The Charles Busch Cleopatra

Mr. Busch presents original productions at Theater for the New City.  I think the prior one was a compendium of religious movies, perhaps like King of Kings, or Samson and Delilah or, the Robe.  I sometimes associate them with sword and sandal movies. There is a genre aspect to his TNC offerings.   His latest is a compendium of Cleopatras, with an emphasis on Mae West.  Part of the script incorporates a Mae West song, and that is a very beautiful segment... We have to begin with the notion that 1930's Hollywood acting is valid, while being perhaps histrionic and over the top.  The ultimate hysteric for me was Colin Clive in Frankenstein.  I sincerely believe in his performance.  The problem may be a question of naturalism.  I grew up with a love for melodrama and it has left me with an expectation.  Melodrama penetrates my skull.  So Mr Busch writes a perfectly eloquent script seriously considering the magic of relationships.  I can't tell how important I think it is to turn antagonism into eroticism, or rather, into coupling.  I don't know... I was thinking about the hit man who goes home to his wife.   It's a closed circle, all his relationships, his seductions with the outside world get redirected to the one true love, and in a way one might think it misdirected... ok

So the piece lives within the realm of gay camp... Maybe it doesn't.  Maybe saying that secures its position elsewhere because in fact I see nothing in it that is gay, nor camp  It's informed... Historically it is informed by Cinema, and yes, to me that is valid.  Cinema dialogue is the drama I know.  

As for his acting, he is reforming the English language.  They all are.  They are excellent actors working with their physicality and further validating the realism of their characters.  

I realize my offering of thoughts to the world requires more thought in doing so. however, this is it.

Addendum:  The introductory announcement for piece, that it's a story of love, betrayal, murder...concludes its list with "eye-liner."   It sounds funny but, yes, look at the eye of Horus.  Eyeliner figures prominently in the symbology of Egypt.  

How to Fly

Masonic

Finally an upbeat story reminding us to do and not INVEST PASSIVELY.  

Cement binds.  Its mortar of concrete is ground stone.  

Grind the stones to dust; pulverize them.  Add water to the dust and fill the space between puzzle mounted stones and any space between them is forgiven   You have a sealed fireplace chimney. 

When water permeates the stones, because cracks in the cement allowed the water to gather and freeze, expanding the cracks, then water gets into the fireplace.  

The fireplace insert that was the rage in the 1930’s was a heatilator, with self-contained interior vent-paths on each of its sides, with openings at the bottom to draw in cool air and openings up top to release the hot air, having passed through the fire heated iron lining to the left and right of the fireplace.  How heatilating!

Because our fireplace stones had been laid and cemented around this enormous 1935 iron heatilator box, all our options for the fireplace addressed inserting an insert inside and up the chimney, through its flu, of which there are two running through the one chimney,

The water that permeated the stones for the past 80 years, corroded the iron.  As the iron rusted thin, it became brittle until, at last, gashes breached its elemental fabric. 

-- Such that I could bend and pull out the pieces.  The Mason observed that our old corroded heatilator box even came with its own (corroded) flu flap, which was incompatible with the flu cap wire that also ran through it to the chimney top.   

So you could never close the heatilator flu containing the fireplace box without catching the wire running up the chimney to the chimney-top flu cap. 

As for the two flues inside the chimney, they run parallel, side by side.  

Surrounded by cemented chimney stones are two clay lined flues running up to the chimney-top, one is for the fireplace and the other for an oil burner below the house.   This took me a while to comprehend.  There are two passageways, the big fireplace is only using one of them.  It is like only 4 inches square... I know this as if I always knew but I assure you, that is not the case.  Was this small opening causing smoke to pour out when we lit a fire?

Water had also rotted the fan of our forced air oil burner and, along with its corroded 300 gallon iron oil tank, it is now gone from the basement. 

In order to heat and cool the house without oil or propane or other fuels, we are using an electric powered Japanese freon-manipulating Heat-pump which also provides cool air through the old oil burner ducts that snake through basement ceiling.  The installers humored me when I asked them, rather than mounting the air-conditioners around the house, to mount them in the basement ceiling and use the old ducts.  

This is the same split system whose condensers you see everywhere, hanging from brackets mounted into the buildings throughout the shanty tenements in the shadow of the Marriott skyscraper along the windy streets of old Shanghai.   

However, our one big fan vented condenser runs its recycling freon through three differing units also mounted into the basement ceiling.

Realistically a zero degree temperature must make it a strain for that freon to produce heat from temperatures lower than the outside weather, but this is a system that is still somewhat incomprehensible and as they say about our judgment of it, the jury is still out. 

So every shanty apartment in old Shanghai has its split duct condenser hanging from the walls.  It is just another example of how our ancient worlds (of the 1930's) live on.

For the Shanghai of 600 years ago, go to the Yu Gardens.

And we're really straying from the topic of successful fireplace masonry.

So I thought that the self-contained re-purpose idea of using those oil fired forced air heat ducts to run the modern heat pump was a good idea, even though it also sends cold air through the floor vents and cold air tends to settle on the floor.   

We just have to remember to kick around the air during the summer. 

The mason man's first job was to re-point the chimney-top cracks.  He also restored the original stone grill (that Candlewood Isle Founding Father Mr. Ducey must have built his own in the back of the house). 

Smoke still poured into our a-frame living room especially as the fire in the hearth died down, so while the mason scanned the internet for a replacement heatilator (I think he did) I drove around the entire Candlewood Lake searching for insert ideas, two places, and then visited the guns and weapons stores -- a Japanese Guy named Hans was quit forthcoming there.   Yes they are collectible saved from the trenches during world war I.  Yes they work.  And if you want magazine guns, there's an extra form to submit.  And I didn't take pictures, no.  

