John Crowley's Blog, page 12

Much Ado

Last night to see Joss Wheedon's Much Ado about Nothing.  Wonderfully successful.  In my opinion it shows what American Shakespeare ought to be and can be.  I think it takes its direction from the new style of British Shakespearean acting, as in the All's Well that Ends Well that was simulcast a year or more ago -- a sort of down-to-earth commonplace way of speaking the verse that retains -- indeed refreshes -- all the sense and the beauty but sounds like people of our time making sense. Many of the actors were recognizable from TV roles in standard cop and similar dramas -- and (Z tells me) from Wheedon's other work -- and they all handled the verse expertly. feelingly and with great sincerity and conviction.  The Benedick was a tad stiff sometimes and didn't always display the nuances as he might have, but he was very solid -- especially in the scenes where he needed to be serious, as when he agrees to challenge Claudio.

This mode is of course easier in comedy (the Dogberry and his officers were priceless, so much better than Michael Keaton's overdrawn and nearly hysterical performance in the Branagh film) but I think it could be extended.  Maybe not to Macbeth -- but the horrid Lear family drama maybe -- and certainly Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida.  This cast did rise to the intense emotions of the catastrophe.  The situations were absurd in a modern America, but this wasn't really America, anymore than the original was really Messina, or really anywhere but the realms of romance.

Could be a joke

After all, those who know how to handle these formulations correctly might be tempted to tease those who can't -- you know, see if they notice -- but i doubt it.
Slate on Edward Snowden's life in the Moscow transit center:

...the detention rooms. Almost all international airports have these spaces, where refugees and others with uncertain immigration status wait to be admitted to the country or shipped back from whence they came.

That sounds complicated enough to work, as stated; it could result in a variant of the Oriental Duck Pop and disappear him forever.

Other media notes

Robert Downey, Jr.'s new film "The Judge" is being partly filmed in SHelburne Falls, MA, not fifiteen minutes from where I live.  A very pretty little hill town, by the Deerfield RIver, connected to  the equally cute town of Buckland by an adorable iron bridge. Beyond the town New England hills rise sharply; Buckland (also part of the film set) is nestled against a ledge of granite up which the town's back streets climb.

The difficulty -- the conceptual difficulty anyway -- is that these scenes in the movie are set in Indiana, another place I lived for years.  Either the movie's producers did not know or did not care that there is no town in Indiana situated as Buckland/Shelburne is.  There are no sharply rising maple-and-fir clad heights.  There are no steep granite ledges.  Massachusetts families left Massachusetts to get away from those things, and farm in the soft soil and flat reaches of places like...Indiana.  I'll have to see the movie to know if they CGI'd out the mountain,

I knew Robert Downey Jr.'s father slightly in NY in the 60s and 70s.  His name was Robert Downey.  He made some hilarious "underground" movies (as they were then called) -- Babo 73, Chafed Elbows -- and a couple of small features, Putney Swope and Pound (about a bunch of dogs awaiting execution in a pound; my friend Don Calfa -- cult favorite in Return of the Living Dead, as I understand -- played a greyhound, in running shorts with a number card on his back.)

Disco Days

"Dance with Me" by Orleans was -- I clearly remember -- made a big hit by a very young female disco singer in the early 1970s. I can't locate her hypnotic rendition. Anybody remember?

Boy Actors

The old novel by Fellowes Kraft imagining Shakespearea s a boy actor -- "Bitten Apples" -- actually contained some hints of all this (made up or guessed at; the book dates from the 1940s), though the picture's not so dark, or so thorough.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22938866

Look who I get to hang with

Well not me exactly, but. I feel I am or will be there, sort of.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/cate-blanchett-mia-wasikowska-to-star-in-john-crowleys-patricia-highsmith-adaptation-carol-201205

Superduper

The boy Superman (apparently not Superboy in this version) in the new version is played at different ages by two actors, named Cooper Timberline and Dylan Sprayberry. Congratulations to both, and for those wonderful names. How did TWO young men with comic-novel/Pynchonesque names end up in the same movie?

Books-do-furnish-a-room Bagshot

That was a character in Anthony Powell's novel , a television chat show fellow who earned the nickname when a fake bookcase of books fell over on him on camera while he cried heartily "Books do furnish a room!" to viewers.  I am sure that's a quote from somebody -- I thought it was Lord Chesterfield but apparently not.  Stanley Fish in the NYTimes today, and all of Wikipedia, attribute it only to Powell.  Is it just a decorator's cliche?  

Block that metaphor

A comment to an article in the NYTimes about TSA X-ray scanners (called here "cancer machines":)

The EU has also banned GMO products as well as 'cancer machines'. What do the Europeans know? They know that a healthy population, not a bloated military, is their greatest strength. As Americans sicken and die from processed and GMO tainted food, lack of healthcare and invasive practices like forced X-rays, Europe and Asia will be eating America's lunch.

Apocalyptic visions can impair rhetorical judgment.

Petaluma again

I've always enjoyed my (imaginary) connection with the Aqus Cafe in beautiful Petaluma, which I apparently founded but have never known exactly how to pronounce, and its admirable literary endeavors.  Here we are dscussing the new iteration (in the same picture we used for the founding in 2010, me splendidly depilated.)

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130525/COMMUNITY/130529749/1033/news?Title=Literary-Saloon