John Updike, Author, Dies at 76

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and novelist, has died. He was 76. Updike won numerous literary awards, including two Pulitzers, for Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and two National Book Awards. One of his better known novels is The Witches of Eastwick, which was turned into a film. The obit in today's New York Times described him this way:  "A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s." 

Back in 1982 in the New Yorker, Updike favorably reviewed Louise Brooks'  Lulu in Hollywood, which had just been released. Years later, at a booksigning, I asked Updike about the actress and her memoir. He paused, and then declared Brooks the finest actor turned writer. That, I thought, was high praise from someone so accomplished.

Valentina and Louise Brooks

An interesting looking Italian-language article on Valentina and Louise Brooks. 

Valentina, la forma del tempo. Ultima settimana in mostra le tavole di Crepax alla Triennale di Milano e per la prima volta i visitatori possono acquistare un pezzo della mostra

L'esposizione chiude i battenti l'1 febbraio 2009, ma sono già on-line le tavole da prenotare per l'acquisto

Triennale Bovisa ha presentato la mostra Guido Crepax. Valentina, la forma del tempo, dedicata al lavoro del fumettista Guido Crepax e a Valentina, il suo personaggio più celebre, creato nel 1965. 

In perfetto equilibrio tra una donna reale e un simbolo di trasgressione, la fotografa milanese Valentina Rosselli è, infatti, il personaggio femminile più famoso nella storia del fumetto.
Il suo volto, il celebre caschetto e molti tratti della sua personalità sono ispirati all’attrice Louise Brooks, diva del cinema muto e protagonista del film Lulù di Georg Wilhelm Pabst(1928).

Oltre al mondo culturale, politico, ideologico ed estetico del suo autore, Valentina incarna una sorta di “spirito del tempo” della società italiana attraverso i grandi cambiamenti degli anni Sessanta, Settanta e Ottanta.
 

Questa mostra, a cinque anni dalla scomparsa, si è posta per la prima volta l’obbiettivo di analizzare Crepax dall’interno. Scavando a fondo nei ricordi e nei reconditi della mente che, come ogni ambiente borghese che si rispetti è rigorosamente rappresentata da una casa e suddivisa in stanze. Ogni stanza rappresenta un diverso modo di intendere e vivere il tempo. La forma del tempo ovvero il tempo nelle sue diverse forme, perché esso non è mai univoca unità di misura.

Tra gli aspetti distintivi e innovativi di questo allestimento, la multimedialità (con elaborazioni video, punti interattivi e ambienti sonori che riproducono e amplificano l’attualità delle invenzioni linguistiche di Crepax e il suo ininterrotto dialogo col cinema), e una particolare relazione con il visitatore (che, grazie alle gigantografie dei disegni sulle pareti, alla proiezione di immagini e a speciali invenzioni interattive danno l’impressione di entrare fisicamente nello straordinario mondo creato dalla fantasia di Crepax). La mostra è articolata in sezioni tematiche (stanze), in cui le tavole originali dei fumetti si alternano a elaborazioni e interpretazioni multimediali.

Per la prima volta i visitatori possono acquistare un “pezzo” della mostra.

Le opere sono ingrandimenti stampati su Forex delle tavole originali che sono stati utilizzati sulle pareti dell'allestimento della mostra.

Sul sito della Triennale tutte le informazioni e l'elenco completo dei pezzi disponibili, con relativi costi 

 

 

26 gennaio 2009

Twittering

For those on Twitter, I have established an account for the Louise Brooks Society. The LBS can now be found on Twitter at " LB_Society "  I found a few other silent film twitter-ers there as well (for Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton).

And, I have set up a Facebook feed for this blog at http://apps.facebook.com/blognetworks/blog/louise_brooks_society/  for those wanting to follow this blog there. 

Ever heard the phrase "circles within circles" ? Well, now we have "social networking sites within social networking sites," I guess.

George Perle, Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93

George Perle, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer, author,  and theorist has died. He was 93 years old. I was alerted to his death by an article in today's New York Times. This from the New York Times piece: 

For many years Mr. Perle was most widely known as a theorist and author. He published his first articles on 12-tone music in 1941 and became the most eloquent spokesman for the style. His 1962 book, “Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern,” became a classic text that was published in many translations. He set forth his own method in “Twelve-Tone Tonality” in 1977.

