BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
wisdom from Arnold Rothsteinand my father:
During the late fifties and sixties, one of the best tout sheets at Belmont Park in NY was Dr. Marlin's Picks. Dr. Marlin was a pretty good handicapper and earned the appellation "Dr." when he picked the winners of seventeen straight races in 1963. To my knowledge his longest streak after that time was six straight winners, a feat that is not unheard of, though rare, among racing cognoscenti. However, like all gamblers who live long enough, he died broke, as eventually, as Arnold Rothstein (and my father) said, "the odds will always get you."
Monday, August 17, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
MAGNOLIA --Paul Thomas Anderson*, writer, director.
I saw this 3 hour film tonight at home. One of the best. Enters my top fifty if I ever make a list. It's complex and original. And never fails to be interesting. Several intertwined stories dealing with forgiveness, happiness, attempting to erase the indelible past, confession, coincidence, deus ex machina, the weakness of the strong, the strength of the weak, choices made in the past, choices to be made in the future, and choices of the present. Creating false personas, and promising to be true.
And, two men dying asking for forgiveness from those they hurt, and from those who don't now that they have been hurt.
Is this enough to keep your interest?
*Note: Two actors have 3 part names like the writer, Paul Thomas Anderson: Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Phillip Baker Hall, if that doesn't confuse you then the movie won't either.
Comment from a friend:
Magnolia. You asked me to tell you what I understood from the rain of frogs. All of the characters in Magnolia, like all of us, are enslaved by our thoughts. We make ourselves, then we get stuck in our own viewpoint. We behave in accordance with what we think. Each of us must liberate ourselves from the incarceration of our ideas. That is the most difficult task we will ever face. It takes great courage to insist on an honest appraisal of what we are and demand of ourselves that we become what we know we must be. The rain of frogs alerts us to the urgency of this task. There is no more time. We must face up to ourselves now, or we shall never escape. The frogs are a warning that everything depends on our acting to liberate ourselves now, or it will be to late, and will languish in the prison of our childish notions until we die. Michael
MAGNOLIA --Paul Thomas Anderson*, writer, director.
I saw this 3 hour film tonight at home. One of the best. Enters my top fifty if I ever make a list. It's complex and original. And never fails to be interesting. Several intertwined stories dealing with forgiveness, happiness, attempting to erase the indelible past, confession, coincidence, deus ex machina, the weakness of the strong, the strength of the weak, choices made in the past, choices to be made in the future, and choices of the present. Creating false personas, and promising to be true.
And, two men dying asking for forgiveness from those they hurt, and from those who don't now that they have been hurt.
Is this enough to keep your interest?
*Note: Two actors have 3 part names like the writer, Paul Thomas Anderson: Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Phillip Baker Hall, if that doesn't confuse you then the movie won't either.
Comment from a friend:
Magnolia. You asked me to tell you what I understood from the rain of frogs. All of the characters in Magnolia, like all of us, are enslaved by our thoughts. We make ourselves, then we get stuck in our own viewpoint. We behave in accordance with what we think. Each of us must liberate ourselves from the incarceration of our ideas. That is the most difficult task we will ever face. It takes great courage to insist on an honest appraisal of what we are and demand of ourselves that we become what we know we must be. The rain of frogs alerts us to the urgency of this task. There is no more time. We must face up to ourselves now, or we shall never escape. The frogs are a warning that everything depends on our acting to liberate ourselves now, or it will be to late, and will languish in the prison of our childish notions until we die. Michael
Thursday, August 13, 2009
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
Here's something from the Paris Review, Summer 2009. #107:
Gay Talese on infidelity.
"Here's what people don't get. Sex is not that important. It isn't the most important thing in any relationship. Marriage is never about sex, and yet in American fiction so many stories and novels present a sexual dalliance ans an unpardonable sin. (In real life) I never thought that should be true. Marriage is the main event. These other relationships bring me into worlds I would otherwise not know. These relationships have helped our marriage. ..I think of all these people who get divorced over minor matters...I don't see how people can live in conventional marriages. "
Gay Talese has a fifty year marriage with a very accomplished,independent and fiscally successful wife.
Here's something from the Paris Review, Summer 2009. #107:
Gay Talese on infidelity.
"Here's what people don't get. Sex is not that important. It isn't the most important thing in any relationship. Marriage is never about sex, and yet in American fiction so many stories and novels present a sexual dalliance ans an unpardonable sin. (In real life) I never thought that should be true. Marriage is the main event. These other relationships bring me into worlds I would otherwise not know. These relationships have helped our marriage. ..I think of all these people who get divorced over minor matters...I don't see how people can live in conventional marriages. "
Gay Talese has a fifty year marriage with a very accomplished,independent and fiscally successful wife.
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley to be published in September
"And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own."
This novel is unlike anything Doctorow has written before, it uses to the Collyer brothers to draw us through the twentieth century in America as seen by a blind man and his eccentric pack rat brother whose bodies were found in a Fifth Avenue mansion after their deaths.
"Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881 – March 21, 1947) and Langley Collyer (October 3, 1885 – March 1947) were two American brothers who became famous because of their snobbish nature, filth in their homes, and compulsive hoarding.
The brothers are often cited as an example of compulsive hoarding associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as disposophobia or 'Collyer brothers syndrome', a fear of throwing anything away. For decades, neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarely-seen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street), in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.
Both were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived as hermits, surrounded by over 100 tons of rubbish that they had amassed over several decades." Wikipedia
E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley to be published in September
"And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own."
