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.

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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!

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* = Former Student™

The first person

I don't even particularly like zombie movies, not at least beyond Romero's first Night of the Living Dead (1969), which had the Pittsburgh chill of genuine phobia to it. For us the living dead idea was a metaphor factory, in full production. For us the living dead idea was a metaphor factory, in full production. For everyone else, it seems, it's just a first-person-shooter XBox game.

—Michael Atkinson on Babylon Fields, his late lamented almost-TV series

Bonus: Amber Tamblynage!

And double bonus: La Tamblyn posts again at Harriet!

“WHY MUST YOU TAUNT ME WITH YOUR BEAUTY?! WHY DOESN’T US WEEKLY TRY TO DRAG YOU DOWN WITH THEIR WHOLE, “STARS… THEIR JUST LIKE US!” COLUMN AND TALK ABOUT HOW IMPERFECT YOU GUYS ARE!!”

What Would Papa Do?

Michael Atkinson's Hemingway Deadlights—coming to your bookstore in August!


(More info at his new website.)

UPDATE 1: NYT has excerpt and piece on the "restored" A Moveable Feast.

UPDATE 2: Trailer for Mike's book! (Watch for EP blurbage at the end!)

Not so good

It's time for my Atkinson vitamin:

In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,” essentially because it is science fiction, because it is a genre film. You can easily understand why Tarkovsky felt this way, given his topos and metaphysical concerns, but what’s shocking is how little the filmmaker apparently understood about his own film, and about the purpose of science fiction in general. The key to the genre is its functionality as metaphor—if it’s merely space opera (Star Wars or the new Star Trek or whatever), then it’s kiddie stuff, and as close to real science fiction, as it’s evolved, as the old Buck Rogers serials. Real science fiction, the only genre defined by ideas, is closer to satire than to fantasy or horror: its battery of metaphors is used as speculation and commentary about the present, hyperbolically exploding whatever mitigations might couch an issue in real life, so we can see the fallout rain down. (In ideas begins morality, and pulpist Edmund Crispin was only the first to note that science fiction is “the last refuge for the morality tale.”) The critic who got this best was the late Brit writer Philip Strick, whose modest but electrically philosophical 1976 volume Science Fiction Movies was an epiphany for me as a movie-struck tween.

—Michael Atkinson, Criterion Collection online

Pynchonesque coverture

So, it’s somewhat unnerving to consider the meaning of The Thin Red Line’s form in light of the persistent rumors that the film in its present form is a monstrous, almost whimsical compromise from the movie Malick had meant to make. In reviews then and since, and in ongoing online dialogue, several possible scenarios have emerged, including the generalized view that Malick, having matured during his hiatus into the most whimsical despot filmmaker this side of Stanley Kubrick, simply decided that a traditional event sequence was no longer desirable, replacing it with a massive weft of fleeting perspectives and incidents.

—Michael Atkinson at Moving Image Source

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for September 24, 2008

Time Out Chicago on U. Chicago's reprint of Richard Stark's first three Parker books—a project spearheaded by none other than Dzyd Levi...I recommend all three books wholeheartedly...they will "hold you up"...!

When worlds collide: A recent Gossip Girl had Chuck speaking disdainfully of Blair's British beau as a "Bertie Wooster"...

Scott Bradfield—fan of Cavemen? Read his new story (up at The Fanzine), "Mankind Through the Ages," to find out...

At the Poetry Foundation*, Dzyd Jordan on Joe Brainard's Nancy paintings and Dzyd Mike on the importance of a good book title....

Who is "Kongthin Pearlmich"? "All his life he has been a recluse. He has avoided the art establishment like the plague." ¶ "A spokesman for Canterbury Cathedral said: 'The work has been offered to Canterbury Cathedral and we are certainly considering it, but we don't know much about the artist.' " ¶ "Experts at Sotheby's and Christie's said they did not recognise the artist's name."...

Strange embedfellows: Google lets you embed books! Not quite sure what this means. (Via L.G. Thomas)...Is it like this, where you can search inside Personal Days?....Speaking of which, is morale low at your company?...

From Dzys Team Member R.E.S.: "Not your grandfather's Moby Dick"....

