the record, he also recorded the B-Minor Sonata of Chopin, and two Liszt transcriptions of Beethoven symphonies (5 & 6) which make one wonder, "why bother with an orchestra at all?" For Gould, the piano was an orchestra, he its conductor. You can see this in how he plays, and hear it in how he sounds. His sound is always clear, conceptually rich, and pulsing with rhythm. Even if you would never (if you could) play a piece in the same way, his authority and infectious enthusiasm with what he does is contagious. He won over many of the greatest musicians of his time, like Richter and Artur Rubinstein; conductors like Leonard Bernstein ("he gives me a whole new interest in music"), Herbert von Karajan, George Szell ("that nut's a genius"), Leopold Stokowski, Joseph Krips ("one of the greatest musicians of our time, if not the greatest of all"), and Bruno Walter (a genius, but I don't like how he plays); like the cellist Mstislav Rastropovich; like violinist Yehudi Menuhin; like singer Maureen Forrester ("in awe of his mind"); let's not forget jazz musicians like Oscar Peterson; Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones; composers Aaron Copland, Stravinsky, and Jacques Hétu who was so haunted with Gould's interpretation of his Variations pour piano that he couldn't sleep for three days; and so on (this piece has become a name-dropping orgy, but that doesn't mean I won't add that Gould was psycho-killer Hannibal Lector's pianist of choice). He continues to win fans of our time. To the point of being a bonified cult-figure.
For your edification and entertainment, I have selected 3 Gould performances off of youtube. There are many more on that site should you wish to explore, for Gould was not just a great pianist, he was an artist of ever-expanding breadth. He was also a composer, a heavy reader, a writer, a radio-writer/producer/editor, film-score editor, a television-nut. He loved technology and used it towards its maximum potential; thus are there scores of recordings, sound and visual, available for who-knows-how-many future generations to enjoy and study. He also conducted a bit - a bit oddly that is. But, getting back to the hypochondriac bit, he was prevented from his planned full career on the podium when he died of a stroke at just 50 from having been on so many medications: legal drugs are still drugs. So the first and last videos of the three also combine to make an excellent "before-after" warning.
But before we just dive rashly into Gould's performances, this little quote from Wondrous Strange: the Life and Art of Glenn Gould by Kevin Bazzana, will serve as an excellent context in which to consider his approach:
"He viewed the act of interpretation as something more than the execution of a series of instructions. In this he took Bach's music as a model. Bach's scores, for the most part, consist of pitches and rhythms only; they are mostly devoid of instructions as to tempo, dynamics, phrasing, expressing. There is a kind of abstraction to Bach's music that makes it frequently amendable to widely diverging interpretations, a quality Gould eagerly exploited. ...Gould treated all scores as though they had been written by Bach..." (pg. 252)
And now, on to the best part:
This first performance is from around 1960 when Gould was 30ish. It is the Finale-Alla Fuga movement, the final movement, of the Eroica Variations for the keyboard by Beethoven, Op. 35.
The second performance is an excellent Gouldian performance of Mozart from the final movement of Sonata 7, K333.
The final performance comes around 1980, and is in 3 parts. The first is Gould discussing (Gould in "conversation" is always amusing since everything is so clearly preplanned) the fugue, specifically Bach's Art of the Fugue. The next two is Gould's performance of the last fugue in that work, which is Bach's last work and is unfinished. Gould may have prematurely aged, but his playing has aged well.
words, words, words...O my the words!
Current mood: enthralled
Category: Blogging
"January 12. I haven't written down a great deal about myself during these days, partly because of laziness (I now sleep so much and so soundly during the day, I have greater weight while I sleep), but also partly because of the fear of betraying my self-perception. This fear is justified, for one should permit a self-perception to be established definitively in writing only when it can be done with the greatest completeness, with all the incidental consequences, as well as with entire truthfulness. For if this does not happen--and in any event I am not capable of it--then what is written down will, in accordance with its own purpose and with the superior power of the established, replace what has been felt only vaguely in such a way that the real feeling will disappear while the worthlessness of what has been noted down will be recognized too late."
