Screensees.
1. See left. (an excerpt: Amsterdam Island, France-
Everyone who stays on Amsterdam for longer than a year is examined by a medical officer from the south of France to check that he is coping with the long period of restriction of movement and the confined, purely masculine environment. No woman has visited longer than two days. At night, the men gather in the small video room in Great Skua to watch one of the porn films from their personal collection. Each man sits in a row on his own. The loudspeakers emit grunts and groans, and the air is heavy with the musky scent of the bull seals.)
2. See fifty (unfairly forgotten films).
3. See the wheel turn (on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series).
An Open, Earnest Letter to People Who Like Gruesomeness in Books & Film
This is your brain on fear. As it turns out, Hippocampus isn't fat camp for Latin nerds.
Dear People,
I’m the pain in the ass who makes deciding on a movie en masse impossible. But is it violent? How violent is it, if it is? Do animals get murdered? Do children get murdered? Eventually we’ll decide on a bonehead comedy or a beautifully shot Icelandic film about rafts in the gloaming.
The Rule of Threes is Bullshit
1. The Kansas City Public Library’s parking garage. Library patrons voted on which titles got used in the facade. Reminds me of Frank Gehry’s Binocular Building in Venice, Ca. Don’t you think it’d be nice to live inside a cartoon? We could draw ourselves into any scene; and every building could double as an object of desire. If your house could be any book, what would it be?
2. For all of the dorky grammarians out there. (I include myself in that group.) Learn Your Damn Homophones.
3. Last night I watched a great Swedish movie called Let the Right One In. It’s likely the most poetic vampire movie you’ll ever watch.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICp4g9p_rgo
4. (because the Rule of Three[s] is bullshit) A tiny lil poem from Mary Ruefle, in her book Indeed I Was Pleased with the World. I love it, and I’m very interested in the tense changes.
Bring me a coffee mug from a house
where no one has died. Bring me
an eggbeater, the scissors,
and a very ripe plum.
I am going to make you a toy.
When you play with it,
in my heart I open my sad eyes
and stare.
HAMLET’S SOLILOQUY AS TAUGHT TO A TODDLER BY BRIAN COX
I don’t even like kids that much, but this is great.
Also, one of the two best movies I saw in 2009 was The Escapist, starring Brian Cox, the first film by a guy named Rupert Wyatt. It’s absolutely terrific and it played in New York for one week, in one theater, and then disappeared. Imagine Brian Cox as an action hero. Excellent trailer after the jump.