The mighty Sampson Starkweather has a thing (poem?) in Typo 12—here's an excerpt from "A Limitation of Birds":

Browsing through used books on 32nd Street, I heard a young man say into his cell phone
Hi, is this the number I’m supposed to call if I find a dead bird in the street?
Later, I saw a pigeon lying in the gutter, some boys without shirts on
were poking it with a stick. I wanted to say something
but I didn’t know what number to call.

Speaking of poetry—this excerpt from Dzyd Mike's (different Mike's) Colored Squares will have you scratching your head and twitching your fingers—and saying: "More??"...

This Saturday (9/27): Dzyd Leland, Ron Rosenbaum, Robert Polito, and others hold an all-day New School conference on "Lolita in America"....

One more PD reading added: I'll join Paul Beatty, Gary Shteyngart, and other authors to read at an Obama fundraiser on October 19. More info here...

ALL DZYS TEAM MEMBERS please post items of interest!



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*where—contra the bio read at the Brklyn Book Fest!—I no longer work

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 27, 2008

I. Oughtables:

Scott: "A few weeks ago Laura has The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin checked out of the library, and I keep thinking the front cover reads The Early Diary of An Assassin."

Yesterday, reading The Week, I thought I read (in a Rauschenberg obit): "But by switching to his left hand, and with the help of assassins, he kept working." (He actually had assistants.)

II. Over at TPF, Mike Atkinson on Philip Schultz. (Who? Exactly.)

III. Ouroboros alert! The L.A. Times review of Personal Days got recycled for the Chicago Tribune's online edition. Under the "Layoffs and Downsizing" tag, you can see that the photo being used is...the one that appeared on The Dizzies!



(Shouldn't "Arlo Ogg" get a photo credit?)

IV. A letter to the Times from 1986: "The Sun Was Eclipsed by Fields of Ice"

V. What did Levi leave in New York?

Then there's the question of where I checked said mysterious object. The ticket bears no writing aside from that red "28," and gives no clue to its origins. I suppose the next time I'm in New York I could retrace my steps, presenting this claim check at every bar and restaurant I visited this time around, enduring blank stare after blank stare until, finally, someone takes the ticket with a brisk nod, spins on a heel and disappears into the back room to return moments later with . . . what?

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 3

I. Parkian fiction and nonfiction:

A) Another bit of the novel The Dizzies has cropped up in a new anthology, 3:AM London, New York, Paris. It's called "The Alchemists"! First line: "But first a little bit about me." (Other bits have appeared here, here, and here.)

B) Speaking of anthologies out in March, the Atkinson-edited Exile Cinema (with my pre-Host Bong Joon-ho piece) comes out this week....yes?

II. New Cinema Scope has part 2—or shall we say "Track 1b"?!—of B. Kite's Rivette epic! Also: Edward Crouse on The Darjeeling Limited, Tony Rayns's eye-opening piece on a Korean movie so alarming-sounding that I've repressed the title, Dizzyhead Jason on Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, Dizzyhead Jessica on Lady Chatterley...I am no longer qualified to write for this excellent magazine!

III. Ten Words has a new writer—Mr. Levi Stahl! (Who is even more of a Powellite than I am—he has actually read Violet Powell's memoirs!)

The connections: Korean cinema edition

In "The Bong Show," my essay on Bong Joon-ho's first two (pre-Host) films, originally published in Cinema Scope, I mention a TV show that the cops are watching in one scene: Inspector Chief. Man-of-many-hats Mike Atkinson (Babylon Fields! Zero for Conduct! Some novels! Flickipedia!) is compiling the index to Exile Cinema, an anthology of film writing in which the piece will appear; he asked if I knew whether the show was real or a fiction created for the film. A few mouseclicks revealed...It's real!:

Now their upcoming project has been announced: Han Hyung-Mo's 자유부인 (Madame Freedom) from 1956. The film is perhaps the prototype for future Korean melodramas, describing social and popular trends in postwar Korea, along with Director Han's usual eye for composition, innovative editing and filming techniques (he was the first Korean director to seriously take advantage of crane shots). The film was adapted from a work by Jung Bi-Seok, which was serialized over 8 months in the Seoul Shinmun from Fall 1954. It aroused a big debate in the Korean Press over the issues depicted, the morality and social values of the characters, with Professor Hwang San-Deok criticizing the film so much it became even more popular. It starred Park Am - who would later star on many TV Drama, including the landmark 수사반장 (Inspector Chief) - Kim Jung-Rim and Joo Seon-Tae.

