Farewell, Ben Gazzara (1930-2012)
Ben Gazzara died this afternoon, on the anniversary of the death of John Cassavetes on February 3, 1989.
Offer: Elmo toy
Posted to the Dubuque Freecycle list:
Chicken Dance Elmo. A little dirty, but works.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless smartphone
Los grumildos
Low-tech mechanical puppets on the fringes of society. They have the size of a Barbie doll, and everything moves.
Gracias a Tom Sale.
headline of the day
‘Internet is for Porn’ pops up during House SOPA debate
Touch of Evil
A serious of shorts, directed by Alex Prager. Fantastic and mesmerizing.
tweet of the day
Photo out of context
“Where’s my rubber chicken?’
A rubber chicken is a replica of a completely plucked but otherwise complete barnyard fowl made from a latex injection mold. A popular sight gag and slapstick comedy prop, rubber chickens are sometimes used by comics as a mock weapon. They are also sometimes used by jugglers in place of clubs. The origin of the rubber chicken is obscure, but is likely a natural change of the use of pig bladders. In the days before the development of plastic and latex, bladders were inflated and attached to a stick. They were used as props by jesters and minstrels for the same comic effects as the modern rubber chicken.
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.
we hope you will expand your horizons with us
Andrew forwarded a post from Colin Marshall on The Tree of Life, and audience reactions to it. What caught my attention was the graphic he linked from a Connecticut theater warning its patrons about the movie they were about to see. I’m pleased the theater did it, but I’m not sure what to say about it beyond that. We live in interesting times. And I don’t think that’s a curse.
Thanks, Andrew.
from the comments
I watched him empty the little packets onto the nuggets. He first dumped the nuggets from their little Chick-fil-a box onto his styrofoam tray. Then he emptied four little mayo packets onto them. Then he dumped both containers of fries onto the tray beside the nuggets. He ate the fries unadorned.
He appeared to be about my age or a bit younger–maybe late 40s. He watched me watching him.
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
from Sheila’s email
A peaceful Saturday morning on Portland’s tree-lined downtown Park Blocks, the sound of a shrill female voice at an angry volume:
“I’M FIFTY-TWO YEARS OLD! THEY CAN’T PUT A WOMAN LIKE ME IN SHOES LIKE THIS!”
. . . repeated ad infinitum.
“It’s all part of life’s rich pageant”
A friend of mine (who eventually became a VP at a Major Philanthropic Foundation) began his (adult) working life as a cross-country trucker. He said that although the so-called “boot-heel” of Missouri scared the bejeesus out of the most seasoned truckers, there was this place where you could go at 7:00 AM and get steak and eggs and bourbon AND watch a live sex show.
Actually, he said, that was also part of the scariness.
He also claimed that he met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam. When pressed, he said, “Well, she said her name was Tanya. And she stole my dope.”
from the comments
Sit back and scan the treacherous waters known as the graveyard of the Atlantic. Pretend you’re a pirate waiting for your ship to come in. Enjoy your spicy okra cup.
Ripped from the Headlines
LONDON: Based on a true story: A teenager stabs a younger boy outside a shopping mall in an English suburb. A lonely detective unravels a series of fake identities and Internet intrigues, gradually obsessing more and more over the case. The latest HBO crime drama? CSI: Manchester? Not quite. It’s the young composer Nico Muhly’s first opera, “Two Boys,” the highly-anticipated Metropolitan Opera commission which premiered at the English National Opera here on Friday night.
Swedish Smörgåstårta
Since we’re on the subject of angry cooking show comedy:
(Via David’s brother-in-law)
sub-headline of the day
Kind of like The Tree of Life, except it’s terrible.
Gay Superbowl…
Anyone else planning to watch?
‘This video is an actual voicemail from a woman that was kicked out of one of our Austin theaters’
For Deron. It immediately made me think of his recent experience at Tree of Life.
Goreyesque, or
Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
Sit down. Shut up. (I’ve done this before — and some audiences actually laughed.)
Brian Beatty in Minnesota Playlist on how and why he does what he does:
Poetry entered my stand-up sets because I wanted to up the “snob” factor of my stage persona, to increase the comedic tension.
The Ascent
Students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have combined an EEG reader with a flight harness, letting people fly when they calm themselves sufficiently.
Shroud of Turin replica coming to Galena
During Holy Week, St. Matthew Lutheran Church will present a full-size replica of the Shroud of Turin, accurate to the smallest detail. Measuring 14.5 feet by four feet, and printed on fabric from the most accurate color photographs of the Shroud ever taken.
