"Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. It even has a watermark. "

So the irony of the situation is this:

a. I just finished reading The Great Gatsby last night.
b. It is far too late for me to still be up reading blogs, but here I am.
c. I was literally just getting ready to close up the 'ole macbook when whaBAM, I came across the coolest art that I've found in a while.

Christmas wish list item numero uno - The Heads of State Great Gatsby "Business Card" Poster Print



Its description according to the site:

"Chapter four of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby reads like a VIP guest list of the Jazz Age. Taking inspiration from those pages, this poster is comprised of the business cards and personal stationery of the movers and shakers that attended Gatsby's parties in the summer of 1922."

And sure enough, pp. 61-63

"From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine...From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence...Benny McClenahan always arrived with four girls...I have forgotten their names...and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be...



...In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O'Brien came there at least once and the Baedecker girls and young Brewer who had his nose shot off in the war."



Oh, and I mustn't forget the lovely Miss Golf Pro Herself...



I WANT.

[Btw, the title quote is Patrick Bateman on business cards in case you were stumped.]

Fincher's Tribute to Larsson

After much perseverance, I have finally finished reading Dostoevsky's The Double and am now very excited to move on to Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I understand that I may be jumping on the bandwagon a tad late, but no matter! I'll very happily move from one psycho thriller to the next.

Here are some promo photos from W Magazine for David Fincher's American film version (Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander). Kinda racey...

Can't wait to start my new read and certainly can't wait to see it on screen. Expected theatrical release December 21, 2011.

Phantom.

I have had the pleasure of performing as Meg Giry in a production of Phantom of the Opera at Rock Valley College's Starlight Theater this summer, and in honor of our second and last run (starting Wednesday, July 6th!), I wanted to blog about some of the intellectual morsels I've discovered in my research concerning the story and its general history.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"Overture"

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


"Who is this angel, this angel of music..."

To begin, I'll say that the musical is only a semblance of the book by French author Gaston Leroux. I read the latter during rehearsals, and despite its differences, the novel's sinister ambiance - the rat-strewn cellars of the Paris Opera, mid-19th century - stirred a fearful curiosity I've learned to use in the show.



The novel concentrates much less on the musical's "pre-opera diva" protagonist Christine and much more on the attempts of her wealthy suitor Raul to apprehend the opera's "Phantom," a deformed man named Erik who kidnaps Christine after her first performance as lead. Raul is approached by an ambiguous character called "the Persian" who lives in the bowels of the opera house and associates himself with Erik through their shared time in India, the personal knowledge of whom he knows will help Raul in his efforts to save Christine.

Totally absent from the stage production (and regretfully so, I must say), the Persian offers narrative insight into Erik's troubled past and the malevolent motivation behind his gruesome actions. Entire chapters are devoted to the Persian's accounts, the most important being his explanation of their acquaintance. Erik, commissioned by a czar in India to build an architecturally elaborate palace impenetrable by the czar's enemies, is suspected of potential treason as he is the only person who could navigate an enemy through the palace's many labyrinths. Paranoia causes the czar to want his architect executed, so he employs the Persian to complete the task. However the Persian, similar to the huntsman in Snow White's tale, takes pity on his victim and fakes the execution, exiling him to Paris and thus saving his life.

And here is where the plot of the musical begins. At the beginning of the show, all we know of the deformed Phantom is that he is gifted as both musician and architect and that he has become perversely obsessed with a young opera singer, so much so that he pretends to be the spirit of her deceased father and commits violent crimes to obtain her love. We only see how his physical insecurities and deranged desire for ultimate power over Christine drive him to insanity; nothing is ever said of what he's endured in the past.

To be honest, the book was somewhat dry at times, and the musical is absolutely beautiful and redemptive in its depiction of Christine's forgiving relationship with the Phantom. But I'm grateful to have learned some historical (be it fictional) background into the Phantom's troubled psyche.

I also learned from the novel that the underground labyrinths and lakes of the Paris Opera actually exist! They were built as an anti-irrigation system so that the opera wouldn't flood and were also used as a sort of "underground railroad" during the Revolution.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"Andre, please don't shout. It's publicity, and the take is vast. Free publicity!"
"But we have no cast..."

My fellow castmates Erin and Megan also contributed to my interest in Phantom trivia. Erin brought a book called The Complete Phantom of the Opera to a rehearsal one night, and I must have spent at least an hour flipping through the history of the tale in all of its forms: literature, film, television, and stage theater. The best part was the book's inclusion of artwork: the early illustrations of Joseph Hope Williams, vintage movie advertisements/photo-clips from different film versions including Rupert Julian's 1925 silent adaptation with Lon Chaney, and Degas-inspired paintings done by Robert Heindel that capture different scenes from the original musical in London.


