Over the years of serving up your Cup of Joe (fresh and hot), this semi-experimental online original commentary on our collective Past, Present and Future, well, sure, there's been great focus on politics. But something happened. Pretty much a year, two even, have been posts about the Con Man Who Swindled America. Titanic effort has been applied all along by yours truly to resist attempting to endlessly post pithy captures our current Idiocracy. The effort has won the day, so, in the words of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, "Good news, everyone!" More normal weird and wonderful items are making a welcome return here. (No, I'm not turning blindly away. How could anyone? We all know what a horrible place we've become. America is now the place parents warn their children about. "And if they catch you, they'll lock you away forever.") So. First we heard about an Alabama man who allegedly had an Attack Squirrel, which he had been feeding meth in order to make it "aggressive", so the police better watch out! Then came The Chase after said owner of the perhaps meth-addicted Attack Squirrel.
Ok then. --- Movies have been on my mind too, as always. Especially regarding the process of making them. As a hardcore fan of the films of Stanley Kubrick, I I enjoyed this oral history about the making of the orgy scene in Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut. "Peter Cavaciuti (Steadicam operator): Stanley’s precision was the thing I remember most. I had three lasers on the Steadicam, pointed to the ground, and when they all lined up, a grip would drop a plumb line from a string from the lens; then I’d line my lasers up, and then the grip would talk me into the mark, saying I was two inches, one inch on the mark. That level of precision was pretty exceptional. You’d very rarely do less than 20 takes. So physically and intellectually, it was demanding. Very often, Stanley would say to me that I wasn’t on my mark. I’d look down and I had my three lasers, so I’d say, “Well, I am on the mark, Stanley.” And one time Tom Cruise whispered to me, “Just move the camera, Pete.” [I realized] it was just code for saying that Stanley wanted to put the camera in a different place." As much as he was known for being a control freak, it is much more a case of his being a collaborator - gathering very talented people, work with them for months to create the best way to tell a scene or a story, and still at the moment of shooting the scene being open to what else might be possible. I was also struck by descriptions of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as great to work with - helpful and contributing to the work. One doesn't spend years working on a difficult project unless their is great commitment and excitement. -- How about pretty much every way you can cook a potato?
The "long read" nature of my writing style and my general slow, sometimes oh-so-slow, process could - to some readers- appear contrary to the popular binary wave patterns digital lifestyle blurring past us and around us. But hang in there kiddo, it's worth it. So while I apologize for making you wait for a new post, I bring gifts, a prime selection of long reads - first up is an artist using photography and digital tech to create powerful images. Via Medium, their profile of Adam Maygur begins:
"Adam Maygar is a computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. But nobody had ever suggested that he might also be a terrorist until the morning that he descended into the Union Square subway station in New York. At the time, Magyar was immersed in a long-running techno-art project called Stainless, creating high-resolution images of speeding subway trains and their passengers, using sophisticated software he created and hardware that he retrofitted himself. The scanning technique he developed—combining thousands of pixel-wide slices into a single image—allows him to catch passengers unawares as they hurtle through dark subway tunnels, fixing them in haunting images filled with detail no ordinary camera can capture."
Please oh reader, explore his images on Medium, as my humble but lovable blog cannot convey how fantastic Maygur's work is:
Maygur says at one point: These moments I capture are meaningless, there is no story in them, and if you can catch the core, the essence of being, you capture probably everything." A constant element in the my own writing/pondering about writing is about the nature of Art itself. By which I mean, what prompts the creation and execution? That leads us to an interview with Phillip Roth, the now-retired Phillip Roth, whose the hands down winner of, if not the long read, the long answer to press questions. And his mastery of language is impeccable. Below, Roth gives an assessment of America:
"Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolence around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever.
You have 300 million people on a continent 3,000 miles wide doing the best they can with their inexhaustible troubles. We are witnessing a new and benign admixture of races on a scale unknown since the malignancy of slavery. I could go on and on. It’s hard not to feel close to existence here. This is not some quiet little corner of the world."
I was deeply grateful to discover a 1999 essay om Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" by Tim Kreider - grateful because it was a brilliant piece about why EWS is great and critics of the day so very wrong. Ignoring all of Kubrick's previous work is idiotic as he was likely the most thoughtful composer of film images ever to wield a movie camera. I too read the movie as a scathing critique of greed and corrupt depravity at the cusp of the 21st century, especially among the mega wealthy, and a critique of those who see themselves as above such lowdown behavior. At heart, their is a murder mystery in the movie and the resolution so typically Kubrickian - intriguing spaces for audiences to ponder on meanings and conclusions: "The open-ended narrative forces us to ask ourselves what we’re really seeing; is Eyes Wide Shut a movie about marriage, sex, and jealousy, or about money, whores, and murder? Before you make up your own mind, consider this: has there ever been even one Stanley Kubrick film in which someone didn't get killed?"
Let's follow the questions about creating home to Tennessee, or at least the South. Located on the Tennessee River, the music recorded in the wee studios of Muscle Shoals are the very foundations of rock and roll and soul music. The 2013 documentary "Muscle Shoals" has been airing on PBS recently and its a solid 2 hours of artistic collaborations that made history,
Yes, I know, a movie is not a read. How about reading movies? Would that work? Actors in Hollywood have been staging live readings of movies, most recently the notorious script for Quentin Tarantino's western The Hateful Eight" - notorious because it got leaked online, which pissed him off so much he decided to not make the movie and sued Gawker for linking to the script. But actors are doing more scripts with all new casts:
"We started with The Breakfast Club," says Elvis Mitchell, the former New York Times critic who now curates film at LACMA. ... Imagine The Graduate without Dustin Hoffman or Anne Bancroft. Now imagine those roles being filled by Jay Baruchel and Sharon Stone (that was April's other live read), all in a stripped-down environment with the actors sitting in a row at a table facing the crowd, with their character names on a card in front of them, like the US supreme court in session. The approach has produced some happy moments of inspired casting, such as Paul Rudd and Mindy Kaling in The Princess Bride, Seth Rogen as The Big Lebowski, The Usual Suspects with Dexter's Michael C Hall, and the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, which was vigorously rejigged with Rainn Wilson as Walter White and Mae Whitman an absolute riot as Jesse Pinkman (Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul were among those cheering from the stalls). Other productions have included Ghostbusters, with Rogen, Jack Black and more Rainn Wilson, and a Boogie Nights do-over that was especially well received, with Taylor Lautner as Dirk Diggler and Don Johnson in Burt Reynolds' porn-impresario role."