I also visited the pipe by the damn and lake pump.  I drove around the entire Candlewood Lake.  

What of the wood? Buy proper wood.  Don't use the cuttings from your crazy scissorhand prunning  There's Crenolite?  Pine oils?

Forget it.  All the  cuttings are going in there, and yet the chimney is clean (I bought and ran through it a 50' chimney sweep rod.  Nothing.)... 

So the mason just pulled out the entire interior and relaid the stones without the heatilator, kept the vents to the sides, used the original wood mantle, and raised the fireplace one foot, building a hearth stone that looks as if it was always there.    

We've still got our $5 four flap screen in front of it, it’s low cost attributable to its light weight, which is of course preferable.  And I was at last able to use my Columbian artifact antique bellows with the copper embossings of owl chewing lobster tail on one side and eight-pronged man on the other.  

The turning point for the commercially manufactured wood burning inserts with the glass window was my visit to the New Fairfield thrift store.  I may have actually bought nothing but when the lady behind the counter heard me talking about the woodburning insert with a neighbor she said, all those fuels are dirty.  There’s a reason we no longer use wood as fuel, it’s the dirtiest there is and when I walk down the street I have to breath the smoke from the homes heating themselves with these woodburning inserts.   

Well you can always get pellets. 

That was pretty illuminating.  Even though fossel fuels are NO LONGER the subject of international price-gouging, electricity is still cleaner.  

Finally, in the lower back of the fireplace box the mason installed a vent pulling air from outside through an opening at the bottom of the chimney. 

The Mason is James Delafield, referred to us by our primary country cottage counselor, Joseph Snopkowski.  Green Star installed and continues to support the Heat Pump HVAC system.  

Monica's insisting that we raise hearth is transformative, even as it looks as if it was always there. 

The Candlewood Isle Film Fest continues the Third Saturday of Every Month with homemade dinner and a movie at the Clubhouse.

Last night, we saw The 1962 Manchurian Candidate, which varied our pattern in previous months of viewing collaborations between directors and their spouses. 

Les Diaboliques stars Vera Gibson-Amado, Henri Clouzot’s wife.

Under Capricorn is scripted by Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock’s wife.

Meet Me in St. Louis stars Judy Garland, Vincent Minelli’s wife.

The Great Gatsby should have starred Ali McGraw, producer Robert Evens’ wife, had she not run off with Steve McQueen... Instead it starred Mia Farrow, the former wife of Don't Drink the Water playwright Woody Allen.

Rachel Rachel stars Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman’s wife.

Here are my notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book enhanced by a 1974 movie, of which I watched at least 70%.  It runs 2 and a half hours, in 4 reels, flat and red, 1:3 to 1, well-cropped, in 16mm perhaps to run during airplane flights across the Atlantic.

It is first and foremost a Robert Evens golden age of Paramount production (1968 through 1976). Ali McGraw, his wife, was to play Daisy until she left him for Steve McQueen.

Francis Ford Coppola already wrote the script, then directed the Godfather I and II, the Conversation, and Finiah’s Rainbow, while Robert Evens held onto the script.

Nelson Riddle adapted the music.

Ralph Laren worked Way Too Hard for the credit he received but it is his movie, too. 

I read the book in high school.  I saw the opera at the MET.  I held the prettily packaged soundtrack to this 1970’s movie in my hands.  That’s the extent of my patchy Gatsby appreciation, until Monica ordered an Ebay print as my Christmas present.

An impeccable cast for the delivery of content consists of Sam Waterson, Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Mia Farrow and Robert Redford (5’8”). 

Its British Director also made The Innocents.”

Gatsby is a purist.  Everyone together is not worth one of him.

There’s a problematic issue, never hit and run.

The Robert Evens bloodbaths are somehow always more violent and upsetting than anything depicted today.  First there is the lingeing over the details of warmth, beauty and luxury (He wants us to smell the pasta.).  

There’s another transgressive moment, too, where Karen Black puts her bloodied hands into her mouth after putting them through a shattered window. 

The languorous pace is heavy with poetic Fitzgerald crafted words.  The text rewards thought and attention with illuminating life experience. 

Rachel Rachel is Paul Newman’s wife’s movie.  Our version is in 16mm Technicolor (from Films Incorporated).  By the time it arrived I forgot why it was initially interesting, because Fairfield County area provided its location.  People who attended the screening remembered its production and knew members of the cast. 

It introduces the exceptional range of Joanne Woodward, in a production directed by her husband.  His next collaboration with her was only as producer.  It’s They Might Be Giants, a Sherlock Holmes windmill of a movie with a memorable supermarket scene near the end, which is currently missing.  Ms. Woodward plays Watson to George C. Scott’s Holmes.  

It was this production's connection to They Might Be Giants that sold me.  

This movie has a lovely conclusion.  Why further impose upon the hospitality of the buyer? When Ms. Woodward leaves her childhood home she takes along her mother.  The change is gonna do them good.  ..  

The April 18^th, 2015 Candlewood Isle Film Fest featured pizza made from scratch, the 16mm condensed digest of The Spider Woman with Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Gail Sondergaard  and, for the feature, The Manchurian Candidate, delivered in the form of a one-gigabyte mp4 file.

The modern television screen that rendered the file refreshes so rapidly (60 times a second) that it made the 24 frame film movement look as smooth as a live video broadcast.  Do you remember when movie theaters were mostly projecting darkness, between which our eyes had to carry one image to the next?  This persistence of memory theory has been debunked, but I still think that traditional film projectors display mostly darkness between the flashes of transparencies… Our eyes are just not sensitive enough to read the flickering. 

