“Painters paint. Writers write. Composers compose. But who are the movers behind the movies? It’s easy to talk of Monet’s Waterlilies or Mahler’s Ninth, but does it make sense to call, say, The Third Man a Carol Reed film? Reed was a passable journeyman who could sometimes push a story along, but nowhere else in his work do you find The Third Man’s expressively baroque sets, much less its portentous deep-focus camera work. It’s commonplace to say the movie is stolen by Orson Welles’s 10-minute walk-on, truer to say that the look and feel of the whole picture — those angular, claustrophobic compositions, that ironic, pleased-with-itself narration — derives from Welles’s example. Like Harry Lime, the penicillin-diluting racketeer he plays in the film, Welles infects The Third Man from opening titles to closing credits. If he had had as much influence on the films that he directed, his place at the head of the Hollywood queue would be assured. Nobody could deny that the handful of pictures Welles masterminded — among them Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil — are made up of many great moments. Only in Citizen Kane, though, are the great moments uninterrupted by slipshod longueurs. Welles rarely had the final say over how his movies looked and flowed. Too often, they were taken out of his hands and worked on by others. The Magnificent Ambersons was butchered so badly that, 40 years after its release, Welles was to be found weeping as it played on his motel television.”

 

 – Christopher Bray

 

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Dusk in the Ruins

 

    Necropolis, Vulci, Lazio regione
 

I arrive, one more uninvited guest.

A June storm coasts down the horizon

Of the volcanic plateau. I trekked hours

To appear before tombs like an earnest 

Pilgrim of some kind. I have come alone.

Cumulonimbus broadens above; flowers

Nod in rising wind. A single white horse

Grazes in the valley, slowly consumed

By the advancing margins of twilight.

Whole histories, spread and cooled in their course,

Load this darkened air — Etruscans doomed

By Romans, proud with bloodlust at their height.

I’m summered and slow in withered light;

My flinted veins, my parched fields, grind and ignite.

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1. Italy looks like a boot, obviously

 

2. Great Britain looks like a woman facing right wearing a long dress that is being slightly lifted by the wind (the West Country is the tip of it). She has on a big floppy hat (North Highlands) and a mantle (Central Highlands)

3. India (not counting the bit that is to the north and east of Bangladesh, which could be a decorative bow if you prefer) looks like a very fat woman facing left and three-quarters turned away. Her head and hair is Jammu and Kashmir; Andhra Pradesh is her thigh.

 

4. Japan looks like a seahorse facing right, with Hokkaido being the head and Kyushu the tail.

 

5. Kuwait is Darth Vader’s helmet. Really!

 

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E-Verse Radio Unbelievable But Real Film Titles of the Week:

 

Lust in the Mummy’s Tomb (2002)

 

Heart Is A Strong Muscle, The (1988)

 

Moon’s White Torso, The (1988)

 

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Alfred Corn talks of Pilgrimage and Poetry
Maria Johnston horses around with the work of Paul Muldoon
Jan Schreiber weighs the wisdom of Maxine Kumin
James Rother scans the frequencies in Timothy Donnelly

 

 

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“Give people a taste of Old Crow, and tell them it’s Old Crow. Then give them another taste of Old Crow, but tell them it’s Jack Daniel’s. Ask them which they prefer. They’ll think the two drinks are quite different. They are tasting images.” – David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985

 

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Thirty miles or so south of L.A.
stand two hangars, two gigantic tombs
on the plain between
the freeway and the mountains,
remote black swarms of army helicopters every hour
departing and arriving:  I still
feel too sick even to think
we lived in their presence
for nearly a year. Oh yes, I remember
it. And when I can’t sleep
I think of huge observatories parting soundlessly
or those two domelike structures
we passed once on the coast highway,
the nuclear reactor eerily lit and crane-manipulated all
                  night long.
And when I’m by myself,
this is my demented song:
welcome to the University —
it seems you’re the only one registered this fall.
You’ll notice our nocturnal sprinkling system.
You’ll notice the library’s books are all blank on the inside.

 

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1. Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
2. Clash of the Titans (1981)
3. Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
4. Mysterious Island (1961)
5. Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

 

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Pinocchio was made of pine.

 

Popeye was 5’6″.

 

Lee Harvey Oswald was booked with mugshot number 54018.

 

The Gulf Stream will carry a message in a bottle at an average of 4 miles per hour.

 

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“It is clear to unbiased eyes that the achievements of liberal bourgeois societies since the 18th century — the American and French revolutions, universal suffrage, women’s liberation, modern medicine, and technology — are cause for admiration, not hatred. At the very least, we must ask, what other ruling class has done better? To put the question in concrete terms: Who would rather live as an ordinary member of a tribe of hunter-gatherers or a medieval theocracy than a bourgeois democracy?” – Adam Kirsch

 

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1. Bill Gates, head of Microsoft
2. Daryl Gates, chief of LA police dept. from 1978 until shortly after the 1992 LA Riots in the wake of the Rodney King affair
3. Robert Gates, Bush’s new Secretary of Defense
4. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Chair of African and African-American Studies department at Harvard
5. Gates McFadden, the doctor on the Starship Enterprise NC1701-D

 

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/03/25/bojone24.xml
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Legendary American poet W.D. Snodgrass

 

UMass Lowell’s Kerouac Center for American Studies Third Annual New England Poetry Conference

 

7PM, April 26, 2007
O’Leary Library 222 (auditorium), UML South
61 Wilder St., Lowell, MA 01854

 

Free and open to the public.
No registration necessary. Free parking is available.

 

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1. Britney Spears
2. Kate Hudson
3. Jessica Simpson
4. Reece Witherspoon
5. Tori Spelling

 

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Worstville, Ohio

 

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A reader sends in “top five names for Japanese restaurants in the US, in descending order of popularity”:

1. Tokyo X [X=house, bowl, Joe’s, Bay, Garden, etc.]
2. Shogun
3. Sakura
4. Ichiban
5. Kyoto

 

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Feeling nervous? We can help.

 

A Paranoid’s Guide To History is documentary theatre, combining words, music, and images. From Tom Paine to Tom Cruise, from James Bond to Global Warming, the show examines the human condition (aka life) from a deeply suspicious perspective.

 

There is something conspiratorial going on, and A Paranoid’s Guide To History can help make sense of it all.

 

WEBSITE: http://mail2.smarttix.com/t/27802/149304/253/0/

 

TITLE: “A Paranoid’s Guide To History”

 

WHEN: April 12, 13, 14 & 19, 20, 21 8:00pm

 

WHERE: UNDER St. Mark’s, 94 St. Mark’s Place, (b/w
1st Ave & Ave “A”)

 

SUBWAY: 6 train – Astor Place, R & W train – 8th
Street

 

TICKETS: $12 ($10 students, seniors, multiple tickets)

 

an imperfectfilms & INRECO presentation

 

How To Order

 

On Line: http://mail2.smarttix.com/t/27802/149304/252/5/
By Phone: 212-868-4444

 

Under St. Marks
94 St. Marks Place
New York, NY 10003
(1st Ave & Ave A)

 

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O Little Root of a Dream
Paul Celan
Translated by Heather McHugh and Nikolai Popov
 
O little root of a dream
you hold me here
undermined by blood,
no longer visible to anyone,
property of death.
 
Curve a face
that there may be speech, of earth,
of ardor, of
things with eyes, even
here, where you read me blind,
 
even
here,
where you
refute me,
to the letter.
 

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A Thicket of Idiots

 

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“What about the trees in  The Wizard of Oz? They may not actually kill, but they are pretty threatening. Also, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe some of the trees are killers, because they are spies for the White Witch.”

 

 

 

“No Womping Willow from Harry Potter? For shame.”

 

 

 

“No Evil Dead? That was a nasty tree. Or maybe it was just a long branch. Either way, scared the hell out of me.”

 

 

 

 

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightening storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now — whenever
we’re not looking.  Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade — surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

 

 

“Don’t forget The Green Man with Albert Finney!”

 

 

 

“A propos of Paul’s trip here’s a site with a great word (tessellation) and lots of Australian motifs as examples of it (and poems).”

 

 

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