Saturday, January 06, 2007

Spittin' Wicked Randomness, Vol. 17

Bobbie reviews Roseanne Barr's Blonde and Bitchin' DVD for The Fake Life!

Shoot The Pump: The saga continues!

I have sentence envy: "But Craig's thrilling vanity in preparing for the part is staggering in way that struck me as Travoltan, if not completely homosexual."

A guide to deflecting arguments against increasign (or for abolishing) the minimum wage.

Fresh Air has excellent interviews with writer Stefan Kanfer, author of Stardust Lost, a history of Yiddish theater, and, relevant to my recent examination of racist cartoons, Jody Rosen, who has compiled the compilation Jewface. Jewface is a collection of old novelty tunes based on anti-semitic stereotypes sung by Jewish performers in Vaudeville, music halls and minsterel shows. Although attacked by certain Jewish groups, they were very popular with Jewish audiences. Then again, substitute "black" for "Jewish," and feed Easy-E and Maxine Waters' names in there, and you have the same story three quarters of a century later.

Jim Emmerson's best double features of 2006.

This month at LACMA: Through the Looking Glass (And Down the Rabbit Hole), a loose program of fims explained thusly:

Rene Magritte's enigmatic paintings, with their deadpan humor and emphasis on monumental objects, were created during a century that saw the birth of both cinema and psychoanalysis and, in the words of LACMA's senior curator of modern art, Stephanie Barron, continue "to appeal to modern audiences hungry for the puzzling conjunctions of the everyday and the fantastic." Though the concept of parallel realities existed in the Victorian era, it was cinema that could induce a dreamlike state in the viewer and depict the visual landscape of the unconscious.

Lewis Carroll's "looking glass" is perhaps our most famous metaphor for the irrational, but it is also an ancient symbol with a variety of meanings: vanity, duplicity, madness, schizophrenia, and hallucination among them. Not surprisingly, many of the films in this series are thrillers, and many depict characters whose obsessions become pathological or self-destructive. For filmmakers like David Lynch, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, and Jacques Rivette, the "looking glass" is the cinema itself, and the silver screen is the mirror through which we, the audience, pass. At its most mythic, death is the unknown land that lies on the other side of the looking glass: in Orphée and Vertigo, the characters journey into the mirror to steal a loved one back from Death itself. Alternatively, films such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz depict imaginary landscapes peopled by delightful and menacing creatures. And in virtually all the films in the series, the audience, like the characters, must ask itself: what is real, and what is fantasy?


From TCM Underground: "lost" scenes from cult movies (including Faster Pussycat, Freaks and Coffy) in comic book form!!!

Speaking of TCM, heads up: on January 29, they're premiering Tod Browning's 1927 silent carnie flick The Show (along with Browning's Freaks and Lynch's Elephant Man) with a new score.

From NPR: punk rock in Beijing, UFO's in Chicago.

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