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offender42085 · 1 year

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Post 0493

“This jumpsuit that I'm wearing, and these shackles don't make me guilty.”

Daniel Bartelt, Wisconsin inmate 621440, born 1994, incarceration intake in 2014 at age 20, sentenced to life

Homicide

Life in prison with no chance for parole. That's the sentence handed down by a Washington County judge for Daniel Bartelt -- found guilty of first-degree homicide in the death of 19-year-old Jessie Blodgett. A prosecutor described Bartelt as the most dangerous criminal he has ever met, and now, the young man will spend the rest of his life in prison. The judge could have set a date for when Bartelt would be eligible for parole -- but the judge instead decided Daniel Bartelt will never leave prison.

A prosecutor described Bartelt as a psychopath. Others described him as narcissistic. Yet Jessie Blodgett's father was able to look at his daughter's killer and tell him this: "Dan, I forgive you as I have every single day. I believe there is good and bad in each of us, so I don't demonize or vilify you," Blodgett's father, Buck Blodgett said. Jessie Blodgett was found dead inside her home. Blodgett and Bartelt have been described as friends and classmates. They even recorded music together. On July 15th, 2013, a new student came to Blodgett’s home for a piano lesson around 12:30 p.m. Blodgett’s mother called for her daughter — but after getting no response, she went to Blodgett’s bedroom and discovered her daughter was dead. Blodgett’s mother tried to revive her using CPR — and noticed something on her daughter’s neck. In court during Bartelt's trial, the 911 call made by Blodgett’s mother was played. Blodgett’s mother: “It looks like strangulation marks.” Dispatcher: “There are strangulation marks?” Blodgett’s mother: “That’s what it looks like. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Investigators discovered what they believe were the signs of murder tossed in a trash can in a park. They also discovered articles about serial killers on Bartelt’s computer. During his sentencing hearing, Bartelt looked directly at Blodgett's family members, and denied killing her. "Buck, Joy -- I can't give you the reasons you are looking for. There's no hiding from yourself in a tiny, concrete cell. This jumpsuit that I'm wearing, these shackles don't make me guilty. I know there's evidence that I can't refute that would make you believe that I am guilty," Bartelt said. The judge admonished Bartelt during his sentencing hearing for not giving Blodgett's family, at this point, the one thing they wanted: an apology. Bartelt faced four felony charges in the case: two counts of first degree intentional homicide, one count of first degree recklessly endangering safety and one count of false imprisonment. One count of first degree intentional homicide was related to the death of Blodgett. The other three charges are related to an alleged attack at a Richfield Park on July 12th. Jurors in this case deliberated for about three hours following a week-long trial that included details of the crime scene. Those details indicated that climbing rope was used to strangle Blodgett in her bedroom.

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andritambunan · 2 years

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Recent for The New York Times

How to Save a Forest by Burning It

Prescribed burns, an age-old practice that rids forests of the small trees, brush and other matter than can fuel wildfires, are getting a 21st-century upgrade.

With climate change parching the land and increasing wildfire hazards, scientists are beginning to use cutting-edge technology and computer modeling to make controlled, low-intensity burns safer, more effective and less disruptive to nearby communities.

“Fire has made us civilized, but we still don’t understand it fully,” said Tirtha Banerjee of the University of California, Irvine, as he watched a tall heap of dead tree limbs go up in flames.

As useful as prescribed burns can be for maintaining forests, they are tough to carry out — costly, labor-intensive, contingent on narrowing windows of favorable weather.

Scientists think we can do better. Several teams recently converged at Blodgett Forest Research Station northeast of Sacramento, an area thick with towering Ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and incense cedar. A planned burn at Blodgett was a precious opportunity to collect data in the field, and the researchers packed carloads of gear including GoPro cameras, drone-mounted sensors for mapping the terrain in minute detail, a sonic anemometer for measuring wind and an assortment of machines that collected airborne particles.

Global warming has brought more of the extremely hot and dry conditions that can turn wildfires into deadly catastrophes. Blazes as ferocious as last year’s Dixie Fire, which burned through nearly a million acres of Northern California, weren’t part of the picture for scientists half a century ago, when the Forest Service and other agencies first developed their mathematical models for predicting how wildfires spread. (Raymond Zhong)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/climate/california-wildfire-prescribed-burn.html

#prescribedburn #climatechange #wildfire #forestfire #firemitigation

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whitepolaris · 1 year

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UFO Contactee’s Headquarters-Mount Palomar

Ah, the flying saucer contactees of the 1950s. Such innocence. Such claims. So many personalities. So little room on the bookshelf but more in the wallet for their fascinating and rare books. There are many reasons to become infatuated with the study of the genesis of a modern, literally space-age, religion.

Again it’s no surprise that a lot of this kind of thing winds up in California. Oppressed crazies have always moved ever westward toward the “frontier,” until they ran out of room. The deserts of southern California became at first ground zero, and then the comforting womb, of the UFO contactee movement that began in the late 1940s.

Resolutely convinced that they were telling the truth (or at least trying to sound like it), the contactees told tales of meeting with space brothers and sisters who looked surprisingly like humans. They brought with them messages of brotherly concern and other beliefs that actually foreshadowed the values of the youth movements of the 1960s. In an era of McCarthyist politics, the movement was considered enough of a threat to arouse the U.S. government’s attention and concern. Many of the believers spouted dangerously leftist sentiments, communicated to them, they said, by these aliens from other worlds.

One of the first to hop on the spaceship was a Polish immigrant who had fought for the United States in World War I. In the 1930s, he took up residence in a hotel in Pasadena and started handing out cards that read:

PROF. G. ADAMSKI SPEAKER AND TEACHER OF UNIVERSERAL LAW AND THE FOUNDER OF UNIVERSAL PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY, ROYAL ORDER OF TIBET AND THE MONASTERY AT LAGUNA BEACH

Adamski was well read in esoteric texts and primed, L. Ron Hubbard-like, for the best way to present his insight to the followers whom he knew would surely come if he just packaged things right. In 1949, he published a science-fiction novel, Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars, and Venus. While UFO hobbyists and scholars debate the truthfulness of his encounters, one thing that is known for a fact is that all of Adamski’s books were ghostwritten. His experiences, or what he said were his experiences, were rendered firsthand to Alice Wells-who along with Charlotte Blodgett and Adamski’s lifetime secretary, Lucy McGinnis-penned all of his major books.

Momentarily down on his luck, he took up with Wells and moved into her rural campground called Palomar Gardens (at the base of Mount Palomar, not surprisingly) in northern San Diego County. Wells hired him as a burger flipper, but Adamski had bigger plans. While fiddling with one of his telescopes on the night of October 9, 1946, he and others saw a gigantic UFO hovering over the camp. A few months later he produced photographs of what he claimed were UFOs, which seemed to be attracted to the property and to Adamski himself.

With photographs and a bevy of sightings to his credit, Adamski needed the pone push that would send him into superstardom, and he got it (or made a lot of people think he did). On November 20, 1952, McGinnis and five others were present at Adamski's first meeting with a spaceman. Flying Saucers Have Landed, Adamski’s first saucer book, described this meeting in plodding detail.

For some reason, when the cigar-shaped craft appeared to them, Adamski asked the others to move away and had first meeting solo with Orthon the Venusian. As he stepped out of his craft, Adamski “fully realized I was in the presence of a man from space-A HUMAN BEING FROM ANOTHER WORLD!” Orthon warned of the evils of wars and atomic weapons, and his new Earth friend in turn taught the Venusian to say “Boom boom.”

Buoyed by the favorable reception to Flying Saucers, Adamski set Blodgett to work on Inside the Spaceships, which was published in 1955 (later retitled Inside the Flying Saucers, probably due to the fact that by the time it was reprinted, people had actually been inside spaceships, the kind that are seen ascending from Cape Kennedy from time to time).

The space people’s names were apparently the invention of Blodgett and, like many other alien handles of the time, sounded like ultramodern synthetic fabrics. In the first three pages, Adamski is willingly kidnapped form a hotel lobby in downtown Los Angeles by Firkon the Martian and Ramu, who hailed from Saturn. Later, he boards a scout ship, complete with one of those thrill-ride safety bars that come down over your lap, and flies off to meet more aliens, with monikers like Kalna and Illmuth. These two were apparently space babes of the highest order. Adamski spares no detail in recalling their “draped garments of a veil-like material which fell to their ankles . . . bound at the waist by a striking girdle of contrasting color, into which jewels seemed actually to be woven.” Apparently, Adamski didn’t want to be one-upped by the likes of Truman Bethurum, whose 1954 book Aboard a Flying Saucer spoke of meetings with Aura Rhanes, a beautiful saucer captain from the Planet Charion, who was described as “tops in shapeliness and beauty.”

Adamski went on wildly popular lecture tours and even claimed to have received an audience with Pope John XXII in 1963, although the Vatican has denied this. He died of a heart attack on April 23, 1965.

Palomar Gardens went through a series of owners and had fallen into partial disrepair when Larry Read and his partner Elizabeth Norris bought the property in 2001 and renamed it Oak Knoll Campground. All but one of the original buildings survived, the outhouse, appropriately enough. Read had no idea of the history of the place-that is until one day when he stood talking over plans for the property with the previous owner. “As we stood in the front drive, this busload of Japanese tourists pulled up and started taking pictures of everything,” recalls Read. “We asked what was going on, and we were told, ‘They’re the Adamski people.’ We had no idea what he was talking about, or what an Adamski was.”

Read and Norris quickly educated themselves on the history of the place and its cosmically famous former resident. The Adamski Foundation contacted the two and proposed a tie-in. Oak Knoll now does a small side current director of the foundation. “We want to create a UFO-shaped museum to display the artifacts we’ve found on the grounds,” says Read. He continues conspiratorially, “Some of the things are really surprising and tell us a lot about what was going on here when Adamski was around.” So far, the only thing to be seen is the original metal PALOMAR GARDENS sign, painted over an older beer ad, hanging on a wall in the camp store. Read has also managed to locate the area where Adamski housed his fifteen-inch telescope, a miniature version of the more famous observatory at the summit of Mount Palomar. Adamski though, correctly, that people would mistakenly associate his equipment with the one up the hill.

Interestingly, George Ellery Hale, the designer of Palomar’s two-hundred-inch telescope, wrote in his memoirs that “elves” or “little people” would visit at night and routinely lend advice on improvements, but this is, of course, not emphasized by the present management at the Palomar Observatory. Oak Knoll is located just off Highway 76 at the Palomar Mountain turnoff.

#weird california #type read

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getusedappliances · 2 years

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Purchasing Utilized Appliances

Getting the top used appliances is an excellent method to conserve cash on new devices. Nevertheless, discovering a good utilized home appliance can take a while. You'll need patience and also a little bit of luck to find a good deal. Nonetheless, the utilized home appliances you can purchase can function just as well as brand-new ones for a fraction of the expense. Before buying used appliances, think about their age and condition. Numerous home devices are large and also hefty, so it's ideal to discover a sturdy truck or hire someone to move the home appliance for you. On top of that, if you're buying home appliances online, make sure to ask great deals of questions. Don't be afraid to ask for recommendations and also get a good friend to assist you out. Pre-owned home appliances are frequently higher-quality than brand-new versions. While utilized appliances might be more affordable, you must consider the brand name and also high quality of the item before purchasing it. Higher-quality products will certainly last much longer.

Look for costs brand names such as Delfield, Blodgett, Vulcan, as well as Garland. It's also essential to look around, as utilized appliances from high-volume restaurants or colleges will certainly set you back much less. A great area to purchase made use of home appliances is at a resale shop. These stores generally offer varieties, washers and clothes dryers, refrigerators, and also microwaves. They do not sell dishwashers, wall surface stoves, or microwaves, which often tend to need various cutouts as well as interest a smaller number of buyers. A third-party store is also an excellent place to get made use of home appliances, although it can take a bit of time and effort. Some of these shops don't provide credit report, but they have flexible financing choices. These stores might also supply delivery and pick-up of the old home appliance. It's important to make sure that you're comfortable with these terms and conditions before you buy made use of devices. Getting used home appliances from a trusted shop is the safest alternative. Open this link for more information on used home appliances.

These shops frequently offer minimal guarantees and provide free shipping. Many made use of device stores likewise recondition their products. While purchasing used devices from a store is more pricey than getting brand-new, you can still obtain bargains if you search. Nevertheless, it is very important to do your study as well as locate a store that has a good track record. Search for any warnings, such as too much bad testimonials. Along with checking the service warranty and also version number, you ought to additionally search for indications of damage or issues in the home appliance. It's an excellent suggestion to obtain a specialist to do an inspection on the device prior to acquiring it. You need to likewise make sure that the home appliance has all its initial components and also manuals. If it's not, pass on it. Find out more details in relation to this topic here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_appliance.

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blodgettcommunications · 6 years

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The judging contest is taking place today in Richmond, Utah. Contestants from all over the western United States are competing in 4H, Secondary and College divisions. Enjoy a few of the pictures and a video from the contest and around the barns. Placings will be available tomorrow.

Black and White Days in Richmond, Utah is underway (Home of the Western Spring National) The judging contest is taking place today in Richmond, Utah. Contestants from all over the western United States are competing in 4H, Secondary and College divisions.

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studiesof-fandom-primaryblog · 3 years

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Library Update

Fan Culture Anastasia Salter; Bridget Blodgett - Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing Katherine Larsen; Lynn S. Zubernis - Fan Culture: Theory/Practice Linda Duits; Koos Zwann; Stijn Reijnders - The Ashgate Research Companion to Fan Cultures

Fandom & Fan Practices Bob Rehak - Materializing Monsters: Aurora Models, Garage Kits and the Object Practices of Horror Fandom Francesca Davis DiPiazza - Fandom: Fic Writers, Vidders, Gamers, Artists, and Cosplayers Joseph Brennan - Queerbaiting and Fandom_ Teasing Fans Through Homoerotic Possibilities Lucy Neville - Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys_ Women and Gay Male Pornography Matt Yockey - Monster Mashups: At Home with Famous Monsters of Filmland Melissa A. Click - Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age Nancy K. Baym - Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community Roos Gerritsen - Intimate Visualities and the Politics of Fandom in India Suzanne Scott - Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry

Fanfiction Ashton Spacey - The Darker Side of Slash Fan Fiction: Essays on Power, Consent and the Body Heather Urbanski - Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric

Boys Love & Yaoi Sandra Youssef - Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Ethnography of Online Slash/Yaoi Fans

Games Melanie Swalwell; Helen Stuckey; Angela Ndelianis - Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives

K-Pop Crystal S. Anderson - Soul in Seoul: African American Popular Music and K-Pop

Specific Fandoms [Buffy] Allyson Beatrice - Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? True Adventures in Cult Fandom [Comic Books] Bill Schelly - Founders of Comic Fandom: Profiles of 90 Publishers, Dealers,Collectors, Writers, Artists and Other Luminaries of the 1950s and 1960s [Doctor Who] Matt Hills - Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-First Century [Doctor Who] Paul Booth; Richard Wallace - Fan Phenomena: Doctor Who [Harry Potter] Christopher Bell - From Here to Hogwarts: Essays on Harry Potter Fandom and Fiction [Harry Potter] Travis Prinzi - Harry Potter for Nerds: Essays for Fans, Academics, and Lit Geeks [Jane Austen] Deborah Yaffe - Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom [Jane Austen] Sarah Glosson - Performing Jane: A Cultural History of Jane Austen Fandom [Music] Daniel Cavicchi - Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans [Music] Eoin Devereux; Aileen Dillane; Martin J. Power - Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities [Music] Mark Duffett - Popular Music Fandom: Identities, Roles and Practices [Music] Toija Cinque; Sean Redmond - The Fandom of David Bowie: Everyone Says Hi [Supernatural] Katherine Larsen; Lynn Zubernis - Representations of Fans on Supernatural [Supernatural] Travis Langley; Lynn S. Zubernis; Jonathan Maberry; Mark R. Pellegrino - Supernatural Psychology: Roads Less Traveled [Westworld] James B. South; Kimberly S. Engels; William Irwin - Westworld and Philosophy [Twin Peaks] Marisa C. Hayes; Franck Boulègue - Fan Phenomena: Twin Peaks [Hunger Games]Nicola Balkind; Emma Rhys - Fan Phenomena: The Hunger Games [Mystery] Marvin Lachman - The Heirs of Anthony Boucher: A History of Mystery Fandom [Lost] Jon Lachonis, Amy Johnston - Lost Ate My Life: The Inside Story of a Fandom Like No Other [My Little Pony] Edwards; Chadborn; Plante; Reysen; Redden - Meet the Bronies: The Psychology of Adult My Little Pony Fandom [Shakespeare] Johnathan H. Pope - Shakespeare’s Fans: Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom [Sports] Adam Brown - Fanatics: Power, Identity and Fandom in Football [Sports] Carrie Dunn - Football and the Women’s World Cup: Organisation, Media and Fandom [Sports] Dağhan Irak - Football Fandom, Protest and Democracy: Supporter Activism in Turkey [Sports] Erin C. Tarver - The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity [Sports] Gary Armstrong; Alberto Testa - Football, Fascism and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football [Sports] George Dohrmann - Superfans: Into the Heart of Obsessive Sports Fandom [Sports] Jamie Cleland; Mark Doidge; Peter Millward; Paul Widdop - Collective Action and Football Fandom: A Relational Sociological Approach [Sports] Mariann Vaczi - Soccer, Culture and Society in Spain: An Ethnography of Basque Fandom [Sports] Nina Szogs - Football Fandom and Migration: An Ethnography of Transnational Practices and Narratives in Vienna and Istanbul [Sports] Phil West - The United States of Soccer: MLS and the Rise of American Soccer Fandom [Sports] Radosław Kossakowski - Hooligans, Ultras, Activists: Polish Football Fandom in Sociological Perspective [Sports] Stacey Pope - The Feminization of Sports Fandom: A Sociological Study [Sports] Steve Redhead - Post-Fandom and the Millennial Blues: The Transformation of Soccer Culture [Sports] Tamar Rapoport - Doing Fandom: Lessons from Football in Gender, Emotions, Space [Sports] Younghan Cho - Global Sports Fandom in South Korea: American Major League Baseball and Its Fans in the Online Community

#library update

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classicmollywood · 4 years

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TCMFF Home Edition Must Watch List

Hello friends!

