Author Archives: Lloydville

LA FRONTERA

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On
the first day of our drive to Baja California we got off to a late
start — a miscalculation that led to us having to spend our first
night in Blythe, in Alta California.  I'm not sure what the deal
with Blythe is, but it seemed like a depressed and hopeless sort of
place.  We stayed in a lousy, overpriced motel and were happy to
be on our way again in the morning.  Above is a picture of a
rooster on top of a cafe in Vidal Junction, Alta California, on the
road to Blythe.  The cafe was closed and the only restrooms we
could find in Vidal Junction were some dirty Porta-Potties behind a gas
station, which was also closed.  The sight of a new moon behind the rooster cheered us up immeasurably.

If you drop more or less straight down from Las Vegas you hit the
Mexican border at
Mexicali, but we'd been told that crossing at the smaller town of
Tecate was quicker and
easier, so we veered off westward at El Centro on the I-8, then dropped
down to a smaller road that skirts the border on its way to
Tecate.  (Tecate is where the great Mexican beer of the same name
originated, though it's now brewed in other places in Mexico as well.)

It was fascinating to drive through the Imperial Valley of Alta California, past the huge
Sahara-like sandscape of Imperial Dunes and through the lush cultivated
fields beyond them.  The water that irrigates the Imperial Valley,
and makes it one of the most productive agricultural regions in the
world, comes from the Colorado River, which used to empty into the top
of the Mar de Cortés.  Now only a trickle of it arrives at the
apex of the great sea and the rich delta that used to be there is more
or less a wasteland.

The land above the border on the road to Tecate is well-watered, too,
and very beautiful.  We passed four U. S. Border Patrol cars along
the road before crossing quickly and easily into Mexico at
Tecate.  You need a Mexican tourist visa if you plan to travel
south of the “tourist zone”, or more than about 20 miles into
Mexico.  Lee had gotten hers and her kids' in Los Angeles but the
Mexican consulate in Las Vegas doesn't issue them.  I got one on
the Mexican side of the border in about 20 minutes, with no trouble at
all.  The Mexican border officials were friendly and efficient.

Somehow we managed to find our way through the teeming streets of
Tecate onto Mexico 3, which cuts across the top of Baja California and
hits Mexico 1, and the Pacific, at Ensenada.  The road passes
through high valleys where grapes are cultivated and wine made.  We
stopped at the largest of the Baja California wineries, L. A. Cetto, a
lovely establishment surrounded by a sea of green vines.

Lee and
I sampled and bought some good, cheap wines there . . .

The kids were
diverted by a pen that held burros . . .

. . . and peacocks . . .

At Ensenada we headed straight for the city's fish market, with its
extraordinary displays of seafood arranged in elaborate, artful piles.  We
had some indifferent seafood tacos at one of the small stalls lining
one side of the market, then cast about for a place to stay for the
night.

We lucked into El Rey Sol, a pleasant motel-like place with a protected
parking lot, a great little bar and a good pool for the kids. 
While the kids swam, Lee and I washed away the dust of the road with
beers and margaritas, talking to a cheerful bartender who recommended
good seafood stands in Baja California Sur, and to other travelers,
including a surfer who'd explored the undiscovered breaks of the
peninsula in his youth and was now revisiting the region with his young
family.

After the motel disaster in Blythe, Lee and I had discussed the
dehumanization of roadside inns in America, contrasting them with the
rich inn culture of Dickens' time, when inns always offered inviting
public rooms where travelers could meet and exchange tales of the
road.  All the Mexican hotels and motels we stayed at had such
public rooms, and they were always in use — just one of the many areas
in which Mexican culture reveals its humane genius and outshines its
“richer” neighbor to the north.

For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.



[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

MEXICO: PARANOIA AND PREJUDICE

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Before
setting off on our drive down the Baja California peninsula my sister
Lee and I did a lot of research about traveling there — online, in books
and in conversations with acquaintances who've visited the region by
car.  In the wake of our own journey it's clear that there's a lot
of misinformation floating around about automobile travel by foreigners in Mexico.

