“A rather tawdry device” is how Orson Welles describes “Rosebud” in his Citizen Kane, saying that it’s the part of the film he’s least happy with, and then he refers to it as a “Freudian gag.” This is from Welles’ famous 1960 interview in Paris which was conducted with Bernard Braden, and which I believe just came out on DVD, and is an interesting peak into the filmmaker’s life at that particular moment in time, when he was passionate and still very much immersed in his own powers of making magic. It’s a treat both for completionists and passing film buffs equally. Below is just an excerpt, which I encourage you to check out (as well the interview in it’s entirety which you’ll find linked to above), especially since Welles has some fascinating insights about the films he’s worked on, still working on, the actors he admires, and how Rome, his home at the moment, is being urbanized to the point that it’s starting to feel like “Philadelphia with spaghetti.”
Tag Archives: H. G. Wells
Prima Aprilis.
So… the first day of a new month, and you ponder as you recover from the madness of mars, how are you supposed to prepare for a whole new month when the first day of said month is one for joking and tomfoolery and hoaxes. And you wonder about this new month, who does it belong to? The jokers and manipulators or the gullible and foolish?
from here.
That’s a question we can ask ourselves, certainly, but maybe another time.
Cause we are clearly not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
I haven’t seen a lot of great April Fool’s Day jokes out there, not even a tremendous amount of RickRolling either, but Maria pointed out that Joel McHale took over Ryan Seacrest’s site, which is kind of funny to me, and also an upgrade, obviously.
How can Ryan Seacrest’s joke be anything but a failure when it’s a celebration of someone like Ryan Seacrest? An age old question. If you look good and hard at the walls in Plato’s cave, that question is written there, along with mythic super hero hieroglyphics and crude depictions of humans hunting animals and having sex with lightning bolts or whatever crazy thing people were onto back then.
Oh, and then I just saw this:
I giggled a bit at that, I won’t lie.
Oh, and this:
Way to go fake science news, as reported by CNET UK: “A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had traveled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.”
So many lovely references in the CNET UK article there, I recommend you glance at it, sci fi nerds. There’s a nice glance towards H. G. Well’s famous novel in the paragraph above, but the story also references that the mysterious stranger from the future was wearing “wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age,” which is a lovely nod to the fact that, as I shall remind you once again, the new series of Doctor Who starts this weekend with the brand new Doctor.
Oh, and this clips’s decent as well.
Maybe I was wrong before when I saw that time travel was something special about last year, something that was meant to stay in last year and that our lurch towards something big and new and wonderful here in the year we make contact was going to be just that, here, now, in this year. But maybe time travel isn’t done with us yet. At least not in pop culture. I say that half seriously, half in jest, and a whole other crazy half in an attempt to segue into how I think that next week’s episode of Lost, which of course is a Desmond one, makes me think it’ll be similar to “The Constant.”
What do you think? Yes, no, maybe? Oh, who knows. We’ll just watch and see. It’s Desmond, so it’ll be good.
But Benjie Light and I were talking the other day, gabbing and gossiping as we’re prone to do, waxing poetic about things we’d like to see as the last season of Lost winds down and half jokingly, and half in an eerie calm wave of deadly seriousness, we decided that whatever the finale image of Lost is… whether it’s Jack smiling at having found his destiny or a gorgeous sunset or Sayid marching off into the future with a whole bevy of beautiful women on his arm, we’d then like the producers to immediately cut to this:
Believe in me like I believe in you.
La Voyage dans la lune, 1902, by Georges Méliès, which translates to english as A Trip to the Moon. It’s simply a classic of the silent film genre or of just the art of film in general and is considered by many to be one of the 100 greatest films of the 20th century. The story is loosely based on two novels by the two of the great writers of early science fiction:
From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, and
The First Men on the Moon by H. G. Wells (a novel of scientific romance).
But Méliès’ lovely little film is also the inspiration for something else I like…
The music video for “Tonight, Tonight” by the Smashing Pumpkins, from way back in the halcyon days of 1996.
The thing about the Pumpkins and, well, Billy Corgan, is that I am a fan of theirs/his still. I’m going to throw that out there and not profess as to why I still am, because frankly, when it comes to other people not liking them or being frustrated with the seeming egomania of Billy Corgan, well… I get it. As a fan of his, let me just put it this way: If you think he drives you crazy, you can only imagine how nuts some of his bullshit makes me.
But still, this is a great song, undeniably, I say, and a wonderful video too, directed by powerhouse team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who then went on to direct Little Miss Sunshine. And after you’ve seen this video, it’s impossible to separate the images from the music in your mind forever after.
from here.
About two years ago now Conrad Noir and I were watching the band perform at one of their very intimate and very cool comeback residency gigs in Asheville, North Carolina and even as this song was playing – which had a tremendous impact on me, something akin to be subjected to magical electrocution, which can often happen with a good band a good song and a good performance when you’re trapped in the middle of an audience that’s feeling it as hard as you are – and even then, just a few of the images from the video floated in my mind. Even as a few people whipped out lighters and others did the cell phone lighter thing (which I find so painfully dumb and dumb looking).
If I really wanted to be sappy I’d tell you about this friend I’d had years ago. And that’s all I’ll say about them, because the story’s not really about them, no story is. It’s about me. But this friend and I shared a mutual love of the band and once, we were parting ways, one of us moving far away. And I decided to leave this friend with a mix CD of music, the kind of thing when you’re stupid and immature, a mix primarily of Smashing Pumpkins music because we both loved it and shared that bond and rather tellingly, I titled the disc Believe In Me Like I Believe In You, which I will admit rather pretentiously is a line from this very song I’ve been discussing all this time. And yet I ask you, is there any stronger, more simple and beautiful sentiment than that in someone you care for or respect with all your being?
And if I really wanted to get emo on you, I’d tell you how I discovered later that that mix CD with that beautiful title and that I poured my heart into and bled over the track listing for was… well, it was never listened to. It’s case was never opened. If I really wanted to be tremendously pathetic with you, I’d share that vague little anecdote with you. But I don’t. Instead I give you the music video for the song, which I hope you enjoy…
Time is on my side.
“I confess that I do not believe in time.”
-Vladimir Nabokov
“A User’s Guide To Time Travel,” from the super powers issue of Wired.
There’s a lot of other great stories in that issue, like stuff on how to be invisible and antigravity.
Richard Alpert/Ram Dass talks about LSD.
Desmond, and to a certain extent, the show as well, are being sued for sexual harassment.
Warren Ellis says that the future will be one of the eat or be eaten variety. Mostly the “be eaten” variety, actually. Prepare for the Robochompocalypse.
“Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I’ll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”
-from A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle, one of my favorite books growing up and one of those few books that I try to read again once every year.
Blah.
Speaking of time travel, the new Star Trek comes out today and I’m excited.
“I Want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.”
-H.G. Wells