Frank Sinatra’s two foiled presidential assassination movies are The Manchurian Candidate and Suddenly. 

My impression gleaned from wikipedia research is that he didn’t buy up these movies and suppress them, it’s simply that the movies weren’t that popular and weren’t remembered until 25 years later.   It turns out, that the New York Film Festival returned Manchurian Candidate to the screens in 1988, when I originally saw it. 

To paraphrase my second favorite moment, it is:  They will pay.   I asked for a trained assassin and never imagined they would give me you.  (Ms. Lansbury’s actual concluding line: “… when I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did in so contemptuously under-estimating me.”)

And the other great scene is in the pressroom when a shouting match opens between the drunken senator and a defense department head, while the news cameras run (and while Frank is acting as a publicity manager?)  The overlap of TV coverage caught within the larger movie frame seems groundbreaking.   

Laurence Harvey, a man from Lithuania, with a Chinese manservant who looks strangely like

The author, Richard Condon, also wrote Prizzi’s Honor. He’s a great storyteller with a rampant imagination.

I also saw John Frankenheimer’s Seconds and The Island of Brando as Dr. Moreau.  I like his Moreau movie, with Brando’s Eleanor Roosevelt routine… Moreau’s Horrors!  This version from 1996 added dictatorial implants.  All the mutating population needs to do to revolt is to pull them out.  According to L. Ron Hubbard we should do the same. 

I entered the world of Les Liaisons Dangereuse last night through a preview performance of the Palm Beach Dramaworks production.  Elizabeth West Versalie, playwright/lyricist of Convertible and member of the South Florida Theater League, also attended.
What is amazing to me is my total lack of sympathy for this play, which took 3 hours to deliver.  I'm sure my low level irritation arises because the subject matter cuts so close to home regarding my own work, in which audiences are challenged to find anything that concerns them.
Somehow after three hours I am at a loss to find character development in the figures parading about.    Their sincerity or lack of it seems arbitrary.  Somewhere buried in them are feelings, and the lead fellow's drive to not take no for an answer is somehow a show of strength and ingenuity, useless though it may be.  The playwright's waste of eloquent speech to resurrect the novel, giving costumed actors the opportunity to pretend and prey upon lower realms from a godlike precipice, is completely inconsequential.  Perhaps it lays a foundation for the French Revolution, but the main question after seeing what you'd be overthrowing is, why bother?  Ok, there's more to consider....   Perhaps this griping goes to the merit of classical french theater, the only names coming to mind being Voltaire and Moliere, which is vaguely satirical.  I remember being also annoyed by The Miser and The Hypochondriac (is that Tartuffe?).  I suppose I've grown to love the Bernstein Wilbur modern day derivative of Voltaire's Candide.  I may grow to love Christopher Hampton's Play, too.  

The Candlewood Isle Film Fest continued last Saturday night with a holiday dinner party screening of Meet Me in St. Louis,” a 1944 movie that introduced the Blane & Martin song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” 

During dinner we projected a 16mm kinescope TV broadcast print of the 6^th installment of “The Judy Garland Show” (1962), which included memorable commercials of odd products of the time (Wondra Flour, Winston Cigarettes, Head & Shoulders Shampoo). 

The show featured June Allyson and Steve Lawrence, as well as sidekick Jerry van Dyck.  We focused our eyes on the screen when Ms. Garland began her solo finale, her “informed” heart throbbing version of a rousing Jeanette McDonald song called “San Francisco.”  Triumphant as the credits ran, she contentedly rolled about the stage ending in a fetal position.  

Then we projected the Blue Strip Technicolor transparencies of Meet Me in St. Louis, a print from Rochester New York, perhaps from the George Eastman House, purchased from The Cure Thrift Shop on East 12^th Street for $5. 

The movie commemorates the transformation of St. Louis’s marshland into fairgrounds for the 1905 World’s Fair. Its episodes cover a year of holidays in the lives of a St. Louis family threatened with a move to New York.  Its screenplay drew from a collection of stories Sally Benson wrote for the New Yorker magazine as a series called 5135 Kensington Street.   Ms. Benson’s varied credits include screenwriting Shadow of a Doubt, Viva Las Vegas and The Singing Nun.

By 1944 Vincent Minelli, had left set designing for Radio City Music Hall and had already directed for MGM the black and white musical “Cabin in the Sky.”  He had a way of creating an intimate family atmosphere in his movies.  Another highlight for me is his Shirley MacLaine bar scene in Some Came Running.  

The Three strip Technicolor printing process used for Meet Me In St. Louis, developed by MIT scientists in 1918, was still precious in the 1940s, so the studio indulged Mr. Minelli’s attention to color detail while allowing him to direct this film.   The color palette is intoxicating.

To photograph in Technicolor, Red Green and Blue filters cover the exposure of three strips of black and white film.  The three films are imbibed into one strip of film, such as the strip we ran through the projector on Saturday. 

The blue strip on our print suggests that the print itself was from the 1940’s when it was necessary to conserve on silver for the war. For some reason this adds to the softness of the high color saturation, giving viewers a blue rather than black base.   

The no-place-like-home warmth of the film becomes satirical against such highlights as the anarchy in the streets bonfire of the Halloween segment,

This is the movie where a bonfire burns brightly in the background as Margaret O’Brien, playing a 5-year-old child, bravely goes forward toward the home of a cat killer and throws flour in his face.  As she runs away the house-dog laps it off the floor.  Throwing furniture into the street fire she yells, “I’m the most horrible.”  Ms. O’Brien demonstrates her range to me in the Secret Garden (1949) where she and another boy engage in a yelling match and I think she wins.  The camera crew must have stood back and let that happen.  She’s a pretty great actor.  . She’s still alive, by the way.  

