April 11

Andrew Sullivan's magnificent indictment of Pope Benedict for his role in the Catholic sex abuse scandal -- factually grounded, carefully argued, simultaneously measured and furious -- represents a great journalist and commentator at the height of his powers:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/04/the-third-strike.html 

There are many excellent plays in the pantheon of world literature that are seldom if ever performed in the English-speaking theater, so it is always pleasing to read of one that is getting overdue exposure, such as Strindberg's Creditors, in a London production directed by Alan Rickman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/theater/11creditors.html

Narciso Ibanez Serrador's provocatively titled 1976 horror thriller Who Can Kill a Child? (an exact translation from the Spanish)  falls squarely in the "spooky children" genre of Joseph Losey's These Are the Damned and Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (and, of course, all versions of Lord of the Flies):

http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2010/04/who-can-kill-child-1976.html

The Auteurs Notebook uncovers some gorgeous Japanese film posters for Paul Thomas Anderson's great Punch-Drunk Love:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1702

The designs are based on the Jeremy Blake artworks featured in the movie. I was unaware until reading this post of Blake's sad subsequent history: in 2007, he committed suicide by walking into the ocean, just a week after the suicide of his partner, the writer and film-maker Theresa Duncan. Though these deaths occurred in New York, there is something very Hollywood-inflected about Blake's manner of suicide: think of Fredric March and James Mason in their respective versions of A Star Is Born, Joan Crawford in Humoresque, Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye. Blake and Duncan have been mentioned as the possible subjects of a movie to be written by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Gus Van Sant, although who knows if anything will come of it.

All of those movie deaths probably derive partly from the 1936 suicide of silent film star John Bowers, who drowned in the Pacific at 50 after renting a small sailboat and announcing his intention of not returning to a friend. The timing of his death in relation to the filming of the 1937 A Star Is Born is interesting: His suicide occurred about two weeks into the production. So either the screenwriters (among them Dorothy Parker) were prescient, or they hastily (almost ghoulishly) incorporated this detail into their screenplay "on the fly." In the earlier version of the material, George Cukor's and Adela Rogers St. John's 1932 What Price Hollywood?, the suicide is accomplished by conventional gunshot; as was the case with St. John's inspiration for the character, silent film actor/director Tom Forman, who gave up in 1926. There is never any shortage of suicides to draw on in Hollywood.

Some suicides are sudden, but some are gradual, as in the case of the heroin-related death of child actor Bobby Driscoll (1937-1968), who starred in Disney's Song of the South and Treasure Island, and won an Academy Award for juvenile performance in the film noir The Window.

http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2010/04/lost-boy-sad-end-of-bobby-driscoll.html

http://www.isntlifeterrible.com/2007/10/bobby-driscoll-1937-1968.html

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

In order to keep from getting too gloomy here, let me introduce a somewhat ridiculous item: Russian artists have apparently reached the inevitable point in the cultural cycle when there can be a kind of pop nostalgia for "socialist realism" -- an artistic style that frequently involved the glorification of technological and industrial subjects, resulting in such characteristic products as Fyodor Gladkov's novel Cement (which I have actually read and have a certain fondness for, although it's not as good as Valentin Katayev's factory novel Time, Forward!). Young composer Anton Lubchenko "has written a symphony in honor of the Shtokman gas condensate field in the Russian sector of the Barents Sea," part of an "Industrial Trilogy" that will also memorialize "the construction of Europe's largest railway bridge across the Yuribei River in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District and the Sakhalin oil and gas projects in Russia's Far East." I can add nothing to that announcement that would not descend to the level of snark.  

http://thefastertimes.com/classicalmusic/2010/04/09/methane-the-symphony/

http://en.rian.ru/culture/20100409/158501471.html

California painter Jeff Koegel has a beguiling style that in a few works seems to be touched by the influence of Joseph Stella and Stuart Davis:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37259

http://www.mkgallery.com/Exhibitions/KOEGEL-EUCLIDE/CARBON-RAINBOW/index.php

Among notables born on this date are poets Christopher Smart, Mark Strand, and Attila Jozsef (Hungary), novelists Glenway Wescott and Sandor Marai (Hungary), animator Norman McLaren, statesman Dean Acheson, Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland, Northern Irish painter Paul Henry, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, bass Kurt Moll, film directors John Milius, Carl Franklin, and Vincent Gallo, and actors Louise Lasser and Joel Grey. The great Norman McLaren could evoke emotions using the most minimal combination of elements. I defy anyone to watch Dots (1940) without smiling: