March 3

Let's Get Cheerful: I'm about to contribute to an "Internet meme" here. As I mentioned the other day, "bad movies" are not really bad if they are interesting, arresting, hilarious, painful, unique, or unforgettable. So why don't we drop the use of the words "bad" and "worst" and simply say that the upcoming Birdemic: Shock and Terror looks....singular.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Is+This+the+Worst+Movie+Ever+Made%3F-2714

http://videogum.com/148092/the-world-premiere-of-birdemic-shock-and-terror/cult-hits/

Please watch the trailer at the first link, as I can pretty much guarantee that it will make....well, change your day. I could tell right away, this is a phenomenon I want to be part of! I'm already in like with the leading man, Alan Bagh; even though it seems that the concept of acting is somewhat new to him, he's cute as a button and definitely watchable for 90 minutes, so who cares? I'm easy.

For all its being "a towering achievement in human creative expression," in the words of its first IMDB reviewer (which are gleefully quoted in the trailer), Birdemic: Shock and Terror is not in 3-D, which is, I don't know, so pre-Avatar, so 2008. In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane presents a long interesting history of the 3-D format:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/03/08/100308crat_atlarge_lane

For more (although not up-to-date) information on 3-D, I recommend Hal Morgan's and Dan Symmes's out-of-print book, Amazing 3-D, which discusses 3-D comics (and reprints examples of them) as well as 3-D films, and includes a pair of 3-D glasses.

The minute I saw the heading "Ten of the best fogs in literature" at Lit Lists, I knew that Bleak House and The Hound of the Baskervilles had to be among the cited texts, and sure enough:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/27/john-mullan-ten-best-fogs

A print and Internet magazine new to me, The Point, dives into the miserabilism of France's literary adulte terrible, Michel Houellebecq:

Michel Houellebecq has published four novels, all of them bitter and miserable. Their pessimism isn’t the only thing to them, or necessarily the most important thing, but it is probably the first that you’ll notice. Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Les Particules élémentaires (1998), Plateforme (2001) and La Possibilité d’une île (2005)—published in America as Whatever, The Elementary Particles, Platform and The Possibility of an Island—are callow, cynical and sex-obsessed, openly racist and misogynistic in turn, rife with B-grade porn writing, full of contempt for art and intellectuals, and operate on a kind of low masculine anger at the indignities of being beta-chimp. They are nonetheless serious, and owe their reputation to artistic achievement as much as any naughty thrill they elicit.

http://www.thepointmag.com/archive/hard-feelings/

Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko has for two decades been aiming to capture the soul of St. Petersburg on camera:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36533

http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/

In another part of the artistic forest, German painter Max Diel processes the influence of Bay Area artists such as Richard Diebenkorn -- quite beautifully, I think:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36288

http://www.cainschulte.com/berlin/artists/diel.html

http://www.maxdiel.de/

A Journey Round My Skull keeps finding more impressive work by Russian illustrator/animator Alexandre Alexeieff, earlier mentioned here at PMD on January 13 and December 31 and thus now officially a Murtha favorite:

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2010/03/voyage-to-island-of-articoles.html

There is something appealingly retro-modern about this "High Desert Pavilion" in Bend, Oregon:

http://www.archdaily.com/50218/high-desert-pavilion-pique/

Although the New York Times doesn't give the new Peter Eotvos opera, The Tragedy of the Devil, an out-and-out rave, it nonetheless sounds uncommonly intriguing, not least because it is based on Imre Madach's 1861 Hungarian drama The Tragedy of Man, one of those purported masterpieces little-known outside its native country (although several times translated into English):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/arts/03iht-Loomis3.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9ter_E%C3%B6tv%C3%B6s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Madach

OK, Science Boy, how would you like your own Atomic Energy Lab complete with uranium ore? In the early Fifties, you could have had it. Bill Crider spotted this, which is completely awesome albeit life-threatening:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/reviews/4347051.html

The estimable Mr. Crider also drew my attention to this bizarre-looking (but real) zebra hybrid:


http://www.oddee.com/item_96986.aspx

Among notables born on this date are poets Edmund Waller, Edward Thomas, and James Merrill, playwright Thomas Otway, novelists William Godwin, Arthur Machen, Aidan Higgins, and Alexandros Papadiamantis (Greece), cartoonist Ronald Searle, mathematician Georg Cantor, actors William Macready, Jean Harlow, and James Doohan, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, radio genius Ira Glass, and film director George Miller.

James Merrill's poetic masterpiece The Changing Light at Sandover, all three books and 500-plus pages of it, is nowhere near as well known outside intense literary circles as it should be. Apart from its intrinsic high quality, the story of how it came to be -- Merrill and his life partner David Jackson "communicating" (who knows?) with dead creators for 20 years via their Ouija board -- is one of the wackiest tales in modern literature. Incubate the occult-received material in the receptive medium of Merrill's poetic technique -- one of the most dazzling of his era -- and the result is a completely beguiling epic. These are the last lines of the first section, "The Book of Ephraim":

And look, the stars have wound in filigree
The ancient, ageless woman of the world.
She's seen us. She is not particular --
Everyone gets her injured, musical
"Why do you no longer come to me?"
To which there's no reply. For here we are.