With respect to Baja California itself, a lot of this is just residual
mythology from the time when driving down Mexico 1 to Cabo San Lucas
was a wilderness adventure.  The road wasn't paved the whole way
to the cape until 1974 — a fact that thwarted my own first attempt to
drive down the peninsula in the late Sixties in a car with
insufficiently robust shock-absorbers.  For years after the road
was paved it wasn't maintained
scrupulously and supplies of gasoline along the way couldn't be
depended upon.  All of that has changed.

But some of the misinformation is undoubtedly due to plain old paranoia and prejudice.

In the whole course of our journey we were only accosted once by an
aggressive and vaguely threatening beggar.  We only encountered one
incompetent and indifferent hotel or motel clerk.  We only found
ourselves once in rooms with seriously malfunctioning air-conditioners
— rooms whose temperatures were recorded at 99 degrees on the room
thermostats and whose wall units were unfitted to reduce this
temperature very much.

All these things happened in Blythe, California, in the Imperial
Valley, before we even crossed the border.

In Mexico itself we
encountered nothing but cheerful hospitality, casual but
efficient and friendly service and good deals.  In La Paz, we stayed in large, cool,
comfortable rooms with pleasant sea views, at one of the best hotels in
town, for five dollars a night less than we paid for the grubby sweatboxes in
Blythe.

We were careful about drinking tap water but were extremely
adventurous
about where and what we ate.  (My nephew Harry, just shy of his
14th birthday on the trip, ate so many strange but delicious things in
Mexico that he kept a photographic record of them, starting with the
bowl of grilled octopus, above, that he ate con mucho gusto in Guerrero Negro on the trip down to La
Paz.)  Each of us experienced brief, mild
bouts of intestinal distress but nothing that could have been the
result of anything more than entering a new microbial environment —
something you might encounter just by visiting a different part of the
United States.

When we got back to Las Vegas we were all jonesing for cheeseburgers
and went out to an upscale burger joint here to indulge
ourselves.  I barfed it all up later that night — something that
never happened to me in Mexico.  I would say that you can get
better, fresher and more delicious food in almost any roadside
taquería in Mexico, however funky it may look on the outside, than you
can find on almost any gleaming stretch of strip
development in almost any American town.  We had really superb
shrimp and carne asada tacos at the improvised diner below, in El Rosario — a place we happened upon by chance:

It would make much more sense for Yankees to warn Mexicans
about traveling here — about the rude, uncaring service, bad deals and
synthetic food — than to listen to the warnings of fellow Yankees
about traveling in Mexico.

For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.


[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

NOIRISH: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THRILLER

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Below is another list of films that are sometimes identified as films noirs but that, in my opinion, really aren't:




Whirlpool


The Big Clock


House On Telegraph Hill


The Blue Gardenia


Shock


Sudden Fear


Shadow Man
The Stranger




These are all in fact what have come to be known as Hitchcockian
suspense thrillers, because Hitchcock remains the undisputed master of
the form.  In these films, ideally at least, the viewer is seduced
into a strong identification with the protagonist, a damsel in
distress or a man wrongfully accused of a crime, and shares the
psychological suspense of his or her ordeal, which includes feelings of
guilt that may not be rational and are in any case disproportionate to
the jeopardy involved.



I think they're distinguishable from the true film noir because
they concentrate on the often aberrant psychology of an
individual and don't reflect a sense of society as a whole, or
existence itself, as deranged.  They chart passages through a
moral/psychological disorientation that is more or less resolved by the
end of the film.  The jeopardized innocents of this
tradition are often women, which also distinguishes it from the
tradition of the
classic film noir, which tends to center on male anxieties.  These films involve an exploration of moral guilt, while classic films noirs involve an exploration of existential bewilderment and incompetence, almost always from a male point of view.



All of the films listed above fall far short of Hitchcock's best work
in the form, primarily because they fail to make us full psychological
participants in the jeopardy of their protagonists.  Their
narratives may be purely Hitchcockian, beat for beat, but their
technique doesn't compel us into a deep and often unconscious identification with
their central characters.



In Whirlpool, for example, we
first see the Gene Tierney character in a department store where she's
just done some shoplifting — but we don't find this out until a store
detective follows her to her car and seizes the lifted item. 
We're looking at the character from the outside, from the point of view of the
authorities.  In a Hitchcock film, we'd see the theft when it
happened, share Tierney's fear as she tries to exit the store without
getting caught — even find ourselves rooting for her to get away with
it.  With that identification established, we'd feel her guilt when she's caught, and feel it as our own guilt, because we secretly hoped she'd pull the theft off.



