Saturday, August 8, 2009
Bloodlust! (1961)
A crazed hunter kidnaps people and turns them loose on his private estate, where he hunts them for sport.
A second-rate rip-off of The Most Dangerous Game, halfway well done, but with some pretty bad acting. With Robert Reed as the hero, later well known as the dad in The Brady Bunch.
Miniatures #1
At the very beginning of a classical concert you can watch the members of the orchestra step onto the stage and start tuning their instruments just before the conductor arrives. You'll hear a cacaphony of sounds that appears to be some kind of invisible composition, it has an aura of its own.
As a child attending such a concert for the very first time I thought it was already part of the concert. And even today I most often consider that part of the concert as more intriguing than the rest of the evening.
- W.K.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Budd Schulberg R.I.P.
The 95-year-old novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg has died of natural causes in his Long Island, New York home. He's best known for his script for On the Waterfront, but also for having snitched before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Lesser known is the fact that he arrested Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.
There's an eulogy here.
Indeterminacy 121
David Tudor and I took a taxi down town. He
was going to Macy’s; I was going on to West
Broadway and Prince where I get my hair cut.
After David Tudor got out, I began
talking with the driver about the weather.
The relative merits of the Old Farmers’ Almanac
and the newspapers came up. The driver said
they were developing rockets that would raise the
weather man’s predictions from 50 to 55 per cent
accuracy. I said I thought the Almanac
starting from a consideration of planets and
their movements, rather than from winds and
theirs, got a better start since the
X-quantities involved were not so physically close
to the results being predicted. The
driver said he’d had an operation some years
before and that while his flesh was dead and
numb, before the wound healed,
he was able to predict weather changes by
the pain he felt in the scar, that
when the flesh lost its numbness and was,
so to speak, back to normal,
he could no longer know in advance
anything about changes in weather.
- John Cage
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Vignettes #39
I've done quite a many different jobs over the years, but the most frequent job was giving private lessons to help kids improve their grades at school. I had been doing this from my early teens on.
One of the many pupils I had was a friend's cousin. She actually wasn't that bad at school, but she was madly ambitious and wanted to have better grades. Although I needed the money I would have rather done without this particular job, because she and her mother, too, were very domineering and asked a lot from me, although they basically stayed friendly. Although I got my hourly pay for visiting and giving lessons, the girl would call up at home and then ask me questions for hours on end. Often I found myself dictating her complete print-ready essays for all likely topics that could come up with a next day's test. I never got paid for those hours.
One day I arrived at their house for the next lesson, I had the girl arguing with her mother and she came into the office with her eyes all red and she was sniffing. I didn't ask her what it was all about, but my friend later told me that their was a big family argument with the girl. She was going to have her 18th birthday soon, and so it was decided as a special meal that they would serve her favourite rabbit!
This fight went on for 2-3 weeks, but the girl lost: as a special gift for her coming of age she was forced to eat her own favourite rabbit...
Indeterminacy 46
In the poetry contest in China by
which the Sixth Patriarch of Zen
Buddhism was chosen, there
were two poems. One
said: “The mind is like
a mirror. It collects
dust. The problem is
to remove the dust.”
The other and winning poem
was actually a reply to the
first. It said,
“Where is the mirror and where
is the dust?” ¶
Some centuries later in a Japanese
monastery, there was a
monk who was always taking
baths.
A younger monk came up to
him and said, “Why,
if there is no dust,
are you always taking
baths?” The
older monk replied, “Just
a dip. No why.”
- John Cage
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Indeterminacy 180
On Christmas Day,
Mother said,
“I’ve
listened to your record several
times.
After
hearing all those stories about
your childhood,
I keep asking
myself,
‘Where
was it that I failed?’ ”
- John Cage
The Front Page (1931)
Overlooking the gallows behind the jail a group of reporters from most of the city's newspapers are passing the time with poker and pungent wisecracks about the news of the day and soon they'll witness the hanging of a convicted murderer.
This is an early classic adaptation of the famous Ben Hecht/Charles MacArthur play, it's a bit dusty by now, but still offers a lot of fun.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
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