I was supposed to be on a plane today to go to my first TCM Film Festival, but stuff happens and then you have a pandemic and everything gets canceled and you have to stay home! ANYWAYS, TCM decided to bring us some joy by playing programming for all of us, giving us the film festival, but at home.

I have decided to list my must watch films for this Home Edition of the festival!

Thursday, April 16th

8 pm: A Star is Born (1954, George Cukor)

Starring Judy Garland, James Mason, Jack Carson, and Charles Bickford

On TCM’s website, this was listed as the inaugural film for the 2010 TCMFF. It’s also a film that is Judy Garland at her best. Garland lights up the screen as Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester. This film has fantastic musical numbers, beautiful colors, and is the best starting film for this festival.

11 PM: Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)

Starring Gustav Frohlich, Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge

If you have never seen a silent film or a German Expressionist film, watch this! Metropolis is the film that aged so well. A futuristic utopia from the lens of the 1920s is very interesting to watch and also some of the themes of this film can be translated to life today. I will say, the film can be described by some as “weird” but I wouldn’t let that stop you from watching it!

Friday, April 17th

2 PM: Eva Marie Saint Live from the TCM Classic Film Festival (2014)

Eva Marie Saint is one of my favorite classic film actresses. She has class, she has poise, and she is very talented. In 2014, TCM had a sit down with the actress to talk about herself and her films. This is such a treat to see!

3 PM: North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)

Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Jessie Royce Landis, and Martin Landau

Another case of mistaken identity and suspense! Hitchcock knew what he was doing when he hired Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint to “sex” up in the screen during the 1950s. Their chemistry is electric. The airplane scene is such an intense watch. And James Mason seems to be good at playing a suave bad guy.

5:45 PM: Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder)

Starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe, Joe E. Brown, George Raft, and Pat O’Brien

Men witnessing a crime and then parading as women so they don’t get murdered! What a farce! Let’s be real, the best chemistry in the film is between Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. They play off each other so well. I will say, I do believe Marilyn Monroe was at her best in this film! Need a laugh, watch this!

1:30 AM: Grey Gardens (1975, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffy Meyer)

Starring Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale

This documentary is fascinating. It is fun but at times absolutely heartbreaking. Big Edie and Little Edie were definitely a fine pair. It is interesting watching the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, because they aren’t living in luxury, which would be expected due to their relation. Big and Little Edie are characters that you have to see to believe. The irony is, they are real people and not acting roles.

5 AM: Kim Novak: Live from the TCM Film Festival (2013)

Kim Novak is so much more than her looks and this interview opened my eyes to how amazing she is as a person as well as an actress.

Saturday, April 18th (AKA MY BIRTHDAY)

6 AM: The Man with The Golden Arm (1955, Otto Preminger)

Starring Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, and Kim Novak

This is one of the grittiest films from the 1950s. It depicts a heroin addict during their ups and downs. I was honestly surprised this film got made at all during the Production Code Era, but am very glad it did. Sinatra is so raw in his performance and Eleanor Parker creates a complex character as his wife. Of course, Kim Novak is wonderful to watch because she is more than just beautiful, she is an actress. This film really showcases her talent.

1:15 PM: Safety Last! (1923, Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)

Starring Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, and Bill Strother

Zany antics a plenty! That’s the best description of this film. Harold Lloyd films are always great to watch because he wasn’t afraid to do crazy things to get a laugh. This film has the infamous clock scene too!

2:45 PM: They Live By Night (1949, Nicholas Ray)

Starring Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, and Howard Da Silva

If you only watch one movie on this list, THIS NEEDS TO BE THE ONE. It’s ironic that it airs on my birthday, because this is one of my favorite films. The story of doomed lovers who try their best to reform from a life of crime to survive wasn’t a new concept, but man, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell make you fall in love with their characters and hope that they somehow, someway make it to their life of happiness together.

10 PM: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles)

Starring Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, and Agnes Moorehead

This film is another case of a film that got cut down by the studio, and in case you were wondering, Orson Welles was pissed. I would hope and pray one day we all get to see the full version (kinda doubtful), but this film isn’t so bad. I think the all-star cast really makes it worth it!

Sunday, April 19th

6 AM: Jezebel (1938, William Wyler)

Starring Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, and George Brent

I am not gonna lie, my first viewing of this film enraged me. Henry Fonda’s character made me so mad because he was a jerk. But I have decided I need to rewatch this film and see if my attitudes have changed. This film did so many great things for Bette Davis and Henry Fonda, so we should all give it another (or first) go around. Also this was the film Jane Fonda was born during! Just a fun fact.

3:30 PM: Auntie Mame (1958, Morton DaCosta)

Starring Rosalind Russell, Forrest Tucker, Coral Browne, Jan Handzlik, and Roger Smith

I want to be Auntie Mame. She is so much fun and so unique and I love it. The costumes are so grand in this film and Rosalind Russell really does a great job of bringing Mame to life. This film is so fun!!!

6 PM: Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)

Starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, and Jean Hagen

This is in my top 5 musicals. This musical always makes me smile and it is one of the few musicals where I know most of the words to the songs. The trio of Kelly, Reynolds, and O’Connor is something magical. Cosmo Brown is also one of my favorite characters in any film (and one of my cat’s namesakes). The film history alone with this film makes it worth watching! JUST WATCH THIS MUSICAL, OKAY?

9:45 PM: The Hustler (1961, Robert Rossen)

Starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, and George C. Scott

Paul Newman is so cool in general, so he was born for this role. I never knew a movie about pool would have my interest, but here we are. The tension between Newman and Jackie Gleason is so well played and the way the film is shot, you feel like you are in the room with them. Also Piper Laurie does a great performance as the conflicted girlfriend of Newman’s ambitious pool shark.

12:15 AM: Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green)

Starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, and Donald Cook

THIS IS PRECODE HEAVEN! You have a woman who uses sex to get ahead in life and men become entranced, and usually destroyed, by her. Barbara Stanwyck plays her character so well that you have a love-hate relationship with her. She can be cruel, but you understand why she is doing what she is doing.

#tcmff #a star is born #metropolis #eva marie saint live from the tcmff #north by northwest #some like it hot #grey gardens #kim novak live from the the tcmff #the man with the golden arm #safety last #they live by night #the magnificent ambersons #jezebel #auntie mame #singin in the rain #the hustler #baby face

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silent-era-of-cinema · 4 years

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Janet Gaynor (born Laura Augusta Gainor; October 6, 1906 – September 14, 1984) was an American film, stage and television actress and painter.

Gaynor began her career as an extra in shorts and silent films. After signing with Fox Film Corporation (later 20th Century-Fox) in 1926, she rose to fame and became one of the biggest box office draws of the era. In 1929, she was the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in three films: 7th Heaven (1927), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), and Street Angel (1928). This was the only occasion on which an actress has won one Oscar for multiple film roles. Gaynor's career success continued into the sound film era, and she achieved a notable success in the original version of A Star Is Born (1937), for which she received a second Best Actress Academy Award nomination.

After retiring from acting in 1939, Gaynor married film costume designer Adrian with whom she had a son. She briefly returned to acting in films and television in the 1950s and later became an accomplished oil painter. In 1980, Gaynor made her Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of the 1971 film Harold and Maude and appeared in the touring theatrical production of On Golden Pond in February 1982. In September 1982, she sustained multiple injuries when the taxicab in which she and others were passengers was struck by a drunken driver. These injuries eventually caused her death in September 1984.

Gaynor was born Laura Augusta Gainor (some sources stated Gainer) in Germantown, Philadelphia. Nicknamed "Lolly" as a child, she was the younger of two daughters born to Laura (Buhl) and Frank De Witt Gainor. Frank Gainor worked as a theatrical painter and paperhanger. When Gaynor was a toddler, her father began teaching her how to sing, dance, and perform acrobatics. As a child in Philadelphia, she began acting in school plays. After her parents divorced in 1914, Gaynor, her sister, and her mother moved to Chicago. Shortly thereafter, her mother married electrician Harry C. Jones. The family later moved west to San Francisco.

After graduating from San Francisco Polytechnic High School in 1923, Gaynor spent the winter vacationing in Melbourne, Florida, where she did stage work. Upon returning to San Francisco, Gaynor, her mother, and stepfather moved to Los Angeles, where she could pursue an acting career. She was initially hesitant to do so, and enrolled at Hollywood Secretarial School. She supported herself by working in a shoe store and later as a theatre usher. Her mother and stepfather continued to encourage her to become an actress and she began making the rounds to the studios (accompanied by her stepfather) to find film work.

Gaynor won her first professional acting job on December 26, 1924, as an extra in a Hal Roach comedy short. This led to more extra work in feature films and shorts for Film Booking Offices of America and Universal. Universal eventually hired her as a stock player for $50 a week. Six weeks after being hired by Universal, an executive at Fox Film Corporation offered her a screen test for a supporting role in the film The Johnstown Flood (1926). Her performance in the film caught the attention of Fox executives, who signed her to a five-year contract and began to cast her in leading roles. Later that year, Gaynor was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars (along with Joan Crawford, Dolores del Río, Mary Astor, and others).

By 1927, Gaynor was one of Hollywood's leading ladies. Her image was that of a sweet, wholesome, and pure young woman who was notable for playing her roles with depth and sensitivity. Her performances in 7th Heaven, the first of 12 films she would make with actor Charles Farrell; Sunrise, directed by F. W. Murnau; and Street Angel, also with Charles Farrell, earned her the first Academy Award for Best Actress in 1929, when for the first and only time the award was granted for multiple roles, on the basis of total recent work rather than for one particular performance. This practice was prohibited three years later by a new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rule. Gaynor was not only the first actress to win the award, but at 22, was also the youngest until 1986, when actress Marlee Matlin, 21, won for her role in Children of a Lesser God.

Gaynor was one of only a handful of established lead actresses who made a successful transition to sound films. In 1929, she was reteamed with Charles Farrell (the pair was known as "America's favorite love birds") for the musical film Sunny Side Up. During the early 1930s, Gaynor was one of Fox's most popular actresses and one of Hollywood's biggest box office draws. In 1931 and 1932, she and Marie Dressler were tied as the number-one box office draws. After Dressler's death in 1934, Gaynor held the top spot alone.[9] She was often cited as a successor to Mary Pickford, and was cast in remakes of two Pickford films, Daddy Long Legs (1931) and Tess of the Storm Country (1932). Gaynor drew the line at a proposed remake of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, which she considered "too juvenile".

Gaynor continued to garner top billing for roles in State Fair (1933) with Will Rogers and The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935), which introduced Henry Fonda to the screen as Gaynor's leading man. However, when Darryl F. Zanuck merged his fledgling studio, Twentieth Century Pictures, with Fox Film Corporation to form 20th Century-Fox, her status became precarious and even tertiary to those of burgeoning actresses Loretta Young and Shirley Temple. According to press reports at the time, Gaynor held out on signing with the new 20th Century-Fox until her salary was raised from $1,000 a week to $3,000. The studio quickly issued a statement denying that Gaynor was holding out for more money. She quietly signed a new contract, the terms of which were never made public.

Gaynor received top billing above Constance Bennett, Loretta Young, and Tyrone Power in Ladies in Love (1937) but her box office appeal had already begun to wane: once ranked number one, she had dropped to number 24. She considered retiring due to her frustration with studio executives, who continued to cast her in the same type of role that brought her fame while audiences' tastes were changing. After 20th Century-Fox executives proposed that her contract be renegotiated and she be demoted to featured player status, Gaynor left the studio, but her retirement plans were quashed when David O. Selznick offered her the leading role in a new film to be produced by his company, Selznick International Pictures. Selznick, who was friendly with Gaynor off-screen, was convinced that audiences would enjoy seeing her portray a character closer to her true personality. He believed that she possessed the perfect combination of humor, charm, vulnerability, and innocence for the role of aspiring actress Esther Blodgett (later "Vicki Lester") in A Star Is Born. Gaynor accepted the role. The romantic drama was filmed in Technicolor and co-starred Fredric March. Released in 1937, it was an enormous hit and earned Gaynor her second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress; she lost to Luise Rainer for The Good Earth.

A Star Is Born revitalized Gaynor's career, and she was cast in the screwball comedy The Young in Heart (1938) with Paulette Goddard. That film was a modest hit, but by then Gaynor had definitely decided to retire. She later explained, "I had been working steadily for 17 long years, making movies was really all I knew of life. I just wanted to have time to know other things. Most of all I wanted to fall in love. I wanted to get married. I wanted a child. And I knew that in order to have these things one had to make time for them. So I simply stopped making movies. Then as if by a miracle, everything I really wanted happened." At the top of the industry, she retired at age 33.

In August 1939, Gaynor married Hollywood costume designer Adrian with whom she had a son in 1940. The couple divided their time between their 250-acre cattle ranch in Anápolis, Brazil, and their homes in New York and California. Both were also heavily involved in the fashion and arts community. Gaynor returned to acting in the early 1950s with appearances in live television anthology series including Medallion Theatre, Lux Video Theatre, and General Electric Theater.[8] In 1957, she appeared in her final film role as Dick Sargent's mother in the musical comedy Bernardine, starring Pat Boone and Terry Moore. In November 1959, she made her stage debut in the play The Midnight Sun, in New Haven, Connecticut. The play, which Gaynor later called "a disaster", was not well received and closed shortly after its debut.

Gaynor also became an accomplished oil painter of vegetable and flower still lifes. She sold over 200 paintings and had four showings under the Wally Findlay Galleries banner in New York, Chicago, and Palm Beach from 1975 to February 1982.

In 1980, Gaynor made her Broadway debut as "Maude" in the stage adaptation of the 1971 film Harold and Maude. She received good reviews for her performance, but the play was panned by critics and closed after 21 performances. Later that year, she reunited with her Servants' Entrance co-star Lew Ayres to film an episode of the anthology series The Love Boat. It was the first television appearance Gaynor had made since the 1950s and was her last screen role. In February 1982, she starred in the touring production of On Golden Pond. This was her final acting role.

Gaynor was romantically involved with her friend and frequent co-star, Charles Farrell, during the time of their work together in silent film, until she married her first husband. Choosing to keep their relationship out of the public eye, Gaynor and Farrell were often assisted by mutual friend Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in maintaining the ruse. Looking back, Fairbanks would later recall, "We three were so chummy that I became their 'beard,' the cover-up for their secret romance. I would drive them out to a little rundown, wooden house well south of Los Angeles, near the sea. I'd leave them there and go sailing or swimming until [it was] time to collect them and then we'd all have a bit of dinner."

According to Gaynor's biographer Sarah Baker, Farrell proposed marriage during the filming of Lucky Star, but the two never followed through with it. In her later years, Gaynor would hold their different personalities accountable for their eventual separation.

Gaynor was married three times and had one child. Her first marriage was to lawyer Jesse Lydell Peck, whom she married on September 11, 1929. Gaynor's attorney announced the couple's separation in late December 1932.

She was granted a divorce on April 7, 1933. On August 14, 1939, she married MGM costume designer Adrian in Yuma, Arizona. This relationship has been called a lavender marriage, since Adrian was openly gay within the film community while Gaynor was rumored to be gay or bisexual. The couple had one son, Robin Gaynor Adrian, born in 1940. Those rumors were never hinted at in newspapers or magazines. Gaynor and Adrian remained married until Adrian's death from a stroke on September 13, 1959.

On December 24, 1964, Gaynor married her longtime friend, stage producer Paul Gregory, to whom she remained married until her death. The two maintained a home in Desert Hot Springs, California and also owned 3,000 acres of land near Brasília.

Gaynor and her husband traveled frequently with her close friend Mary Martin and her husband. A Brazilian press report noted that Gaynor and Martin briefly lived with their respective husbands in Anapolis, state of Goiás at a ranch (fazenda in Portuguese) in the 1950s and 1960s – both houses are still there nowadays. There is a project by the Jan Magalinski Institute to restore their houses to create a Cinema Museum of Goiás.

On the evening of September 5, 1982, Gaynor, her husband Paul Gregory, actress Mary Martin, and Martin's manager Ben Washer were involved in a serious car accident in San Francisco. A van ran a red light at the corner of California and Franklin Streets and crashed into the Luxor taxicab in which the group was riding, knocking it into a tree. Ben Washer was killed, Mary Martin sustained two broken ribs and a broken pelvis, and Gaynor's husband suffered two broken legs. Gaynor sustained several serious injuries, including 11 broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, pelvic fractures, a punctured lung, and injuries to her bladder and kidney. The driver of the van, Robert Cato, was arrested on two counts of felony drunk driving, reckless driving, speeding, running a red light, and vehicular homicide. Cato pleaded not guilty and was later released on $10,000 bail. On March 15, 1983, he was found guilty of drunk driving and vehicular homicide and was sentenced to three years in prison.

As a result of her injuries, Gaynor was hospitalized for four months and underwent two surgeries to repair a perforated bladder and internal bleeding. She recovered sufficiently to return to her home in Desert Hot Springs, but continued to experience health issues due to the injuries and required frequent hospitalizations. Shortly before her death, she was hospitalized for pneumonia and other ailments. On September 14, 1984, Gaynor died at Desert Hospital in Palm Springs at the age of 77. Her doctor, Bart Apfelbaum, attributed her death to the 1982 car accident and stated that Gaynor "...never recovered" from her injuries.

Gaynor is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery next to her second husband, Adrian. Her headstone reads "Janet Gaynor Gregory", her legal name after her marriage to her third husband, producer and director Paul Gregory.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Janet Gaynor has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6284 Hollywood Blvd.

On March 1, 1978, Howard W. Koch, then the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, presented Gaynor with a citation for her "truly immeasurable contribution to the art of motion pictures".

In 1979, Gaynor was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross for her cultural contributions to Brazil.