Ben Hecht, who wrote the script for Hitchcock's Notorious, also wrote Whirlpool
for Otto Preminger.  The latter has all the ingredients of a
classic Hitchcockian thriller — so it's highly instructive to study
why it isn't one.  It all comes down to Hitchcock's genius in
constructing identification with the protagonist, an identification
that can contradict our conscious disapproval of the protagonist's
behavior.  Preminger made one of the best of all noirs, Angel Face, but on the evidence of Whirlpool he had no gift for, and apparently no great interest in, the Hitchcockian suspense thriller.



[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows — Sudden Fear is included in Kino's film noir box set The Dark Side Of Hollywood . . . Whirlpool, The House On Telegraph Hill and Shock are part of Fox's film noir series . . . Shadow Man is included in VCI's Forgotten Noir series . . . The Stranger is part of MGM's DVD noir series . . .The Big Clock is part of Universal's noir series . . . and the packaging of the Image DVD release of The Blue Gardenia identifies it as “classic noir  with a feminine twist.”  I don't see any point in calling any of these films noirs unless you're willing to call almost all of Hitchcock's American films noirs — which I think stretches the definition of noir beyond the point of usefulness.]

THERE IS A WAY

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Last
month I started off on a road trip with my sister Lee and her two kids,
Nora and Harry, down the length of the Baja California peninsula. 
It was a journey of great adventures but surprisingly easy and
trouble-free, contrary to some stories we'd been told about the hazards
of driving in that part of Mexico.  We ascribe most of our good
fortune to the Ghost (my trusty Lincoln Navigator) and to the kind
ministrations of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe.


The Ghost is not a car for the 21st Century, due to its high
consumption of fossil fuel, but it is in all other respects one of the
most perfect machines for land travel ever created.  It transports
four people and assorted luggage in extreme comfort and is as reliable
as a burro, though far less truculent.


Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe is a lady for all ages.  The essence
of Mexico's own peculiar understanding of Christianity, she also
embodies the spirit of the nation.  There are improvised shrines
to her everywhere — the one above is just outside the public market in
La Paz.  She is sometimes called La Reina de Mexico, the Queen of Mexico, and sometimes just La Morenita, the Little Darling.



Mexico has a deeply humane culture, made up of many grave and gracious
courtesies between people.  Just recognizing, however crudely,
that this system of courtesies exists is enough to open the heart of
almost any Mexican to a stranger, even a gringo.



Things
rarely work the way they're supposed to
work in Mexico, but they work, by a complex system of improvisation
and accommodation that can't be reasoned out, only intuited. 
Traffic signs, for example, are never taken as anything more than
suggestions.  But when you stop at a crosswalk, for example, to
let someone cross the street, as the regulations require, the
pedestrian will almost always pause and nod and salute you for your
consideration, as though to acknowledge that you have not obeyed a law
of man but of God, who asks people to treat each other with dignity and
respect.



The lack
of apparent logic
in the organization of things could easily drive a Yankee
batty, but that's because he or she would have failed to realize that
Our Lady of Guadalupe travels with them at all times in Mexico, ready
at any impasse to lean in and whisper, “There is a way.”



And there always is.

[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

THE SEA

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Friends disappear into darkness, vanish like smoke into
bright air. Mysteries descend like snowflakes and collect into drifts
six feet high — then melt without a trace.


There
are times when I think the ocean offers answers to unanswerable
questions:



Where do virtue and goodness go when they're lost — where
do they come from in the first place, so preposterous and inconvenient?

Où sont-elles, Vierge Souvraine — les neiges d'antan . . . les vagues d'hier soir?



At other times I think the ocean only offers an accompaniment to all
this — no answers, only consolation, a consolation that is itself
a mystery.



Be quiet anyway, and listen . . .



Readers,

     There will be no new posts for the next
week or two, then some exciting news.  Until then, enjoy the
archives and be assured that I remain . . .