--- (Franz Kafka, from Diaries 1910-1913, pg. 41 (the year is 1911))
Kafka here describes quite well the danger to forcing a definition, or summation, on matters which one has not yet been able to envelope within one's sphere of comprehension.
Being prone to self-examination and ponderances, I not too infrequently become lost in trying to describe the purpose and implications of this and that observation I make. Sometimes even the observing itself can become confused; because just as our eyes have the not faculties to see but a limited range of light on the light spectrum, so can our faculties of comprehension not "see" what we sense. It is when we become fearful of this state of unresolve, of question, that the likelihood of such a danger as Kafka foresees, greatly increases.
A contemporary of Kafka's, Rainer Maria Rilke, extrapolates Kafka's postulate further:
"One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort." (Letters to a Young Poet, pg. 71 (letter 8))
Sometimes it is best to not immediately give a name to something. With the questions ever present, and patience, the thing will become more clear and therefore the name will come.
An example: Just today I began reading with ravishment Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and in chapter 2 of the "At Marygreen" section, encountered a passage where Jude, a sensitive and slender 11 year-old boy, is in the presence of his great-aunt Drusilla as she tells visitors of how she came to be in custody of him : his parents had died. She looks at Jude and says "It would ha' been a blessing if Goddy-mighty had took thee too, wi' thy mother and father, poor useless boy!"
I like to make notes and underlines in books I read seriously, and here I had decided to make a comment summarizing this type of attitude held towards children that used to be so much more socially acceptable to espouse. I drew an arrow from the vicinity of that passage, and wrote "child as" ... then froze. I couldn't think of the proper word. I considered and rejected words like "property" (close, but too great a relationship with houses and land), "object" (too inanimate), and "possession" (lacking the quality of value).
Instead of forcing a word into the blank -- "Child as property," for example, I left it blank, believing that the right word would later come to me. Just hours later it did. It came from my USA History textbook. The word was "commodity".
For me, in the process of writing nearly anything, I often sail into similar conundrums. I'm always searching for the word, that one perfect word that will clarify and settle everything. Even selecting the word to define my mood for a blog entry, such as this one, can take 5, 10 minutes. I ask myself, "how do I feel?" and then I'm not always sure. Sometimes I don't want to find out because it might spoil the moment; or I'm just darn perplexed. Then there are political issues : "I can't have too many negative moods in a row or I'll look like quite a dreary person." Or : "This isn't necessarily my mood, but it best fits the mood of the entry."
But I always choose one because I find the kitty so cute and I want to run its cycle of expressions -- it's aesthetic, yet as close to the truth, or a truth, as I can manage.
U.S.A.: J.D. Salinger (all) --- James Agee (Letters to Father Flye, The Morning Watch, Death in the Family) --- Joel Agee (Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany) --- Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof)
Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guilderstein are Dead) --- Isaac Isamov (I Robot, Robot Dreams) --- Frederick Douglas (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas) --- Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel) --- Ben Hecht (Gaily! Gaily!) --- Ring Lardner (various short stories) --- Jim Bouton (Ball Four) --- Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend) --- Bernard Malamud (The Natural) --- Mark Twain (The Prince and the Pauper)
Raold Dahl (James and the Giant Peach) --- F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise) --- John Bellars (Eyes of the Killer Robot) --- Al Stump (Ty Cobb) --- Edgar Allen Poe (various short stories, "The Raven" poem) --- J.T. LeRoy (Sarah, The Heart is Deceitful Above all Things) --- Douglas R. Hofstadter (Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language)
