Several poems have been transcribed on the glass of the second-floor entranceway of David Hall. I don't know who did the transcribing, but when I saw the attribution, I saw the story behind it was a sad one:
In loving memory of Dayton William Lane Moore Aug 1, 1992-Feb 6, 2011 a collection of original poems
Stop on by and have a read, when you get the chance. An obituary for Moore can be found here.
[Edit: Anza did the transcribing; more info at her blog here, and here.]
Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. In special cases you could strip that formula down even further -- sometimes you just need some light and a human face.
Well, even under the best of circumstances, maybe that formula doesn't give you a whole movie. I liked Antonioni's The Passenger well enough when I saw it on the big screen several years ago, but I have to admit not much of it really stuck with me. With the exception of the above scene. That I'll take with me happily to my grave. The dialogue and the idea of the scene are too existential-chic, but really, it doesn't matter: movement, color, light strobing across a face, wind streaming through hair, a shift in gaze. Those things can dive straight into your ribcage. The resolution on the youtube clip, of course, can't do it justice.
Hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable new year's. Here's a parting shot from 2010 -- a few days ago the Library of Congress announced the 25 films they're preserving for 2010. In addition to catching up on some SNC art-related stuff over break, I wanted to link & embed a variety of interesting stuff to read & look at, for any of you out there jonesing for wider art-related material in between the family pleasantries and the wintersport exertions. The Library of Congress list provides a good excuse to embed some of the shorter films -- which can be found on youtube or elsewhere. There was a wide range of selections, ranging from pop-culture heavyweights to independent experimental films. Here's the list (If you want to read some descriptions of the films, click here. There are several personal favorites on it: "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," which is more tough-minded than its reputation might suggest, "The Front Page," "Airplane!", and I still have a soft spot for "The Empire Strikes Back," despite all the oxygen Star Wars sucks up in the culture. The one I most want to see, but haven't yet, is "make Way for Tomorrow," which sounds kind of devastating.)
1) AIRPLANE! (1980)
2) ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976)
3) BARGAIN, THE (1914)
4) CRY OF JAZZ (1959)
5) ELECTRONIC LABYRINTH: THX 1138 4EB (1967)
6) EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE (1980)
7) EXORCIST, THE (1973)
8) FRONT PAGE, THE (1931)
9) GREY GARDENS (1976)
10) I AM JOAQUIN (1969)
11) IT'S A GIFT (1934)
12) LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)
13) LONESOME (1928)
14) MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937)
15) MALCOLM X (1992)
16) MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
17) NEWARK ATHLETE (1891)
18) OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE (1969)
19) THE PINK PANTHER (1964)
20) PRESERVATION OF THE SIGN LANGUAGE (1913)
21) SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)
22) STUDY OF A RIVER (1996)
23) TARANTELLA (1940)
24) TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, A (1945)
25) TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET, A (1906)
Of the experimental shorts, I've never had the chance to see Mary Ellen Bute's "Tarantella" (if you drop her name in youtube, you can see several of her excellent animations). Larry Jordan's "Our Lady of the Sphere" can be seen in a muddy transfer here (come to think of it, it's probably another source for the Ramona Falls video I blogged about a while back).
Click here for a bio of the San Francisco-based Jordan; if you want to see "Our Lady" in a decent transfer, it's on a DVD called "The Larry Jordan Album" -- review here, and you can order it here.
Another selected short available on youtube is from the Prelinger Archive, a great resource that I leaned on heavily, for raw material for the documentary class last semester. "A Trip Down Market Street" is one of the purest expressions of film-as-a-time-machine I've seen: a camera, affixed to the front of a trolley, glides down Market street in san Francisco, recording all the horses, bicycles, pedestrians, cops, and so on, that pass before its fixed gaze -- shortly before the 1906 earthquake hit, and obliterated much of the scene. As someone who made the Market street traverse several times in my decade+ as a San Franciscan, it holds a special sort of temporal whiplash.
You can download a copy of the film from the archive here. A youtube user going by the name lunarparcel created a side-by-side juxtaposition of the film, and a film taken on Market street after the earthquake, here.
Lastly, the inclusion of "Airplane!" allows me to segue into something I saw at the local Savemart a couple days ago -- a Leslie Nielsen birthday card that probably should've been retired, still hanging about on the racks. I hope Nielsen would find it funny. Though now we're beyond knowing:
There are a few performers who I passed up chances to see, and then they died before I got another chance -- leaving me with pangs of regret. Fela was the first, then Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and then I actually had tickets to see Nina Simone but something else came up. Fortunately, I caught Abbey Lincoln at Yoshi's on a valentine's day with my wife a few years ago. I don't know if any other valentine's day will beat that one.
A voice can transmit many things. Abbey had a beautiful voice, but I think what I treasure most about it is that it's a voice that seems to embody dignity. It was fun that night to watch the quiet deference of her band, all young men sharply dressed, and all aware of their good fortune to be sharing the stage and the music with her.
I hope the recent spate of obits here doesn't seem morbid -- but one of the perks of having artists in our lives is that, when they go, they leave behind things that are easy to celebrate -- things that give us the illusion that they're still here, sharing the room with us.
I've used a recording of the Abbey Lincoln/Max Roach piece above for a "Digital Darkroom" class a few times. It's a photoshop class, and I find that, with easy access to images from Google and stock photo sites, it's sometimes hard for students to climb out from under the shipwreck of images that have preceded their ideas -- to identify images that come from within, instead of without. To encourage students to pay attention to the stuff that bubbles up from behind their eyes, rather than in front of them. So we shut off the computer monitors and I play three songs for them, for them to listen to with eyes closed, and see what sort of visions appear on their inner movie screens. Then they make sketches and share what each of them saw.
The first song is a song with a strong story, kind of a movie with lyrics. The second song has more oblique lyrics -- there are words, but they don't always connect up in obvious ways. And then the third song is Abbey, abandoning words for raw sound. It can take students to some interesting places.
Here's a clip of Abbey acting in the 1964 independent film "Nothing But a Man" -- might show it in an "independent film" class I've been cooking up:
And here's Abbey in her later period. It's always different to hear a song from somebody dead than it is to hear one from somebody alive, but the lyric "you can never lose a thing if it belongs to you" has an extra sharpness now:
You can catch an interview with Abbey on Fresh Air here.
I've been to discombobulated to keep up posting over the break, but I couldn't let the deaths of Eartha Kitt and Harold Pinter pass without at least a couple links.
Here are a couple choice Kitt performances (the first, "I Want To Be Evil," was the tune that made me fall for her -- the second, "Uska Dara" is in Turkish):
And here's the first segment of a TV version of Pinter's play "The Collection," starring a quartet of terrific actors: Helen Mirren, Malcolm McDowell, Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates (you can get to the other parts if you click through to youtube):
Obit in the NY Times. Here's a clip of her on the Johnny Cash show, back in 1969, doing a solo song and then a duet with Cash. The duet is a calypso tune, which is a funny match for a folk singer and a country singer, but they pull it off just fine.
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