   
              
              
            a sus pies,

   
              
              
            Lloydville



THE LOOK OF NOIR

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It’s a commonplace of writing about film noir to see its dark, moody lighting as derived more or less directly from the German expressionist cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, best
exemplified in work done at the UFA studio in Berlin.  The proposition is logical enough — the “UFA style” had become a kind of shorthand in Hollywood for highly exaggerated, expressionistic lighting, and many of the cinematographers and directors associated
with film noir had European backgrounds, with experience working at UFA itself or in traditions influenced by it.

The proposition gets a little shaky, however, when you examine the visual style of film noir
with a careful attention to detail.  Its resemblance to the look of UFA-style expressionism is mostly superficial.  The UFA style had a Romantic quality, evoking candlelight and gaslight rather more than popping flashbulbs, stabbing headlights and glaring neon — which characterized the noir style.  The UFA influence is very clear in the Hollywood horror film cycle of the 30s, with its atmospheric, Gothic sets and lighting — but it’s less clear in the jagged edges of light, the jarring collisions of black and white in film noir.

As I’ve written elsewhere: “Lotte Eisner sees Murnau’s visual strategy [in Faust] as one which opposes darkness against light, but this is not quite right, for Faust is not a film of stark contrasts, but of chiaroscuro, of subtle gradations and complications. Light itself is in some ways the protagonist of the film, its mysterious workings and shadings offering a mystical perspective, making the characters and settings emblematic but also providing consolation and inspiration — the sense of a world animated by Spirit.”  This was true of many films in the German expressionist tradition — and was decidedly not the visual strategy of film noir.



There’s another, home-grown visual tradition that I think had a much clearer influence on the look of noir — the American tabloid crime photography of the 1930s and 1940s.  A book called New York Noir makes a very convincing case for this influence.  It collects images from the pages of the New York Daily News and most of these images echo the look of film noir far more closely than the great films made at UFA.

The visual style in question begins with the adoption of the Speed Graphic camera by the Daily News photographers in the 30s.  Its faster film stocks, along with developments in synchronized flash technology, allowed these photographers to penetrate the night for the first time.  The flash itself created bold contrasts of light and dark and helped construct the public image of the night-time city, especially its seamy underside — an image that is faithfully explored in classic films noirs.

Weegee was the most famous of the Daily News photographers — his book Naked City brought the public a conscious awareness of the tabloid style as a distinct phenomenon,
recognized directly by filmmakers Hellinger and Dassin when they bought the book’s title
for their New York police procedural movie of the same name.  But Weegee was just one of many great tabloid photographers who pioneered this style, who lodged it in the public imagination.

The great filmmakers who worked at UFA before WWII, including many who
eventually made their way to Hollywood, certainly developed and codified expressionistic lighting in movies — but I think the many, mostly anonymous photographers who snapped pictures of crime scenes for the American tabloids had a much greater and more direct influence of the look of the film noir.

The frame below, from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, seems to be trying to invoke precisely the look of a tabloid crime scene photograph:

DALMATIANS

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In the list
I recently linked to, showing the 100 top-grossing films of all time (domestically),
with revenues adjusted for constant dollars, there are, as you would
suspect, a number of Disney classics.  Many of these films
performed only adequately on their initial release but kept making money over the years.  Snow White was the only one to make the top ten but I was surprised to see 101 Dalmatians
at number eleven.  This is one of my favorite Disney films but I
always thought of it as a minor work, and certainly not a
mega-hit.  Apparently a lot of other people have loved it as much
as I do.



Word is that a two-disc Platinum Edition of the film, loaded with
extras, will be coming out next year, which is exciting news. 
Disney also released a CD of the soundtrack a few years ago — it's a
wonderful, light, slightly jazzy score that really evokes the early,
pre-Beatles Sixties.  It's now out of print but copies can still
be found on Amazon — and it's well worth tracking down.


Check out the film, too, if you don't know it — but just rent it, in
case you fall in love with it and want to grab the definitive edition
when it comes out in 2008.

BAD BLONDE

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In the annals of Hollywood degradation, no tale is more sordid than that
of Barbara Payton.  In her earliest days in the film business she
starred in pictures opposite James Cagney and Gregory Peck — then hit
the skids and ended up in her 30s hooking on the Sunset Strip, addled
by drugs and alcohol, bloated and with a few of her front teeth
missing.  She was dead at 39.