#janet gaynor #silent era #silent movie stars #silent hollywood #golden age of hollywood #classic movie stars #classic hollywood #1920s hollywood #1930s hollywood

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chiseler · 4 years

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Utopia and Apocalypse: Pynchon’s Populist/Fatalist Cinema

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.

--from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow

To begin with a personal anecdote: Writing my first book (to be published) in the late 1970s, an experimental autobiography titled Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Harper & Row, 1980), published in French as Mouvements: Une vie au cinéma (P.O.L, 2003), I wanted to include four texts by other authors—two short stories (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, “The Secret Integration” by Thomas Pynchon) and two essays (“The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” by Charles Eckert, “My Life With Kong” by Elliott Stein)—but was prevented from doing so by my editor, who argued that because the book was mine, texts by other authors didn’t belong there. My motives were both pluralistic and populist: a desire both to respect fiction and non-fiction as equal creative partners and to insist that the book was about more than just myself and my own life. Because my book was largely about the creative roles played by the fictions of cinema on the non-fictions of personal lives, the anti-elitist nature of cinema played a crucial part in these transactions.`

In the case of Pynchon’s 1964 story—which twenty years later, in his collection Slow Learner, he would admit was the only early story of his that he still liked—the cinematic relevance to Moving Places could be found in a single fleeting but resonant detail: the momentary bonding of a little white boy named Tim Santora with a black, homeless, alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee in a hotel room when they discover that they’ve both seen Blood Alley (1955), an anticommunist action-adventure with John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, directed by William Wellman. Pynchon mentions only the film’s title, but the complex synergy of this passing moment of mutual recognition between two of its dissimilar viewers represented for me an epiphany, in part because of the irony of such casual camaraderie occurring in relation to a routine example of Manichean Cold War mythology. Moreover, as a right-wing cinematic touchstone, Blood Alley is dialectically complemented in the same story by Tim and his friends categorizing their rebellious schoolboy pranks as Operation Spartacus, inspired by the left-wing Spartacus (1960) of Kirk Douglas, Dalton Trumbo, and Stanley Kubrick.

For better and for worse, all of Pynchon’s fiction partakes of this populism by customarily defining cinema as the cultural air that everyone breathes, or at least the river in which everyone swims and bathes. This is equally apparent in the only Pynchon novel that qualifies as hackwork, Inherent Vice (2009), and the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of it is also his worst film to date—a hippie remake of Chinatown in the same way that the novel is a hippie remake of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—seems logical insofar as it seems to have been written with an eye towards selling the screen rights. As Geoffrey O’Brien observed (while defending this indefensible book and film) in the New York Review of Books (January 3, 2015), “Perhaps the novel really was crying out for such a cinematic transformation, for in its pages people watch movies, remember them, compare events in the ‘real world’ to their plots, re-experience their soundtracks as auditory hallucinations, even work their technical components (the lighting style of cinematographer James Wong Howe, for instance) into aspects of complex conspiratorial schemes.” (Despite a few glancing virtues, such as Josh Brolin’s Nixonesque performance as "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, Anderson’s film seems just as cynical as its source and infused with the same sort of misplaced would-be nostalgia for the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, pitched to a generation that didn’t experience it, as Bertolucci’s Innocents: The Dreamers.)

From The Crying of Lot 49’s evocation of an orgasm in cinematic terms (“She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she’d come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera’s already moving”) to the magical-surreal guest star appearance of Mickey Rooney in wartime Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, cinema is invariably a form of lingua franca in Pynchon’s fiction, an expedient form of shorthand, calling up common experiences that seem light years away from the sectarianism of the politique des auteurs. This explains why his novels set in mid-20th century, such as the two just cited, when cinema was still a common currency cutting across classes, age groups, and diverse levels of education, tend to have the greatest number of movie references. In Gravity’s Rainbow—set mostly in war-torn Europe, with a few flashbacks to the east coast U.S. and flash-forwards to the contemporary west coast—this even includes such anachronistic pop ephemera as the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men and the 1955 Western The Return of Jack Slade (which a character named Waxwing Blodgett is said to have seen at U.S. Army bases during World War 2 no less than twenty-seven times), along with various comic books.

Significantly, “The Secret Integration”, a title evoking both conspiracy and countercultural utopia, is set in the same cozy suburban neighborhood in the Berkshires from which Tyrone Slothrop, the wartime hero or antihero of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), aka “Rocketman,” springs, with his kid brother and father among the story’s characters. It’s also the same region where Pynchon himself grew up. And Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus and richest work, is by all measures the most film-drenched of his novels in its design as well as its details—so much so that even its blocks of text are separated typographically by what resemble sprocket holes. Unlike, say, Vineland (1990), where cinema figures mostly in terms of imaginary TV reruns (e.g., Woody Allen in Young Kissinger) and diverse cultural appropriations (e.g., a Noir Center shopping mall), or the post-cinematic adventures in cyberspace found in the noirish (and far superior) east-coast companion volume to Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge (2013), cinema in Gravity’s Rainbow is basically a theatrical event with a social impact, where Fritz Lang’s invention of the rocket countdown as a suspense device (in the 1929 Frau im mond) and the separate “frames” of a rocket’s trajectory are equally relevant and operative factors. There are also passing references to Lang’s Der müde Tod, Die Nibelungen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and Metropolis—not to mention De Mille’s Cleopatra, Dumbo, Freaks, Son of Frankenstein, White Zombie, at least two Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, Pabst, and Lubitsch—and the epigraphs introducing the novel’s second and third sections (“You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood — Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray” and “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more…. –Dorothy, arriving in Oz”) are equally steeped in familiar movie mythology.

