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street food vendor, 1930s, singapore; from the-inncrowd.com
The Columbo star played a stunning variety of roles, from heroes to villains, from romantic leads to comic sidekicks, and even The Twilight Zone’s version of Fidel Castro. Don’t fret about him being gone from us. He’ll come back as a landed angel, for the coffee and cigarettes.
In case you haven’t noticed, there are some lovely cover-art images on this page’s lower left. They depict books, CDs, and DVDs with at least a vague connection to Seattle and proximity, all of which are for sale.
The selection changes at random every time you load or reload any page on this site. So if you don’t see something you like, you probably will the next time.
I just added more than 100 additional titles to the database, so there’s plenty of variety.
Of course, if you really want to help support these verbal endeavors, you should buy one of our own lovely MISCmedia products.
At least two more of those will be up for your perusal and purchase within the next few months. Stay tuned.
The film version of (part of) Atlas Shrugged has come to and mostly gone from America’s cinemas. (Around here, it’s still playing at one multiplex in Bellevue.)
All progressively-minded film critics and political pundits have used this apparently mediocre movie to make big snarky laffs at the expense of the story’s original author, the eminently and deservedly mockable Ayn Rand.
As is usually the case, Roger Ebert expressed this conventional wisdom better than anybody. (Though Paul Constant at the Stranger gave it a good try.)
So why am I writing about it this late in the game?
Because there’s something ironic, and not in a cute/funny way, about art-world people calling Rand and her followers arrogant elitists.
There’s an outfit in Italy called the Manifesto Project. It gathered short essays on graphic design and commercial art (in English) from 24 leading designers around the world.
One of these is by the eminent American magazine, book and poster designer Milton Glaser. During a passage about how “doubt is better than certainty,” Glaser starts discussing why so many designers can’t embrace either doubt or collaboration:
There is a significant sense of self–righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty. Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad—the client, the audience and you. Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self–righteousness is often the enemy. Self–righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co–existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.†Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.
There is a significant sense of self–righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.
Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad—the client, the audience and you.
Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self–righteousness is often the enemy. Self–righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co–existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.†Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.
I’ve ranted umpteen times in the past about “alt” culture’s silly tendencies toward us-vs.-them nonsense. All the anti-“mainstream” pomposity. The brutal stereotypes against anyone who can be sufficiently categorized (suburbanites, sports fans, meat eaters).
The real purpose of art and culture isn’t to show off how awesome you are. It’s to communicate something to somebody else, to strengthen the bonds that tie all of this mongrel species together.
When we fail at this, are we no better than Atlas Shrugged’s cocktail-downin’ snobs (only with hipper clothes)?
At 2 a.m. this morning, I finished a book project that won’t earn me a cent for at least six months. I can now resume finding other excuses not to blog.
After I post a few entries I’d been putting off.
First, you might have heard of the big online buzz over what is supposed to be the only nude photo ever posed by Elizabeth Taylor.
It’s a photoshopped fake.
The original “body shot,” to which Taylor’s face was pasted on, is a “tasteful” Hollywood glamour nude, done in 1940 by photographer Peter Gowland and included in a photography guidebook he and his wife issued many years later.
The figure pictured in it doesn’t even remotely match the see-thru shots Taylor had made for Playboy on the set of Cleopatra. Those were published in 1963, less than five years after she was supposed to have posed for the nude. (The Playboy image does not appear to be online in any freely accessible place; here’s a tiny thumbnail of a similar shot.)
To any sane person (other than a marketer or a techie), the current Hollywood major-studio feature films are by and large loud and idiotic.
How did they get this way?
Mark Harris, writing in GQ, has his own theory. To Harris, there was a time when the likes of Star Wars and Jaws could coexist in the multiplexes with the likes of An Officer and a Gentleman and The Shining. Then….
Then came Top Gun. The man calling the shots may have been Tony Scott, but the film’s real auteurs were producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, two men who pioneered the “high-concept” blockbuster—films for which the trailer or even the tagline told the story instantly. At their most basic, their movies weren’t movies; they were pure product—stitched-together amalgams of amphetamine action beats, star casting, music videos, and a diamond-hard laminate of technological adrenaline all designed to distract you from their lack of internal coherence, narrative credibility, or recognizable human qualities. They were rails of celluloid cocaine with only one goal: the transient heightening of sensation.
That’s exactly what’s also wrong with America’s political discourse.
A cable TV channel (founded by a Hollywood studio) has taken effective control of one of the two major parties. Along with its radio pundit counterparts, it dumbs down all debate into simplistic emotional manipulations. You’re not even supposed to think about what they’re saying. You’re just supposed to react with anger/hubris/fear on cue.
PS: The 2011 Oscars? What a bore of self congratulatory tripe. Even more than usual.
The celebrities and their handlers are not even pretending, for the most part, to be living in a world remotely resembling the real America of the bottom 98 percent.
the ordeal was “sped up” in the wrong way, by taking out any potential for spontaneity and water cooler moments, leaving the bare bones outline of the massive droning ritual with no “breathing room,” no chance for personality or creativity. Much like your standard assembly line major studio movies themselves. The only “moments,” such as they were, were a senile Kirk Douglas refusing to stick to the script and the appearance of Mr Trent Reznor in a tux. That and a sharp political barb by the Best Documentary winner were, I am afraid, it.
One more reason for me to say: Save the movies. Kill Hollywood.
A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.
As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.
MTV.com has, today, finally posted all of $5 Cover Seattle.
Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton completed the “webisode” music/drama series over a year ago. But the MTV bureaucrats sat on it ’til now.
If only Shelton had had someone in her life who could have warned her about working with this company.
Oh, wait….
Last night, I attended the highly anticipated premiere of I Am Secretly an Important Man, the long in-the-making biopic about Seattle poet/author/musician/actor/performance artist Steven J. “Jesse” Bernstein.
Documentarian Peter Sillen had been collecting footage and reminiscences of Bernstein since the year after Bernstein’s 1991 suicide. Only now, after directing four other films and performing camera work on several others, has Sillen finally assembled this footage into an 85-minute feature.
He’s done a spectacular job.
The finished work captures, as well as any mere 85-minute feature can, the immense creative range, depth, and contradictions within Bernstein, which I won’t attempt to describe in this one blog entry.
(Of course, it helps that Bernstein recorded so much of his life and work in audio tape, video tape, and film, much of it taken by artists and collaborators from across the Northwest creative community.)
Suffice it to say you should see An Important Man during its engagement later this autumn at the Northwest Film Forum.
This week has seen two members of the still fledgling Seattle filmmaking community step out of the scrappy milieu of ultra-low-budget indie cinema and into the most formula-driven segment of Hollywood, “episodic” television.
Last Thursday, John Jeffcoat’s warm, subtle dramedy feature Outsourced premiered as a broader, more blatant NBC sitcom.
And on Sunday, Humpday mumblecore auteur Lynn Shelton made her Directors Guild of America debut helming a particularly emotional episode of AMC’s Mad Men.
Reviews for Outsourced the series are mixed at best. Shelton’s Mad Men episode got its full share of the praise that that critics’-darling series has gotten.
Jeffcoat and George Wing, his co-screenwriter on the Outsourced movie, are credited with the screenplay for the Outsourced series pilot episode. But Hollywood producer Robert Borden shepherded the series adaptation.
The simpler, cruder gags and ethnic humor in the show, compared to the original film, could be the work of Borden. But they should more appropriately attributed to the network’s vehicle assembly system, the layers of bureaucracy that turn so many promising shows into mush before they even get a chance.
Reportedly, Jeffcoat and Wing have been retained as consultants on the series. Let’s hope they can help mix in a greater portion of the film’s higher culture-clash content.
Shelton faced the opposite situation.
She was given a script, complete with multiple last-minute rewrites. She was given standing sets, a regular cast and crew, and an established audio-visual vocabulary. She had input on the episode’s new settings and guest actors. She had eight shooting days and a similarly tight editing schedule.
The result was not, by any means, a Lynn Shelton film. It was a regular Mad Men, albeit an especially potent one.
Directing episodic TV is more akin to conducting than to composing. It’s working within a complex set of disciplines and strictures. It is an art in its own right.
A ramble today about the miserable economy and potential alternatives thereto.
I begin with recent remarks by Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang. He has a book out in the UK, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.
Plugging the book in the Brit daily The Independent, Chang’s alleged that the current global corporate system has turned us all into Matrix drones, sleepwalking through a fantasy world and incapable of imagining any other.
This is the ol’ Plato’s cave allegory, refitted to modern pop-culture references.
And I believe it’s only half true, at most.
Eleven years ago, thousands swarmed Seattle’s streets protesting just that system.
Today, you sure don’t have to be a political radical to see a lot of dysfunction in the way things currently are.
But what to do about it?
In this country, the Republicans only offer a return to the lobbyist-whoring ways of the Bush years. The corporate Democrats offer watered down Clintonian half measures, then dilute them further.
I’ve talked and corresponded with a lot of people who desperately want something better.
But what?
Third-world style dictatorship works at keeping a small elite in power, but it’s lousy for most everybody else. Central-state Communism sometimes worked a little better in regard to social services; but it could be brutally inefficient, where dictatorships were simply brutally efficient.
Besides, excessive centralization of capital and wealth is a lot of what’s wrong with the present system. We need more economic diversity and democracy, not less.
So I hereby introduce my own formula for a better, more prosperous tomorrow:
Economic MISCosity.
The elevator-pitch description: Try whatever works.
To hell with pure socialism, pure capitalism, pure anything.
Decentralize businesses and business units. More authority to those in the field. More co-op and worker-controlled enterprises.
Use public financing and/or administration for those social goods that often aren’t best serviced by the profit motive. I’d nominate health care as just such a sector.
Promote more and different metrics of economic success, other than just the Almighty Stock Price.
