Oh, dear God, classic film bloopers are a timesink. Must not stay up all night watching silliness from actors I love, even if Claude Rains blowing a line from White Banners (1938) and shouting himself offscreen with, "Oh, damn and bloody and bugger and blast!" (evidently entering that year's competition for George VI sound-alike) is one of the most peculiarly endearing things I've seen in weeks. I have to do something respectable and job-related in the morning.
2011-05-18
1. Thank God, brain. I dreamed last night that since childhood I had owned a biography of Lloyd Alexander with hand-colored photographs of the author and his wife Janine for endpapers. The dust jacket matched the original hardcover editions of the Prydain Chronicles. I feel much better about my subconscious now.
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strange_selkie's latest project is reminding me that I never got around to putting together a dinner menu of things named entirely after the Napoleonic Wars. If I ever turn into Kate Beaton or Sydney Padua and draw cartoons of Nelson, he will be wearing a T-shirt which reads, "I died at the Battle of Trafalgar and all I got named after me was an obscure cultivar of apple." Seriously, even Talleyrand gets a complicated flaming dessert.
3. Late this morning I found myself on a subway car whose route map hadn't been altered since, I believe, 1983: Downtown Crossing was Washington, JFK/UMass was Columbia, and the Red Line terminated at Harvard and Quincy Center. I remember when the line was extended out to Alewife. I didn't know until just now that there's an actual, artist-chosen title for what I've always thought of as the caterpillar benches.
4. Goodbye, Edward Hardwicke. You were never my definitive Watson—I imprinted on David Burke—but I have family and friends in mourning for you.
5. It's one of those days when I despair of being art.
Here, movies, records, concerts, novels, poems, paintings, can seem to vibrate with an energy repressed but not stolen by time. You begin to discover what it is you truly love. Like David Thomas with the walls of his skull decorated with pictures of Ghoulardi, Captain Beefheart, Sky Saxon of the Seeds, Alfred Jarry, and a hundred more, you begin to create a personal culture of maps and talismans, locks and keys, within the greater culture of which you are a part whether you want to be or not. When you approach the greater culture with a personal culture, you do so with the knowledge that the greater culture can never satisfy you, and the knowledge of what an earthquake it would be if it did: if the greater culture could, even for an instant, truly satisfy anyone, and then nearly everyone, as, on occasion, as with the emergence of Charlie Chaplin or the Beatles, it has. Look at it this way, and the music Rocket from the Tombs left behind might begin to speak.
—Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006)
2.
strange_selkie's latest project is reminding me that I never got around to putting together a dinner menu of things named entirely after the Napoleonic Wars. If I ever turn into Kate Beaton or Sydney Padua and draw cartoons of Nelson, he will be wearing a T-shirt which reads, "I died at the Battle of Trafalgar and all I got named after me was an obscure cultivar of apple." Seriously, even Talleyrand gets a complicated flaming dessert.3. Late this morning I found myself on a subway car whose route map hadn't been altered since, I believe, 1983: Downtown Crossing was Washington, JFK/UMass was Columbia, and the Red Line terminated at Harvard and Quincy Center. I remember when the line was extended out to Alewife. I didn't know until just now that there's an actual, artist-chosen title for what I've always thought of as the caterpillar benches.
4. Goodbye, Edward Hardwicke. You were never my definitive Watson—I imprinted on David Burke—but I have family and friends in mourning for you.
5. It's one of those days when I despair of being art.
Here, movies, records, concerts, novels, poems, paintings, can seem to vibrate with an energy repressed but not stolen by time. You begin to discover what it is you truly love. Like David Thomas with the walls of his skull decorated with pictures of Ghoulardi, Captain Beefheart, Sky Saxon of the Seeds, Alfred Jarry, and a hundred more, you begin to create a personal culture of maps and talismans, locks and keys, within the greater culture of which you are a part whether you want to be or not. When you approach the greater culture with a personal culture, you do so with the knowledge that the greater culture can never satisfy you, and the knowledge of what an earthquake it would be if it did: if the greater culture could, even for an instant, truly satisfy anyone, and then nearly everyone, as, on occasion, as with the emergence of Charlie Chaplin or the Beatles, it has. Look at it this way, and the music Rocket from the Tombs left behind might begin to speak.
—Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice (2006)
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