Saturday, June 25, 2022
photo: rapture, 1985
This photo was taken by John Tlumacki on an unusually warm day in Boston in 1985. It is the only known documentation of the Rapture. Apparently these Christians were out walking on the water when, to their surprise, a trumpet sounded and they found themselves heaven-bound.
susan orlean | obsssions
"John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth. He has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games. Laroche is thirty-six years old....
Sunday, June 12, 2022
uta hagen | respect for acting
I called the book Respect for Acting for a very clear reason. I did not call the book Delight in Acting or Love of Acting or The Fun of Acting. I called that book what I called that book because of the shocking lack of respect that was creeping into both the teaching and the practicing of acting. Now? Forget it. We have allowed so much to recede or languish that I don't know what I could call a book today. Demand for Acting might work. ...
There was a time when people became bored and they took up bridge or golf; ladies had an affair or had their hair rinsed and joined a book club. Now they want to act. And there are fools with no standards who allow them into classes and theatre groups and tell them to live their dream. I don't care about dreams. I care about work and responsibility and truth and commitment. You can see how old-fashioned I am.
When you are bored or depressed, you might be advised to visit a museum, to look at the art. You are not, typically, advised to pick up a brush and become a painter. It is understood that this is a rare gift, and foolish to presume it might be yours. If your soul is crushed, it might be suggested that you listen to classical music or submit to opera. It is not suggested that you audition for the Metropolitan Opera, or even your local, provincial opera company. You haven't had the training. But acting? All you need, it seems, is the dream, and there are doors--doors that once meant something and once housed some standards behind them--that fly open and embrace you. And it enrages me.
If there is some small society that calls itself amateur or community or whatever, and they want to get up and do plays, that is fine. I'll contribute money and I'll support you in the joys of understanding plays, but do not call yourself an actor. Do not think that your dream is similar in weight or meaning to the years of training and commitment that I and all the many actors whose work I love and respect and envy have invested in this art. Respect what is an art. It is not a pastime, and it is not something to get you through a bad time, and it is not something that should be taught to everyone with a dream. The term seriousness of purpose comes to mind. Apparently, only mine.
Uta Hagen, Interview with James Grissom (1996)
Saturday, June 11, 2022
baseball all-"americans"
In the nineties, a Japanese game designer had to make up "American" names for the players.
Onson Sweemey
Darryl Archideld
Anatoli Smorin
Rey McSriff
Glenallen Mixon
Mario McAlwain
Raul Chamgerlain
Kevin Nogilny
Tony Smehrik
Bobson Dugnutt
Sunday, June 05, 2022
annie dillard | living like weasels
Once, says Ernest Thompson Seton - once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?
We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience - even of silence - by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and rop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
from Teaching A Stone To Talk
Thursday, June 02, 2022
tad friend | no pictures!
Ron Galella’s assignations with movie stars were legion. For decades, Galella was the world’s leading paparazzo, a tireless stalker with an Elmer Fudd laugh, so it was only natural that, when he jumped from behind a post with his Nikon flashing, the stars would respond to him. Often, they’d beckon coyly with a middle finger, or send over a bodyguard to suggest a tension-relieving service that he could perform upon himself. Yet melancholy suffuses any brief rendezvous, and the titles on the Kodak boxes of photographs in the basement of Galella’s white brick villa in Montville, New Jersey, tell a tale of serial disenchantment: “The Gabors, No Zsa Zsa”; “Marlo & Danny Thomas, No Phil”; “Marilyn Monroe Look-A-Likes”; “Anthony Quinn Alone.”
Only one relationship truly satisfied: his liaison with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Last week, Galella, who is seventy-nine, sat in what he calls his great room, dressed in black, and reminisced. Above him was a framed “Windblown Jackie,” his favorite shot of Onassis, snapped from the back of a taxi. “I was a bachelor until I met my wife at the ‘Superman’ première at the Kennedy Center with Christopher Reeve, in 1978,” he explained. “So for a long time Jackie was my girlfriend—I lived in the Bronx, and it was a big adventure to go into the city to stake her out. She was soft-voiced and mysterious and a great subject, because she didn’t stop and pose; she kept on moving, jogging away, ducking into restaurants.”
He continued, “The only time Jackie touched me, she was at the 21 Club, and she came out and grabbed my wrist and said”—his foghorn voice whispered—“‘You’ve been hunting me for three months now.’ She loved being pursued.” Some of her other endearments included, “You stay away from me!” and “I thought you were in jail!” Galella mused, “I think I brought out her beauty from within, an emotion revealed, usually surprise. I really put her on a pedestal. The only way she disappointed me was with the court battles.” First, Onassis won a verdict that required Galella to maintain a distance of fifty yards, and later, in a settlement after he had repeatedly violated that order, he agreed to stop photographing her altogether.
In a documentary about Galella, “Smash His Camera,” which premières on HBO next month, several observers say that he had no distinctive style. But, as Galella sifted through his trophy shots, he pointed out the aesthetic hallmarks: “When there’s two people, you focus on one. Like, with a bride and groom, the bride should be looking at the camera, the groom at the bride.” By way of example, he held up a “Love Story”-era photo of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, who wore a startled smile and, most noticeably, no bra. “Also her titties are showing, so that’s a good composition,” he added.
He pulled out a 1974 shot of Robert Redford striding away from his car. “Then there’s the bull’s-eye picture—a profile shot where you feature the better eye, the strong eye that holds your gaze, at the center. His is the right eye.” Redford was wearing mirrored shades, and his left eye was the centered one, but, still.
“My other technique is to shoot fast without permission,” he went on. “That way, I get the startled look. When I shot Farrah Fawcett’s baby, Edmond, or whatever the name was”—Redmond—“the baby was coöperative, the baby was into it, but Farrah got angry, so I honored her wishes and stopped. But I already had the shot.
“See, there’s a lot of hypocrisy,” he confided. “The only one who was sincere about not wanting to be photographed was Garbo.” What about Marlon Brando, who broke Galella’s jaw in 1973? “See, now why did Brando sock me? My analysis is this: Number one, he’d just taped the Cavett show and it did not go good. Number two, he’s walking with Cavett when I jump out, and Cavett must have said, ‘This is Ron Galella, who went to court with Jackie.’ I found out later that Brando dated Jackie once—I think he must have been sympathetic to her. Number three, Brando is all nuts—he’s just weird.
“Now, here’s Sean Penn,” he said reproachfully, gazing at a 1986 print of the actor, scowling. “He’s always hiding behind Madonna. They walked to their apartment on West Sixty-fourth, and as soon as he’s in the courtyard he started spitting at us and said, ‘You’re on private property now.’ ” Galella looked bewildered. “But is it private, a public courtyard? It’s the same thing with Doris Day, who got upset when I knocked on her door and shot her in Beverly Hills. Is a door private? I know that shooting over the wall is fine, like I did later from her alley. Just don’t go into the house, that’s my ethics. That changes the relationship, somehow.”
The New Yorker, May 24, 2010