June 25, 2013 On the Shelf Map Your Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein Café Kafka, Barcelona. A new app, Placing Literature, lets you find literary landmarks and bookstores wherever your travels take you. For your delectation: ten bookish restaurants. (We want to go to Café Kafka.) Everyone knows the original Little Mermaid—walking on knives, sea foam, and all—is anything but cute. At the LA Review of Books, scholars weigh in on the implications of Andersen’s grim tale. A tribute to that publisher’s friend, the subtitle. “The teaching of the humanities has fallen on hard times.” Verlyn Klinkenborg on the rise and fall of the American English major.
June 24, 2013 At Work Object Lessons: A Conversation with Christian Patterson By Rebecca Bengal Sissy Spacek in Badlands, 1973. By permission of Criterion Collection. Lovers on the run tend to travel light. Generally speaking, in our collective imagination, accoutrements tend to be limited to car (probably stolen), gun (also stolen), clothes on their backs. Yet Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate (captured in 1958 after a violent shooting spree in Nebraska and Wyoming that left eleven dead) become legend in part by leaving behind a physical trail. Of the multiple films inspired by the Starkweather-Fugate killings, Terrence Malick’s 1973 Badlands (newly released by the Criterion Collection), is the one that—even as it takes dramatic liberties—most explicitly focuses on these tangible objects. Kit and Holly (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek) cart along a birdcage, a copy of Kon-Tiki, and a Maxfield Parrish painting; the film’s art director, Jack Fisk, filled one character’s house with $100 worth of random pieces—a jar of black widows, a giant ball of twine—he’d bought from the relatives of a dead man. Just prior to their capture, Kit buries a few of their belongings, described in deadpan voice-over: “He said no one else would know where we put ’em, and that we’d come back some day, maybe, and they’d still be sitting here just the same, but we’d be different, and if we never got back, well, somebody might dig ’em up a thousand years from now and wouldn’t they wonder.” Nearly forty years later, Christian Patterson’s 2011 book of photographs, Redheaded Peckerwood, continues down a similar path. Already in its third edition, with a thoughtful introduction by Luc Sante and curator Karen Irvine, Patterson’s is a work that defies the easy definition of photo book, approaching as it does the Starkweather narrative from a number of vantage points: newspaper clippings, interviews, ephemera. The photographs of bits of evidence, or of things belonging to the killers and victim—a hood ornament from the getaway car, the teenage Fugate’s stuffed toy poodle—have the aura of a saint’s relics. Tucked into the binding of the book are more souvenirs, reproductions of documents related to Starkweather (a store receipt with a poem printed on its reverse side; a typed list of dirty aphorisms). Even those things that are not directly related to Starkweather and Fugate take on the air of authenticity; the effect of seeing all these effects, in the context of the photographer’s present-day mapping of their journey, is transcendent and shocking, the objects themselves acting as witnesses. What struck you most about Badlands when you first saw the film? I was taken with the film in every way. Visually, it was just so damn beautiful, with its big, painterly skies and endless, romantic landscapes. And thematically, well … it was one hell of a crazy story. Sheen and Spacek were great too. It’s a great film. What were some of the first pictures you made that appear in the book? And when you arrived in Nebraska, what were some of your early impressions? House at Night and Ray of Light stand out in my mind. The former is the first of my photographs that appears in Redheaded Peckerwood and the latter is one of the last. Read More
June 24, 2013 Arts & Culture The Strange Mystery of Ambrose Bierce By Sadie Stein On this day in 1843, the cynic, journalist, and satirist Ambrose Bierce was born in Ohio. It’s his death that’s in question; in 1913 the seventy-one-year-old writer disappeared without a trace (probably) somewhere in Mexico, while (possibly) traveling with Pancho Villa’s army. Nearly everything about Bierce’s final days is subject to speculation, rumor, and debate. While some claim he ended his final letter with “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination,” others debate the validity of the prophetic pronouncement. Some claim he was killed by firing squad; others, that he committed suicide; and still others, that he disappeared into another dimension. In any event, his continued existence seems unlikely, and his legend assured by the mystery. As he himself put it, “Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him.”
June 24, 2013 On Film Notes on Comedy, My Own and Others’ By Pedro Almodóvar Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Although we associate comedy with spontaneity, the comedies I’ve made to date—including this new one, I’m So Excited!—are rehearsed exhaustively during preproduction and afterward during shooting. Spontaneity is always the product of rehearsal. A script isn’t finished until the film has opened. I rehearse a script as if it was a play. As it happens, both Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and I’m So Excited! are play-like, in the sense that the action takes place mainly on one set. I rehearse them like plays, but I don’t film them like plays (actually, I’ve never directed a play, so I don’t know what it’s like). They’re very verbal comedies: the action lies basically in the words and in the openness of the characters. I usually improvise a lot in rehearsals, then I rewrite the scenes and rehearse them again, and so on, to the point of obsession. With improvisations, the scenes usually grow longer, but it’s the best way I know to find nuances and parallel situations that I would never discover if we stuck rigidly to the script. After stretching the scenes out and blowing them up, I rewrite them again, trying to synthesize what has been improvised. And then we rehearse again. Some of the actors, especially Carlos Areces, can’t bear you to cut a single one of their jokes, even if it has come up while the scene is looking for itself and hasn’t yet gelled. Everything that comes up and involves his character belongs to him. If it were up to him, the film would last three hours. (At times I shoot two versions of the same scene, and I admit that at times I edit the “improvised” one.) Lola Dueñas is another one who immediately appropriates all the antics that occur to me during the first rehearsals. Afterward, it’s heartrending to tell her that it was just a game, a way of stretching, of being crazy, of probing, of losing all sense of the ridiculous—above all losing respect for the script—and that it was all just an exercise. When Lola sees me improvising a scene with her character, however exaggerated it may be, if she likes it, she grabs on to it and it’s impossible to convince her that I was just fooling around. I admit that at times she’s managed to get her own way. When I had the idea for the mise-en-scène of the first time she goes into a trance in the cockpit, looking for sensations while groping the two pilots’ bodies, all those involved laughed, but I never thought about editing the scene like that—and yet that’s how it turned out in the film. After much insistence, Lola asked me at least to look at how she did it and then decide. The point was, I had to give her the chance to play the scene that way. She did it, and after seeing it, I had no choice but to include it. Lola is capable of breathing such truth into the most insane situations that she manages to make any craziness plausible. Read More
June 24, 2013 On the Shelf Fake Blake, Back Covers, and Other News By Sadie Stein So what’s with all the women’s backs on book covers? “Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet,” said John Quincy Adams. Judge for yourself. A school librarian has discovered that a poem called “Two Sunflowers Move into the Yellow Room”—attributed to Blake and included on many a school reading list—was in fact written in the United States in the 1980s. Following some extremely (and legally) questionable advice on “getting awesome with women,” Kickstarter has banned all seduction guides. This week’s Bookriot Sunday Diversion—guessing a book title based on its Library of Congress catalog subjects—is, in our humble opinion, nearly impossible.
June 21, 2013 Look Drawing Gitmo By Molly Crabapple In the eleven years since captives arrived at Guantanamo Bay, only three artists have been allowed to visit. I’m here drawing the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed hearings for VICE magazine. Artists sketch through three layers of soundproof glass. There’s a monitor for sound, but it runs on a forty-second delay. The delay is to allow for any classified information to be cut. The world in front of you does not sync with the censored world on the screen. We sit far from the accused. Our opera glasses were confiscated as “prohibited ocular amplification.” Before we take drawings into the outside world, a court security officer must approve and sticker them. Read More