March 6

TCM's month-long tribute to Kurosawa in honor of his 100th anniversary on March 23 is a big deal:

http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=290029

It will include everything except the early feature The Quiet Duel (1949) (not in Criterion's Kurosawa box set either -- someone else holds the rights) and the last three films -- Dreams, Rhapsody in August, and Madadayo.

It's always good to hear about little arts venues in "out of the way" places. The New York Times discovered a jazz club called The Falcon in the town of Marlborough in New York's Hudson Valley. (Be sure to click on the slideshow.)

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/travel/escapes/05falcon.html

When I lived in Wisconsin, I was aware of a similar club in Princeton in the middle of the state, the Fox Note:

http://www.thefoxnote.com/

This new paperback series, Myna Classics, looks very cool both from the standpoint of both text selection and cover design:

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2010/03/mynas.html

The blog War Poetry has been throwing a spotlight on John Allan Wyeth (1894-1981), "now starting to be recognised as the most important American soldier-poet of the Great War":

http://war-poets.blogspot.com/2010/03/wyeth-redivivus.html

http://war-poets.blogspot.com/2010/02/john-allan-wyeth-souilly-hospital.html

The Guardian Books Blog looks back at John Brunner's mammoth 1969 Hugo Award-winning novel Stand on Zanzibar:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/26/stand-on-zanzibar-john-brunner

Certainly a dystopian book, it is not cited in PopCrunch's interesting list of the "16 Best Dystopian Books of All Time," which is also entirely lacking in international examples such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We:

http://www.popcrunch.com/the-16-best-dystopian-books-of-all-time/

My ignorance of Nepali pop cinema starts with the fact that I didn't know Nepali pop cinema existed:

http://diedangerdiediekill.blogspot.com/2010/03/commando-nepal-199.html

Public squares evoke very pleasant feelings for me, and this example in Montreal looks like a civic gem:

http://www.archdaily.com/50456/square-des-fre%CC%80res-charon-affleck-de-la-riva-architects/

Re-creating entire art exhibitions of 40 and 50 years ago -- of the California painter Billy Al Bengston -- is unquestionably an intriguing idea:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36411

http://www.patriciafauregallery.com/

The Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich has mounted the first comprehensive major exhibition of surrealist photography in twenty-plus years:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36574

http://www.fotomuseum.ch/index.php?id=22

Among notables born on this date are the painter Michelangelo, conductors Kiril Kondrashin and Lorin Maazel, philosopher Donald Davidson, baseball players Lefty Grove and Willie Stargell, graphic novelist Will Eisner, film directors Andrzej Wajda and Rob Reiner, operetta composer Oscar Straus, poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, novelists Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George du Maurier, Ring Lardner, and Jan Kjaerstad (Norway), soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery, bluesman Furry Lewis, Western swing bandleader Bob Wills, astronaut Gordon Cooper, and actors Lou Costello and James Edwards. Ring Lardner's baseball novel You Know Me, Al and its sequels are still acidly funny today -- I'm not sure that anyone nowadays approaches Lardner's level of cynicism about sports. John Sayles brilliantly cast himself as Lardner in his great baseball movie Eight Men Out -- no one could miss the startling resemblance: