Chazzbot II

month

June 2013

1 post

“No studio had been shrewder than Fox at working the Academy; using the large portion of the voting membership that it employed, the studio had muscled its way to Best Picture nominations for one borderline-or-worse movie after another, from “The Longest Day” to “Cleopatra” to “The Sand Pebbles.” The studio had no choice but to try again. In January and February [1968], Fox booked sixteen straight nights of free “Doctor Dolittle” screenings at its theater on the lot, and promised dinner and champagne to any voter who showed up.” —

Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.

Doctor Dolittle received nine nominations, including one for Best Picture.

Jun 04, 20130 notes

May 2013

8 posts

“

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country – indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like falling cities, the flaring roll of sky – provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.


Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, grafitti’d celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.

”
—Annie Proulx, “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water.”
May 24, 20130 notes
“The fact that a gay guy painted the Sistine ceiling is not nearly as dumbfounding as the papacy’s protection of pederasts in spite of their official attitude toward such “objectionable” practices—one of which ought to be the ceiling itself, for if anything is unnatural, for them, genius is.” —William H. Gass, “The Literary Miracle,” acceptance speech for the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
May 16, 20130 notes
May 10, 201310,346 notes
May 10, 20130 notes
“At night I feel her panting in her sleep. Her paws twitter as she runs toward or away from an image in her dream. Sometimes she wakes me up with her quiet dream-yelp and I watch her ride out the nightmare and break free of it on her own. She is always confused when she first wakes up. As she reenters the world, the light in her eyes is dull and demented. She sniffs the bed, gets a drink of water, and shakes it off. When she returns to the bed, she brings her nose close to my mouth and sniffs the particular fragrance of my breath. Okay, she decides, it’s *you*. Satisfied, she turns around and curls up in my arms, pushing herself against my body so that every inch of her spine is touching me. She licks my hands and returns to the even breath of sleep. I don’t need to know what she dreams of. It is what everyone dreams of: being helpless, being chased, losing a loved one, getting lost. Relics of her traumatic past mingle with common details of the present day—squirrels and broomsticks, her mother and me.” —Domenica Ruta, With or Without You.
May 08, 20130 notes
May 05, 20130 notes
May 04, 20130 notes
May 04, 20130 notes

April 2013

5 posts

Apr 27, 20130 notes
“I don’t remember many of the details now. But that can happen to any memory, toxic or not. If you can remember anything, it’s already wrong. The image or event has changed, just as you have—minutely, chemically, through the passage of time between then and now. Something happens to you, and then it’s gone. It becomes a memory that becomes shrapnel. Shards of experience still hot with life singe the brain wherever they happen to get embedded. Sometimes I swear I can feel the precise location of my memories like warm, tingling splinters under my scalp. Pictures with no sound, feelings with no pictures, the lost and found, mostly lost.” —Domenica Ruta, With or Without You.
Apr 26, 20130 notes
Apr 05, 20130 notes
“[Elvis] was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart. When I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in ‘65, never even came close.” —Lester Bangs, “Where Were You When Elvis Died?”, The Village Voice, 29 August 1977.
Apr 03, 20130 notes
“The history professor looked at his watch. Another minute had passed into his domain.” —John Sladek, Roderick, or The Education of a Young Machine
Apr 03, 20130 notes

March 2013

2 posts

Mar 09, 20130 notes
Mar 04, 20130 notes

February 2013

5 posts

Movies I Will Watch Anytime

A student asked me to list my favorite movies of all time. I ended up making a list of movies I will watch anytime and a list of movies I think everyone should see in their lifetime. Here is the first list, in no particular order (an asterisk indicates a movie that invariably evokes tears):

Close Encounters of the Third Kind*
The Empire Strikes Back
The Darjeeling Limited*
Henry V (Kenneth Branagh version)*
Chinatown
Apollo 13*
The Right Stuff*
2001: A Space Odyssey*

There are probably others, but these are the first that came to mind.

Feb 27, 20130 notes
“American history reveals that periods of fundamental reform are typically triggered by one or more of the following: a major war; a large-scale shift from one industrial era to another; extreme levels of economic inequality; a dramatic change in the composition of the political parties. On the rare occasions when these forces coincide, they fundamentally transform society. That is what happened when Reconstruction coincided with the dawn of the first industrial revolution; it is also what happened when the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression coincided with the beginning of the second industrial revolution. All the requisite ingredients for change are now coming together again, at the onset of the post-industrial age. If patterns hold, our nation’s next major reinvention cannot be far away.” —Ted Halstead, “The American Paradox,” The Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2003.
Feb 21, 20130 notes
Feb 10, 20130 notes
Feb 08, 20130 notes
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