Since watching The Big Sleep (1946) recently, I feel the need to do the following:

1. Watch all movies featuring, in any capacity, Humphrey Bogart (there are almost 80)
2. Read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, upon which the movie is based (even Chandler himself couldn't follow the plot)
3. Read all novels by William Faulkner (there are 17), who worked on the screenplay
4. Might as well: Watch all films (47) directed by Howard Hawks
5. Watch again The Big Lebowski, which is, quite geniously, the Coen Brothers' take on the classic
6. Smoke
7. Drink brandy (in a glass)
8. Wear a hat

A good Bogart story here, as recounted in Time magazine on October 10, 1949, in an age (obviously) when celebrities were (quite awesomely) much more brazenly confident and straightforward with the media.

The Great Stone Face

From One Week (1920)

I saw four Buster Keaton films at Film Forum Monday night:

Electric House (1922)
One Week (1920)
High Sign (1921)
The General (1926)

They were great, all of them. I want to go every week; the theater is running a series, Keaton movies every Monday until September 25.

I like this story about how Buster got his name, from Buster Keaton: The Damfino's Official Website (home of the Buster Keaton Fan Club):

Sharing the bill with the Keatons were the great escape artist Harry Houdini and his wife, Buster's godparents. Houdini saw little Buster, then only about six months old, slip and tumble down a flight of stairs, arriving virtually unharmed, perhaps even amused, at the bottom. "What a buster your kid took!" Houdini is said to have cried out. With those simple words, Keaton became the first person to use Buster as a name. Buster Brown, Buster Crabbe and Buster Poindexter all came later, presumably owing their names indirectly to Harry Houdini.

For a great shiver, the silent film star singing, playing the ukelele, and telling stories, at a party in 1962, from NPR's Quest for Sound:

http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/990806.stories.html

Hearing his voice is kind of like seeing a photo of your favorite radio host: Bizarre and oddly wonderful, with that pang of - even though you're curious - the mystery being over.

Cinema d'Or

Simone Signoret and Serge Reggiani, Casque d'Or (1952)

We watched Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or last night.

C’est une histoire d’love and death and the underground, and it’s delicious – especially photographic-wise. Toward the end we stopped it over and over, to capture shots.

The love affair of the movie, between Marie (Simone Signoret) and Manda (Serge Reggiani), is a cinema love affair you’re not attached to and you can’t figure out why. I didn’t once, throughout the movie, root for the couple's success, or feel that pang of “rightness” when they were together, as sometimes happens in other movie romances. Maybe their relationship felt mis-fitted because Manda seemed so moral and Marie didn’t; I’m not sure. For whatever reason, I didn’t crave them together, and because everything that happened to Manda happened because he wanted Marie, I always felt like shrinking from the story. Not avoiding it - just shrinking from it, like from an odd smell.

“Casque d’or” translates roughly into “the golden helmet,” although the English version of the film was titled “Golden Marie.” Marie’s hair, except when sleeping, is arranged in three to four glorious, fat loops atop her head – helmet-like; and her face is frequently framed in fifties cinematic female glow, from behind – definitely golden. Although, does the golden helmet refer to Manda? His ability in the end to be “angelic,” accepting full responsibility for his actions? His dying for his actions? His Christ-like profession as a carpenter?

Stopping now. Arrêter. It’s a beautiful film and it should be watched. It's on Criterion:

http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=270#synopsis


Interestingly, Signoret and her husband, Yves Montand, helped Reggiani launch his second career as a singer, in 1965. A full biography of the multi-talented homme, who acted as late as 1998 in The Pianist (he died in 2004) is here:

http://www.rfimusique.com/siteEn/biographie/biographie_6061.asp

Even if you don't ...

Tom and I went to Chelsea galleries Saturday. We've perfected a route of visiting them, over the year, without really trying; we start at Bellwether and wind through 22nd Street like we're on a board game, stopping in places, until we end somewhere usually on 24th Street, like Charles Cowles, usually my favorite.

This past Saturday, after Charles Cowles, we crossed the street to Galeria Ramis Barquet, a gallery I'd never visited. I still have the show there, Steven Giué's Even if you don't…, on my mind.

The show is comprised of over 20 photos that document a relationship, the young couple doing nothing more extraordinary than buying groceries or saying goodbye to his mother, sleeping on their futon or bathing. But the intimacy of the photos, together in a quiet gallery, telling a story with no real beginning or end even though you know there was one of each, is so powerful you're lost, in that best way art enables. The photos are extremely confidential but welcoming, like a good club that's not exclusive.

