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.
Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet
I stumbled on this yesterday. A 1920s-era, trans-gender, silent film adaptation of Hamlet, staring Asta Nielsen.
Scenes from the 1920 silent film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” starring Danish silent film actress Asta Nielsen. In this interpretation, inspired by Dr. Edward P. Vining’s book The Mystery of Hamlet, Hamlet is born female and disguised as a male to preserve the lineage. Though a radical interpretation, the New York Times said this film, “holds a secure place in class with the best.”
You can watch the entire film here. I told Sheila I was proud to have found something she didn’t already know about.
Terence Stamp in “Toby Dammit”
Terence Stamp, speaking in his own voice, in “Toby Dammit,” Federico Fellini’s contribution to the 1968 omnibus (anthology) film, Histoires extraordinaires (Extraordinary Stories/Spirits of the Dead).
For years only dubbed versions were easily available.
This is my Easter basket treat for all y’all. Make of it what you will.
(Terence Stamp just got another award. This one from the Film Society. San Francisco.)
The Last Supper — Monty Python LIVE!
(Thanks to Ju Ju.)
The Last Supper Processional — LIVE!
The Last Supper — LIVE!
Off stage with The Men of the Living Last Supper:
Jesus, a recent seminary graduate, has worked behind the scenes in corporate theater, as well as in the “home party business.”
James the Less was a senior VP (TV Production) for an ad agency.
Matthew played John the Baptist/Judas in a production of Godspell.
Read more
Storywoods
(Thanks, Alison.)
All Rite Now
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” (Hunter S. Thompson)
You are — “in quotes” — a serious actress
Historical perspective on Helen Mirren’s magical bosom.
Thanks to Kimberly and Ju Ju for this. (We’ve had an extended afternoon conversation about Helen Mirren.)
Two Weeks with Love
It was fun today having lunch with a friend at the suburban lesbian bar and watching part of Two Weeks with Love (1950), starring Jane Powell, Ricardo Montalban, and Debbie Reynolds.
The Robinson family, father, mother and two daughters, are spending two weeks of summer vacation at a resort in the Catskills. Older daughter Patti vies with her friend, Valeria, for the affections of Demi Armendez but Patti is at a disadvantage because her father thinks she is too young for boys. But with Patti singing at an amateur show and a dance, her adventures in quest of Armendez end happily.
Note to Deron: Two weeks of summer vacation at a resort in the Catskills.
Melt. Thaw.
And resolve itself into a dew.
The onset of spring: for me, a time of joy often tinged heavily with melancholy.
If My Apartment Were Within Your Sight Line (I)
The Great Rupert (1950) | For Cindy
In which a multi-talented squirrel aids an impoverished family of vaudevillians (headed by Jimmy Durante) by stealing cash their landlord has stashed in a wall.
Beautiful Clothes (Make Beautiful Girls) [1942]
Featuring Harry Langdon. Directed by Josef Berne.
Furs by Louis Rifkin.
We were talking about visual merchandising. And living mannequins.
Wish I Had A Sylvia Plath
I am doing assistant stage managing, and I did all the props for it. It’s a good time in that very dark sort of way. You should come see it if you’re able to. I don’t even like plays very much and I like this one a lot.
Scott Thompson: Interviewed by Jesse Thorn on “The Sound of Young America”
Thompson on his KITH character Buddy Cole:
It was mostly really queenie guys that were most upset with me. They were like, I can’t believe that you’re always playing gay men like that; I think it’s very insulting and stereotypical. I would be like, why don’t you play your voice in a tape recorder and listen to it, because they’re ridiculous. People were in denial. It was such a polarized time. AIDS was ravaging the gay community, so there was no room for humor. Everything was so deadly serious and earnest and it was life and death, and I think I was seen by a large proportion of the gay community, particularly the Mandarins – - and I love to use that word – - who lorded over the movement as sell out, or the Uncle Tom, or the enemy. To this day it’s still painful for me, because for me I’m like, wait a second, what’s wrong with being effeminate, number one, and number two, lots of gay men are effeminate! It’s crazy! No matter how many weights you lift, you still carry your books like a girl. Grow up! Get a grip! Accept it! I think people were in such a – - it was such a terrible time that Buddy Cole was seen as the enemy. At least Buddy is sexual, he was not neutered, he was never a neutered gay guy. And he was smart! He’s smarter than I am. That queen up until then – - they were always stupid and you laughed at them, and you never laughed at Buddy, Buddy was always in control. He was an alpha queen. I couldn’t understand it; to this day I think they were dead wrong.
A great interview.
facebook post of the day
Super Sari Saturday Night
on Devon Avenue, Chicago’s principal Indo-Pak commercial strip.
Inspired
by Amanda Mae’s assertion of her well-attested gift for concocting unrelated alternate realities when under the gun of a deadline,
and by the joy I have this day derived from emailing and Facebook-posting about: Cold War civil defense PSAs featuring clumsy marionettes endeavoring to convey dubious information to America’s farmers; the wonder of wieners: their inclusion in bento boxes and the variety of their presentation to customers of Danish wienie wagons; the oddity of Little Oscar, the world’s smallest chef and spokesman for Oscar-Mayer; and countless other curiosities,
I extend my heartfelt thanks to all the friends who have contributed to my delinquency and enabled my avoidance of work for yet another day.
You know, the mid-twentieth-century American humorist Robert Benchley wrote a delicious essay on this topic. It would appear (at least in his case) that the late-1920s version of fooling around online was apparently leafing through back issues of the National Geographic and clipping odd and arresting images. In the essay he writes about his efforts to avoid tackling a theater review or other assigned piece, saying, “I have a picture of a viper fish I wish you could see. You would die laughing.”
