Passed away at age 89. I loved his films.
Through sheer serendipity a few days ago I picked up a dvd of Chloe in the Afternoon, which I haven't seen in quite some time. Maybe I'll watch it tonight in memory of this film maker who never stopped loving young love.
My Night at Maud's. Was there ever a film like it? Or like his last one (2007) Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon?
I wonder what he did in the war. There's never any mention of his activites I've seen between his boyhood and his first appearance in the film world, in 1947 or so.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Postmamboism Has Arrived in Manchester
The Food, Music and Justice blog has gone Postmamboist!
The blog's blog is here.
Apparently the blog's creators are working to make a New Orleans - Manchester connection.
No trackback buttons on the site. It looks to be a subscription kind of thing for music and videos.
Heh. Last night it was Big Sam's Funky Nation at Sullivan Hall. New Orleans and NYC, baby. A friend was in town who is on the music faculty at Williams & Mary College. She got good and warm. Can't get real like that in Williamsburg. Heh
The blog's blog is here.
Apparently the blog's creators are working to make a New Orleans - Manchester connection.
No trackback buttons on the site. It looks to be a subscription kind of thing for music and videos.
Heh. Last night it was Big Sam's Funky Nation at Sullivan Hall. New Orleans and NYC, baby. A friend was in town who is on the music faculty at Williams & Mary College. She got good and warm. Can't get real like that in Williamsburg. Heh
Friday, January 8, 2010
A Report on Simon's Tremé From Larry Blumenfeld
In the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Simon takes on a daunting task in capturing the not well understood and somewhat insular subcultures he's chosen as his focus. With any success, he can achieve something mightier too—an understanding of the essential role musicians play in New Orleans's social order and recovery, as well as the embattled position they often find themselves in. Mr. Simon, a master at portraying systematic dysfunction, will no doubt turn a lens on the curious and combative relationship between the city's culture bearers and its power brokers. (In 2007, Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs took the city to federal court over raised permit fees, for instance; Mardi Gras Indian assemblies have suffered police intimidation.)
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Who Wears Postmamboism 002?
Vaquero writes:
Here's our new celebrity model [artist, Michael Zwack]. There will be more. If y'all will indulge me, I'm having fun with this . . . though I'm running out of 2XL . . .I highly second V.'s idea that you click on the links to get a glimpse of Michael's art.
To see what Michael Zwack's work looks like when it's been digitized, reduced to a small size, and lit up on a flat screen -- it's very different from seeing the real work -- go to
http://michaelzwack.com/work/gallery/1358
My favorite is
http://michaelzwack.com/work/view/1358/7217
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Political Disagreements When You're All On the Same Team
An interview with David Simon.
My take-away is this:
In order to get the season's shows written, the team of writers had to come to accomodation with each other, somehow, even though they didn't agree on everything. In order to do that it had to be recognized that all the people in the room had the same objectives, the same goals -- which were to write the damned best season they could write. They were not enemies. They saw differently. Which ultimately made for better writing because it could not be one dimensional, when there were so many different perspectives. Woo.
Those of us who are equally horrified by what's happened in this nation via the neocons and righttwingers, etc., and where the teabaggers are determined to take us -- and what this means for the future of us all: we still must not get personally angry with each other because we see things differently in terms of the dems as a party and this administration. We must come to accomodation, because the objective isn't either the Dems or Obama, but saving the nation. Maybe the world. Pretty grandiose, right? But then, considering the sort of fiction and entertainments so many of us are involved in, grandiose r us, right?
BTW, my other takeaway from this interview was that both guys, Simon and his interviewer, were engaged in mutual wanking, all rahrahrah about their he-manism, and how they could have just whacked that guy who cut in line at a -- KaChing! -- Pogues show.
My take-away is this:
There would be a series of planning sessions. First, at the beginning of every season, we did a sort of retreat with the main writers, the guys who were going to be on staff the whole year. We’d discuss what we were trying to say, but we were really having a current-events/ideology/political argument. The writers didn’t all think the same. We weren’t in lockstep on the issues of the day, whether it was the drug war or public education or the media. So we had to discuss the issue as an issue first. Never mind the characters, never mind plot.
In order to get the season's shows written, the team of writers had to come to accomodation with each other, somehow, even though they didn't agree on everything. In order to do that it had to be recognized that all the people in the room had the same objectives, the same goals -- which were to write the damned best season they could write. They were not enemies. They saw differently. Which ultimately made for better writing because it could not be one dimensional, when there were so many different perspectives. Woo.
Those of us who are equally horrified by what's happened in this nation via the neocons and righttwingers, etc., and where the teabaggers are determined to take us -- and what this means for the future of us all: we still must not get personally angry with each other because we see things differently in terms of the dems as a party and this administration. We must come to accomodation, because the objective isn't either the Dems or Obama, but saving the nation. Maybe the world. Pretty grandiose, right? But then, considering the sort of fiction and entertainments so many of us are involved in, grandiose r us, right?