This novel is unlike anything Doctorow has written before, it uses to the Collyer brothers to draw us through the twentieth century in America as seen by a blind man and his eccentric pack rat brother whose bodies were found in a Fifth Avenue mansion after their deaths.
"Homer Lusk Collyer (November 6, 1881 – March 21, 1947) and Langley Collyer (October 3, 1885 – March 1947) were two American brothers who became famous because of their snobbish nature, filth in their homes, and compulsive hoarding.
The brothers are often cited as an example of compulsive hoarding associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as disposophobia or 'Collyer brothers syndrome', a fear of throwing anything away. For decades, neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarely-seen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the corner of 128th Street), in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and many other items, with booby traps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.
Both were eventually found dead in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived as hermits, surrounded by over 100 tons of rubbish that they had amassed over several decades." Wikipedia
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Saturday, August 08, 2009
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
William Vollmann
But meaning can be found in the most desolate zones, for survivors if not for victims, and in Rising Up and Rising Down Vollmann relates the following story from the San Francisco morgue as what he calls a "Solomonic parable":
Three different mothers were led into the viewing room one by one to identify a dead girl, and each mother claimed the girl as hers, with a desperate relief, as I would suppose.... Those three mothers must all have given up hoping that their daughters would ever speak to them or smile at them again. They wanted to stop dreading and start grieving. They didn't want to go into viewing rooms any more. And maybe the glass window was dirty, and maybe their eyes were old or full of tears. It was a natural mistake. But one mother was lucky. The dead girl was really her daughter.
William Vollmann
But meaning can be found in the most desolate zones, for survivors if not for victims, and in Rising Up and Rising Down Vollmann relates the following story from the San Francisco morgue as what he calls a "Solomonic parable":
Three different mothers were led into the viewing room one by one to identify a dead girl, and each mother claimed the girl as hers, with a desperate relief, as I would suppose.... Those three mothers must all have given up hoping that their daughters would ever speak to them or smile at them again. They wanted to stop dreading and start grieving. They didn't want to go into viewing rooms any more. And maybe the glass window was dirty, and maybe their eyes were old or full of tears. It was a natural mistake. But one mother was lucky. The dead girl was really her daughter.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
"A Man Escaped" Director: Robert Bresson--1956
The most tantalizing, enthralling movie I have ever seen. The true story of a French prisoner of the Nazis, who meticulously plans an escape. The detailed planning takes 1 hour and 30 minutes of the 1 hour and 40 minutes of the entire film. Breathless, riveting, alarming, complete non-stop tension.
Rating:
Run Time: 102 min
MPAA Rating:
Released: 1956
Directors: Robert Bresson
Genre/Type: Drama
Prison Film
Docudrama
Escape Film
Producers: Alain Poiré
Jean Thuillier
Plot Synopsis by Tom Wiener
In a genre crowded with quality films, director Robert Bresson's POW drama has become legendary, in part because it strips down the experience of a man desperate to escape to the essentials. That's in keeping with the approach Bresson took with all of his films. The filmmaker, who spent a year in a German prison camp during World War II, based this story on the experiences of Andre Devigny, a French Resistance fighter sent in 1943 to the infamous prison in Lyons, where 7,000 of the 10,000 prisoners housed there died either by natural means or by execution. Lt. Fontaine (Francois Leterrier) is certain that execution awaits him, and he almost immediately begins planning his escape, using homemade tools and an ingenuity for detecting the few weaknesses in the prison's structure and routine. For a time, he goes it alone, then takes on a partner, but only reluctantly. Fontaine does get some help from a couple of prisoners allowed to stroll in the exercise yard, but for the most part he is a figure in isolation. For Bresson, the process of escape is all, and in simplifying his narrative he ratchets up the tension, creating a film story of survival that many feel is without peer.
"A Man Escaped" Director: Robert Bresson--1956
The most tantalizing, enthralling movie I have ever seen. The true story of a French prisoner of the Nazis, who meticulously plans an escape. The detailed planning takes 1 hour and 30 minutes of the 1 hour and 40 minutes of the entire film. Breathless, riveting, alarming, complete non-stop tension.
Rating:
Run Time: 102 min
MPAA Rating:
Released: 1956
Directors: Robert Bresson
Genre/Type: Drama
Prison Film
Docudrama
Escape Film
Producers: Alain Poiré
Jean Thuillier
Plot Synopsis by Tom Wiener
In a genre crowded with quality films, director Robert Bresson's POW drama has become legendary, in part because it strips down the experience of a man desperate to escape to the essentials. That's in keeping with the approach Bresson took with all of his films. The filmmaker, who spent a year in a German prison camp during World War II, based this story on the experiences of Andre Devigny, a French Resistance fighter sent in 1943 to the infamous prison in Lyons, where 7,000 of the 10,000 prisoners housed there died either by natural means or by execution. Lt. Fontaine (Francois Leterrier) is certain that execution awaits him, and he almost immediately begins planning his escape, using homemade tools and an ingenuity for detecting the few weaknesses in the prison's structure and routine. For a time, he goes it alone, then takes on a partner, but only reluctantly. Fontaine does get some help from a couple of prisoners allowed to stroll in the exercise yard, but for the most part he is a figure in isolation. For Bresson, the process of escape is all, and in simplifying his narrative he ratchets up the tension, creating a film story of survival that many feel is without peer.
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