Europe: Arthur Rimbaud (poems, letters) --- Osip Mandelstam (poems) --- Rainer Maria Rilke (poems, The Notebook of Martin Laurids Briggs, Letters to a Young Poet) --- Enid Starkie (Arthur Rimbaud)
William Shakespeare (many plays) --- Albert Camus (The Stranger) --- Pier Paulo Pasolini (The Ragazzi, A Violent Life) --- Alexander Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) --- Nicolai Gogol (The Nose, Dead Souls)
Euripides (Ion) --- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince) --- Par Lagerkvist (The Dwarf) --- J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion) --- C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, Out of the Silent Planet)
Nick Cave (And the Ass Saw the Angel) --- Jean-Paul Sartre (The Wall) --- Knut Hamsun (Hunger) --- Franz Kafka (Amerika) --- Lewis Carroll (the Alice books) --- G.K. Chesterton (What's Wrong with The World, The Poet and the Lunatics) --- William Golding (Lord of the Flies) --- Fyodor Dostoevsky (A Gentle Spirit, Notes From Underground, The Adolescent)
Vladimir Nabokov (The Defense) --- Hermann Hesse (Demian, Steppenwolf) --- Guy de Maupassant (Contes de la Becasse) --- M. Ageyev (Novel With Cocaine) --- Alberto Moravia (The Conformist, Two Adolescents, 1934) --- Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure) --- W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage) --- Anthony Burgess (Language Made Plain)
South America: Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Of Love and Other Demons)
Middle East: The Bible, Omar Khayyam / Edward Fitzgerald (Rubaiyat)
Asia: Matsuo Basho (poems, various writings)
Film: Andre Bazin (What is Cinema?, Orson Welles, etc.) --- Andrei Tarkovsky (Sculpting In Time) --- Jonathan Rosenbaum (Critical writings) --- James Agee (On Film) --- Manny Farber (Negative Space) --- Peter Bagdanovich / Orson Welles / Jonathan Rosenbaum, ed. (This Is Orson Welles) --- Nicholas Ray (I Was Interrupted) --- Donald Richie (The Films of Akira Kurosawa) --- Wheeler Winston Dixon (The Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut) --- Tom Milne, ed. (Godard on Godard) --- Francois Truffaut (The Films of My Life, Hitchcock) --- Jean Douchet (French New Wave)
Film Journals: Cahiers du Cinema, Cinemascope, Film Comment, Cineaste
Music: Aaron Copland (What To Listen For In Music) --- Glenn Gould / Tim Page, ed. (Glenn Gould Reader) --- Kevin Bazanna (Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould) --- Wanda Landowska (On Music)
and others by artists such as Frank Miller, Alex Toth, Neal Adams, Carmen Infantino, Joe Kubert, Jim Aparo, Jack Kirby, Marshall Rogers, and Dick Sprang.
These are my favorite films. There are many because I love the cinema.
(Ordered by country in which film was produced, and date - earliest to latest) (latest additions in sky-blue) Algeria/France: The Battle of Algiers
Brazil: Antonio das Mortes, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
Canada:Lost and Delirious, My Winnipeg
Czechoslavakia: Alice
Denmark: Vampyr (1931), Stars and Watercarriers (1973), Sunday In Hell (1976)
England: The 39 Steps, Henry V (1944), Brief Encounter, Hamlet (1948), The Third Man, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Richard III (1953), Lawrence of Arabia
A Hard Day's Night, Help!, Blow Up (1966), Romeo & Juliet, King Lear (1969), Death in Venice, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Three and Four Musketeers ('73), Robin and Marian, Monty Python's The Life of Brian, Brazil
Finland/England: I Hired a Contract Killer
France: Un Chien Andalou, Napoleon (1927), Blood of the Poet, Zero For Conduct, L'Atalante, Beethoven (1934), The Grand Illusion (1937), La Marsaillaise, The Rules of the Game
Jour de Fête, Beauty and the Beast, Diary of a Country Priest, M. Hulot's Holiday, Les Enfants Terribles, The Earrings of Madame D..., Orphée, A Man Escaped, Night and Fog, Lola Montes, Rififi, Mon Oncle
Zazie Dans le Metro, Pickpocket, The 400 Blows, Le Doulos, Shoot the Piano Player, Antoine et Colette, My Life To Live, Jules and Jim, Contempt, Band of Outsiders
