A list of stuff

1. At Shadowplay, David Cairns shares two pretty good tales out of Fred Zinnemann, An Autobiography.

2. An anonymous commenter at "my" Beatles blog, Hey Dullblog, turned me onto the videos of Michael Sokil, who has taught himself how to play the guitar, bass, drum, and piano parts to every Beatles song.

3. My old friend James Browning, now of Common Cause in Pennsylvania, talks about fracking with MSNBC.

4. This is just a list of stuff!

The Believer — 2011 Film Issue

It's the first of the month—that means it's time for a new Believer! This year's film issue comes with a DVD of the 1930 German film People on Sunday (you can read Jessica Winter's great liner notes here).

And the articles! F.S.* Rebecca Taylor's terrific memoir, "Virginia Mountain Scream Queen," details her life in B-movies (or should that be C-, or D-?)—here she is at 18, negotiating:

There's no up-front pay, he tells me, but there will be points on the back end.
I don't know what "points on the back end" means, but I decide this ist he way it must be in Independent Low-Budget Horror-Westerns. I ask him—has anyone else signed on? Anyone that I might know of?
He tells me Conrad Brooks has a cameo, a veteran of the Ed Wood movies, an actor from Plan 9 From Outer Space.
I've never heard of Conrad Brooks or Ed Wood or Plan 9 From Outer Space, but I'm ready to believe that this means something.

*

David Cairns (of Shadowplay fame) looks at the varied career of William Cameron Menzies (who had a hand in everything from Gone With the Wind and King Kong to Invaders From Mars; Light Industry's Thomas Beard on the digest film; Peter Lunenfeld follows Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner to California; Michael Atkinson tracks the many moods of Robert Mitchum; Bess Lovejoy on grave goods; and more...

And the interviews! Debra Winger, David Wain, Walter Murch/David Thomson, Paul Verhoeven...plus Greil Marcus/Nick Hornby/Jack Pendarvis, the finalists of the Believer Book Awards (this year including poetry), and much more...Only $10! You already have it, maybe, if you subscribe!

__________________
* = Former Student™

I like when this happens

"She’s ugly-beautiful, which is better than beautiful. Especially today, with our screens lousy with beauty. What is the point of Jessica Alba, anyway?"

*

I was admiring that line, from a piece called "Farewell My Porcupine: Notes on Glenda Farrell" (title of the year?), in the delightful new online periodical The Chiseler. I skimmed to the end and saw that the piece was written by none other than...David Cairns, of Shadowplay fame!

Hand it over

David Cairns on the joys of hand acting:

When I had the utter pleasure of directing the great Graham Crowden some years back, we had a couple of insert shots to do in which the Great Man was required to handle some seashells, and some coins.

“Just a bit of hand acting required here,” I would tell Graham.

“Oh I’m very good at that!” he would flash back, without fail. The same reply would also serve, it turned out, for foot acting, or anything else I suggested. A joy.

Here are some other good bits of hand acting I’ve enjoyed recently. Perhaps you can identify the hands in question, or the films, or both?

Table-Talk for New Year's Eve 2008

I. Happy new year!

II. At the New Yorker's Book Bench blog, PD has been dubbed "2008’s Best Novel About Doing Battle with Microsoft Word and Losing"! Heyyy—I'll take it!

An eeriely prescient tale of layoffs; think “Alien” set in an office, where computers are stealthily self-destructing and people keep disappearing from their cubicles, leaving vast empty warrens of corporate debris. Did I mention that it’s deeply, bitterly funny?

(Thanks to Levi for the tip.)

III. At Moving Image Source, assorted cinéastes weigh in on their favorite moving-image moments of the year. Here's a tidbit by Dzyd David "Shadowplay" Cairns:

I attended a rare screening of Sidney Lumet's Tennessee Williams adaptation Blood Kin and was most impressed by a shot where a giant plastic cow was wheeled past James Coburn. It made me feel alive in a special way. The combination of elements—Coburn and cow—something about it was just so right, and so bold.

(Here is Part 2.)

IV. Happy new year, again! Thank you for reading this blog! (AND a big thanks to everyone who read PD, or reviewed it or blogged it or end-of-year-listed it, or came out to see me read, or sent in PD sightings.....)

And that's...



(Via VSL. See more "The End" cards here.)

Thursday Evening Ouroboros

Dzyd D. Cairns—the illuminated magician behind Shadowplay—embeds an Ouroboros for us in this mind-bender of a post at The Auteurs—"The Forgotten: I Stab Sane."

The innovation of Sebastian is its bold, surreal transposition of wartime desperation to swinging London, an masterful, eccentric solution that successfully folds time back on itself to create a temporal ouroborous – in which 60s glitz is nourished by 40s passion.

The assorted anagrams for SEBASTIAN make me wonder: Is there a term for words/names that carry the same sequence of letters? E.g., Tokyo and Kyoto...

TOKYOTOKYO
KYOTOKYOTO

They are a step above being anagrams of each other..."Sequential anagrams"?

Movie's Start

Just in time for the Oscars, The New-York Ghost's film issue is out, and I can say that it's great and not sound totally immodest because—well, I didn't edit it!

It's the handiwork of B. Kite, and he got some wonderful stuff from writers who are generally not asked to write "year end" film survey things—including Luc Sante, Victoria Nelson, Toni Schlesinger, and Mr. Shadowplay himself, David Cairns.

Sniffed out

Whatever happened to the prosthetic schnozz Nicole Kidman donned in The Hours? David Cairns tells all.

Now, onlooker — Aphorisms

Here's how David Cairns writes about movies:

Here is the blade of a sword.

Here is the man who holds the hilt.

Here is a straw effigy, his target.

The sword.

The man.

Now, onlookers…

We draw in on the straw figure, remorselessly.

We’re all in a field!

CHOP!

That's his entry on 1968's Samurai Rebellion, explaining how a simple scene can be skillfully amped up "just by being splintered into Ecstatic Fragments." Love this kind of film writing—and I'm already a fan of Cairns's new blog, Shadowplay. Highly recommended.

* * *

If I were to just get one page of the New York Times delivered every day, it might have to be page four, where they have unusual international stories. Yesterday's was great: "Dark One Liners Shine a Light on Mood of Serbs."

The Communists who still ran the country were not amused by...an aphorism that ultimately got [Rastko Zakic] arrested. Roughly paraphrased, it said, “When our Father died, it turned out he abused us and he abused our mother as well.”

In 1984, an unrepentant Mr. Zakic published his aphorisms again in a book called “New Crossed Words” — but with all the aphorisms in the negative form. The new anti-Tito aphorism said: “When our Father died, the court determined that he didn’t abuse us.”

After he was hauled into court, he called mathematicians and philosophers to the stand to argue he could not be tried twice for saying opposite things.

O is for...

Oscar — my apologies to the Other Ed, whose Oscar blog I failed to contribute to on Sunday, as I attempted to climb out of the endless jetlaggery...(actually, I did manage one post: “The lofty beauty and the freckled schoolboy are distractingly reminiscent of Galadriel and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, and almost as asexual.” —Caroline McGinn, review of Notes on a Scandal, TLS, 2/16/07)

And word of Oscar brings us to the New-York Ghost's movie issue, available now for free (as always!)...It's unlike any year-end wrap-up you've ever read. Here's a tidbit by David Cairns:

SO QUIET ON THE CANINE FRONT (a Dogville short) is like all the bad dreams you thought you'd forgotten. WWI enacted by dogs! They attached piano wires to the hapless mutts to help them fight erect, and smeared peanut butter on their gums to make them ‘emote.’

(and it's also for: Oops!)