As Tom said, the show is also a capturing of a Bohemia that is rarely found anymore, especially in the Design Within Reach-infected citysters of New York today. The gentle mess; the beer bottles; the organic shampoo; the warped linoleum; the handmade sushi; the oil paints. The details spill and you know this couple cared nothing for possessions and status, in the conventional senses. The photo where the woman is dragging her finger in a creek convinces you.

According to the gallery's press release, the show is autobiographical, based on a relationship the photographer was in. Which is interesting but which doesn't change at all the impact of the show, which I think is important. Because it makes the context unimportant, the story of the show so complete, but still a tender mystery, on its own.

The show is up until February 18. I recommend a visit.

ramisbarquet.com/home.asp

KMOCA & B&H & Other Capital Things

Tom has an opening at KMOCA, Kingston Museum of Contemporary Arts, in upstate New York this Saturday. It's the gallery's opening show, and Tom's first solo show. It's part of a gallery walk occurring in downtown Kingston for the weekend.

Here's the map to the gallery walk. I like the paragraph about Tom.

http://www.askforarts.org/galleryguidenew.pdf


I met Tom at B&H Photo tonight, to buy more frames for his photographs, for his show. A thousand people can say it, but there is no store in the world like B&H Photo. I marvel at the store's efficiency. My marveling is approaching pious adoration.

We had called this morning, to reserve some frames in advance, and after the clerk looked up our order he stood for a minute, tapping his keyboard, not looking at me. Tom went away and looked at other frames. I played with the bowl of Goi Goi kosher candy on the counter and waited. After five minutes I asked if something was wrong.

No, the sweet Hasidic boy told me, they just can't find the last three frames of our order in the basement. "Op!" he said, "they just found them." A moment later, a green crate carrying our twelve frames burst through a hole next to his computer, fresh from the massive B&H subterranean storehouse. It was like a birthing. Almost.

I smiled, thinking of the basement workers efficiently scurrying amongst the aisles of products - I knew without knowing that there were monstrous metal gray shelves - digging through merchandise for our last little frames, maybe irritated that they weren't in their proper place. The triumphant message up that they had been found. The swift movement to the next order.

They have free seltzer at B&H too, and cola. Today they even had straws.


Goi Goi candies:
http://www.peccin.com.br/principal.php?id_menu=inicial



um
someone else's b&h receipt

A Ray of New Year Light

Watch the videos, all of them. Remember when you were 12 and 14 and got home from school and sat in front of the television, on the blue plastic chairs that when pushed together made a couch but usually just slid apart the further you slid down on them. They were always sticky, those seats.

Remember watching VH1 and MTV, waiting - waiting - for that Madonna video you cherished - cherished - to make an appearance. Then how, after it was over, you danced in the television room, trying to be lady who only gets hotter as she gets older, eating the last cookies your mom made before your brother came home and finished them off and you didn't even have a chance. Maybe you'd perform the dance with your sister when your mom came home. Maybe she'd say it was good, nice, as she poured a glass of wine and pulled the crackers from the cupboard.

madonna.com

Dimensions a Trois

"The corn is popping in your face, and it's ... 3-D!" so sayeth the Swedish chef, in one of the Muppet movies. He's manning the popcorn booth at the 3-D movie theater, wearing 3-D glasses, throwing popcorn into the air and letting it fall on his face.

How many times did my sister and I shriek that phrase and throw things in the air as we did, letting them fall on our faces. Raisins, I think. I think we used raisins.



J.R. Eyerman, 1952


I went to my first 3-D movie yesterday. I was tempted, when I sat down, to throw my popcorn in the air and let it fall on my 3-D-glassesed face. I didn't.

The movie was Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, at Film Forum. It was good in 3-D, but it would have been good in 2-D too - the only scene that is truly enhanced in 3-D is the murder scene, when Grace Kelly stabs her attacker with scissors. Otherwise, the 3-Dness is just a novel effect. The movie was filmed in 3-D, but was released in 2-D shortly thereafter; 1950s audiences apparently felt the same way.

Most interesting 3-D tidbit: The finger that dials the "M" in the movie is a huge wooden replica, as is the telephone; 3-D effects, apparently, didn't work well when the filming was close up, as it was with the finger and telephone. So Hitchcock had enormous models built and filmed those instead.

I like the way Hitchcock sees obstacles - a too-small finger, the MPPC code - as challenges to appreciate and solve. I liked being in a theater where I knew everyone was wearing 3-D glasses.

I got to keep my 3-D glasses.