Her spiral to the bottom seems to have started with her disastrous alliance with B-movie star Tom Neal (above), who achieved immortality as the lead in the classic film noir Detour but whose arrogance and violent temper kept him perpetually on the
fringes of the movie business.  Payton tried to leave him and
became engaged to classy but alcoholic star Franchot Tone (below).  Neal
confronted Tone one night at Payton’s home and beat him within an inch
of his life, creating one of the biggest tabloid scandals of the
50s.  Tone recovered, barely, married Payton and divorced her a
few months later — apparently because she was cheating on him with
Neal.

Payton’s career never quite recovered, mainly because she couldn’t slow
down.  A sex addict and an increasingly dysfunctional alcoholic,
she went from one bad relationship to another, and by the time she
realized that her reputation had ruined her career it was too late to
rescue it.  She proceeded down her road to oblivion with almost
manic determination, eventually selling blow-jobs on the Strip for $5 a
pop, with several arrests for prostitution and theft along the way.

John O’Dowd has written a detailed and sympathetic biography of the doomed
starlet, plausibly suggesting that some sort of childhood sexual abuse
resulted in an overwhelming self-loathing in Payton — that on some
level she willed her own destruction.  Her story can take its
place with the one Robert Guralnick tells in his magnificent two-volume biography of
Elvis Presley as an object lesson in the way American celebrity can
destroy the fragile psyches of damaged innocents.

It’s all totally heartbreaking.  You might pick up this book
looking to relish the sheer sordidness of Payton’s story — and there’s
never been a more grueling (or more responsibly researched) examination of Hollywood sordidness — but you’ll
end up touched by its portrait of an oddly appealing lost soul.

O’Dowd has a web site devoted to Payton here.

ART BABES

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The self-portrait above is by Élisabeth Louise
Vigée-Le Brun, a pupil of David who worked in the late 18th and early
19th centuries.  It’s one of a series of vexing and brilliant
self-portraits in which the artist announces her babeness with
delightful and unapologetic verve.  (You can see more of them at
the Art Renewal Center website, one of the Internet’s great resources.)

Vigée-Le Brun was the teacher of Marie-Guillemine Benoist, who painted the amazing portrait below, which hangs in the Louvre:

I discovered Benoist’s painting on Amy Crehore’s web log Little Hokum
Rag.  Crehore once incorporated it whimsically into one of her own
paintings:

Girlness is the central subject of most art, of course, but it has a
pure sort of loveliness when executed by actual girls — though I’m not
sure quite why that should be.

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW

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Touch Of Evil is sometimes cited as the last classic film noir but I'd nominate in its place Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, which came out a year later.  Odds Against Tomorrow is certainly a true noir, as well as one of the greatest films in the tradition, and its themes recapitulate the core themes of noir with elegant clarity, while at the same time looking forward to the post-noir future.

Odds Against Tomorrow is steeped in the mood of existential dread that characterizes the classic film noir
— and more specifically the sense of male impotence in the face of a
world gone horribly wrong.  It makes sense to see the root of this
dread in the global catastrophe that was WWII and in the spectre of
global annihilation summoned up by the atomic bomb — and Odds Against Tomorrow deals directly with both these themes.



Robert Ryan's character is an aging WWII vet whose capacity for
violence is no longer needed — is a bewildering liability in the
post-war world.  He has a sense that his best days are past, that
he has no place in society, and this fear un-mans him, all but destroys
his relationship with a woman who truly loves him but whose ability to
earn more money than he can fills him with shame and self-loathing.



Harry Belafonte's character is also a war vet, but as a black man his
sense of impotence in a white world is even more intense.  The
Ryan character suffers from deep psychological wounds — the Belafonte
character has a handicap in a racist society that nothing could possibly cure . . . the color of
his skin.  He's a jazz singer but addicted to gambling, to finding
the one big score that will enable him to tell the white
nightclub owners he works for to kiss his ass.  His gambling, however, has wrecked
his relationship with his wife and made him incapable of being a true
father to his daughter.  Assaulted from without and within, his
sense of himself as a man has imploded.



These two characters are brought together for a crime caper by a crooked ex-cop, who incarnates the assumption in films noirs that corruption is universal.



