Pulling into a strip mall in West Covina, Calif.

1:20 am  •  9 March 2010

Just kinda wish it said “Private Eye” instead of “Realtors.” Taken in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

1:14 am  •  9 March 2010

I am no longer en Californie. Here is a picture I took in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

2:32 pm  •  8 March 2010

Going to California.

12:36 am  •  26 February 2010  •  2 notes

“Written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.” This celebrated title graces almost 20 films by perhaps the most remarkable creating duo in the history of film. The 45th Karlovy Vary IFF will devote one of its retrospectives to the filmmakers.

The career of the British film director Michael Powell (1905-1990) began as an assistant to famed silent-era director Rex Ingram before moving on to collaborate with Alfred Hitchcock and later to direct so called “quota quickies”. Then came the fateful year of 1939 when the talented filmmaker met a Hungarian immigrant named Emeric Pressburger(1902-1988) who was already a renowned screenwriter. Under the auspices of their production company, The Archers, they created films provocative for their unclassifiability at a time when British film sought strength in near documentary-like realism or escape in comedies and melodramas. Works such as A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) aroused controversy for decades until they were finally recognized as essential to the development of European and world film. Much credit for this belongs to an eminent admirer and promoter of the creative tandem’s work, Martin Scorsese, whose The Film Foundation (together with UCLA Film & Television Archive) was behind the extensive 2-year 4K digital restoration of The Red Shoes (1948). Premiering last year at Cannes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s most famous film will be screened alongside the above-mentioned titles via the Karlovy Vary retrospective.

It’d be worth going back to KV this year just to see these.

10:22 am  •  24 February 2010

Working on a short piece about L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot, a truly incredible documentary that pieces together the strange story of the great director’s unfinished experimental would-be masterpiece L’Enfer, using a cache of footage from the film’s doomed production and extensive, experimental pre-production phase. Clouzot intended to incorporate the latest in avant-garde image and sound techniques to create the inner life of a tormented husband; the film’s insight into his fractured creative process is astonishing. See this movie.

(That’s Romy Schneider in a test shot, by the way.)

1:56 pm  •  23 February 2010  •  1 note

This needs to be out on DVD or Blu-Ray in this region now. Criterion, I’m lookin’ at you!

12:44 pm  •  23 February 2010

Happy birthday Luis Buñuel, born on this day 110 years ago. I highly recommend his memoir My Last Sigh, a really special book. From the first chapter:

In this semiautobiography, where I often wander from the subject like the wayfarer in a picaresque novel seduced by the charm of the unexpected intrusion, the unforeseen story, certain false memories have undoubtedly remained, despite my vigilance. But, as I said before, it doesn’t much matter. I am the sum of my errors and doubts as well as my certainties. Since I’m not a historian, I don’t have any notes or encyclopedias, yet the portrait I’ve drawn is wholly mine—with my affirmations, my hesitations, my repetitions and lapses, my truths and my lies. Such is my memory.

3:53 pm  •  22 February 2010

brokedownpalace:

Whatever happened to that antiquated style of the possessive that companies (and subsequently people) once used? Woolworth’s, Chasen’s, Disney’s. We just don’t do this anymore, and when old people refer to something with the possessive, like Duane Reade’s, it sounds oppressively out of touch. Our culture is changing everyday!

Montreal has its own language-law-derived variation on this, where possessive-named companies went plural to get around 101. Schwartzs, Bens, etc.

2:16 pm  •  22 February 2010  •  17 notes

[A few years ago I started a blog to keep track of my scattershot thoughts about books I was reading. At some point a malicious hacker or computer virus wrecked the whole damn thing and I gave it up. Recently I fished a couple of pieces I wrote out of the Internet Wayback Machine, so here’s one of them. I still recommend the Stefan Zweig book , and think about it a lot, but the Henry James story is mostly lost to me.]

Two books I’ve read recently have had me thinking about pity. The first is Stefan Zweig’s amazing novel Beware of Pity, which may be the most beautifully cruel title I’ve ever heard. I don’t think Zweig is quite as well-known today as he should be. In the early decades of the 20th Century he was a real literary superstar. “In the 1920s and 1930s Stefan Zweig was an immensely popular writer, a man who had to barricade himself in his house in Salzburg in order to avoid the fans lurking around his property in the hope of waylaying him,” Joan Acocella writes in her introduction to the New York Review Books edition.

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10:00 am  •  22 February 2010