Pierrot le Fou, Alphaville, Mouchette, Weekend, Playtime, The Wild Child, Army of Darkness, Le Boucher, La Maison du Bois (The House in the Woods), Day For Night
Lancelot of the Lake, Trafic, The Red Circle, Two English Girls, The Mother and the Whore, Last Tango in Paris, Un Flic, The Devil Probably
Sauve qui Peut (la Vie), Keep Up Your Right, La Vie Bohème, Jeanne d'Arc (1996), Beau Travail, I'm Going Home (2001), Notre Musique, Monsieur Ibrahim
Germany: Nosferatu, Metropolis, M, Chronicle of Anna Magdelena Bach, Aguire the Wrath of God, Ludwig, Nosferatu (1979), Fitzcaraldo
Hong Kong: Drunken Master 2
Hungary: The Red and the White (1968)
India: The Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, The World of Apu)
Iran: The Traveller, The Experience, So Can I, The Wedding Suit, Bread and Alley, Solution Number 1, The Key (1985), Where is the Friend's House?, Close-Up, Life and Nothing More..., A Moment of Innocence, The Silence (1998), The Wind Will Carry Us, The Day I Became a Woman, 10, Offside
Italy: Shoeshine, Rome: Open City, Paisan, The Bicycle Thief, Germany Year Zero, Flowers of St. Francis, I Vitelloni, La Strada
The Woman With a Suitcase, La Dolce Vita, Rocco and His Brothers, Family Diary, Mama Roma, La Ricotta, L'Eclisse (The Eclipse), 8 1/2, The Leopard
Love Meetings, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Hawks and Sparrows, Oedipus Rex, Teorema, Toby Dammit, Burn! (Quemada), The Spider's Stratagem, The Conformist
Japan: I Was Born But..., The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums, I Remember a Father (1942), Seven Samurai, Tokyo Story, Throne of Blood, The Bad Sleep Well, Yojimbo, Harakiri (Seppuku), Fighting Elegy, Branded to Kill, Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, Derzu Urzula, Ran
Kazakhstan: Revenge (1987)
Mexico: Los Olvidados, Nazarin, The Exterminating Angel, Simon of the Desert
Morocco/Italy: Othello (1952)
Poland: Ashes and Diamonds, Knife in the Water, Wojaczek
Russia: Gulliver's Travels (1935), Alexander Nevsky, Ballad of a Soldier, The Cranes Are Flying, My Name is Ivan (Ivan's Childhood), Homeland of Electricity, Welcome! No Tresspassing
Andrei Rubleyv, Solaris, The Mirror (1975), The Ascent (1977), Mother and Son, Moloch, Russian Ark, The Return (2003), Father and Son
Russia/Cuba: I Am Cuba
Spain/Mexico: Viridiana
Sweden: Monica, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence (1963)
Tunisia: Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces
Ukraine: Earth (1930), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
U.S.A.: Our Hospitality, The Gold Rush, The Crowd (1927), Sunrise, The General, The Cameraman, Sherlock Jr., The Circus, Frankenstein (1931), City Lights, Scarface (1932), Trouble in Paradise (1932), Duck Soup, I Married a Millionairess, It's a Gift
Modern Times, The Fury, The Awful Truth, The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra, The Long Voyage Home, The Bank Dick, Dumbo, The Great Dictator, The Shop Around the Corner, Pinocchio, Citizen Kane
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), To Be or Not to Be (1942), Casablanca, Shadow of a Doubt, Double Indemnity, Jane Eyre, Detour, Monsieur Verdoux
The Big Sleep, Notorious, Arsenic and Old Lace, My Darling Clementine, Lady From Shanghai, Macbeth, Rope, Adam's Rib, The Heiress, White Heat, Ace in the Hole, The River (1950)
The Big Heat, In a Lonely Place, All About Eve, Steel Helmet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Clash By Night, Monkey Business, Strangers on a Train, Singing in the Rain, Johnny Guitar, 99 River Street
On the Waterfront, Rear Window, The Little Fugitive, Night of the Hunter (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Rebel Without a Cause, The Killing (1956)
Seven Men From Now, The Searchers, Kiss Me Deadly, The Tall T, Bitter Victory, Sweet Smell of Success, The Wrong Man, A Face In the Crowd, Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Rio Bravo, North By Northwest, Psycho, The Intruder, One-Eyed Jacks
The Trial (1961), The Jungle Book, The Birds, The Nutty Professor, Shot In the Dark, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Fearless Vampire Slayers, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?