These are all populist allusions, yet the bane of populism as a rightwing curse is another near-constant in Pynchon’s work. The same ambivalence can be felt in the novel’s last two words, “Now everybody—“, at once frightening and comforting in its immediacy and universality. With the possible exception of Mason & Dixon (1997), every Pynchon novel over the past three decades—Vineland, Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge—has an attractive, prominent, and sympathetic female character betraying or at least acting against her leftist roots and/or principles by being first drawn erotically towards and then being seduced by a fascistic male. In Bleeding Edge, this even happens to the novel’s earthy protagonist, the middle-aged detective Maxine Tarnow. Given the teasing amount of autobiographical concealment and revelation Pynchon carries on with his public while rigorously avoiding the press, it is tempting to see this recurring theme as a personal obsession grounded in some private psychic wound, and one that points to sadder-but-wiser challenges brought by Pynchon to his own populism, eventually reflecting a certain cynicism about human behavior. It also calls to mind some of the reflections of Luc Moullet (in “Sainte Janet,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 86, août 1958) aroused by Howard Hughes’ and Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot and (more incidentally) by Ayn Rand’s and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead whereby “erotic verve” is tied to a contempt for collectivity—implicitly suggesting that rightwing art may be sexier than leftwing art, especially if the sexual delirium in question has some of the adolescent energy found in, for example, Hughes, Sternberg, Rand, Vidor, Kubrick, Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and, yes, Pynchon.

One of the most impressive things about Pynchon’s fiction is the way in which it often represents the narrative shapes of individual novels in explicit visual terms. V, his first novel, has two heroes and narrative lines that converge at the bottom point of a V; Gravity’s Rainbow, his second—a V2 in more ways than one—unfolds across an epic skyscape like a rocket’s (linear) ascent and its (scattered) descent; Vineland offers a narrative tangle of lives to rhyme with its crisscrossing vines, and the curving ampersand in the middle of Mason & Dixon suggests another form of digressive tangle between its two male leads; Against the Day, which opens with a balloon flight, seems to follow the curving shape and rotation of the planet.

This compulsive patterning suggests that the sprocket-hole design in Gravity’s Rainbow’s section breaks is more than just a decorative detail. The recurrence of sprockets and film frames carries metaphorical resonance in the novel’s action, so that Franz Pökler, a German rocket engineer allowed by his superiors to see his long-lost daughter (whom he calls his “movie child” because she was conceived the night he and her mother saw a porn film) only once a year, at a children’s village called Zwölfkinder, and can’t even be sure if it’s the same girl each time:

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pökler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child—what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you can speed or slow at will…)?

***

Cinema, in short, is both delightful and sinister—a utopian dream and an apocalyptic nightmare, a stark juxtaposition reflected in the abrupt shift in the earlier Pynchon passage quoted at the beginning of this essay from present tense to past tense, and from third person to first person. Much the same could be said about the various displacements experienced while moving from the positive to the negative consequences of populism.

Pynchon’s allegiance to the irreverent vulgarity of kazoos sounding like farts and concomitant Spike Jones parodies seems wholly in keeping with his disdain for David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s popular song “Laura” and what he perceives as the snobbish elitism of the Preminger film it derives from, as expressed in his passionate liner notes to the CD compilation “Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones” a half-century later:

The song had been featured in the 1945 movie of the same name, supposed to evoke the hotsy-totsy social life where all these sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors,witty repartee—a world of pseudos as inviting to…class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was already too late for that, Tin Pan Alley wisdom about life had not stood a chance under the realities of global war, too many people by then knew better.

Consequently, neither art cinema nor auteur cinema figures much in Pynchon’s otherwise hefty lexicon of film culture, aside from a jokey mention of a Bengt Ekerot/Maria Casares Film Festival (actors playing Death in The Seventh Seal and Orphée) held in Los Angeles—and significantly, even the “underground”, 16-millimeter radical political filmmaking in northern California charted in Vineland becomes emblematic of the perceived failure of the 60s counterculture as a whole. This also helps to account for why the paranoia and solipsism found in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient and Out 1, perhaps the closest equivalents to Pynchon’s own notions of mass conspiracy juxtaposed with solitary despair, are never mentioned in his writing, and the films that are referenced belong almost exclusively to the commercial mainstream, unlike the examples of painting, music, and literature, such as the surrealist painting of Remedios Varo described in detail at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, the importance of Ornette Coleman in V and Anton Webern in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the visible impact of both Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs on the latter novel. (1) And much of the novel’s supply of movie folklore—e.g., the fatal ambushing of John Dillinger while leaving Chicago’s Biograph theater--is mainstream as well.

Nevertheless, one can find a fairly precise philosophical and metaphysical description of these aforementioned Rivette films in Gravity’s Rainbow: “If there is something comforting -- religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” And the white, empty movie screen that appears apocalyptically on the novel’s final page—as white and as blank as the fusion of all the colors in a rainbow—also appears in Rivette’s first feature when a 16-millimeter print of Lang’s Metropolis breaks during the projection of the Tower of Babel sequence.

Is such a physically and metaphysically similar affective climax of a halted film projection foretelling an apocalypse a mere coincidence? It’s impossible to know whether Pynchon might have seen Paris nous appartient during its brief New York run in the early 60s. But even if he hadn’t (or still hasn’t), a bitter sense of betrayed utopian possibilities in that film, in Out 1, and in most of his fiction is hard to overlook. Old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) don’t like to be woken from their dreams.

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Footnote

For this reason, among others, I’m skeptical about accepting the hypothesis of the otherwise reliable Pynchon critic Richard Poirier that Gravity’s Rainbow’s enigmatic references to “the Kenosha Kid” might allude to Orson Welles, who was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Steven C. Weisenburger, in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), reports more plausibly that “the Kenosha Kid” was a pulp magazine character created by Forbes Parkhill in Western stories published from the 1920s through the 1940s. Once again, Pynchon’s populism trumps—i.e. exceeds—his cinephilia.

#Jonathan Rosenbaum #The Chiseler #Thomas Pynchon

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timeless-hollywood-classics · 4 years

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Janet Gaynor (born Laura Augusta Gainor; October 6, 1906 – September 14, 1984) was an American film, stage and television actress and painter.

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Janet Gaynor has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6284 Hollywood Blvd.

In 1979, Gaynor was awarded the Order of the Southern Cross for her cultural contributions to Brazil.

#janet gaynor #golden age of hollywood #classic hollywood #classic movie stars #old hollywood #classic cinema #classic movies #silent era #silent stars #silent cinema #silent hollywood #1920s hollywood #1930s hollywood

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