castle of illusion

"This year Ballard’s stories in particular have been a revelation to me, being at once well..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:06:04 -0400

“This year Ballard’s stories in particular have been a revelation to me, being at once well made, full of the supposedly contemptible components – plot, setting, character – and yet irreducibly strange in proportion. It’s a marvel how implacably and consistently weird he managed to be despite appearing to use all the normal tools at the disposal of any English short-story writer. All in all there is something a little shaming in reading Ballard: you have to face the fact that there exist writers with such fresh imaginations they can’t write five pages without stumbling on an alternate world.”

- Zadie Smith on the rise of the essay | Books | The Guardian

One needs only to scan the stories in “Beginners” and the ones...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 07:42:36 -0400

One needs only to scan the stories in “Beginners” and the ones in “What We Talk About” to see the most obvious change: the prose in “Beginners” consists of dense blocks of narration broken up by bursts of dialogue; in “What We Talk About,” there is so much white space that some of the stories (“After the Denim,” for instance) look almost like chapters in a James Patterson novel. In many cases, the man who didn’t allow editors to change his own work gutted Carver’s, and on this subject Sklenicka voices an indignation she is either unwilling or unable to muster on Maryann’s behalf, calling Lish’s editing of Carver “a usurpation.” He imposed his own style on Carver’s stories, and the so-called minimalism with which Carver is credited was actually Lish’s deal. “Gordon … came to think that he knew everything,” Curtis Johnson says. “It became pernicious.” (via Stephen King, Raymond Carver’s Life and Stories - Review - NYTimes.com)

So Michael [Mann] sent out this memorandum to everyone in the...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:36:14 -0400

So Michael [Mann] sent out this memorandum to everyone in the cast and crew and the staff that none of the other actors can ever meet me. There has to be complete separation between me and the other actors, so I had a PA to run around for me everywhere. One in front and one behind, so there’s no way I can run into anybody. I flew on other airlines. I stayed at other hotels. It was sort of crazy. So the crew at this point is starting to get weirded out by this person, not because of what Michael did, it was to do with me. And nobody was allowed to talk to me except for certain members of the crew. Michael likes creating drama on the set a little bit, which is effective in a lot of ways. When I did the first scene, where I had a stocking over my face, that’s the first thing we shot. I could tell the crew was scared of me. I was also huge,. I’d been bodybuilding, and I’m big to begin with, and I enjoyed that whole thing. Michael, again, never spoke to me, never directed me very much. (via Tom Noonan | Film | Random Roles | The A.V. Club)

metamatica: touchscreen (1979)

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:13:50 -0400

metamatica:

touchscreen (1979)

Tomorrow, on what would have been his 79th birthday, family and...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:14:24 -0400

Tomorrow, on what would have been his 79th birthday, family and friends of JG Ballard will gather in London to celebrate his extraordinary life and still more extraordinary literary achievement. I don’t really do “heroes”, and Jim Ballard’s whole outlook was antithetical to the notion of the “great man” (though less so, I suspect, to that of the “great woman”), but if I were in search of an antiheroic hero it would have to be him. When I was stranded in the doldrums of my early 20s, desperate to write fiction but uncertain that there was any way to yoke my perverse vision to any recognised form, Ballard’s luminous short stories and minatory novels showed me a way forward. Then there’s the man himself. I was just one of the scores of journalists who went out to sleepy Shepperton to beard its seer, and no matter how many times we’d already been told not to expect some drug-crazed weirdo, we were all surprised to find the genial, rather bluff Jim Ballard, happy to discuss anything from the wilder shores of futurity to the pinched parochialism of England’s greening. Over 15 years I got to know this intensely private man – a little. It was difficult for me not to look to him for advice – and he showed me the respect of never providing any, save by omission, the real advice being: think for yourself. Early in life, during the Japanese occupation of his natal city, Shanghai, Ballard had learnt the vital lesson that anyone can descend effortlessly into barbarism, and so he eschewed all state-sanctioned morality and the mock heroics that bolster it up. Ballard’s contribution to literature, to the visual arts, to architectural theory and even philosophy will, I feel certain, be increasingly acknowledged in the decades to come. His writing life straddled the period from when censorship meant that commonplace thoughts could not be set down to the current era when anything can be said – but hardly anyone bothers to listen. He thus stands as the last great English avatar of the avant garde – heroism enough for anyone. (via My hero JG Ballard by Will Self | Books | The Guardian)