The connections: When I spoke to Gina Kim this summer about her film Never Forever, she cited Madame Freedom as an influence.

Time for...

...some Awesome Tapes from Africa:

Ata Tak, "Adagya"
Boubacar Traore

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Via Ed: Watch the pilot for Atkinson's Babylon Fields!

Czech, please!

Atkinson is on fire with these capsules:

We Own the Night (2007) James Gray makes the same movie a third time, but these are interiors, crowds, real city homes and working-class environments we haven’t seen since Forman’s Czech days. Moral: don’t run a nightclub?

The zombies — Every which way but Lucy

A few clips from the pilot of Babylon Fields (co-created by Mike Atkinson)...

UPDATE: Like what you see? Sign the petition!

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Bill Watterson on the new Schulz biography:

"It would have been interesting to learn how Schulz's conception of the strip changed over the years and what Peppermint Patty, Spike and Rerun offered him in the way of new expressive possibilities."

And—I never thought of it this way before:

"Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip)...."

(Via Other Ed)

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday, September 25—how is it the last week of September?!

Friend Leland sends in this new bit of one-word poetry, "Lion-eating poet in the stone den," to give "Buffalo buffalo..." a run for its money...New Psychic Envelopes activity—no, not the mega-single "Berlin Wall," but a double cover of Team Knucklehead and some unknown band out of Liverpool!...Finally saw Once, and I concur with Atkinson and the Termites—loved this movie! Termite Matt points out that a version of "Falling Slowly" that stars Glen Hansard (of the Frames) and Marketa Irglova played on The Tonight Show "doesn't have the same heat, the same exhilarating release of energy as the version in Once." The song gets embedded in your head—I was humming it as I walked home—and I think part of the reason is the very canny way it's presented in the film: We watch and listen as Hansard teaches the song to Irglova (they are nameless in the movie), at the back of the music store where she sometimes goes to practice piano; he sings out the parts for her before he starts playing the song proper, and this makes our encounter with the song as fresh as hers (as theirs, really, since this is the first time they've played it together)—we're learning it at the same time...Once opens on Hansard playing Van Morrison's "And the Healing Has Begun"; here's footage of him singing VM's "Astral Weeks"...Dizzyhead L. muses on post-apocalyptic lit—and film—and TV—and music...Dizzyhead Thomas has a blog..."Things I Learned in 2002," a short prose piece by Dizzyhead/Psychic E. chanteuse Sarah is the basis for this terrific short film...She looks Asian!...I have a Dizzyhead meme/contest in the works...STAY TUNED...

Psycho-obscurism

Remember B. Kite's pangaea-caliber lede for his Rivette piece? Here's Atkinson's appropriately mammoth-sized kickoff to his Bergman obit.

Another thunder lizard falls – over a half-century after what has come to be known as "the art film" emerged onto postwar American screens, the Greatest Generation (semi-irony siren, please) takes another hit with the passing of an 89-year-old Ingmar Bergman, at once a dinosaur, a one-man New Wave, a mammoth formal influence, a pioneering pop existentialist, a despot in his own nation of cinematic currency, an unexploitable navel-focused artiste who did not bow to the world’s entertainment will but instead made it bow to him, an unestimable provider of cultural fuel to the rise of college-educated counter culture between 1959 and 1980, and, let’s face it, an astonishingly adventurous sensibility that embraced virtually every stripe of expression available to him, from melodrama to the world’s most overt symbolism to gritty realism to epic pageant, farce and avant-garde psycho-obscurism.

"I know it’s tempting to stay and meet these blonde women"

Over at the Poetry Foundation, Dizzyhead Rachel looks into the strange success of Rumi.

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Atkinson: " I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see and read everything I already have."

I like Mike —

This just in: The one and only Michael Atkinson has entered the blogosphere — hold on to your hats!

La Vie en Rose is such an accomplished biopic in its way that I never want to hear Edith Piaf again.