Where was I?
Nov. 4th, 2007 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersSo I worked on Way 2 yesterday, for the first time in probably a month or more. How did it fall by the wayside, so to speak, for so long? Well, anyway, I edited the letters and wrote a few responses. I'm going to try to learn how to use Publisher with this issue, so that's probably going to extend the process as well. I also need artwork, if anyone is feeling artistic.
Around noon I walked up to the post office to mail a couple of zines. It was overcast when I started out, but the sun had broken through by the time I got there. However, there was a line out the door, and I decided life was too short for such a long line, so I just turned around and walked home along a different way. It was good weather for raking leaves, so that's what I did when I got back, although it was breezy enough that more leaves kept falling where I had just raked. What the hell, it was an aerobic workout as far as I was concerned, and it felt good to sweat and huff and puff a little after too many hours staring at a computer screen.
After more work on Way back on the computer screen, I watched the University of Oregon play Arizona State in football on a different screen. This was a battle between the 4th and 5th ranked teams in the nation, so it was on national TV. It was a good game, which meant I felt nervous for much of it, because I wasn't sure Oregon would win until the end of the third quarter. I'm working on the zenlike acceptance it's only a game, but I haven't gotten there yet. In the end Oregon did win, so the nerves were better than they might have been. The Duckies are still in the national championship hunt.
Last night I watched another Jacques Tourneur movie, The Flame and the Arrow (1950), which is the next movie he made after Stars in My Crown. This is a technicolor swashbuckler that's very much a star-vehicle for Burt Lancaster, who gets to show off his impressive acrobatic skills. (The DVD was released as part of a Burt Lancaster collection.) It's set in the 13th century of the Hollywood imagination, in Lombardy under occupation by the Germans (i.e., the Holy Roman Empire). Lancaster is the free-spirited Dardo who lives in the forest with his young son and doesn't care about the oppression of his people by the imperial Germans. Well, you can see where this is going already.
It's a fairly superficial and predictable copy of Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood, for the most part, although it's beautifully shot (which almost goes without saying in a Tourneur film) and has a few interesting hints of darkness and internal conflict here and there. For example, Dardo's wife (and the mother of his son) has left him to take up with Count Ulrich, the leader of the German occupation force. The rebel encampment is set in some beautiful Roman ruins -- a little reminder of the vanity of power. In the ruins, Dardo keeps Count Ulrich's niece, Anne of Hesse (played by the almond-eyed Virginia Mayo), on a metal dog collar chained to a tree. (Guess who falls in love?) There's also an interesting character in the Marchese Alessandro de Granazia, a Lombardian nobleman who refuses to pay taxes to Count Ulrich but is not exactly enamored of the peasant rebels either. Another strange character in the rebel troupe writes with his feet rather than his perfectly capable hands. Why? he is asked. "The art of civilization is doing natural things the unnatural way," he explains. It almost seems that Tourneur is mocking his own movie with this line -- look, ma, no hands!
For the most part, however, these hints of something deeper are not developed. Nonetheless, it's still a lot of fun just as an action picture full of sword fights and danger and acrobatic derring do. It doesn't reach the heights of its model as such, but it's a perfectly good way to while away a Saturday night. "What sets it apart from its peers," says one online source, "is the witty script and imaginative situations the characters find themselves in."
Maybe now I'll get around to watching the pirate movie follow-up that Lancaster made a couple of years later, The Crimson Pirate (1952), directed by another noir great, Robert Siodmak. I guess the early '50s saw a wave of technicolor swashbucklers.
Around noon I walked up to the post office to mail a couple of zines. It was overcast when I started out, but the sun had broken through by the time I got there. However, there was a line out the door, and I decided life was too short for such a long line, so I just turned around and walked home along a different way. It was good weather for raking leaves, so that's what I did when I got back, although it was breezy enough that more leaves kept falling where I had just raked. What the hell, it was an aerobic workout as far as I was concerned, and it felt good to sweat and huff and puff a little after too many hours staring at a computer screen.