To my alt-culture pals: Can the square-bashing, the rural-bashing, and the working-class-bashing. We’re all in this thing together.
To my baby-boomer pals: This ain’t gonna be pretty, or laid back, or mellow. Be prepared for some heavy lifting.
To my NPR-fan pals: This ain’t gonna be easy to understand, let alone simple to accomplish. Beware of easy answers, no matter what they are. Our future is a messy, complex, complicated place, full of twists and seeming contradictions. Live with it.
“From Off the Streets of Cleveland,” as the kicker on his American Splendor comic books proclaimed, came legendary realistic memoirist Harvey Pekar.
Pekar was a Beat Generation-aged guy who didn’t find his career niche until the late ’70s. But that’s a gross overgeneralization, something Pekar always refused to do.
Pekar’s roots were in stuff that’s relatively timeless—jazz music, modern lit, the architecture of urban neighborhoods, the subtle emotions of everyday working-class life. He was not a man of fads, fashions, or flash. He was a man out of time, outside the publishing industry’s notions of marketability.
He found his breakthrough concept through lifelong friend Robert Crumb, who had discovered his own breakout shtick as the cartooning idol of a flower-power subculture he’d despised. Pekar would write stories that Crumb would draw. These strips grew into a full-length comic book, which Pekar self-published in annual installments, with a growing corps of illustrator-collaborators.
These comics were sold through comic book stores in “direct market” fashion. Pekar put up his own money to print them. Stores put up their own money to carry them (no consignments or returns).
In a few years, Pekar had become one of the biggest stars in the tiny world of alt-comix. He kept putting out the work on a steady schedule. He maintained a high standard in both his writing and in his collaborators’ artwork.
Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi has argued that no great cartooning is ever writer-centered; that an artist’s visual imagination must be at the core of anything in the genre. Pekar regularly disproved that. The American Splendor books always carried a strong visual flair in their dialogue-heavy panels.
That’s because Pekar, as his own publisher/editor/art director, kept a paternalistic but tight tein on his hired hands. The art in his books was always realistic, always based on the minute details of faces, clothes, and poses. Employing a variety of drawing partners in each volume only confirmed the degree to which American Splendor’s vision was Pekar’s.
Pekar never sought fame. Nor did he openly decry it. He went on the Letterman show during a network technicians’ strike wearing a pro-strikers T shirt, as a simple statement of workers’ solidarity. He used his latter-day brand image to promote the work of other writers and artists, and to discuss the big stuff that pertains to the little stuff (recession economics, Jewish identity). By staying in his realm, he remained true to his self.
One of the great cult filmmakers has passed on at age 89.
Decades before the Lifetime Movie Network, he had the vision to combine two female-centered genres—soap opera melodramatics and softcore sex.
The visual, narrative, and acting styles of his ’60s New York films (Moonlighting Wives, The Love Merchant, Red Roses of Passion, etc.) borrowed heavily from the era’s daytime TV soaps. Harsh lighting; long speeches; single-camera-angle dialogue scenes with people talking to one another but looking out in the same direction.
The women and men in these films had a lot of sex, but it was obsessive-compulsive sex, which often inflamed his characters’ feelings of guilt and helplessness.
As the grindhouse film circuit turned to Eastmancolor sunniness later in that decade, Sarno came to spend his summers filming in Sweden. These films (Swedish Wildcats, Butterflies, Young Playthings) now had bright skies and green scenery and pouting young blonde stars. But they were still rooted in pathos and dramatic conflict. And they still depicted their heroines and heroes as fully dimensional people, torn between conflicting desires, or between desires and obligations.
When theatrical softcore faded as a commercial genre in the ’70s, Sarno turned to directing hardcore porn under pseudonyms—first for porn theaters, then direct to video. He kept at this until 1990. But hardcore’s stag-film aesthetic of frenetic fake “heat” and forced “happiness” wasn’t really his style.
By then, Seattle’s Something Weird Video had issued several of Sarno’s softcore dramas on VHS. With these releases, and later DVD reissues, Sarno became known as someone a cut or three above the genre’s formulaic hacks.
Retro Seduction Cinema (part of the string of video labels started in New Jersey by William Hellfire and Michael Raso) acquired other old Sarno films, and reissued some that Something Weird had put out before.
Then in 2004 they brought him out of retirement to make one comeback opus, Suburban Secrets. It was shot on handheld video cams, with much of the regular cast and crew from Raso and Hellfire’s lesbian horror-spoof vids. It’s two and a half hours long. While the cast isn’t as adept at dialogue histrionics as it is at body bumping, Sarno’s signature touches shine through. Where Raso’s movies usually hide behind the safe emotional costumery of “meta” parody, Suburban Secrets treats its characters, and the sex they’re having, as if they actually meant something.
Our ol’ UW Daily colleague Jim Emerson has found a snarky fake movie trailer that perfectly encapsulates a “generic movie based on the movie they’ve been releasing every single week since the 1980s.”
