January 12

A blog new to me, The Hollywood Interview, has a first-rate discussion with Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne:

http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2009/10/robert-towne-hollywood-interview.html

The blog is very good in general, featuring interviews with people you wouldn't expect, such as Police, Adjective director Corneliu Porumboiu.

Very cool to read about a tribute show to Desi Arnaz and his orchestra conceived by his daughter Lucie Arnaz, with her brother Desi Arnaz Jr. as a percussionist and no less than Raul Esparza as a featured singer. I have always felt that Desi Arnaz is a terrifically underrated performer, even though his gifts as a television producer are more widely acknowledged. I Love Lucy benefited enormously from his presence in front of the camera as well as behind it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/arts/music/12lyrics.html

On that very point, by the way, Douglas McGrath published a wonderful appreciation of Arnaz in the New York Times in 2001, the anniversary year of I Love Lucy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/arts/television/14MCGR.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=1

Among notables born on this date are novelists Jack London and Haruki Murakami, crime novelist Walter Mosley, Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera, double Oscar-winning actress Luise Rainer (who celebrates her 100th birthday today), film directors Jean Delannoy, Wayne Wang, and Rob Zombie, radio personality Howard Stern, mentalist The Amazing Kreskin (which is his legal name, by the way), Russian avant-garde writer Daniil Kharms, folklorist Charles Perrault, statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, Founding Father John Hancock, country singer Tex Ritter, painter John Singer Sargent, composers Morton Feldman and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, and Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar. TCM is celebrating Rainer's 100th by playing seven of her films today, including her Academy Award turns in The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth.