tycho magnetic anomaly one

It’s not like somebody tagged me with the Alphabet Movie Meme (link), except maybe myself. So here comes the list: Aguirre der Zorn Gottes, Berlin Chamissoplatz, A Cock and Bull Story, The Draughtsman's Contract, Die Ehe der Maria Braun, Falsche Bewegung, The Great Gabbo, Helsinki Napoli All Night Long, India Song, Johnny Stecchino, Kamikaze 1989, Ladri di saponette, La Maman et la putain, Nuit et brouillard, Ossessione, Pasqualino Settebellezze, Q, Roma, Stalker, Teorema, Unforgiven, Vivement dimanche!, Le Week-end, X, Yojimbo, and Z.

tags or elements

Finally a web-meme I can get into! Over at Mother Tongue Annoyances (a blog) I found the following meme (link) tacked on to the end of a funny rant on Henry “Dick” Miller:

A simple, two-step approach for generating your own, fully personalized, 21st century, Web 2.0-based reading list:

1. Make a list of the top three books that have influenced your life, and make a note of the authors’ names
2. Visit Literature-Map, plug each author name into the text box (one at a time, naturally) and generate a cloud of related authors. That ought to keep you busy for a while!

Thanks for playing. Have a nice day.

OK. Easy enough. My three life-changing books, off the cuff, were:

• Voltaire, Candide. [map]
• Joris-Karl Huysman, À Rebours. [map]
• Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop. [map]

The first thing which struck me was the name juxtaposed to Voltaire’s, i.e., Scott Adams. In Paris, I once stayed at a hotel on the quai de Voltaire (across the Seine from the Louvre), and that key was named so because the building in which Voltaire spent the last years of his life and in which he died, then housed a café on its ground floor. I ate a lovely breakfast there, with strong coffee, croissant, and plum preserves. On the other hand, I once taught a Java class for a cohort of masters students from Pacific Bell, before it morphed into SBC and finally lapsed back into AT&T. Knowing that the author of Dilbert had worked there for years, I asked each student on the first night of class to introduce themselves, give any programming experience, and tell me the best story they knew about Scott Adams when he worked there. The only memorable story was that one of the students knew the woman engineer that the character Alice was based on. Go ahead and check out the maps for each of my three chosen authors. I did and enjoyed the fact that I had read works by about 50% of them.

what hath kuleshov wrought?

I hadn’t known—and probably never would’ve dreamt of—it, but (thanks to the Shamus) I discover there’s a whole YouTube genre of videos of 45 RPM records spinning and music issuing thence (e.g., this Hollies tune He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother). I was immediately reminded of this scene in Eustache’s masterful La Maman et la putain (1973) of Bernadette Lafont lying and listening and weeping to Edith Piaf sing Les amants de Paris on an old stereo system.

Et pourtant, je sais bien
Que les amants de Paris
m’ont volé mes chansons.
A Paris, les amants ont de drôles de façons
[...]
J’en ai collé partout
Dans leurs calendriers
Les amants de Paris ont usé mes chansons.
A Paris, les amants s’aiment à leur façon.

litterae catenatae

You know, I am of two minds about this whole blog-meme-tagging thing. On the one hand, I like to be constrained in my writing, but, on the other, it seems a bit like unsolicited email or faxes.So, I’ve been toying with using these memes, whether tagged (as in this) or not (as in this or that), and then not playing by their rules of further tagging somebody else.

time and being and nothingness

I just ran across Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule’s film quiz (aka Mr. Shoop’s Surfin’ Summer School Midterm) via an entry (no longer there sic gloria Interretis transit) over on Bad for the Glass.

1. Favorite quote from a filmmaker.

   To be or not to be. That’s not really a question. Jean-Luc Godard.

2. A good movie from a bad director.

   A Star Is Burns (1995) by Señor Spielbergo. Although his non-union Mexican counterpart is actually not as bad as Mr Spielberg or his movies. (And, yes, I know that Señor Spielbergo is a fictional character in an animated sitcom.)

3. Favorite Laurence Olivier performance.

   Dr Christian Szell in The Marathon Man (1976). He was also good in Last Action Hero as Hamlet.

4. Describe a famous location from a movie that you have visited. (Bodega Bay, California, where the action in The Birds took place, for example.) Was it anything like the way it was in the film? Why or why not?

   I spent a pleasant afternoon under a bridge in the Los Angeles River culvert discussing Repo Man (1984) with Dean Lent. We also dropped by the Bradbury Building from Blade Runner (1982), but it was closed. Both of these locations were a lot like they were in their respective movies.

5. Carlo Ponti or Dino De Laurentiis (Producer)?

   Ponti. If only because he produced Le Mépris, and Godard is said to have punched him in the face over the dubbing.

6. Best movie about baseball.

   That’s a tough one, because I don’t much care for baseball. I’d have to say Damn Yankees (1958). Those outfielders sure could dance.

7. Favorite Barbara Stanwyck performance.

   Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire (1941).

8. Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Dazed and Confused?

   Dazed and Confused (1993). It seemed closer to my experience in high school in the ’70s.

9. What was the last movie you saw, and why? (We’ve used this one before, but your answer is presumably always going to be different, so ...)

   Diva (1981). Because it appeared in the mail; I got the DVD from Netflix. It was nice to see it again in widescreen and transfered from a decent print.