Joseph Hope Williams




Rupert Julian's 1925 version








Arthur Lubin's 1943 version




"I'm Here, I'm Here, I'm Here"--Robert Heindel



"The End of Innocence"



"Phantom Dancers" [My personal favorite, as my character Meg is one of the ballerinas ;]



"Sarah and Michael, Music of the Night"



"The Phantom, Michael Crawford"



"The Phantom of the Opera"



"The Phantom, Michael Crawford"




. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


"Why so silent, good messieurs? Did you think that I had left you for good..."



Megan introduced me to the idea that the short story "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe may very well have inspired the costuming and overall feeling of peril adopted by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the first scene of the musical's second act, "Masquerade."

Here's an excerpt I found especially befitting:

"It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes,

(which embraces three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,)

there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before."


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

"God give me courage to show you, you are not alone."

Last but not least, I came across a verse the other day that reminded me of what I believe to be one of the most profound themes belonging to the famed story, regardless of the medium in which it takes form...


Psalm 39:5

"You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Each man's life is but a breath.

Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro:

He bustles about, but only in vain; he heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it.

But now, Lord, what do I look for?

My hope is in you."

Proud to announce...

that I have officially finished reading the 550 page Louise Brooks biography I started just under a year ago.

What a tormented soul she was.



One of my favorite quotes is an epitaph chosen for her by the book's author Barry Paris, taken from one of her favorite authors - Marcel Proust.

"Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us. We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthma, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest."

Indeed, Louise was one of these neurotics. She lived a boastful, fast, liberated existence, damning all that took advantage of her and only finding solace in the books on her shelf. She was undoubtedly lonely and overly self critical, thinking that she was a failure at most everything she attempted in life. But she contributed a great deal to the art of expression in her dancing, acting, and writing, candidly giving away her opinions and her soul to people who never expected nor deserved such passion or intellect from a uniquely beautiful young girl in mid-twentieth century social/hierarchical/financial (and the list continues) chaos. These qualities simply were not conveyed in women in film before her. More profound than her accomplishments in screen personality and conviction, however, was Louise's cultural challenge to strive for veracity in understanding one's past and meaning. She labeled eras of her life for what they were - good, bad, sweetly and sourly unforgettable, drunken, failed; periods of spiritual growth and periods of darkness. Regardless of the implications, Louise was (I believe) honest to a fault with her loved ones and herself, constantly searching for God and redemption. I only hope that I am neurotic enough to contribute as much of a masterpiece to the arts and to Truth as she bravely did, despite the cost and the sleepless nights.

Certainly she wasn't perfect...but at least she never pretended that she was.

Hesher

Definitely reminds me of an avant garde yet-even-more-twisted-and-dysfunctional Matilda. Being that the Dahl classic is one of my all time favorite childhood reads and being that Nat Portman produced, I'm sure I'll give this kooky flick a go.

Films to wait for...

Two of which happen to feature Mia Wasikowska. Those Aussies - simply bred for good filmmaking.

Jane Eyre
Release: March 11

Yet another rendition of the Bronte classic, only with an eery air [pun intended] of spiritual darkness in each dimly lit, wide-angle shot.
Directed by Cary Fukunaga



Restless

I love the morbidity of the opening shot sequence and the symbolism you know it will play in regard to the rest of the film's redemptive plot line.
Directed by Gus Van Sant



Happythankyoumoreplease

"It's the simple things in life" as the old adage goes, right? If only I'd thought to write an indie screenplay with that very theme and work in a few interconnected characters and plot lines. I mean, it's not like it's been done before or anything. (American Beauty, Happy Go Lucky, Crash...) Still, this one looks pretty adorable.
Directed by Josh Radnor



Frankie and Alice

I recently saw an interview with Halle Berry where she mentioned that she'd fought a number of years to personally produce this film, which I found pretty remarkable and endearing. It takes an introspective look on the saga of a paranoid schizophrenic, where the dueling alter is a white, upper-middle class debutante vying for control over the mind of a black, disco-dancing hussy living amidst the 60s' uproarious Civil Rights Movement. Right up my psychoanalytical ally.
Directed by Geoffrey Sax



Hanna

Not generally my type of movie, but let's face it - whoever thought casting the Albino-looking Ronan as a 14 year old assassin badass was going to make an excellent motion picture is a cinematic clairvoyant ahead of his or her time.
Directed by Joe Wright

For English Lit Nerds Like Me.