It was such fun having dinner with the movie that we plan to charge $10 and serve dinner and drinks at all future screenings, which are the third Saturday of the month.   

For The Candlewood Isle Film Fest Newsletter, an essay following the dogma,

“Some people write about that which they know.  We write about what we want to find out about.”

---------------

Last month the Candlewood Isle Film Fest screened "Les Diaboliques," the movie of a script Alfred Hitchcock lost to French director Henri Clouzot, forcing him to make "Psycho" instead. 

"Les Diaboliques" preserves the screen acting of Jeanne Moreau and Vera, Clouzot’s Brazilian wife who some years later passed away from a heart attack… just like in the…

This month we saw Sir Alfred’s “Under Capricorn,” a title descriptive of its 1800 setting; near Sydney, on the then prison island (an island the size of the 48 States) of the British Empire, Australia, below the Tropic of Capricorn.  Yes, Glenn Moore knew … The Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn are on our earth’s 23^rd parallel.

As with all Hitchcock possessives, “Under Capricorn” is collaborative.  His Hollywood power was off the charts but look at the credits:     

Writer, Alma Reville, was his wife since his movie career began in 1926. 

In later decades, the blondness of his starlets distracted, or rather, inspired him, but in the 1940’s he focused on the project assigned.

After his off-the-charts British success (What are the “39 Steps”?) David O. Selznik brought him to the States and exerted over him some control.  

Efforts to control Hitchcock inspired him; his greatest US inspiration: the Motion Picture Production Code.

Collaboration highlights through the 1940’s include:  

-- with Joseph Cotton and Theresa White in "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943), featuring "Our Town" ambiance purchased from Thornton Wilder. 

-- with composer Miklos Rosa, painter Salvador Dali and Ingrid Bergman in "Spellbound,"

-- again with Ms. Bergman, Cary Grant and Claude Reins in "Notorious,"

-- and with Cary Grant and again Joan Fontaine (of Rebecca) in "Suspicion."

The efforts of Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotton combined (with help from Mr. Cotton’s friend Michael Wilding) in “Under Capricorn,” made in England in 1949 during Hitchock’s Transatlantic Studio movies, preceded by “Rope,” the movie that implemented the dogma of real-time single shot continuous camera continuity.

Did the box office for “Rope” (with script credit including Arthur Laurent, inspired by the case of Leopold and Loeb) suffer from a simplified perception of the relationship between its two murderers?

Did "Under Capricorn" suffer from its Ingrid-Bergman-has-a-baby-with-Roberto-Rosselini synchronicity?

Both Technicolor films disappeared for a time after their release.  Today, for us to see “Under Capricorn,” we watched a Korean DVD.

Hitchcock did not again go Technicolor until "Dial M for Murder" which made everything all right again and opened the gate for Hitchcock's traipse down the stony end of blondness.

Like “Rope,” “Under Capricorn” uses continuous shooting, but not “real time.”  Also here Hitchcock permits himself cutting between cameras when needed. 

This means more amazing tracking shots.  Hitchcock’s single-shot tracking journeys date back to his focus on the No-One-Can-Drum-Like-the-Drummer-Man drummer in his British film, “Young and Innocent” and can be dated forward to Brian DePalma’s focus on the bucket above the prom stage in “Carrie.”

“Under Capricorn” writing credits include John Colton, the “Shanghai Gesture” Playwright, Jessica Tandy’s husband, Hume Cronyn, and Warsaw Concerto Composer Richard Addinsell.

There are love lessons and life enhancements obtainable from directing one's attention to the two hours of "Under Capricorn" screen time.  See it when you can.  Peter 

8mm Wedding Only Titles June 22nd, 1957

Lou Reed Birthday

Revisiting The World of Lou Reed Under the open guidance of Jeffrey Lewis November 21st, 2013 at Jalopy...almost all my favorite current songwriters were in that room last night
From my notes:  Random order opened with
They're taking her children away.  I am the Waterboy.
then another song ultimately embedded into the Berlin Album:  Stephanie says.  It's so cold in Alaska
Then the cancer cure, "Her life was saved by Rock and Roll"
Black Ocean Ashes
Black Angel's Death
Czechoslovakians, to get to know you, invite you up for tea.  When visiting leave a gift.  Open House.
(Songs for Drella, because that's what we called him?)
Last Great American Wailing Whale.
Run run run.  Take a drag or two, on 5th Avenue.
Jeff's cover of The original wrapper rapper (political song from the 80's).
Satellite of Love.
Steve sang Who Loves the Sun...
I sang "You're right and I'm wrong.... " for piano please credit Allan Macmillan and Rick Wakeman. I never inquired before and found an italian site:  http://www.loureed.it/ that explained it all.  "Berlin" was on the  first Lou Reed solo album!  Eins Zwei Drei Zugabe!  oh, and then later instead of "Don't forget to hire the vet," he came right out and said it... don't forget to Marry The Vet.  he hasn't had that much fun yet...but if he marries you he will... fun... hey baby I like your iggy pop david bowie Fun...  

A low level sarcasm rings out in his poetry and harmonically radical pop gestures... There is some great groundbreaking music, in a low budget music sort of way (especially from alternate guitar tuning), and that's what attracts me, as well as the misleading spirit of entropy and dissolution. In my performance I felt there was so much more to say at the piano... I gave suggestions and want to do more!

Jeff's brilliant structure:  from his email:

THE PERFORMERS!  (Not listed in order… the performance order will be random, and we'll do two rounds of one song each to make sure everybody gets on at least once!)

Add:  Jim Flynn! 