But his most revolutionary writing was on Berg. Considered an authority on the composer by the early ’60s, Mr. Perle was granted access to Berg’s unpublished manuscript for the opera “Lulu” in 1963. When he ascertained that the third act, long thought to be an unfinished sketch, was actually about three-fifths complete and cast an entirely new light on the opera, he protested publicly that Berg’s publisher was repressing an important part of the work. His efforts led to the completion of the third act and the presentation of the complete opera in 1979.

As many of you know, Berg based his Lulu opera on Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays. Pabst's version of Lulu, Pandora's Box - a film staring Louise Brooks, came in between.

I was most familiar with Perle's work as an author and musical scholar. Perle wrote The Operas of Alban Berg (1980 and 1985), a two-volume study widely regarded as the definitive analysis of Berg's operas. I have a copy of the second volume, which is devoted to Lulu.
 

Joan Crawford

Yesterday, I received the new Joan Crawford book. It's by Peter Cowie, the internationally renown film writer familiar to fans of Louise Brooks for his 2006 pictorial, Louise Brooks; Lulu Forever. Like that earlier title, Joan Crawford: The Enduring Star is published by the good folks at Rizzoli and is a beautifully printed coffee table book. This new book features a foreword by Mick Lasalle, author of Complicated Women and film critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. There is also an "afterword" by George Cukor, the late director. Cukor died in 1983, his text consists of the eulogy he delivered in 1977 at the memorial service for Crawford, who had died that year.



I haven't had time to sit down and read the whole books (which I intend to do), though I have read bits and pieces and have "read" all the pictures. 

What's caught my eye, so far, are the reference to Louise Brooks. Cowie starts the book this way: "The inspiration for this book stemmed from my research for Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever(Rizzoli, 2006). Joan Crawford was often linked with Louise in references to the Jazz Age, the flapper era, the frenzy of the Charleston, and even weekends at Hearst castle. Yet while Louise treated Hollywood with ill-disguised scorn, Joan Crawford embraced it, and would not rest until she had become its star of stars."

To me, that is an interesting, and surprising, comparison. Are their any Louise Brooks / Joan Crawford fans out there? What do you think? Be sure and check out this lavish new book.

The United States of Tara

Louise Brooks is referenced on "The United States of Tara,"  according to a syndicated article about the new television series which airs at 10 pm on Sundays on Showtime.

It's interesting to note that "Tara" was created by Diablo Cody, who wrote the 2007 comedy "Juno." Both "Tara" and "Juno" feature young characters who are wise beyond their years and show off a startling knowledge of pop culture of decades past. Juno was a punk aficionado. Tara's son Marshall offers university-level lectures on the silent films of Louise Brooks and plays Thelonious Monk to drown out T's tantrums.

Has anyone seen this series, and if so, what was said about Brooks?

Another Weimar book of interest

Though I haven't seen a copy, one book I am anxious to look at is Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture, 1918-1933, by Mila Ganeva, an assistant professor of German at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. This expensive new book (it retails for $75.00) was published by Camden House last summer.




Has anyone seen a copy of this new title? I would like to hear from you. I'm wondering if there is anything about Louise Brooks contained within. Here is the publisher's description.

"In the Weimar Republic, fashion was not only manipulated by the various mass media -- film, magazines, advertising, photography, and popular literature -- but also emerged as a powerful medium for women's self-expression. Female writers and journalists, including Helen Grund, Irmgard Keun, Vicki Baum, Elsa Maria Bug, and numerous others engaged in a challenging, self-reflective commentary on current styles. By regularly publishing on these topics in the illustrated press and popular literature, they transformed traditional genres and carved out significant public space for themselves. This book re-evaluates paradigmatic concepts of German modernism such as the flaneur, the Feuilleton, and Neue Sachlichkeit in the light of primary material unearthed in archival research: fashion vignettes, essays, short stories, travelogues, novels, films, documentaries, newsreels, and photographs. Unlike other studies of Weimar culture that have ignored the crucial role of fashion, the book proposes a new genealogy of women's modernity by focusing on the discourse and practice of Weimar fashion, in which the women were transformed from objects of male voyeurism into subjects with complex, ambivalent, and constantly shifting experiences of metropolitan modernity."