The Black Isle

Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg… Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg… I must leave it. I must leave it. I must leave it now. But how to escape one’s city?

from Guy Maddin’s hometown fantasia My Winnipeg.

In this interview, Maddin reveals that his next project will be an internet choose-your-own-adventure film collaboration with the poet John Ashbery.

Welles and Hayworth at the Stork Club, NYC, 1943.

Related: Virginia Postrel on George Hurrell’s glamorous 1930s star portraits in the Atlantic Monthly.

“…And then we knew the war was really over.” American postwar optimism, in purest form:

Zhou Xuan (aka Chow Hsuan), beloved Shanghai songstress and somewhat stilted movie star, died 50 years ago yesterday.

How easily animals were fooled/bullied in the 1930s:

Stolen from Modern Mechanix.

The unmissable show at LACMA right now.

Just about the coolest title ever? Steve Erickson’s ZEROVILLE will be out from (the very classy) Europa Editions in November but you can pre-order it now.

The opening paragraph:

1.
On Vikar’s shaved head is tattooed the right and left lobes of his brain. One lobe is occupied by an extreme close-up of Elizabeth Taylor and the other by Montgomery Clift, their faces barely apart, lips barely apart, in each other’s arms on a terrace, the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies, she the female version of him, and he the male version of her.

Wow.

Got an invite today from Roger Gonin, director of the legendary Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, for Gourmet Baby to show there again as part of a special sidebar next year. The film was last there in 2002, in the official International Competition, and that was also the place where I secured a sales agent (agent to many of the most famous shorts in the world) who then went on to sell the film internationally while forgetting to pay me a cent…

Even that couldn’t tarnish for me the pleasures associated with Clermont-Ferrand. I’m not being ironic. I know people like to malign that city (the Detroit of France, etc.). But it’s host to one of the best festivals in the world — and was the setting for Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s. That’s more than I can say for most cities.

I had a blast there in the hometown of the Michelin Man, seeing some of the most amazing short films ever, staying at the ridiculously cute Hotel Marmotel (with its logo of a marmot carrying a suitcase) and eating gigantic meals in the middle of the night with strange assortments of filmmakers.

I have to say I’m really impressed by Roger Gonin’s elephantine memory. He’d earlier also shown my Moveable Feast in 1997, and then years later, when organizing an international traveling show of his favorite shorts, he asked for it again. Now if he’d only been my sales agent.

Organizing mounds of info is a pain. But I’m encouraged: Will Self’s low-tech, Post-It Heaven! More pictures of his writing room on his website, courtesy of things magazine.

I have the Post-Its. But I need to get me some walls!

More sedate writers’ rooms, as featured every week in The Guardian.