1) Turner Cody 

2) Preston Spurlock 

3) Cal Folger Day 

4) Phoebe Novak 

5) Jeffrey Lewis 

6) Lee Feldman 

7) Pete Galub 

8) Dawn Landes

9) Peter Dizozza 

10) Kristin Andreasson 

11) Peter Stampfel 

12) Pizza Underground 

13) Steve Salett 

14) Steve Espinola 

15) Cannonball Statman

16) The Purple Organ 

17) Common Prayer

I'd love to hear the song most inspired by Lou Reed from each of them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-KLkU0fqHo

ALL THOSE SONS

I recently played ping pong with my agile aging father.  He is not one for passing me "20's" and getting parking tickets, but I dreamed last night that I was playing ping pong with a man named Mohammed and before the game he kept passing me "20s," while pulling parking tickets off his car.  

I don't know how yesterday's pope-resignation headlines affect me, but somehow in my recent real and imagined excursions through manhood I arrived at grandiose thoughts resonating from La Ricotta, a short movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini whose cruelly comic atmosphere sits like a cloud over the purity of communism.

Communism as a reaction to tyranny prolongs tyranny.  (I say this because my condition is a product of my own reflexive anger.)   Maybe Emma Goldman could purely express communist principles (I don't know), but something muddies the rebel causes for both Pier Paolo Pasolini and Marc Blitzstein.

Consider the voice of the great composer Marc Blitzstein; his political preaching to the choir seems sadistic because he advocated a class condition distant from his own.  While condemning people of privilege, Pasolini and Blitzstein each welcomed individuals from all walks of life.

La Ricotta displays the comic death of a passion-play movie extra.  He dies on the cross.  The callousness and cruelty of his supper and crucifixion call to mind a father/son relationship between God and the man on the cross.  Pasolini, having suffered from the childhood domain of a stringent father, became that father.  In a more conjectural way I suggest that Pasolini rebelled against his nasty/sadistic father.  He re-enacts the ritual against his own sons, as they appear in his movies, his other 1962 son appearing in Mama Roma.   The script calls for a crucifixion of  Mamma Roma's boy, too.  Callous authority repeatedly, ritualistically kills its rebel sons.

Ever resonating from the"facts" of Pasolini's passing is that his own life ended in violence.  Political conspiracies aside, Mr. Blitzstein met with a similar end while also embracing the world by welcoming its strangers.  I then conjecture that both artists were interactive in orchestrating the chaotic scene of their own demise.

I put my general realization in the form of a lyric I added to a Bob Dylan song, "God stopped Abraham but no one stopped God from killing his son on highway sixty-one."

Whether or not it is done to save the world, my ridiculous point is that there is a pattern of fathers killing sons.  As sons rebelling against our fathers we prolong the pattern.  

In general, Pasolini's poetic audio visual legacy is a treasure.  Existing as her own force of nature within his world (and around the same time in the world of Luchino Visconti) is Anna Magnani.

To find signs of Pasolini's personal salvation look to the dance lesson in another room, in the last minutes of his last movie, Salo.  Excluded from the De Sade family assembly, these sons are unaffected, independent and free.  

If you've ever wondered whether the medium is the message, consider the following:  In the Christian Bible there is another Genesis contained in the introductory lines to the Gospel of John.   

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ... and the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."  

The liturgical service commemorating the events reported in this gospel places within a central tabernacle behind an altar, where once an ark held scrolls inscribed with God's words, bread that by a miracle becomes the flesh of the son of God.  (Eating replaces reading ...  Sensuality replaces intellect...)

While it is God's words inscribed in the scrolls, John's gospel also announces that "the Word was God." 

If words define our consciousness then no truer words were ever written,  

Conflict over religion in Western Civilization can end because, despite the many sects, we're all a product of only one religion.

I find myself awake on this Friday morning realizing the needs and fears that make up the inaction of the moment... That's the way it is right now maybe forever... Sometimes I think there is a destiny and a connection with God... a universal One of some sort... and that I am an important player, a part in universal destiny that is somehow connected with my creative inspiration as it translates into music and writing... But today I'm more a drone than ever before and I felt I was one when I first started working at the Comptroller's Office... the 54 years have their moments... Sometimes I do feel happy and good about myself and the world... My alter ego has become my father, as he should be, as he always was the man I most avoided... Now I have no choice but to confront him in all his intensity and permanence.  My inspiration consists of seconds, and the perspiration part required to translate inspiration into communication... well, it's an act of focusing, and every moment I feel like I must stop now... I'm feeling at every moment of action that I must stop, that something is stopping me... The simple example with this computer typing is The Heat of the Computer... I may as well admit that after sleeping for a time I turned on the television and it allowed me to start over on its broadcast of Reservoir Dogs, a simple production attaining near perfection... The impact of the Harry Nillson song at the end is now somewhat matched by the brilliant time shifted script.  It's a play and a work of cinema, an opportunity for actors to display their own unique brilliance... an admirable accomplishment, inspiring me to aspire to such an accomplishment.  But it leaves me in a state of low grade hysteria, the Coconut song hysteria... Would I wish this on another person?  The piece leaves you in a crazy place.  And it is brilliant in its engagement.  I was hooked from beginning to end, watching in awe as I understood the context in which memorable events transpire.  It's a strong context... It's the script.  This fellow's impact on my life is somewhat considerable and exists apart from my own life.  I would like a role model somewhere in the entertainment engaging me.   Someone I'd actually like to be, not seeing people who remind me of the worst of me...identifying and awakening my masculine predicament.   It's a pretty funny predicament... Ultimately these movies are comedies, part of the comedy being that they are movies.  

