If it's true, this may be the singularly most unusual "old Hollywood" story I've ever heard. But I'll just direct you to the source. For the last few weeks, a gossip blogger who uses the name "Ent Lawyer" (is that some kind of Tolkien thing?) has been drawing attention with his story that an award-winning actress was actually a man. Here's the original blind item as it appeared on his blog "Crazy Days, Crazy Nights" three weeks ago, and here's the wrap-up where he tells the whole story.
The first of these has been around for over a year, and the sequel's been up since March, but I just ran across them. Some of the best Flash animation I've seen, and a sort of contemporary "Duck Amuck". The artist's name is Alan Becker (according to his web page, he's only 18) and you can find more of his work here.
It wouldn't be much of a weekend without an arts overload from the New York Times, would it? A.O. Scott looks at the 40th anniversary of Bonnie and Clyde and feels guilty... Woody Allen recalls Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese weighs in on Michelangelo Antonioni, and Christopher Hitchens holds forth on the latest and last Harry Potter book.
..And just on the heels of yesterday's news comes another obituary. It's the end of an era for the giants who reshaped international cinema in the postwar years. Details and appreciation here, plus a guide to scenes from his films on YouTube.
Ignore the usual sour-grapes that are bound to follow anything that has been around as long as it has. The Simpsons isn't just a long running tv series; it's mankind's greatest achievement! Says so right in The Onion's A.V. World, where they're commemorating the release of The Simpsons Movie with an entire week of Springfield-related content. For starters, try this list of "15 Simpsons Moments that Perfectly Captured their Eras" . I couldn't agree more with No. 6, which sums up the post-ironic age perfectly when Homer goes on the road with Lollapalooza (his act consists of being hit in the stomach by a cannonball), prompting this audience exchange:
"Oh, here comes that cannonball guy. He's cool."
"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"
(after a desparate pause...) "I don't even know any more."
Below, one of the great Simpsons guest star appearances:
"First things are always beautiful", as the critic and novelist Gilbert Adair accurately said of this film. More than eleven decades have passed since the Lumiere brothers first presented this work to the public, but it's lost none of its magic. Look! it says. Here is the real world of people and animals and bicycles and traffic. It's alive, it's real and above all, it moves!
The Artist Still Known as Prince has been very busy lately, launching a new fragrance (scratch here for a sample), opening a club in Las Vegas,playing lengthy sold-out engagements in Los Angeles and London (What? He's only playing in cities that start with "L"?), preparing for a religious sabbatical sometime next year, and - this week - releasing a pretty darn good new album, "Planet Earth", which marks the return of former Revolution-mates Wendy and Lisa. In the New York Times, Jon Pareles explains that Prince could pretty much rule the world if he wanted to, while Time and the Guardian explain why he's giving the record industry fits. Though it seems to me that the clip below might be a pretty good reminder as well.
Besides his own excellent work as a solo artist and with Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry has always been one of the most gifted interpreters of other songwriters' work, his smooth and subdued lounge-lizard vocals bringing an air of world-weary melancholy to everything from The Velvet Underground to "You Are My Sunshine". From the blistering version of "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall" that opened his first solo album, 1973's "These Foolish Things" to the pairing of "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and "Don't Think Twice It's All Right" on 2002's "Frantic", Ferry has revealed a surprising affinity for the work of Bob Dylan, culminating in what seems in retrospect like an inevitable event, his latest album "Dylanesque". Browsing through the Dylan catalog, Ferry explores everything from light-hearted pop to Hendrix-inspired noise to make even such familiar and inimitable songs as "Simple Twist of Fate" and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" into a personal cabaret. The highlight is this poignant, haunting resetting of one of Dylan's most bitingly angry songs, "Positively 4th Street".
Finally, some footage from one of the most anticipated films of the year, I'm Not There, in which director Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven) sets his sights on Bob Dylan, with The Man From Hibbing played by six different actors of varying race and gender, Heath Ledger and Richard Gere among them. The clip below features Cate Blanchett as the Don't Look Back-era Dylan, with David Cross as Allen Ginsberg.
(A big thanks to Hollywood Elsewhere and The L.A. Times' Gold Derby for the link, though I have to take exception to the latter's complaint that Blanchett isn't "believable". Whatever Haynes' is up to here, it should be pretty obvious that it's not realism.)
You may recognize the lovely lady to the right from the cover of Gore Vidal's classic "Myra Breckenridge", but before securing that modeling gig she was a fixture of the Sunset Strip, perched on a giant coin as part of a billboard advertising the Sahara Casino and located in front of the legendary/notorious Chateau Marmont. Raquel Welch duplicated the cowgirl's costume in the excruciating 1970 film version of Vidal's novel (which also included footage of the original statue). But an even odder appropriation of the cowgirl statue has been brought to my attention, courtesy of Domenic Priore's "Riot on Sunset Strip" (reviewed below). In 1961, cartoonist Jay Ward unveiled a statue of Rocky and Bullwinkle in front of his Sunset Blvd. studio, directly across the street from the Chateau Marmont. (The studio is gone, as is Ward's neighboring gift shop, The Dudley Do-Right Emporium, which operated from 1971 to 2005, but the statue remains a Hollwood fixture to this day.) And as both Priore's book and this picture clearly show, Ward's statue was a mischievous (but subtle) parody/homage to his lovely, patriotic neighbor.
Speaking of Hollywood landmarks, a friend directed my attention to Hollywood Lost and Found, a modest but entertaining selection of Southern California history, movie lore and other miscellany, including this rather disturbing image (Warning!: Contains Clowns!)
Is it really possible that both of these satirical classics are out of print?
Finally, here's an apocalyptic theme song for the day:
The almost indescribableWings of Desire ("Der Himmel uber Berlin") is 20 years old this month. On his website, director Wim Wenders is justifiably proud of his much-loved creation. If you haven't seen it (or if you've had the misfortune of seeing the American remake), ..what are you waiting for?
I was fortunate enough to see Sly and the Family Stone perform live in 1973, right on the heels of their last great album Fresh and they were amazing. Sly's rapid decline and gradual withdrawal from the music world has made him the last of the legendary recluses in music but, as this interview in the current Vanity Fair reveals, the musician's long absence from the public eye may be coming to an end. Hot fun in any season.
Thanks to an item at Trio for introducing me to Literary Traveler (even though it's been around since 1998!), a website about books and authors and the places they lived and wrote about. Each month is devoted to a particular theme, currently "Western Literature" (as in cowboys and covered wagons). Recent subjects have included children's books and pirates, and the individual articles on the site run the gamut from the Victorian England of Beatrix Potter to the Puerto Rico of Hunter S. Thompson's "Rum Diary".
The Riot on Sunset Strip (the historical event) was a spontaneous protest that erupted one night in November 1966 when Los Angeles police, prompted by local business interests, tried to enforce a curfew law in order to drive out the teenaged crowds who had dominated the area’s club scene for the previous few years. Riot on Sunset Strip (the movie) was a quickly-produced exploitation film with production values slightly lower than an episode of “Dragnet” but with performances by some of the authentic Sunset Strip bands of the period (The Standells and The Chocolate Watchband among them). Cult starlet Mimsy Farmer falls in with a bad crowd, to the dismay of her estranged father, policeman Aldo Ray. “Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Last Stand in Hollywood” (Jawbone Press, 288 pp., $29.95) is probably the definitive look at the period that lead up to the above two items, but for author Domenic Priore the real riot of the period was a cultural breakthrough that produced an onslaught of significant music in those strange few years before AM top 40 gave way to unprogrammed FM. Priore's premise is that after the immediate shock of the British invasion Los Angeles responded in kind by becoming the musical and cultural capital of all things young and new. Besides obvious heavyweight acts like The Byrds, Frank Zappa, Love and the Doors, it was an environment in which all kinds of music from surf to psychedelia, from the feel-good pop sounds of the Turtles and The Mamas and the Papas to proto-punk garage bands like The Seeds and The Knickerbockers flourished and encouraged each other. Priore is a pop culture historian and enthusiast with an encyclopedic grasp of the period as well as, I'd guess, an extensive record collection and a complete run of "Hit Parader" back issues. He can tell you not only how many different bands recorded "Hey Joe" but how many recorded "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune". Hardly an aspect of pop culture of the era, from art to appearances on. Hanna Barbera cartoons escapes his attention. The result is an exhaustive, handsomely designed volume that not only recreates the spirit of that brief period in L.A. history but will have you scribbling lists of obscure tracks and forgotten bands worth tracking down. His grasp of the period is strong enough to defend even the most commercial projects of the time (Hey, Hey, they're the Monkees) and as well as to define the Sunset Strip period within history and distinguish it from the later excesses of the San Francisco sound and the rise of FM-radio Album-oriented rock. His is a lively, informative and always entertaining history of a microcosmic teenage culture that burned brightly and disappeared too fast.
It's pretty simple: Amnesty International - an organization which already deserves your support - wants to draw attention to the horrors currently taking place in Darfur, Sudan. They've released an album of a few dozen musical heavyweights (U2, Green Day, R.E.M., Aerosmith, Jackson Browne, Lenny Kravitz) performing cover versions of John Lennon songs. Like most such projects, it's all over the map musically , but most of it is pretty good. All you have to do is go here and sign their petition and/or buy the CD.
For at least three decades, he was the standard by which other actors were judged. In the London Review of Books, Michael Wood looks at the legacy of Marlon Brando.
