Orson Welles on Cold Reading

toulouse lautrec

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The Moulin Rouge is celebrating an important anniversary this year. Today, the actual club is hard to find behind all the German, Italian, and Dutch tour buses parked out front, and, last I checked the prices, was too expensive, even for a spendthrift like me.  Dauntingly prosaic, but, you know, it's still holding up, a kind of trashy glamor seeps out of the doors. Like a girl with torn stockings.

off stage

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James Wyeth

Pumpkinhead, by James Wyeth

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If once in your life

If once in your life you have slept on an island, James Wyeth

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The Author Speaks

 “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

— Mr. Cormac McCarthy

From an interview in the Wall Street Journal

The Oxford Project

Peter Feldstein photographed all 600 residents of Oxford, Iowa, in 1984. In 2007, he went back and photographed his subjects again, at least, the ones who were still alive and willing. The second time, a writer went along with him to interview the subjects. Their stories appear between the '84 and '07 portraits, a tryptich of time past, time recalled and present time.

You find out, for example, that this man was a buckskinner, some kind of alternative lifestyle where you lived as in the olden days, hunting with muzzle loader guns, fishing, skinning animals. He was born again and became a preacher. He has visions of demons and angels. He wrestled a demon once in a hotel room, a literal demon with horns. He also preaches on a public access TV.

It's moving and not a little frightening to see how time wears on people, mangling them, twisting them, and in some cases, purifying them -- making them more individual. (Before, of course, it obliterates them and us into anonymous molecules).

 

This guy's 38. On the left, you see him as a rodeo star. Now, he says, getting up is like warming up an old car. It takes time to get everything moving again.

The first time, Feldstein only used one shot to capture each person. This lead to happy/spooky accidents that make many of the earlier portrait that much more effective. One set is told by a man who was an infant in the first picture. You see him held by a large, bearded guy, but the man's face is blurred, just as his face must be slightly blurred in the memory of that son who was too young to form much more of a memory of him beyond a voice, a smell and the feel of his beard.

It's currently showing at the Belger space, in Kansas City where I saw it.

The show reminds me of one of my favorite books, Winesburg, Ohio, a series of linked short stories that make up a novel by Sherwood Anderson. One of the themes of the book is the secret and surprising interior lives the characters have -- it's set in a small town, a town like Oxford, probably. You'd think the stories would be banal. Each character, though, has a rich or surprising secret life. Among the 25 people shown you meet in the Oxford Project are: a lesbian, a mystic, a rodeo star, a vet who liberated Buchenwald, a Vietnam veteran, a devout Buddhist, and some more ordinary men and women.

In some respects, it's much like Michael Apted's documentary series 7-Up, where you meet a set of people at distinct moments in their lives. Only this is compressed: a moment, a short bit of narrative, a second moment. It gives you the chance to contemplate, to wonder, and to fill in the blanks. To shake your head, once more, at the ceaseless noise of time.

Check out the Smithsonian Magazine article.

Mr. Raft

“I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.”

-George Raft


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photo -- smoking

Sean Marc Lee
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Guy Richie's Nike Commercial

I don't care about Nike or commercials. But this is hard to resist in all its butchy glory.

Worth remembering, here and there

The ever-cadverous Mr. Cage and the dentally challenged Mr. McGowan sing it.
I'm sending this out to a special person. And she knows who she is.

Jerry Lee Lewis, Original Punk

(Sid with his mommy after stabbing Nancy.)

It is more punk to start your own band than to be in a boy band put together by a producer.

It is more punk to make up your own music than to play along with whatever the band's doing.

It is more punk to marry your 13 year old cousin and have two of your six wives drown in your swimming pool than to stab your girlfriend.

It is more punk to make a piano shake, rattle and roll than to wank on a bass.

It is more punk to believe you're going to hell because of your music, and play it anyway instead of being some bargain basement atheist.

It is more punk to be original in 1957 instead of copying the Ramones in 1977.