Visually, the movie is a wonder, with its profusion of detail...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:08:00 -0400

Visually, the movie is a wonder, with its profusion of detail and exquisitely focussed “performances” by the figurines, whom Anderson frames in images as precisely composed as those featuring actors in his live-action work. The voice performances are sparkling and apt; the adventure plot is realized with a scenographic splendor that’s as understated as it is dazzling, and is also invested with a surprising moral weight. Though the emotional realms—and the philosophical twists—that Anderson evokes are unusually sophisticated for a children’s film, its exuberance is a universal tonic. (via Richard Brody, Fantastic Mr. Fox : The New Yorker)

At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender anti-fable —...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:05:00 -0400

At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender anti-fable — truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source — does not even look like a movie. In spite of the pedigreed voices (Meryl Streep and Bill Murray, along with George Clooney in the title role), it feels more like an extended episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children. All of which may only be another way of saying that this is a Wes Anderson film. The spirit of self-conscious juvenile playacting has informed his work from the start, providing a theme for “Rushmore” and a sensibility for everything else. His live-action subjects often move like stop-motion figures through landscapes that resemble drawings and models more than real places. (Think of the cutaway ship set in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”) There is a deadpan, understated quality to his performers that also suggests puppetry, and he shows a stubborn reluctance to let story take precedence over style. (via AO Scott, Movie Review - Fantastic Mr. Fox - Don’t Count Your Chickens - NYTimes.com)

"One director I feel that I always think about when I don’t know how to approach something is Steven..."

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:30:00 -0400

“One director I feel that I always think about when I don’t know how to approach something is Steven Spielberg. He would know how to do it. But, ultimately, if you’re asking me which director I think about in terms of just living my life—maybe this is crazy, but I’m going to have to say Stanley Kubrick, which I think is a bad sign because that is someone whose whole thing was about controlling his life. I mean, he apparently had a great family life, and he had his work arranged in a way that fit into the way he wanted to live. And people went to see his movies. And he only did the movies he liked to do. He didn’t do one movie for the money, so he could do the next one because he liked it. He only did the ones he wanted to do. He had total, utter, complete creative control over not just the movies but also the life of making them. He had a system, which you need because there are too many things to keep track of.”

- Wes Anderson - Interview Magazine

Rescued and reposted: A Crash Course in Cronenberg - scanners

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:27:06 -0400

Rescued and reposted: A Crash Course in Cronenberg - scanners

Why do people gush over Proust? I'd rather visit a demented relative | Germaine Greer | Culture | The Guardian

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:26:18 -0400

Why do people gush over Proust? I'd rather visit a demented relative | Germaine Greer | Culture | The Guardian:

If you haven’t read Proust, don’t worry. This lacuna in your cultural development you do not need to fill. On the other hand, if you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted, time that would be better spent visiting a demented relative, meditating, walking the dog or learning ancient Greek.

Who speaks of Howards End these days? Who expounds on the...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:24:41 -0400

Who speaks of Howards End these days? Who expounds on the virtues of this magnificent drama, whose traditional style seems almost as distant as its Edwardian setting? Seen today, years past its 1992 release, it strikes one as not only the ultimate accomplishment of the Merchant Ivory team but also the high-water mark of a certain kind of filmmaking, a landmark example of movies of passion, taste, and sensitivity that honestly touch every emotion. Below its exquisitely modulated surface, this film may set off lasting and heartfelt reverberations in the viewer; every time you see it, it moves you in different ways. (via Kenneth Turan on Howards End: All Is Grace - From the Current)

The Auteurs Daily: Angels Wanna Wear Her Red Shoes

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:21:31 -0400

The Auteurs Daily: Angels Wanna Wear Her Red Shoes

Photo

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:01:50 -0400

ekstasis: nightmarebrunette: rejecter: Ed Ruscha: ‘A Girl I...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:25:11 -0400

ekstasis:

nightmarebrunette:

rejecter: Ed Ruscha: ‘A Girl I Walked All Over’ (1988)

"Barthelme is a fellow New Yorker writer whom I read faithfully and have learned a fair amount from...."