The shadow of the atomic bomb is omnipresent in the film — to a greater degree than it is even in Kiss Me Deadly, another classic noir which makes a clear connection between its bleak mood and atomic-age anxiety.  In Odds Against Tomorrow characters
refer to the bomb on several occasions, and the explosive climax of the
film references it visually and metaphorically.

When the subtext of a tradition like film noir
gets as close to the surface as it is in this film you can be pretty
sure that the tradition is just about played out.  Film noir didn't disappear after Odds Against Tomorrow, but it became something else — neo-noir, which is always, at least in part, a commentary on the old form in its less self-conscious incarnation.  But by centering
the psychological dread of a character like Belafonte's in a particular social
problem like racism, the ground is prepared for the politically
conscious films of the Sixties and onward.  True noir, while
always attuned to social ills, and always political in that sense,
trafficked in a more existential brand of hopelessness.  Odds Against Tomorrow, which was financed by Belafonte himself, looks forward to a time of action.


Belafonte gives a terrific performance in the film — he's appealing
and incredibly cool but hard-edged.  His rage and resentment don't
seem ideological or didactic but deeply personal.  Ryan's
performance as the washed-up thug, whose racism is just another mask
for his impotence, is one of the best of his career, with a creepiness
that's also touching, and all the more creepy for that.



The film is beautifully shot, mostly on location in Manhattan and in
Upstate New York — and yet a few annoying, pretentious zooms remind us
that the end of the classic noir
style is at hand.  Apart from that it's a brilliant film on every
level — maybe Wise's best — and it certainly belongs in the classic film noir canon.  In fact, I think you could say that, like Ryan's aging boxer in Wise's The Set-Up, the film noir tradition goes out here with one last improbable, bittersweet triumph.

THE HOLLYWOOD END GAME

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The lesson of the chaotic chart above, as Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing
observes, is that Hollywood studio executives could make equally
rational choices about what movies to make simply by rolling
dice.  They have no consistently reliable knowledge or instincts about what
audiences want to see.



A relevant list
of box office earnings over the years expressed in real dollar amounts
shows only one film made in the last quarter century among the top ten
— Titanic.  That's doubly instructive since Titanic,
a film about commitment and female empowerment cast in the terms of a
Victorian melodrama, violates almost every tenet of the current
Hollywood wisdom about “what audiences want”.



What's going on here?  Hollywood executives aren't stupid, the
corporations who employ them are presumably interested in serving their
market.  I think that Hollywood has simply given up.  It
senses that it will not be part of the future of entertainment but it
lacks the energy to remake itself for a new age.  Executives are
interested in making as much money as possible in the short term by
releasing the safest product they can imagine using the outdated
paradigms and then retiring in style.  After all, if all your
peers in the industry are just as clueless as you are, as the chart
above seems to indicate, then you have no real competition.  What
incentive do you have for taking chances?


[Note: The Birth Of A Nation
almost certainly belongs in the list of the top 100 box office champs
linked above but at this point there's no way of ascertaining exactly
how much money it made.  The film was released in most parts of
the country on a “states' rights” basis, which meant that a distributor
bought the right to exhibit the film in a certain territory for a fixed
sum and then kept whatever profits he earned himself, with no
obligation to report them to anyone else.  Louis B. Mayer made his
first fortune distributing the film in New England — then helped
create the Hollywood cartel which virtually monopolized film
distribution in America, assuring that no new entrepreneurs could ever
again make money the way he did when he was starting out.  This
illustrates the basic principle of American corporate capitalism —
“Free market for me, rigged market for you.”]

EIGHT MORE RANDOM FACTS

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Responding
to my post EIGHT USELESS FACTS, Paul Zahl writes to say that he's not
actively blogging at the moment but that if he were he'd offer the
following eight random facts about himself, plus one bonus fact:



Here are the eight facts:



     1. I spent an afternoon once with Jacques Cousteau.



     2. My wife and I got caught in the middle of a
gun fight between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants in
Bethlehem. In fact, Mary was able to duck just in time as an off-course
bullet went right over her head.



     3. Ten days ago I spent the night in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.



     4. I asked John F. Kennedy for his autograph
when I lived around the corner from his house, and he gave it to me.



     5. As a child in New York City, I lived across
the street from Marilyn Monroe when she was married to Arthur Miller,
and my Mother would point them out to me on walks when I was in my
stroller.