I just love when my blog posts can [somewhat] unintentionally relate to each other in theme. After seeing Beauty and the Beast on stage the other night, Rach asked if I'd ever seen the French film version, La Belle et La Bete.  I responded with an enthusiastic "YES" and immediately had imagery running through my mind of Jean Cocteau's ethereal palace gardens and monstrous shadow lighting.

This then brought to mind the poster on Veronique's red bathroom wall in her little apartment in Paris - a place I once called home.



The next day I fortuitously came across this pic of an adorable literary clutch by Olympia Le Tan, carried around Paris during this year's fashion week [thus making me all the more nostalgic]...



...and searched to find that Le Tan's collection is more vast than a classics fiend such as myself could ever have dreamed or imagined.

[Never mind, of course, that they're $1450 a pop.]





And to wrap up my relative series of artistic and cultural interests, it just so happened that Natalie P. toted a Lolita (her first on-screen role) to the premiere of Black Swan, the latest film that I've seen and so been obsessed with since the release of its trailer two and a half months ago [review blog to come soon.]



Le Tan even has a cute kitty that reminds me of a street cat I know named Boots.
But this one's name is Fritz.

Look at that bow...this woman is great.



Oh Fritz.

Novice thinking.

"If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could've won."
Mumford & Sons "I Gave You All"

Well, in lieu of this lyric's very prominent relevance in my life, I have begun writing...finally. Not a ton, but enough. It's still 
hard for me to set my own goals when it comes to finishing an entire story (or even blog or book), but I've certainly been 
jotting things down more often, and I suppose, too, that it's more of an ongoing battle; must keep telling myself that as long as
I do a little bit here and there, just keep the juices flowing, then I won't completely lose creative drive. More importantly, the 
day to day processes of work and play will start pouring forth good material for coverage. However, I still only write for 
myself, and it dawned on me that writing on a team for a bigger audience (something I would love to do) could prove to be a challenging switch.

I read an interview between two young filmmaker friends - NYU grads Jody Lee Lipes and Lance Edmands - that touched on 
the creative process from a novice point of view. Most interesting to me was Lipes' discussion on how he maintained a certain 
amount of creative stamina when he had no money and was forced to commercialize his work against his will. For both Lipes 
and Edmands the biggest obstacle was and still is figuring out how to fulfill personal creative goals while still drawing audiences.

The Interview

LE: "When you're making a film it's a constant battle about what you want and what does the audience want."

JLL: "I definitely think that movies that push the boundaries of entertainment and storytelling can be great, but to me the 
ultimate goal is to make films that are unique, but that still have a mass appeal. The best creative minds can create a movie that 
everyone loves but still has its own voice. Even someone like Kubrick was always upset that more people didn't go to see his
movies...I think it's more about your personality. I have a sort of lofty theory that when you make movies you have to make 
strong decisions. I think most of the movies I like turn out better that way, rather than trying a thousand different things 
without a commitment to telling a story a certain way."


Make strong decisions and commit. 
Commit. Commit. Commit.

At least I'm getting a little better in this endeavor...

College

The excerpts of "Howl: I" that remind me of my University days. 

by Allen Ginsberg

___________________________________________

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness: starving, hysterical, naked...

Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who, poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high, sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
cold-water flats, floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, 

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El 
and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool 
eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war...

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, 
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, 

sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks... 

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists 
jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills...

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes...

who studied Plotinus, Poe, St. John of the Cross, telepathy, and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas...

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of
poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago...

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams...

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts...

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish...

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time...

who sang out of their windows in despair...

who barreled down the highways of the past...

who drove crosscountry seventy-two hours to find out if I had a vision 
or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity...

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation
and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second...

rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love...

the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at 
the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,  
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, 
and even that imaginary; nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, 
and trapped the archangel of the soul between two visual images and   
joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and 
dash of consciousness together...

the madman bum and angel beat in Time,
unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death...

an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio..."

Read full poem here.

"do something worth remembering...with a scar."

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS from Astray Films on Vimeo.

"I never wanna take this for granted, so I try and keep motivation simple, real, and positive. If I am to
scrape a living, at least it's a living worth scraping. If there's no future in it, at least it's a present worth
remembering. For fires of happiness and waves of gratitude, for everything that brought us to that
point, enough at that moment in time, to do something worth remembering with a photograph or a scar
- I feel genuinely lucky to hand on heart say I love doing what I do, and though I may never be a rich
man, if I live long enough, I'll certainly have a tale or two for the nephews...and I dig the thought of that."