2001: A Space Odyssey, Once Upon a Time in the West, Point Blank (1969), Badlands, Zabriski Point, The French Connection, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, A Clockwork Orange, Five Easy Pieces, Taking of Pelham 1,2,3
F for Fake, The Godfather Parts 1 & 2, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, Dog Day Afternoon, The Great Waldo Pepper, The Passenger (1975)
Barry Lyndon, Assault On Precinct 13 (1976), Bad News Bears (1976), Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, New York New York, Fingers, Days of Heaven, Alien, The Big Red One
Caddyshack, Where the Buffalo Roam, Pennies From Heaven, Raging Bull, The Shining, Secret Honor, King of Comedy (1983), Trading Places, White Dog, Down By Law, Ghostbusters, Once Upon a Time in America
Strange Brew, This is Spinal Tap, The Terminator, Big Trouble in Little China, Aliens, To Live and Die in L.A., Blue Velvet, Full Metal Jacket, Predator, The Princess Bride, They Live
The Glass Shield, Groundhog Day, Dead Man, Friday, Freeway, The Big Lebowski, Rushmore, Bringing Out the Dead, Eyes Wide Shut, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, High Fidelity, Mission to Mars, The Straight Story, The Emperor's New Groove
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, Unbreakable, A.I., Lilo & Stitch, The Man Who Wasn't There, Mulholland Drive, The Royal Tenenbaums, White Orleander, Mystic River, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Million Dollar Baby
Good Night and Good Luck, The New World, The Science of Sleep, Children of Men, Letters From Iwo Jima, Grizzly Man, Dead Girl, Loving Annabelle
Tideland, Waitress, Hotel Chevalier - The Darjeeling Limited, No Country For Old Men, Redacted
Uzbekistan: Takhir and Zukhia, Tenderness (1967) From who knows where?: Chimes At Midnight
I should like to start posting capsul film-analysi. Updates shall be regular and placed in alphabetical order by title. Thus do I begin with Hard Candy, a film whose theme is initially relevant to this site in which I shall post these capsuls.
Bad News Bears (Dir: Michael Ritchie, USA, 1976) This could seem to be standard rags-to-riches fare, except that "riches" is satirized scathingly. Walter Matthau is the boozed, disgruntled ex-pro ballplayer whose only reason for coaching is the check. But when he sees his ragtag team begin to accept failure, like he had, he jaws them back and assumes a more responsible and motivational role. Can he avoid getting carried away with pride in winning, as some other coaches in this competive Southern California league do?
The relationship between Matthau and his ace-pitcher, a girl, who would like the uncertain Matthau to be her father, is particularly touching.
Father and Son (Dir: Alexander Sokurov, Russia, 2002)
Russia's great film-poet, Alexander Sokurov, followed up his meditative film on the bond between Mother and Son with this sweeping, virile poem on the Father and Son bond. A son on leave visits his father. Through soft lenses, editing and camera angles that manipulate the relationship between characters and space, and the nearly constant use of Tchaikovsky music used as subtly as a breeze through treetops (as seen in Mother and Son), Sokurov fosters their affection so that we may participate in the experience of the essence of the father and son bond - which is lively.
Hard Candy (Dir: David Slade; 2005, U.S.A.)
Youth is the victim of online predators? This film would like to propose a more interwoven relationship between the persuer and the persued. However it does so with a plot development that ends up growing so contrived that it can be none other than a gimmick. Who can believe that a slender 15 year-old could find out, perpetrate, and fend off, so much? Ellen Page, who plays the seemingly delicate, intellectual teenager Haley, zigzags enough between the coy flirtations and shyness of many girls her age, and a cold, self-righteous vengence to make one feel that, for much of the film, she could. Until the equally osculating, muscular 30-something year-old photographer Jeff (Patrick Wilson) fails to subdue her for the upteenth time. Jo Wellems' camera fluidly traps them inside flat images that blur the soft, uni-tonal interiors of Jeff's house in the outskirts of Los Angeles. Flesh and steel are as much a part of the backdrop as of the foreground. If the action had been developed as disciplined as the style, we would have had more than a revenge fantasy.