     6. I produced a movie about blue-collar Protestants in a small town in Northern Ireland.



     7. I acted in two movies that were directed by Lloyd Fonvielle.



     8. My favorite movie of all time is Matinee, directed by Joe Dante.



     9. Optional extra fact:  I presented
Stevie Wonder with his doctoral hood when he became a Doctor of Music
at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.



The films directed by Lloyd Fonvielle he mentions were 8mm efforts done when we were in high school — The Journal Of Jonathan Harker, in which Zahl portrayed Count Dracula, interpreting him as a crazed Presbyterian, and The Fruit At the Bottom Of the Bowl, an unauthorized adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story in which Zahl portrayed a debonair murder victim.



Zahl was not an easy actor to work with.  He had his own version
of “The Method”, which involved shutting himself in a closet between
takes and singing In Darkness Let Me Dwell. 
I did not feel that this technique aided him in his interpretation of
his roles and our quarrels on the set were legendary.  We never
worked together again, though the two films we did make have since
become celebrated as lost cult classics.



[Meanwhile, Tony D'Ambra of films noir has posted his eight random
facts here, and Amy Crehore of Little Hokum Rag has posted hers here.]

UMBERTO ECO ON CASABLANCA

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Robert Nagle of Idiotprogrammer posts this interesting quote from Umberto Eco on Casablanca:


“Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an
anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually
against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their
control. And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic
theories and theories of film making. For in it there unfolds with
almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state,
without Art intervening to discipline it. And so we can accept it when
characters change mood, morality, and psychology from one moment to the
next, when conspirators cough to interrupt the conversation if a spy is
approaching, when whores weep at the sound of 'La Marseillaise.' When
all the archtypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two
cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly
that the cliches are talking among themselves, and
celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual
pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so
too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime.
Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a
phenomenon worthy of awe.”



I think this comes close to explaining the unclassifiable nature of the
film (which I touch on briefly here)
— a quality shared by many collective works of art, like Gothic
cathedrals, for example, which have a mysterious, chaotic unity even
though they were built by many hands over many generations following
only the most general and ever-shifting plans. 
I would suggest, though, that Ingrid Bergman is the central vault of Casablanca — the stunning core phenomenon around which the other disparate elements cohere.

EIGHT USELESS FACTS

Posted on by





I
guess this is sort of the blogosphere version of a chain letter, but
someone got the idea of posting eight random facts about himself on his
blog and inviting eight other bloggers to do the same, and urging each
of the eight other bloggers to invite eight additional bloggers to join the enterprise.



Here are the 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 write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4.
At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged
and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them
they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.



For some reason I got nominated by flickhead, so here goes:

1.  I once played baseball in Yankee Stadium, back in the early
Seventies, in the old park, before it was remodeled.  I won a
contest hosted by George Plimpton in which fans were asked to write in
telling why they wanted to play ball in the House That Ruth
Built.  The winners played an abbreviated exhibition game before the
regular game against a team of former Yankee all-stars.  I wore
Thurman Munsons's uniform, came to bat once and faced Whitey Ford on
the mound — he was lobbing them in underhand to Joe Garagiola behind
the plate.  I grounded out to Mickey Mantle who was playing first.

2.  I have always hated the Yankees and rooted for the Mets.

3.  I have crossed the North Atlantic three times in the dead of winter on a freighter.

4.  I feel guilty about how much I love boxing.


5.  I was born on the stroke of midnight.  My mother had to decide which day would be recorded as my birthday.

6.  The first word I ever spoke was “light”.

7.  I always eat strawberry shortcake on my birthday — always.

8.  I think oysters are the food of the gods but I never eat them
in months without r's in them.  Right now I'm missing them
terribly.

And my nominations of other bloggers are:

Amy Crehore of Little Hokum Rag

Tony D'Ambra of films noir

Robert Nagle of Idiotprogrammer

Andre Soares of the Alternate Film Guide

Tom Sutpen of If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger



Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing

Paul Zahl of PZ's Picks



Burke Hilsabeck of The Hefty Section



I realize this is all kind of silly, but flickhead's post led me to
some interesting blogs I didn't know about, and maybe mine will lead
you to some, too.