This is my quantum physics post addressing the question of how to make a qubite computer. It already exists through the @rnd function, the random number generator. we have ones and zeros and an unexecuted random number function with the parameter limited to between zero and one. The unexecuted random function is the third bite. The ordinary computer's random number generator arrives at its underwriting calculations by limiting high and low parameters, running the random calculation over and over, the parameter between the random numbers becoming smaller, in effect shrinking Shroedinger's box with the cat in it... I suppose there is no doubt to the answer that ultimately the cat is dead, the act of avoiding observation while trying to determine the observable answer kills it ... Peter Dizozza

The biggest moonshine in 18 years happens tonight. Various earthquakes have already hit the Pacific, New Zealand and Japan, and my mother passed away from a sudden quake of sorts within her. She went forward doing, learning, listening and contributing until she was stopped, in this case by her physical being. Because her mother lived to be a hundred and even then did not die from a natural cause, my mother's health did not receive the attention my father was giving to his own health.
Though not in cause, in effect the reason for my mother's and grandmother's passing is the same, most recently addressed in the script for A Question of Solitude.
Reality is barely comprehensible at a close look. I hear my mother speaking to me. At one point she was entirely me. At this point I am my own person and she is part of me. I miss her and love her.

There aren't many mysteries at present, just of time and existence, of gravity and friendships, of living. The mysteries of eight are infinite but it's just a symbol for a number. We can count and eight can look like a single symbol... are their different symbols for eight in different languages? What does the symbol look like elsewhere. For here it is infinity, a mobius strip, add the ribbon flip to the figure and you have three dimensions in two.

2.26.98



Carol's favorite Movies

I Know Where I'm Going
Michael Powell Ernest Pressburg
Wendy Hiller

Lawrence of Arabia
Great Expectations
David Lean

The River
Jean Renoir
(I like his Dana Andrews Film, Swamp Water)

Snow White
Disney

Gigi
Vincent Minelli

Odd Man Out

--------
Ghost Stories
The Haunting

Comedies
Take the Money and Run
Bedazzled

Sandy likes

The Maltese Falcon
John Huston

Casablanca
Michael Curtiz

Charade
Stanley Donen

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Richard Lester

The Inlaws


M

Gigi

The Thin Man

The Thing

The Sound of Music

Ghandi

Ruggles of Redgap

All of Me

Sabateur

Suspicion



Dizozza Personal Favorites
(please follow each category with the words, "of which I'm aware")

The Music Lovers
Ken Russell

The Chalk Garden
Ronald Neame

The Ruling Class
Peter Medak (also directed Negatives) -- met the director in September, 1992

The Marriage of Maria Braun
Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Chinatown
Roman Polanski

Sleeper
Woody Allen

Oliver!
Carol Reed

Carrie
Brian DePalma

Catagories:

Kubrick
Lolita
Dr. Strangelove
2001
Clockwork Orange
Barry Lyndon
The Shining
(although 20 years in the making, this is the best
string of films since Hitchcock)
also Paths of Glory
Full Metal Jacket
The Killing/Killer's Kiss

Polanski
Rosemary's Baby
(Chinatown)
Cul de Sac
The Tenant
almost Tess and Repulsion
Scorsese
Temptation
Mean Streets
Taxi Driver
maybe Portrait of an American Boy
almost New York New York
King of Comedy

DePalma
Carrie
The Fury
Scarface

Ken Russell; * = good for something other than as a musical
Song of Summer, etc., Billion Dollar Brain
Women in Love *
The Music Lovers *
The Devils *
(The Boy Friend, Savage Messiah), XValentinoX
Tommy *
Lisztomania *
Altered States
Crimes of Passion
Gothic, Salome's Last Dance, Lair of the White Worm

he was also ARIA organizer

Other Musicals I believe are worthwhile -- because at least I've seen them

Follow the Fleet
Roberta
Top Hat

The Bandwagon
Singing In the Rain

42nd Street
Dames
Gold Diggers of 1933

Cabaret (Bob Fosse)
Hair (Milos Forman)
(Oliver!)
A Hard Day's Night
Help!
Yellow Submarine
The Wizard of Oz

The Little Shop of Horrors
The Rocky Horror Picture Show

West Side Story
Gypsy
almost Bye Bye Birdie

Ken Russell
ALL HIS FILMS ARE MUSICALS
Tommy

Disney

Pinocchio
Snow White
Peter Pan
Mary Poppins

The Little (My Little) Mermaid

Maybe Pollyanna
-- also see Parent Trap for Pre-Chalk Garden Haley Mills


Great Hitchcock

almost Young and Innocent
The 39 Steps

Rebecca
Shadow of a Doubt
Strangers on a Train
Suspicion
The Man Who Knew To Much
Rear Window
Vertigo (The James Stewart Trilogy)
North by Northwest
Psycho
(The Madness Trilogy)

The Birds

also The Trouble with Harry

Great DePalma
Obsession
The Fury
(Carrie)
Scarface

Remember
Elaine May:
A New Leaf

Mike Nichols directed
The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge

Arthur Penn directed
The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, and Little Big Man

Warrent Beatty
B & C
$ (Dir. Richard Brooks)
Heaven Can Wait
Bugsy (Music: Ennio Morricone)
Dick Tracy

William Friedken directed
The French Connection
The Exorcist
The great Boys in the Band opening

1910-20
Swedish Films
Victor Sjostrom
Mauritz Stiller

Best Swedish Film
The Silence (Bergman)

1920-30
Way Down East
The Gold Rush
The General
Greed
Sunrise

1930-40
Little Ceasar
Public Enemy

1940-50
Casablanca, of course
They Died with Their Boots On (Prequel to Little Big Man)