After more work on Way back on the computer screen, I watched the University of Oregon play Arizona State in football on a different screen. This was a battle between the 4th and 5th ranked teams in the nation, so it was on national TV. It was a good game, which meant I felt nervous for much of it, because I wasn't sure Oregon would win until the end of the third quarter. I'm working on the zenlike acceptance it's only a game, but I haven't gotten there yet. In the end Oregon did win, so the nerves were better than they might have been. The Duckies are still in the national championship hunt.
Last night I watched another Jacques Tourneur movie, The Flame and the Arrow (1950), which is the next movie he made after Stars in My Crown. This is a technicolor swashbuckler that's very much a star-vehicle for Burt Lancaster, who gets to show off his impressive acrobatic skills. (The DVD was released as part of a Burt Lancaster collection.) It's set in the 13th century of the Hollywood imagination, in Lombardy under occupation by the Germans (i.e., the Holy Roman Empire). Lancaster is the free-spirited Dardo who lives in the forest with his young son and doesn't care about the oppression of his people by the imperial Germans. Well, you can see where this is going already.
It's a fairly superficial and predictable copy of Flynn's The Adventures of Robin Hood, for the most part, although it's beautifully shot (which almost goes without saying in a Tourneur film) and has a few interesting hints of darkness and internal conflict here and there. For example, Dardo's wife (and the mother of his son) has left him to take up with Count Ulrich, the leader of the German occupation force. The rebel encampment is set in some beautiful Roman ruins -- a little reminder of the vanity of power. In the ruins, Dardo keeps Count Ulrich's niece, Anne of Hesse (played by the almond-eyed Virginia Mayo), on a metal dog collar chained to a tree. (Guess who falls in love?) There's also an interesting character in the Marchese Alessandro de Granazia, a Lombardian nobleman who refuses to pay taxes to Count Ulrich but is not exactly enamored of the peasant rebels either. Another strange character in the rebel troupe writes with his feet rather than his perfectly capable hands. Why? he is asked. "The art of civilization is doing natural things the unnatural way," he explains. It almost seems that Tourneur is mocking his own movie with this line -- look, ma, no hands!
For the most part, however, these hints of something deeper are not developed. Nonetheless, it's still a lot of fun just as an action picture full of sword fights and danger and acrobatic derring do. It doesn't reach the heights of its model as such, but it's a perfectly good way to while away a Saturday night. "What sets it apart from its peers," says one online source, "is the witty script and imaginative situations the characters find themselves in."
Maybe now I'll get around to watching the pirate movie follow-up that Lancaster made a couple of years later, The Crimson Pirate (1952), directed by another noir great, Robert Siodmak. I guess the early '50s saw a wave of technicolor swashbucklers.
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Date: 2007-11-04 05:50 pm (UTC)I'd also include The Black Shield of Falworth with Tony Curtis ("Yonda lies da castle of my fadda.") And The Sea Hawk with Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth. Don't forget Captain Blood! And Scaramouche... The Scarlet Pimpernel... maybe even The Prisoner of Zenda, if you can take TWO Stewart Grangers at the same time.
I'm told the reason that Lancaster's acrobatic partner in Flame and The Crimson Pirate played mute characters is because he had a super-duper New Yawk accent.
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Date: 2007-11-04 07:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-04 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-04 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-04 08:28 pm (UTC)So what specific pieces are on your homemade compilation?
Spent two hours late Friday night at WFC with Charles Brown drinking Laphroaig and listening to string quartets and orchestral music on this great little sound system he had in his room. He played me quartets by Richard Danielpour and John Corigliano (both quite wonderful) and I played him a quartet by John Blackwood McEwen and the Sallinen Violin Concerto, which he liked. Great fun.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-04 09:19 pm (UTC)Specific pieces on the comp I just made: Debussy, "La Mer"; Sibelius, "Oceanides"; Sallinen, "Chorali"; Hovhaness, "Celestial Gate" (Symphony No. 6).
It's a little misleading to call this a comp. They're just some pieces I've been listening to a lot recently and wanted to extract from their album context to give them a new one. Although the first two go together very well.