Review of a Review

"Wallowing in Misery for Art's Sake"
by A.O. Scott - New York Times

It is both surprising and refreshing to me that this New York Times film columnist actually acknowledges the ubiquitous 
pretense of film festivals, being that people like him are often in close conjunction with the semantics of their production. 
Instead of an air of overall praise, he aligns himself with people like me who find it aggravating that a) the general public is 
rarely (if ever) given the opportunity to attend, b) most of the films screened (especially foreign submissions) are otherwise 
impossible to see, and c) independent films are sadly being taken off festival rosters in favor of manic depressive art films 
deemed worthy by executives (see title). 

I learned from this article that a large contributing factor to these issues is high brow film societies' disdain for "the American
art-movie economy" or "the independent sector" of festival submissions.  Scott explains that independent film companies, 
struggling along with the rest of the country from the wayward economy, have started commercializing their material, be it 
minimally and begrudgingly. Nevertheless, festival execs are aghast at the presence of any commercialization whatsoever and 
have hitherto cast a furrowed critical brow on indie gems, resulting in their gradual replacement with a slew of depressing 
featured films that display absolutely no evocation of viewing pleasure whatsoever. In other words, anything redemptive, 
American, and only-commercial-enough-to-put-food-on-the-table is rejected.  

Now, don't get me wrong, I can appreciate a despondent foreign film as much as the next guy, but those that I'm not as crazy 
about I wouldn't be able to see even if I wanted to. Scott alludes that the reason for this restriction is the executive assumption
that the general public isn't interested in these kinds of films, meaning there's no need for festivals to be made readily 
available. Neither are the films themselves for that matter, because any kind of mass distribution would certainly buck their 
"no commercialism" rule.

Mind's eye of festival execs: "If we eliminate the only films they'd be interested in attending and make every other film 
impossible to find then maybe we can make our high brow critical society even smaller..."

Thus, promotion to keep festival attendance a caste system of what Scott refers to as "a transnational fraternity of directors, 
journalists, and well, festival programmers" is in full swing.

After all that, I guess I'm just complaining because I feel left out, festival films are impossible to find, and I love indies. 

End of story.

short film.

by Arev Manoukian

so beautiful, i love the music.


Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

Films to wait for...

Black Swan (In the vein of everything Hitchcockian that I love...loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's
novella The Double, which you can read for free online here.) Opens December 1, 2010



Blue Valentine Opens December 31, 2010



Never Let Me Go based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (An absolute MUST read...look for a review in
the next few days.) Select release September 15, 2010, but it opens in Orlando October 8--maybe look for it near you then??




It's Kind of a Funny Story based on the novel by Ned Vizzini (Currently reading and already loving.) Opens October 8, 2010

Amelie.

 

When watching Amelie for the bajillionth time, I came to the scene where she cheerfully flits over to the blind homeless man waiting to cross the busy street [the homeless man who plays bewitching tunes on an early 20^th century record player in the Abbesses train stop] and aids him down the comic strip sidewalk to the train, all the while explaining each and every zany, lovely goings-on that occurs as they pass...

And I cried for how beautiful it was.

In my personal opinion, this scene independently portrays the solitary aim of the film as a whole, a film that everyone needs to watch at least once in his or her lifetime. 

Everyone.

sunshine cleaning.

So it's been a while since I've done one of these, but this one certainly does warrant a warm, praiseworthy review.
It's about a baby sister who can't really get much right, and an older sister who, despite her own problems, takes on those of her family in order to make things right...make things sunny again. 


Needless to say, it hit close to home.    ;]
 

stop motion.

Not until I saw Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox and was forced to watch its special features by my bestie Lyssa and her boyfriend Blake did I fully come to appreciate the dynamics of stop motion.  

It was a confusing movie, so I would like to watch it again before I write a review.  Until then here's another stop motion snippet that I think is mesmerizing.  The evolutionary theme is not to my personal liking, but the artistry is phenomenal and vast.  I especially love the sound effects [i.e. the crab clinking through a drain pipe, hehe] and all of the dinosaur murals!

royally__remarkable.

So this was the immaculately illustrated blueprint for Margot Tenenbaum's bedroom.
Note the bearded mask and the IBM electric typewriter.
Those Andersons are great.

And I really want my bed in a turret.


by Eric Chase Anderson