Month / July 2008

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Ralph Bakshi

Ralph Bakshi appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #214. Bakshi is the director of such films as Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and American Pop. There is also a recent book, Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, now out that collects his work.

Condition of the Show: Caught in a musical daydream.

Guest: Ralph Bakshi

Subjects Discussed: The role of music in Bakshi’s films, making good films without a lot of money, emotionally correct songs, daydreaming, Bakshi’s record collection, the original idea of using Led Zeppelin for Lord of the Ring, Leonard Rosenman, Bakshi’s relationships with composers, Andrew Belling’s Wizards score, the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic, artistic freedom, why Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” was the final song in American Pop, the relationship between writing fast scripts and revising in animation, the ending of Heavy Traffic, subconscious symbolism, the use of long shots and extended takes, Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksander Nevsky, giving Thomas Kinkade his first big break, on Fire and Ice not being a Bakshi film, using imagination with pre-existing visual elements, rotoscoping, getting the little artistic details, Edward Hopper, designers vs. montage, operating in the present as an artist, being honest, The Last Days of Coney Island, the impending collapse of America, Barack Obama, burning out, American avarice, and Bill Plympton.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about music in your films. It’s certainly important in American Pop. You pilfered from your record collection for that, as well as the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic. And there’s “Ah’m a Niggerman” from Coonskin, which you wrote. I’m wondering if you did this because you have an aversion to Carl Stalling-style orchestral music.

Bakshi: First of all, I love music. I’ve always loved music. And I’ve loved various kinds of music. Music is part of our lives. It’s part of the soundtrack that what we all grow up with. Especially in my day. I don’t know today. There’s so many things going on. I’m talking about yesterday and my day, which are the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Music is so emotionally important to the movie. It’s just as important as anything else. If the song is emotionally correct for a scene, the scene plays better. Or the scene plays better than it would have with a different song. So music is so critical to movies. I chose songs that I knew emotionally worked with these scenes that I wrote. Because whenever I listened to music while either driving in a car or sitting at a bar or listening to Coltrane or Billy Holiday – you daydream. If you don’t daydream to music, then you’re not listening to good music.

(Lengthier excerpts from this program can be found here and here.)

Listen: Play in new window | Download

by Edward Champion

Barack Obama is Unamerican

You bastard. Let us be perfectly clear about what happened here. Obama pledged that he would support a filibuster of any bill involving telecom immunity. And what did he do this afternoon? He allowed Americans to be sodomized on this point. Even Hillary voted against this. If this centrist prevaricator keeps this up, I’m voting for some third party loon on principle. The Daily Kos, true to its hypocritical and opportunistic stance, remains silent about this disgrace. I guess Kos and the gang don’t like to advertise when they’ve been thoroughly betrayed by their ostensible savior. Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald is on the case.

[UPDATE: And if this flip-flop doesn’t piss you off, perhaps Obama’s astonishingly sexist remarks on abortion will. “Mental distress?” Why don’t you just say that these women are suffering from hysteria?]

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • The Frank O’Connor Award people have given the latest prize to Jhumpa Lahiri. But they haven’t even had the decency to serve up a shortlist. The jurors claim that Unaccustomed Earth was “so plainly the best book that they would jump straight from longlist to writer.” But what you may not know was that their secret goal was to enable Jhumpa Lahiri’s out-of-control ego. Never mind her $4 million, two-book deal. Having taken pivotal NEA money away from other writers who still have to work a full-time day job (and do indeed have children to support), Lahiri will not rest until she has taken every last dollar from every last award. She’s the Brenda Walsh of the literary world. And Darren Star has been trying to find the right television hook for years.
  • Tribune inside man Lee Abrams has expressed a few words about books sections, calling them “too scholarly” and in need of being “dramatically rethought.” While I disagree with the notion that a book on the “Phillippine Socialist Movement in the 1800s” (are Abrams and Zell even aware of the underlying reasons for the Spanish-American war?) can’t be interesting, I nevertheless agree that any 21st century books section should involve something fun, engaging, intelligent, and even a bit iconoclastic. It involves respecting the intelligence of readers (they are much smarter than you give them credit for; I’m looking in particular at you, Garner and Tanenhaus) and getting them excited about books, even if it means sometimes going a little over-the-top (although in a justifiable way). It involves being flexible to genre, debut fiction authors, books in translation, and crazy titles that nobody else would think of reviewing. Mark has an idea that goes much further. [UPDATE: Mark Athitakis also has some thoughts about this. As soon as my time clears up a bit, I plan to offer a sizable post later this week on additional problems plaguing book review sections.]
  • If by “Woody Allen for the new millennium,” you are referring to Allen’s woefully unfunny films of the past decade (for my money, the last funny Allen film was probably 2000’s Small Time Crooks and that was only because of Elaine May), then I suppose there’s a case to be made. But let us consider a more suitable comparison. At the age of 51, Sedaris has written the unfunny book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. At the age of 51, Woody Allen made Hannah and Her Sisters and Radio Days — inarguably two of his best late-period pictures. Apples and oranges, to say the least. (via Books, Inq.)
  • Yeah, I’m with Pinky on this silly Steve Erickson profile. People certainly have the right to read a book any way they want to, but the reader who sits down with Zeroville without laughing her ass off leaves me somewhat suspicious.
  • I’m pleased to report that Brockman has seen the light.
  • And Good Lord, I’m old enough to remember watching this Stephen King AMEX commercial on the tube.
by Edward Champion

Cysted Twitter

Maud has a very interesting post on how Twitter may very well be doing its part to divulge publishing deals to the public. What’s fascinating about all this is that, unlike blogging, corporate blocking software won’t prevent some folks from Twittering. They can, after all, type in sentences from their cell phones. You no longer need a keyboard to blog. Because the Twitter people have made this all so easy. So if there is now such an overwhelming urge to confess (the new form of resistance?), then why not encourage workers to do so anyway?

I must likewise confess about my own confessions. In the early years of this blog, when I had a day job, about 90% of the posts were composed on the clock. The fact that most of my co-workers were not readers made it all somewhat esoteric. To this day, I still heighten and downplay minute words and phrases just to see how close the readers are paying attention. Indeed, the scary verities elucidate remarkable yammering from unexpected nomina.

As to whether I have a Twitter feed, and whether I confess anything there, well, the Internet’s a grand adventure, isn’t it? To me, Twitter seems to be blogging’s answer to the David Markson novel. But now that every word we type is fair game for speculation, a whole grand cabinet of fun has been presented to me.

by Edward Champion

RIP Bruce Conner

Jesus, July is a bad month for the iconoclasts. If you don’t know Bruce Conner, one of the found footage masters, heaven help you, start here.

Also, The Great Search is available in its entirety on YouTube: (Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three) (Part Four) (Part Five) (Part Six) (Part Seven) (Part Eight) (Part Nine) (Part Ten) (Part Eleven) (Part Twelve) (Part Thirteen) (Part Fourteen) (Part Fifteen) (Part Sixteen) (Part Seventeen) (Part Eighteen)