BTW, my other takeaway from this interview was that both guys, Simon and his interviewer, were engaged in mutual wanking, all rahrahrah about their he-manism, and how they could have just whacked that guy who cut in line at a -- KaChing! -- Pogues show.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Who Wears Postmamboism
At some point this year we are hoping to start lines of design made in Haiti, by Haitians. Lots of sequins. Sequins = mirrors, behind which are the faces of the the divine. In the meantime we're working on the second design.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Lord Byron on Daniel Boone
A friend provided me the Lord Byron verses concerning Daniel Boone, in response to the essay. If reading these line about this subject by this author isn't cognitive dissonance, it's very like. From Don Juan:
Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the great names, which in our faces stare,
The General Boone, backwoodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest among mortals anywhere,
For killing nothing, but a bear or buck; he
Enjoy’d the lonely, vigorous, harmless days,
Of his old age, in wilds of deepest maze.
Crime came not near him; she is not the child
Of solitude; health shrank not from him, for
Her home is in the rarely trodden wild,
Which, if men seek her not, and death be more
Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguil’d
By habit to what their own hearts abhor —
In cities cag’d. The present case in point I
Cite is, Boone liv’d hunting up to ninety:
And, what is stranger, left behind a name,
For which men vainly decimate the throng;
Not only famous, but of that good fame,
Without which glory’s but a tavern song;
Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame,
Which hate or envy e’er could tinge with wrong;
An active hermit; even in age the child
Of nature, or the Man of Ross run wild.
‘Tis true, he shrank from men even of his nation,
When they built up unto his darling trees;
He mov’d some hundred miles off, for a station,
Where there were fewer houses find more ease.
The inconvenience of civilization
Is, that you neither can be pleased, nor please.
But where he met the individual man,
He show’d himself as kind as mortal can.
He was not all alone; around him grew
A sylvan tribe of children of the chase,
Whose young, unwaken’d world was always new;
Nor sword, nor sorrow, yet had left a trace
On her unwrinkled brow; nor could you view
A frown on nature’s, or on human face.
The free-born forest found, and kept them free,
And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.
And tall and strong, and swift of foot were they,
Beyond the dwarfing city’s pale abortions;
Because their thoughts had never been the prey
Of care or gain; the green woods were their portions
No sinking spirits told them they grew gray,
No fashion made them apes of her distortions.
Simple they were; not savage; and their rifles,
Though very true, were not yet us’d for trifles.
Motion was in their days; rest in their slumbers;
And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil;
Nor yet too many, nor too few their numbers;
Corruption could not make their hearts her soil;
The lust, which stings; the splendor which encumbers,
With the free foresters divide no spoil.
Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods.
Happy 2010. This time, 2000, I was in Havana. It looks like our opportunities for returning to Cuba are regressing again, like so much has regressed since the stated objectives out of this administration a year ago.
Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the great names, which in our faces stare,
The General Boone, backwoodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest among mortals anywhere,
For killing nothing, but a bear or buck; he
Enjoy’d the lonely, vigorous, harmless days,
Of his old age, in wilds of deepest maze.
Crime came not near him; she is not the child
Of solitude; health shrank not from him, for
Her home is in the rarely trodden wild,
Which, if men seek her not, and death be more
Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguil’d
By habit to what their own hearts abhor —
In cities cag’d. The present case in point I
Cite is, Boone liv’d hunting up to ninety:
And, what is stranger, left behind a name,
For which men vainly decimate the throng;
Not only famous, but of that good fame,
Without which glory’s but a tavern song;
Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame,
Which hate or envy e’er could tinge with wrong;
An active hermit; even in age the child
Of nature, or the Man of Ross run wild.
‘Tis true, he shrank from men even of his nation,
When they built up unto his darling trees;
He mov’d some hundred miles off, for a station,
Where there were fewer houses find more ease.
The inconvenience of civilization
Is, that you neither can be pleased, nor please.
But where he met the individual man,
He show’d himself as kind as mortal can.
He was not all alone; around him grew
A sylvan tribe of children of the chase,
Whose young, unwaken’d world was always new;
Nor sword, nor sorrow, yet had left a trace
On her unwrinkled brow; nor could you view
A frown on nature’s, or on human face.
The free-born forest found, and kept them free,
And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.
And tall and strong, and swift of foot were they,
Beyond the dwarfing city’s pale abortions;
Because their thoughts had never been the prey
Of care or gain; the green woods were their portions
No sinking spirits told them they grew gray,
No fashion made them apes of her distortions.
Simple they were; not savage; and their rifles,
Though very true, were not yet us’d for trifles.
Motion was in their days; rest in their slumbers;
And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil;
Nor yet too many, nor too few their numbers;
Corruption could not make their hearts her soil;
The lust, which stings; the splendor which encumbers,
With the free foresters divide no spoil.
Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods.
Happy 2010. This time, 2000, I was in Havana. It looks like our opportunities for returning to Cuba are regressing again, like so much has regressed since the stated objectives out of this administration a year ago.
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