What the Writers Almanac website says Garrison Keillor said today on the show:
The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on this day in 1917. Laura Richards and Maude Elliott won the prize for biography, with their book about the 19th-century writer and suffragist Julia Ward Howe. Jean Jules Jusserand (zhawn zhool zhoo-say-RAWN), the French ambassador to the United States from 1902 to 1925, won the prize for history: With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert B. Swope of the New York World won the prize for journalism, and when he picked up his award, said: “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula of failure — which is try to please everybody.”
What Garrison Keillor actually said (I just listened):
The first Pullitzer Prizes were awarded on this day in 1917, and the authors were all writers whom you or I never read, nor does anybody else today.
I skim a lot of blogs relating to arts and culture during the day, and things catch my eye, but I hate to repeatedly blog little links here. I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr and I think it’s the right way to do it, leaving this blog for stuff that’s actually about us (hence the name, right?).
Ergo, I give you Culture Log.
I’ll be blogging several links and quotes and things per day that I find interesting. It’s all completely subjective. Tumblr doesn’t provide commenting features, which I’ve fallen progressively more out of love with anyhow, and it makes it very easy to quickly blog all kinds of media. Culture Log has an RSS feed, so feel free to subscribe . . . or not. This is mostly for my own edification and for anyone else who wishes to look over my shoulder and see what I’m reading.
I keep trying to quote this to people because I love the image Raymond Chandler paints, but he put it so much better that I’ll just post it here for everyone to read:
He was still out when I got back. I unlocked the door, dragged him into the house, shut the door. He was beginning to gasp now. I switched a lamp on. His eyes fluttered open and focused on me slowly.
I bent down, keeping out of the way of his knees and said: “Keep quiet or you’ll get the same and more of it. Just lie quiet and hold your breath. Hold it until you can’t hold it any longer and then tell yourself that you have to breathe, that you’re black in the face, that your eyeballs are popping out, and that you’re going to breathe right now, but that you’re sitting strapped in the chair in the clean little gas chamber up in San Quentin and when you take that breath you’re fighting with all your soul not to take it, it won’t be air you’ll get, it will be cyanide fumes. And that’s what they call humane execution in our state now.”
I just finished working on a film where the director had an idea, but didn’t know how to make choices to execute it. Similarly, despite all our bashing of Hollywood blockbusters, Noel Murray makes a good argument over at the AV Club:
Not so long ago, the big summer blockbusters were being helmed by the likes of Roland Emmerich, Chuck Russell, Stephen Sommers, Simon West and Dominic Sena - all middling technicians with no clear vision - and Michael Bay, a visionary with no finesse. The movies were frequently sloppy, ugly, and dispiriting. By contrast, [Sam] Raimi (Spider-man 1-3) and [Gore] Verbinski (Pirates of the Carribean) make movies with personality, crafted with skill. Critics and film buffs may not like that personality, but they should at least appreciate that definite choices were made, by directors with a clear plan in mind. They’ve given us something intelligible to engage with.
It’s like the difference between arguing politics with a newspaper columnist and arguing politics with a Jerry Springer guest. Both may be an exercise in futility, but at least the former will give you a chance to use your wits, if you choose to take it.
On another note, I’ve noticed that the number of musician biopics has gone up since the success of Ray. Last year it was Walk the Line. This year we have La Vie en Rose (about Édith Piaf), Todd Haynes’s tangential Bob Dylan flick I’m Not There, Anton Corbijn’s Control about Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, and, of course, Across the Universe Julie Taymor’s Beatles extravaganza. Then in development are biopics on Janis Joplin (starring Zooey Deschanel), Miles Davis (Don Cheadle) and a project about Keith Moon, the Who’s drummer (starring Mike Myers). (courtesy of GreenCine)
When you’re at work, or you’re at home, and you’re sort of just . . . daydreaming . . . what do you most wish you were doing, or could do?
Short-term, long-term, I want to know.
For me, it goes back and forth, but these days I have two main daydreams; one is that I’m a full-time writer who actually can make a living at it, and therefore I’m justified in doing it, and the other is that we run a very artsy but kind of L’Abri-style place out of a brownstone or two in the West Village, and I get to do all the fun stuff like curating the library and booking the speakers and running a cafe and maybe a theater.
What’s yours?
I can wonder, tongue in cheek,
(By living a life that I actually sort of like),
Will I add, (so to speak),
Five days to each week?
- From Second Hand Smoke, by Linford Detweiler
I was listening to Sidney Lumet’s commentary on Network and he said something profound about acting:
I think one of the things that the actors in live television were able to assimilate as part of their technique was the same thing the theater gives you which is the necessity of making the dramatic selection in advance. You don’t get a chance to work in the detail that you do in movies shot by shot, but you sure have a much better idea and a sense of control over the entire arc of the character and that is irreplaceable, because that teaches you to use whatever you need sparingly and not to repeat anything.
I get more and more excited about the new possibilities our DSLR will enable us to pursue. I was reading up on street photography again (I used to do a lot of it in college) and was reminded of how many of the best photographers simply shoot more pictures than anyone else.
Garry Winogrand is famous for having exposed three rolls of Kodak TRI-X black and white film on the streets of New York City every day for his entire adult life. That’s 100 pictures a day, 36,500 a year, a million every 30 years. Winogrand died in 1984 leaving more than 2500 rolls of film exposed but undeveloped, 6500 rolls developed but not proofed, and 3000 rolls proofed but not examined (a total of a third of a million unedited exposures).
Amazing! In reality, you might only get one great picture out of 1000, which makes large volumes of shooting all the more important. Thank goodness I’m using digital!
I’ve been hearing great things about Cormac McCarthy’s new book The Road, so much so that I’ll probably read it sometime in the next year, but I also hear you should read some of his earlier work first. Well tonight I came across this sweet little excerpt from No Country for Old Men.
Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin something bad about em, but of course that’s a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I don’t like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I don’t think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt that she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.
Our friend Angela blogs a lot and it’s hard to keep up with all of it, but this post of hers from a few weeks ago struck me as so insightful and encouraging for why we should continue speaking the truth, I thought it deserved reposting here:
Driving back down here, David was telling me about taking some friends around the Capitol building who remarked, These people are talking to nobody. Which, for the uninitiated, Congressmen are, indeed, usually talking to a bunch of empty seats with the tape recorder rolling. But David said, No, they’re talking to posterity. Which is a great way of thinking about it. And judges really do read these transcripts when they are interpreting legislation to figure out what the lawmakers intended…Ocassionally it’s a surprise who finds you as a result. But you figure, with a few exceptions, it’s the choir that’s approaching you. And it’s nice to be appreciated, but so what, you found each other. What about the bad guys. Do they care? For the little bit of posterity that will want to know, for the noise that percolates to the street, for the guy who just might be on the fence that day, I’ll keep speaking into the record.
Recommended.
Film
• Babel - it was superbly acted and very heartfelt. I haven’t seen Amores Perros or 21 Grams, but this was a thought-provoking exposition of communication and misunderstanding and perhaps even a veiled call to just listen sometimes.
• Wonder Boys - my first time around. Pure fun.
Food
• The brunch at Miracle Grill, at 2nd Street and 7th Ave in Park Slope. Despite a missing corn chowder order, the food was great.
• We had carrot-apple-cream-cheese muffins from Blue Sky on the way to church on Sunday and they were the perfect combination of soft and textured and warm and yum.
• Crif Dogs, in the East Village, which we had on the way to Tara Leigh’s show last night.
Speaking of Tara Leigh, we did indeed go to the show last night, after which we nabbed a copy of her book and new CD (Here’s to Hindsight). We met up with her and her friend Jane afterwards for burgers at this place on 3rd Ave below St. Marks. I can never remember the name of the place, but the burgers are great and the hot chocolate is seventy-five cents. Good times.
I started reading the book on the train this morning, and I’m loving it. Having grown up in a somewhat similar environment (pretty darn conservative, but in love & grace), I’m identifying with it a lot. And of course, who wouldn’t love reading TLC’s life story? I can get all kinds of dirt on her this way. And I haven’t gotten that far yet, but apparently Tom (yes, our own dear Tom) gets a mention. We are so rockin’ famous.
Somehow, Fidel Castro manages to provide a good amount of blog fodder for me. I saw him on the big CNN TVs yesterday saying something to the effect of “my enemies have prematurely reported my death”. Sounds like someone’s been reading Mark Twain.
After posting this morning, I came across another piece of commentary by Brett McCracken, this time on filmmaker Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World) and why he makes the kinds of films he does. It’s absolutely brilliant! Basically Malick taught philosphy at MIT for a while and became quite the Heidegger expert, which comes out so clearly in his films if you know anything about Heidegger. McCracken writes:
Heidegger and Malick share the idea that the world reveals itself to us through our moods and emotion, not cognition and rationalism. Thus, it is easier to understand Malick’s de-emphasis of plot in favor of flowing imagery and “natural encounter” cinema—films not as interested in how the world is, but that it is. For many viewers, such an unconventional method is off-putting, but for those who are open to more experiential cinema, Malick’s organic, spur-of-the-moment style is a beautiful trademark. The New World producer Sarah Green echoes this: “Terry is not big on convention; he’s big on what has an impact on him in the moment.”
For Malick, like Heidegger, truth and beauty exist most fully in the unexplained and momentary experience of encounter—evidenced in Malick’s visceral brand of filmmaking. Indeed, a Malick signature is the primacy and invasive “thereness” of nature, whether in close-ups of dying animals (Badlands), glistening vistas of blowing wheat fields (Days of Heaven), or shimmering sunlit rivers in a dark, unexplored land (The New World). But beyond the visual, Malick echoes Heidegger’s claims in his refusal to morally judge or even attempt to explain the actions of his characters. There are no heroes or villains in Malick; just humans from all walks of life, on all sides of the central struggle of existence.
I read this short clip in Brew Cultures weekly email, which came from a Relevant Magazine article by often film critic Brett McCracken. It’s certainly where the battle’s being lost:
Our world today, however “flat” or “global” it may be, does not seem to encourage big-picture thinking. The ocean of information that surrounds us is easier than ever to navigate, but harder and harder to grasp on a holistic level. We are always three clicks away from any fact or figure or answer we may want; we are the most informed, mediated, equipped, positively-reinforced generation ever, and so why are we retreating into our iPod-capsulated, ethnocentric, blissfully-ignorant zones of comfort? Is it just too daunting to make the most of our information overload, quiet and focus our minds and try to answer the big questions?…What we lack today is a mind for making connections. We have all the tools for hyperconnectivity and every resource for every fact and truth as yet discovered by humankind. But in this overwhelming vastness of puzzle pieces and pixels, we are too fatigued and apathetic — or perhaps too skeptical — to try to pull back and see the immense picture that emerges when things start clicking together.
