Watched Va savoir last night. Lots of fun. Jacques Rivette is still pushing out films at 70-something. While I've only seen Céline et Julie vont en bateau and La Belle noiseuse, I think I have a feel for what kinds of flicks Rivette makes: great ones! While too long for the post-VCR, ADD crowd, I find his movies, if anything, too short. Character driven in a vague sort of way, without too much psychological baggage, literate and humorous.
He has six characters, a play en abyme, and shelves full of books all vying for your attention. The dialog is in Italian (the play is Luigi Pirandello's Come tu mi vuoi) and French. Love, theft, 18th century unpublished Goldoni plays, love triangles, cheating, Heidegger, fidelity, duelling, and no easy explanations. There's at least two PhD dissertations: one in philosophy and the other on Roman and Greek fibulas (ancient safety pins) and their connection to American and French cinema. It's on DVD, and I say "rent it."
The web is a dangerous place, I tell you. Between google bombs and vanity surfing lies synchronicities of the eldridge kind. Whilst soothing my ego on Google, I came across Scott Johnson and a couple of his blogs. I notice he'd coauthored the O'Reilly book on blogging. Later, the next week I came across another reference to the blogging book, and a quick visit to Amazon served up another happenstance link to a different book on blogging written by Biz Stone. Now my consulting company is called Bitzone which is often mistaken for Biztone (though, like many a webledge company, they seem to have gone offline), but now there's also a vanity site called Biz Stone! Too much. Luckily our mascot, since retired, was named Hank, not Biz. One last piece that falls into place (after a quick whois query) is what is the relationship of Biz with fellow Wellesley alum and Hollywood director Greg Yaitanes?
"There are a lot of Bitzones in Bizarro World," quoth Viki.
Getting ready for the trip to Wels, Austria, to see the premiere of Ich Pilatus on 11 December, I decided that Cingular's overseas roaming rates were just too much, and that it was time to get my cell phone's SIM card unlocked so that I could buy a German or Austrian one. Despite what I read online, it was relatively easy to speak with a customer care rep at Cingular, and though she couldn't find the NCK in their database, she got it to me later that day in email after getting it from Ericsson. Now, it all begins: choosing a plan. It's just like choosing all over again, and this time the websites are mostly in German. Sites like this one were full of cool sequences of buttons to press to get at those hidden service menus. More fun than entering new ringtones.
Too precious for words: Veep Cheney and Sadam Hussein, business buddies. Thomas Albert has his $0.02.
It reminds me of a great book I read back in the late '80s: Charles Higham's Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé on the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933-1949. (Sadly out of print.) How to keep American owned companies from collaborating with the Axis. IT&T, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil, et al. Same as trading arms for hostages of more recent memory.
Watched two Hal Hartley flicks recently: No Such Thing and Henry Fool. Jesse had told me about them eartlier when we went to see the benshi performance, and I finally got around to renting them. Liked both of them. It was refreshing to see a couple of non-Holleywoodian American movies. I guess the independent cinema still exists, though the monster film was produced by American Zoetrope. Yet, it only cost $5 million.
The earlier Henry Fool seemed less coherent, but then it didn't have the horror genre to structure it. The male protagonists in both films are similar and perhaps a mouthpiece for the director, though in interviews he's comes off as mild mannered. Literate screenplays with lots of witty dialogue. Lots of contempt for the world (read America) and ones fellow man (read humankind). Acting and direction a pleasure throughout.
Curious post-911-ism in No Such Thing there's a newscast near the beginning about terrrorism up by 70% and nerve gas being released in the subway. In an interview, Hartley said that after 911 even Spinal Tap had deeper meaning. And the bit about publishing Simon's poem on the "internet thing" seems a little ahead of the curve, since Henry Fool was released in 1997.
"The foregrounding of style is hardly new with postmodernism, of course. It is already characteristic of the earliest modernist writing -- Flaubert, Henry James. Flaubert in particular is responsible for introducing what Jonathon Culler has called a 'labor theory of value,' whereby the aesthetic value of verbal art is to be measured in terms of the amount of work that has gone into the production of the linguistic surface." [Brian McHale. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction, pp. 148f., with a footnote on p. 248 to Jonathon Culler's Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, pp. 12f.]
When I first recalled this text after having read it some days [weeks?] earlier, I misremembered its key phrase as "the amount of work that goes into decoding the linguistic surface." Then, I couldn't find the passage at all, even though I searched every couple of months for it, usually after having mentioned to somebody Culler's "labor theory of value." When I found the page it was on and read in disbelief that it wasn't making a work difficult to read but difficult to write, I was embarassed.
Erling told me about Ern Malley the other day on our way back from a Music Now concert at CSUS. Love these literary hoxes: all the way from Ireland and MacPherson up to Araki Yasusada. The thing is, if you read McAuley and Stewart's letter to the editor which exposed the hoax, it sounds as though they actually just composed some "modernist" poems and had them published under a pseudonym. Juxtaposition of chaotic images and an aleatory style of theme choice. Oh, well. The best bit I came across was David Lewis' tongue-in-check article in the rather conservative Quadrant (of which McAuley was the first editor). The tidbits were so tempting, I went off to the NRLF and checked out some of the two bad boys' feeble poems. Hard to distinguish their "authentic" output from their "hoax". Contra McAuley, I see the pinacles of pre-modernist poetry as folks like Algernon Swinburne or Gerard Manley Hokpins.
Leni Riefenstahl turned 100 hundred in August. She's being sued by a German organization called Rom. She's been denying her Nazi past since the end of the war, saying she was an apolitcal filmmaker. Is it possible to be apolitcal? Was CNN apolitcal during its coverage of the Persian Gulf war? What about Dubya's upcoming war in Iraq?
Also ran across a great URL looking for some info on a song I heard on Shirley and Spinoza Kooky radio show: the FBI's Freedom of Information Act page. And how about that whacky recording industry? CD price-fixing, who'd've thought it possible?