flutter by wings

A while back, miladus edenensis posted on his delightful blog, Ad Usum Delphinorum, a link to an exhibit at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on Honoré Daumier and his heirs (link), one of which, Wiaz, drew the cartoon below (link). The insouciant pear is French Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac, and the trenchant knife is Édouard Balladur, the Minister of Economy, Finance, and Privatization.

Not being familiar with Wiaz, I looked him up in the French Wikipedia, and, lo, his real name, Pierre Wiazemsky, made me think of Eve Democracy in Godard’s Le Vent d’est (1970, link) and Odetta in Pasolini’s Teorema (link). His sister Anne Wiazemsky was also the middle of Godard’s three wives, all of whose names begin with Ann. As if all that was not enough, the siblings Wiazemsky were the grandchildren of the daughter of Francois Mauriac (Claire) and the Prince of Wiazemsky and Count of Levachov (Yvan).

pipes all the way down

Robert Sullivan has written an interesting article (“This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie”) for the New York Times Magazine about Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic (I’m Not There). Two things come immediately to mind: Velvet Goldmine (1998) and Christine Vachon. Haynes and Vachon are a major part of the New Queer Cinema, which, for a while, gave the tired, old cinema a run for its money.

Todd Haynes’s Dylan project is a biopic starring six people as Bob Dylan, or different incarnations of Bob Dylan, including a 13-year-old African-American boy, Marcus Carl Franklin, and an Australian woman, Cate Blanchett. It’s a biopic with a title that takes it name from one of the most obscure titles in the Dylan canon, a song available only as a bootleg, called I’m Not There.

Included amongst the avatars of Dylan, besides Franklin and Blanchett, are: Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw. The article makes it out to be a 20 million dollar experimental film, which I suppose is possible in a de-con, pomo sort of way. I might not even wait for the DVD of this one, but drag myself out to a matinée. I’m sure that niche in the multiplex will be close to empty. Now, if only, they could manage to keep the picture in focus.

web two oh twiddles, lit crit yearns

Qualis artifex pereo. Short, sweet, and to the point:

With the rise of the web, writing has met its photography. By that I mean, writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened to painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do, that in order to survive, the field had to alter its course radically. If photography was striving for sharp focus, painting was forced to go soft, hence Impressionism. Faced with an unprecedented amount of digital available text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.

[Kenneth Goldsmith Writing Crisis V.1.0; via Ron Silliman’s mini-posting.]

dancing and singing houses

Thanks to a contemplative entry over on Pullquote, I developed a hankering for some old timey cartoons of the Fleischer variety. You know the ones where houses breathe and sing and dance, and dad’s head turns into a Victrola. Pop culture in the service of surrealism. Well, thanks to the public domain and the good folks over at Internet Archive, I was able to watch the three Betty Boop cartoons that features Cab Calloway and his orchestra.

• Minnie the Moocher (1932)
• Snow White (1933) to the song, St James Infirmary Blues
• The Old Man of the Mountain (1933)

What is immediately apparent is that the same live Calloway footage, shown at the beginning of Minnie the Moocher, is reused in each rotoscoped dance sequence in all three of these cartoons: first as a walrus (I thought Paul was), second as Koko the Clown transformed by the evil stepmother, and finally as the old man in the mountain. It is interesting to compare Roland “Doc” Crandall’s strange and scary animation with that of the Disney Studio’s rather tame Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs four years later. Betty Boop was just another casualty of the Production Code.