April 28

Arianna Huffington's piece on the disappearance of jobs of value in America is one of her best efforts. Hats off:

...the loss of middle class jobs is rarely talked about in Washington. Neither is the way that the useful section of our economy is being replaced by the useless section of our economy. But the numbers don't lie: the share of our economy devoted to making things of value is shrinking, while the share devoted to valuing made up things (credit swap derivatives, anyone?) is expanding.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/not-all-jobs-are-created_b_552864.html

Huffington points to a good column about the failures of the financial sector by Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, and wryly notes:

When the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times is sounding like the second coming of Karl Marx, you know things have gotten way out of hand.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f2e4dbb0-4caa-11df-9977-00144feab49a.html

The difficulty now, of course, is that it is far easier to diagnose what has happened than to reverse it; I do not think it can be reversed.

Great Moments in Politics: A Ukrainian Parliament session erupts in a chaos of egg throwing, fist-fights, and smoke bombs. I don't think we've seen actual mayhem like this in our Congress in many decades -- perhaps not since Senator Preston Brooks's famous assault on Senator Charles Sumner with a walking stick on May 22, 1856:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Quote-of-the-Day-And-You-Thought-Our-Health-Care-Debate-Was-Tough-3381

http://history1800s.about.com/od/abolitionmovement/a/sumnerbeaten.htm

I recently received the latest Hard Case Crime paperback (since I am a member of the Hard Case Crime Book Club). The late Donald Westlake's substantial Sixties novel Memory had been rejected by his agent and remained in manuscript form for almost fifty years. Now it is receiving such ecstatic reviews that it is a shame that Westlake had to miss this vindication of his forgotten child:

http://blog.vincekeenan.com/2010/04/book-memory-by-donald-e-westlake-2010.html  

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/westlake/memory.htm

The interestingly conflicted fiction-writer and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi -- whom I always think of as a young guy, but he's a few years older than me -- sat down for an interview with The Literateur:

I only like religion when it’s really horrible, when it’s hateful – only then does it have any point. Look at what’s happened with the Catholic Church – it’ll soon be so regulated that Catholicism will become really bland – there won’t be any hatred left. It’ll be a bit like David Cameron: there’ll be no Tory hatred left, no fire in it. I mean I liked Thatcher because I hated her.

http://www.literateur.com/2010/04/an-interview-with-hanif-kureishi/

The Canadian publisher Quattro Books is doing its bit to promote short novels, although not indiscriminately; they actually established a set of six criteria for the ones they will look at publishing. Tightly focused series like this are an interesting concept; I mentioned another a few weeks ago, the Penguin India Metro Reads series (PMD, March 30).

http://www.themillions.com/2010/04/the-novella-is-alive-and-well-and-living-in-canada.html

Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton's takes on The Great Gatsby strike me as very funny:

http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=14636

The Chicago History Journal blog flags an important new volume in Chicago architectural history, The Autobiography of Irving K. Pond. Pond (1857-1939) was a distinguished author as well as architect, and a significant presence on the Chicago scene for many decades:

...until now there has not been an easily accessible book dedicated to this creative and eclectic early Chicagoan. Irving's autobiography....was only available on micro-film at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The memoir was written between 1937 and 1939 and the entire manuscript was in pencil. Yes, pencil. Please note that including a brief preface, an introduction by Guy Szuberla, the lists of illustrations, buildings and projects, Swan's book is a hefty 588 pages. It is not recommended as a "beach book," but I also couldn't recommend it more strongly. It is a journey back in time with a man who was at the center of Chicago's rise, and he paid attention. He made notes, and they are all here.

http://www.chicagohistoryjournal.com/2010/04/pondering-pond-raison-detre.html

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

The important Portuguese film director Joao Cesar Monteiro (1939-2003), little known in this country, is getting an important retrospective at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn:

Over 21 films made from 1969 to his death in 2003, the Portuguese auteur built worlds out of flat screens, a still camera, and soundtracks consisting of people talking softly—all of which would sound terribly boring, save for the men running around in pig masks and the gods with the giant dildos. It's an extremely dark, extremely funny world without a center. 

http://www.artforum.com/film/id=25420

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/04/a-conversation-about-joao-cesar-monteiro/

http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=2060

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_C%C3%A9sar_Monteiro

Jack Stevenson's new book about Scandinavian erotic cinema of the Sixties and Seventies, Scandinavian Blue, sounds like a must-read:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1715

A reference in this post set me off on an odd research trail:

....the most controversial item discussed by Stevenson was actually never made: After his Henry Miller adaptation Quiet Days in Clichy (1970) turned him into a media star, Jens Jørgen Thorson announced his next project would be a pornographic film about Jesus. Chaos ensued.

My immediate thought was that such a film was made (if not by Thorson), because I remembered reading about it in the Medved Brothers' 1980 bad-films book The Golden Turkey Awards. But it turns out the matter is more complicated than that, because the Medveds state at the start of the book that one of the films they describe is "a complete hoax," and over the years a number of people have guessed that the film in question is the gay Jesus movie Him (purportedly 1974). In 2005, the FilmChat blog looked at the evidence (as the Snopes urban legends website had also, although I can't find anything there about this issue now), and noted that although no copy of the supposed film had shown up, at least one Internet poster claimed to remember seeing a contemporary ad for the film. A now-inactive blogger posted such an ad on his site:



http://filmchatblog.blogspot.com/2005/05/gay-jesus-movie-hoax-or-fact.html

A commenter on the FilmChat post pointed out that the actual hoax film in The Golden Turkey Awards was Dog of Norway (illustrated with a photo of the Medveds' own dog). Wikipedia agrees and further observes that reviews of Him have been unearthed in several publications, although an actual print of the film remains elusive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Him_%28film%29  

The fullest and most up-to-date information can be found here:

http://obscurityandbeyond.blogspot.com/2010/02/lost-movie-detective-him-1974.html

Glad to have cleared that up for all of you! For the record, although Him is not a Scandinavian film,a porno Jesus movie did get made over there right around the same time, Ib Fyrsting's I Saw Jesus Die:

http://www.shockcinemamagazine.com/isaw.html

I think I need to go clean myself off now...

Among notables born on this date are President James Monroe, humanitarian Oskar Schindler, mathematician Kurt Godel, novelists Harper Lee, Roberto Bolano (Chile), and Johan Borgen (Norway), crime novelist Ian Rankin, satirist Karl Kraus, painter Yves Klein, chef Alice Waters, conductor Paul Sacher, film director Kaneto Shindo, jazz singer Blossom Dearie, talk show host Jay Leno, and actors Lionel Barrymore, Madge Sinclair, Ann-Margret, and Penelope Cruz. Despite receiving a ton of nominations and awards over the years, Ann-Margret is insufficiently acknowledged as a fine actress; perhaps it is hard to budge your reputation after starring in movies like Kitten With a Whip and Viva Las Vegas. But she has done some excellent work, including a memorable Blanche DuBois in the 1984 television version of A Streetcar Named Desire (in which Beverly D'Angelo is also excellent as Stella). An IMDB reviewer ungallantly points out that Ann-Margret is not stage-trained, which is true enough, but her intuitions about this role and her identification with it are formidable. If you can hold your own with the memory of Vivien Leigh in one of her most famous parts, and put your own stamp on it, you are doing something.