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:23:38 -0400

“Barthelme is a fellow New Yorker writer whom I read faithfully and have learned a fair amount from. I think Barthelme’s stories of the sixties were really very liberating as far as what one could do with a short story, and I know that my own short stories have been influenced by his. Also, like Hemingway, he’s a great simplifier or stripper away of verbal nonsense. After reading enough Barthelme, your own stories tend to become a little shorter and cleaner and more spasmodic. John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don’t think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I’m saying. His last novel, Chimera, which is really a series of novellas, was essentially about the kind of marital breakup and re-synthesis that I have written about. Pynchon I do feel more alien to; I really find it not easy to read him; I don’t like the funny names and I don’t like the leaden feeling of the cosmos that he sets for us. I believe that life is frightening and tragic, but I think that it is other things, too. Temperamentally, I just have not been able to read enough Pynchon to pronounce intelligently upon him. Clearly, the man is the darling of literary criticism in America now, especially of collegiate criticism. I am just no expert but all I can say is I have not much enjoyed the Pynchon I have tried to read.”

- American Centaur: An Interview with John Updike: The Book Bench : The New Yorker

oldhollywood: Still from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:59:43 -0300

oldhollywood:

Still from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

bohemea: nickdrake: mr coppola on the set of the godfather...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:44:00 -0300

bohemea:

nickdrake:

mr coppola on the set of the godfather part two.

The first sentence of “The Voices of Time” (1960) is...

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:44:00 -0300

The first sentence of “The Voices of Time” (1960) is the first of many great opening sentences from the author of perhaps more great opening sentences than any other author in the field. As far as the chronological ladder of Complete is concerned, it all comes from nowhere: Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. We could unpack the cargo of this sentence for days; the heart of its burden, for me, of course lies in its assertion of a world that has already been spent. It is a sentence in which the passage of time is as detached as a loose retina, for its first word refers to a recollection that will either come later in the tale, or maybe not until the tale, which is about re-enacting the past, has been told. Belatedness piles on belatedness, under the eye of an implied author who is clearly omniscient but (like god) lets us guess. Then there is the empty swimming pool: an artifact of 20th-century Lonely Crowd culture that cannot any more hold water. And there are the strange grooves, runes as unheimlich as the carved faces that shout out the vacancy of Easter Island, in dead silence. And then, for the first time in the chronology of stories here assembled, we are given to understand that the protagonist is a becalmed professional—a doctor or a scientist of some sort, there will be dozens of him in later Ballard stories, the kind of man who, like a shark, must swim constantly to keep from choking in the obsolescence of his skills kit—and we suspect that his deepest gesture in “The Voices of Time” will reiterate the insectile obedience of Whitby: that both men carve glyphs as ultimately unreadable as termite droppings. (via 98 stories! 1,216 pages! Is the complete J.G. Ballard worth it? | SCI FI Wire by John Clute)

madmenfootnotes: “Then there is the miraculous Hamm, playing...

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:12:32 -0300

madmenfootnotes:

“Then there is the miraculous Hamm, playing the lead character, Don Draper. Here is an actor who at once projects sexual mastery and ironic intelligence, poise and vulnerability. That alchemy has created the greatest male stars, from Gable to Grant to Bogart to McQueen to Clooney, because it wins for them both the desire of women and the fondness of men. So the show’s white-hotness was all but predetermined.”

You MUST read this. It is by far my favorite thing ever written about the show.

Ingmar Bergman on the set of Jaws

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:13:58 -0300

Ingmar Bergman on the set of Jaws