The New World (Dir: Terrence Malick; 2005, U.S.A.)
What might it have been like to be an explorer from 1600s europe seeking a route through North America to India? What if you were a "natural" (Native American) involved in these light-skinned foreigners' struggles? Terrence Mallick's dream film pays particular attention to how they communicate with one another and to the opposite manners in which they relate to nature. The title also refers to the theme of adaptation that is at the heart of this eliptical and ecstatic film. Q'orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahontas (although this name is never spoken once), is the perfect bridge between cultures. Very relevant to our times -- to all times. And unspeakably beautiful.
Vertigo (Dir: Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1958)
Hitchcock and obsession! James Stewart plays a former cop who suffers from vertigo AND an obsession with a mysterious blonde. He begins tracking her strange treks about the streets of San Francisco. Hitchcock's camera and editing dramatically captures Stewart's vertiginous fall into obsession and insanity. Contains a very eerie dream, lots of green and red, another blonde who loves him, and a spirling, Twilight-Zone-esque score by the great Bernard Herrmann.
A Liszt of Fire and Ice by Arrau and Horowitz
Current mood: chipper
Category: Music
Ack!!! Too much Liszt.
This evening I actually listened to an entire album of his works for the solo piano and now all I can hear are enormous crescendos and loud punctuations followed immediately by an ultra soft lull, seemingly unrelated. But that's Liszt. He loves effects. The Chilean Claudio Arrau was the artist performing the B-Flat Sonata, Harmonies Poetiques #3, two Konzertetuden, and the Valee d'Obermann. He's extremely good. Liszt does not phase his fingers. But he played too safely. Liszt only works when the pianist is not only a virtuoso, but also fascinated with linking together furious and tender passions into as many piano effects as possible because that's what much of Franz Liszt's music is about: the instrument of the piano.
Two weekends ago I listened to the Liszt side of an LP my father has with the Russian Vladimir Horowitz playing. That shook me. The relentless driving thud of the bass in the funeral march, the furious scales that sparkle at their heights and quake in their lows, the resonance of voices, nearly forgotten, broughten back and then splintered into thousands more - all in different spaces - and then slammed back together and held by the 3rd pedal as a new section melds in; then there's something he did near the end of the last piece, which Horowitz wrote himself based on a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, that neither my father nor I could describe: a blur of notes in the same or neighboring octaves that were as smooth as a harp yet as fiery as Leonard Bernstein's conducting; and it kept going and going -- my God! All the pieces had such a focused, driving rhythm too. Long live Horowitz!
A How-Could-I-Survive-If-I-Had-Everything Poem
Current mood: Attentive
Category: Attentive Writing and Poetry
If ebbing warmth enwrapped me in laughter And throngs of friends were crowned with drink in long, Smoking, battered, flowing feasts -- much banter!
If magician-bed sent me where I belong: Sifting through wild grass, wading in trinkling streams... Down a shrouded trail leaves shiver with song;
Should books serve the same in day as my dreams, My room my mind staging all to my delight: Lanterns sway, curtains drop, a sword careems, And sculptured music lingers in the soft night;
Though all the gods loved me tenderly and I were desired by all; still, what fright Could I retain unstained in such a land, Allowing me to retreat to that grotto Where I bury myself under his hand?
Rainer Maria Rilke translations
Current mood: calm
Category: Writing and Poetry
Rainer Maria Rilkewas a German poet of the very end of the 19th century and on through 1926. Most of his artistic life he was supported by various wealthy admirers and friends throughout Europe. Besides German (and the occasional Italian and Russian efforts), Rilke took to writing a large number of poems in French, from which my following translations are drawn. The last few years of his life, nearly all of his poetry came from this foreign language he loved so well.
From:Migration des Forces
The child at the window awaits the return of his mother. It is the long, being-altering hour of a wait never ending... What can soothe his initial glance, so tender, throughout seeing only those dissimilar from her, on whom he's depending? These vague passersby felled in his vigil, could they be wrong in failing to fulfil him, as she...?
accomplished
ditzy
surprised
enthralled
contemplative
chipper
calm