1950-60
Rebel Without a Cause

1960-70
The Graduate

1970-80
Midnight Cowboy

1980-1990
Brazil
Raging Bull

Best Welles

Citizen Kane
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Lady from Shanghai

The Third Man
Carol Reed


Great Acadamy Award Winners

The Deerhunter
The Godfather / The Godfather II
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Milos Forman)
Gone With the Wind
From Here to Eternity
The Best Years of Our Lives
The French Connection

Great Marilyn Monroe
Bus Stop
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
The River of No Return
The Misfits

Heat Wave, in There's No Business Like Show Business

Best Spielberg
Duel

Best Bette Davis besides Whatever Happened to Baby Jane
Now Voyager
The Petrified Forest
(Maybe: Marked Woman, Dark Victory)

Best Katherine Hepburn
Alice Adams
Morning Glory
Bringing Up Baby

Best Cary Grant
BUB
Charade
NBN

Best (funniest) Italians

Bertollucci - never saw The Conformist
Last Tango in Paris
Partners
1900
The Last Emperor
Antonioni
Blow Up
almost Red Desert
L'Aventura
Pasolini
Pig Pen
Arabian Nights
Salo
Visconti
Ludwig
(Death in Venice/The Damned)
Fellini
Il Vitelloni
La Strada
La Dolce Vita
Best German
Nosferatu
Caligari
M
Aguire
(The Marriage of Maria Braun)
Lola
The Tin Drum

Best Japanese
Ran
Throne of Blood
Night and Fog in Japan
Kwaidon
Ugestu
Ikiru
others

Best Bergman
The Silence

Detective Films
(Chinatown)
The Big Sleep
The Big Heat (Lang)
The Thin Man

Crime Films
Double Indemnity
(The Killing)
D.O.A.
Sorry Wrong Number

Horror
(Rosemary's Baby)
Halloween
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
almost Witchfinder General/Masque of the Red Death
Freaks
(I Walked with a Zombie)
The Cat People
Island of Lost Souls
Mad Max

Great Whale
Frankenstein
The Bride of Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Show Boat

Ghost Stories
Beetlejuice
Blithe Spirit
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

Best Carol Burnett Version of A Movie
Mildred Fierce

Best Woody Allen
ALL are of consistent quality
favorite: Sleeper

Best Marxes
Duck Soup
Horse Feathers
Go West
All the rest.

Best Comedies
Arthur

Old
City Lights

Best Danny Kaye
Up in Arms

The Saddest Comedy
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Most Misfired Comedy
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Toon Town)

Best Natalie Wood besides Gypsy and West Side Story
Miracle on 34th Street
Rebel Without a Cause
Best looking Natalie Wood besides the others
The Great Race

Good Shirley McLaine
The Trouble with Harry
Sweet Charity (Directed by Bob Fosse)
Terms of Endearment

Ingrid Thulin is in The Silence and The Damned

CARTOONS
Snow White (companion, WB: Coal Black)
Pinocchio (Cinderella?)
Peter Pan
(My) Little Mermaid

Yellow Submarine
Light Years (Korea -> France -> Assimov)

Japanese Male Holocaust Fantasy: The Wandering Kid

TOONS: Mouse/Bunny/Boop

Famous directors of the least important financially profitable films to achieve attention, ever:
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg
Best moment or fraction thereof: Lunch, with Ms. Allen, Mr. Ford and a monkey in Raidrs accompanied by John Williams' music.
Best Williams score: The Fury. The better orchestral inspiration -- Mahler, the Seventh Symphony.

Music names:

Frank Zappa
We all have our favorites
-- best overall album
Burnt Weeny Sandwich (Berlin)
-- albums containing good material
Apostrophe (Yellow Snow/Pancake Breakfast, Remus)
Overnite Sensation (Zombie Woof)
Joe's Garage (Cyborg)
Roxy and Elsewhere (cheepnis)
Uncle Meat
Waka Jawaka

Andrew Lloyd Webber
(Jesus Christ Superstar)

Marc Blitzstein
(Nickel Under Foot)

Kurt Weil
(Three Penny Opera, the Road to Silverlake)

Hoagy Carmichael
Film appearances

Harold Arlen hits in general

Johnny Mercer, lyricist and singer

George Gershwin

Duke Elington, Billy Strayhorn

Patti Smith
(Four Albums)

The Rolling Stones
(Beggar's Banquet, Let It Bleed)

The Beatles

Alexander Scriabin
(Sonatas 5 & 10)

Johannes Brahms

Gustav Mahler

Peter Tchaikovsky

Serge Prokofiev

Claude Debussey

Erik Satie

Stephen Sondheim

David Bowie
(The Man Who Sold The World, Diamond Dogs)

Carly Simon

Laura Nyro

Elvis Costello
(Mighty Like a Rose, My Aim, This Year's, Armed Forces, Get Happy)

Peka Pajola

Steely Dan
Phil Oches
Pleasures of the Harbor, Letter from California

Madonna
(Recording: 12" Live Angel, song: Material Girl)

Samantha Fox

Belinda Carlyle

The Roches

Bruce Springstein
(Thunder Road, Bobby Jean)

Elis Regina

Sergio Mendez

Gong(?)

Genesis
(Nursery Crime, Selling England, Supper's Ready)

Gentle Giant
(Glass House)

Movie Music:
Collaborators with Hitchock
Bernard Herman
Ken Russell,
Peter Maxwell Davies, Rick Wakeman

Ennio Morricone

and for De Palma
(least important major talent, John Williams, shines in The Fury (Mahler's Seventh), rehashed by someone else in The Elephant Man. Williams shining also: Superman, Can You Read My Mind?, and in the good Raidrs scene.)