10. Whether or not you have actually procreated or not, is there a movie you can think of that seriously affected the way you think about having kids of your own?

    Lumière’s L’Arroseur arrosé (1895) or Vigo’s Zéro de conduite: jeunes diables au collège (1933). I was going to say Man Getting Hit By Football (1995) by Hans Moleman or its subsequent remake with George C. Scott in the titular rôle, but I decided one pretend movie per film quiz.

11. Favorite Katharine Hepburn performance.

    Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (1968).

12. A bad movie from a good director.

    Star 80 (1983) from Bob Fosse.

13. Salò: The 120 Days of Sodom—yes or no?

    Yes. What is there not to like? Pasolini (his last film) and de Sade (wrote it while in the Bastille) together at last.

14. Ben Hecht or Billy Wilder (Screenwriter)?

    Wilder, if only just slightly because he was also a director.

15. Name the film festival you’d most want to attend, or your favorite festival that you actually have attended.

    I’d like to attend La Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia.

16. Head or 200 Motels?

    The Blackadder episode Head. No, but seriously. The Monkees or Frank Zappa. I’ve seen both and liked them both.

17. Favorite cameo appearance. (This question was inspired by Daniel Johnson at Film Babble.)

    Jean Eustache as a kind man with a bandage in a Parisian bar in Der Amerikanische Freund. Runners-up in the same film, Nick Ray (as a dead painter making a living) and Sam Fuller (as a mafia porn producer).

18. Favorite Rosalind Russell performance.

    As Mame in Auntie Mame (1958).

19. What movie, either currently available on DVD or not, has never received the splashy collector’s edition treatment you think it deserves? What would such an edition include?

    The Great Gabbo (1929, with screenplay by Ben Hecht, (can I change my answer above?). There is a DVD out there, but the famous multicolor sequences are in balck and white. It would have to include commentary by Stroheim and Hecht being channeled from beyond the grave. Also, a making of featurette would be nice. Anybody but Spielberg could direct it. If all that is not possible, the Simpsons episode Krusty Gets Kancelled could be bundled with it.

20. Name a performance that everyone needs to be reminded of, for whatever reason.

    George Hamilton or Sophia Coppola in The Godfather, Part III (1990). Take your pick.

21. Louis B. Mayer or Harry Cohn (Studio Head)?

    Barney Balaban at Paramount. For what he did to Max Flesicher. And for being Bob’s uncle.

22. Favorite John Wayne performance.

    The Centurion at the foot of the cross (or Longinus) in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

23. Naked Lunch or Barton Fink?

    Is this the Head or 200 Motels question with different movies? Both are flawed great movies. I’d suggest two substitutions: have John Mahoney play Bill Lee and Ian Holm play Mayhew.

24. Your Ray Harryhausen movie of choice.

    Valley of Gwangi (1969). It’s Jurassic Park without the CGI or the Spielberg.

25. Is there a movie you can think of that you feel like the world would be better off without, one that should have never been made?

    E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or Hook (1991).

26. Favorite Dub Taylor performance.

    As Rev. Wainscoat in The Wild Bunch (1969).

27. If you had the choice of seeing three final movies, to go with your three last meals, before shuffling off this mortal coil, what would they be?

    Cammell and Roeg’s Performance (1970), Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), and Guest’s The Big Picture (1989).

28. And what movie theater would you choose to see them in?

    The Alhambra in San Francisco, California.

29. Your proposed entry in the Atheist Film Festival.

    Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (2004). If atheists had not existed before that movie, they would have to after it.

30. What advice on day-to-day living have you learned from the movies?

    Make ’em laugh!

8 factoids about this bloggista

I've been blog-meme-tagged by Goofy of Bradshaw of the Future.

There are rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

These are my eight factoids:

1. Once upon a time, I lived in Denio, Nevada, and attended a two-room primary school there: the first through third grades were in the original one-room school house and fourth through eighth grades were across the road in the post office building.
2. All the male students in first through third grades in said one-room school house, except for me, had the same surname and where all siblings or cousins.
3. Denio is on the border between eastern Oregon and north-western Nevada. We students played in Oregon but studied in Nevada.
4. My best friend Quinn was named after the Quinn River which ran through his family’s ranch.
5. We had an abandoned gold mine on Alder Creek ranch, which is where I lived during my time in Denio.
6. While playing with a friend, who was not Quinn, I discovered a box of dynamite above the walk-in freezer in our ranch compound. My first instinct was to exclaim cool and grab one of the sticks. My second instinct was to leave the attic area quickly and quietly and tell my father and uncles what I had found. We were both seven years old at the time, and we chose the latter course of action. The box of dynamite was quite old.
7. We had an old air-raid siren to call the forty or so ranch hands in to lunch and dinner. My grandmother did all the cooking for them, and they lived in a bunkhouse on the property. I learned how to play poker from them.
8. I have never been to Burning Man.

Okay, here’s the multilevel marketing scammy part of the blog entry. You play with bloggers, you run the risk of being meme-tagged. I must now choose eight blogging buddies to inflict:

1. All I Know
2. Balashon
3. Blogging from Berkeley
4. Drax Blog
5. Eye of the Goof
6. Gramarye
7. The Mad Latinist
8. Erling Wold