==pla|\|ing lakes==

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Criterion will release Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty in May, though with few extras -- just an interview with Jean-Claude Carrière

10:36 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

I see from poking around Giornale Nuovo that there's a Max Ernst retrospective at the Metropolotan in NYC starting next month through July 10

Boy I wish I could hit this one. One of my favorites.

The Giornale link has huge repros of late paintings if you click on the images and save.

9:30 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

John Cleese from The Pythons on how it started and The Paradox:

There was a real sense of discovery. It's like you want to be a painter: however, the paints haven't arrived, there's not much you can do. Then suddenly one day the paints turn up and you start dabbing around and you're excited by all the possibilities. When we joined The Frost Report it was very much we were the young ones, we didn't know anything, we had no track record, and of course we should shut up and listen to the more experienced people, that was fine. But then, as you start doing it that way, a bit of you says, "Oh, what a shame they wouldn't let us do that." As you get more confident that you could make something different work, then the frustration builds up in you. Nothing terrible. We're talking about year of The Frost Report before I was allowed to do The 1948 Show. I was tremendously lucky. It wouldn't ahve happened without Frost. He invited me to be on The Frost Report and asked me to put The 1948 Show together with Tim [Brooke-Taylor]. Unbelievable, I could have spent four years pottering around doing little bits here and little bits there before I would have had an opportunity like it. And the strangest thing I think about Python is how few people tried to copy it. When you think of most of show business, if anything is successful, people immediately begin to copy it, but there was something about Python that had the immediate reverse effect. It was very successful and nobody tried to copy it. Maybe we just became too famous. Hugh Laurie has told me that they'd start writing something and they'd say. "Oh, that's too much like Python," and they'd just drop it. That is a paradox and I don't understand it.

8:57 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Monday, March 28, 2005

Diversion

Reading David Terrenoire's Beneath a Panamanian Moon which is a funny spy thriller with few pretenses

9:32 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

How file-sharing helps artists

Recording industry executive Andy Gershon sees opportunity in the online file-sharing networks that most of his rivals decry as havens for music pirates. As president of V2 Records, home to such established acts as The White Stripes and Moby, Gershon mines such Internet distribution channels for new fans and revenues.

"The cat is so far out of the bag and so far gone that it's pointless to keep fighting it," Gershon said. "I might as well make as many people fans of our music, whether they illegally download it or not."

A number of mostly independent recording artists and labels have experimented with and embraced the freewheeling digital distribution that the Internet affords. And many worry that a victory by major recording companies in a landmark file-sharing case now before the U.S. Supreme Court could short-circuit the very technologies that they believe are making a more level playing field of the music business.

9:23 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Matthew Carnahan's new novel Serpent Girl sounds like fun -- though he sounds even more interesting

Reminds me of Carnivale.

9:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()