Best Bacharach (despite words, of course, although the words are essential)
One Less Bell to Answer
Hey, Little Girl
The Look of Love

Bacharach and Herb Albert: This Guy's in Love with You

Best Scores for: Casino Royale, Lost Horizon, Arthur (Bacharach also gives credit to April Fools).

Best Bachrach recording by other than Bacharach -- The Mendez "Look of Love."

Hamlish wrote
Theme from Ice Castles: Please Don't let this feeling end ...
The Spy Who Loved Me - Best recording
If You Remember Me (The Champ)
(On Broadway: Chorus Line/Playing our Song. Is any of it good?)
Favorite Sondheim: All, particularly A Little Night Music

1990 Peak of Powers: Sondheim and Elvis Costello
(Mighty Like a Rose)

Favorite Rupert Holmes (from Drood)
Ceylon, and almost Perfect StrangersFavorite Books

The Woman in White

Bleak House

1984

Lolita

Flowers for Algernon

And Then There Were None

The Glass Key

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Cobra

Madame Bovary

The Picture of Dorian Gray



Best Anne Rice? -- Lestat

Best Kosinski: Cockpit

Melville
Falkner
Chandler
Hammett

John Barth, anyone?Writers
Recent interest in: Robert Benchley
Raymond Chandler
Anne Rice (Rampling? Roquefort)
Aleister Crowley
Doonesbury
Martin Amis -- London Fields, Time's Arrow, half way through Money I had had enough.
Daphne DuMaurier,
Short stories collection: The Turning Point
My Cousin Rachel
etc.
Isaac Asimov's Robot and Foundation trilogy.

Philip K. Dick's Valis

Some Vacchs books
The Perfume Book
The Unnatural Selection book.

Music: Marc Blitzstein
Broadway besides Sondheim:
Harnick & Bock She Loves Me, Fiddler, Fiorello

Artist Names:

Max Ernst
Salvador Dali
Hans Belmer
Francis Bacon
Max Escher
Hieronemous Bosch
Peter Breugel

Renoir
Vermeer
Monet
Gogh

Giacometti

DeKooning, exhibited at the Guggenheim over ten years ago.

Theatre events

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Stratford, Kier Dullea, Fred Gwyne, and Ms. Ashley

Mourning Becomes Elektra, Stratford

Our Town, Stratford

Three Penny Opera, not Beaumont's but Delecort's

Taming of the Shrew, Delecort, Raul Julia, and the only time Merrill Streep has made an impression (positive).

James Earl Jones' King Lear, Delecort

The Caucasion Chalk Circle, Brecht

Lupone as Evita

Les Miserables

Dream Girls

Sweeney Todd six weeks into the Uris run

Ian McKellen's Duchess of Malfi

Pinter's Sweet Bird of Youth

can't remember...

Pacino played Hughie -- that was good. dir. Theodore Mann

My favorite Hamlet: Richard Chamberlain
Favorite Playwrites:
Shakespeare
O'Neill (Mourning)
Williams (Cat)
others (Pinter, Stoppard, Mamet, Rabe)

Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest
Wrote the Happy Prince and the Devoted Friend, recorded by Claire Luce for Folkways Records

The interesting phenomenon during Last Night's visit to the V clinic... I'm kidding, it's not the V clinic... I'm helping with a study on brain waves, remember? The phd candidate is searching for the brain difference between aspergers and normals... is normals a pluralable noun?

... While there, with a constantly moving head within the magnetoencephelograph helmet, I experienced the phenonmenon of hearing lips and seeing voices... Professor McGurk's studies in the 1970's... ?? I have to look this up but the sound of the word changed as I looked at a video of the speaking of it run backwards... basically from a ba sound to a cla sound...the other studies were by Professor Tallon-Baudry and Professor Peter J. Lang...

Seeing a thing while it is making a noise changes the way we hear the noise the thing is making... that is ONE way to put it....the experiment here consisted of showing the video then reversing the video of the same spoken word. it sounded like a different word...

I am aware today of the following:

Charles Fourier and his proposal for community cooperation ordered as a phalanx...The Phalansteres is a Grand Hotel... Procul Harum introduced me to that setting...

Charles Dana, editor of The New York Sun once lived in a phalanx farm.

Thanks to a grant from Mr. Dana's foundation, I've learned that the brain emits magnetic rays at about 10 waves a second. Flashing faces may affect that. Choose whether they are black or whte, in black and white or color, whether their mouths, noses or eyes are blurred or focused, whether they are happy afraid angry fearful or neutral... Early results suggest when my eyes are open the wave patter more resembles the eyes closed pattern than when they are closed. The average wave is constant rather than varied.

I believe my participation is beneficial to everyone.

We don't even get to personality until we are impeccable with our word... How can you attain the right to be a person if you constantly make mistakes? Needless to say, I am my mistakes and do not call them that. I am secure in my awareness until I am proven wrong and am just as secure in my new awareness, and appreaciate your proofs and the attention you gave me. Thank you! Now what am I doing, I'm making a motion to amend pleadings to add a cause of action. We even don't get into the courtroom unless the papers are in order.

I have kitty-cat visitors for the weekend.

The fundraiser at the neighborhood playhouse went well, thanks to the great talent involved... I'd especially like the thank THE STEPPE DOGGES!

How about assuming full responsibility? oh to live up to it...

When it comes to my actions, I am self-insured...

Insurance companies have been in the film business. there's transamerica for united artists, american international is aig... and now, The CVII Insurance Company.

Insurance creates a disproportion in risk assumption... I am seriously suggesting here being

self-insured.