May 14

David Cairns claims Frank Perry's 1974 thriller Man on a Swing, with Joel Grey and Cliff Robertson, as a precursor to David Fincher's Zodiac (one of my favorite films of the past decade):

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/1801

Perry is an underrated director, as Cairns indicates; certainly David and Lisa, The Swimmer, and Last Summer are all very fine efforts.

Conductor Alondra de la Parra's work on behalf of Mexican composers sounds right up my alley:

http://www.sequenza21.com/2010/05/us-premieres-by-mexican-composers/

Marc Myers of JazzWax talks to saxophonist Hal McKusick about his 1958 album Cross Section -- Saxes:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/05/hal-mckusick-cross-sectionsaxes.html

Michael Orthofer of The Complete Review is enthusiastic about Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou's latest work, Broken Glass:

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/congo/mabancka2.htm

http://www.alainmabanckou.net/

Another novelist probably new to most readers is the Pole Piotr Szewc, whose Annihilation is available in translation:

In an amazing feat of narrative control, the actual plot of the book is kept resolutely offstage for the entire course of the thing. Like the opening chord of a Beethoven symphony, we get the book’s title – and then it’s left there, hanging over the book with a resolution that grows more terrifying the longer its ignored.  

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/annihilation/

The blog Caustic Cover Critic likes Andy Smith's design for Brady Udall's new novel The Lonely Polygamist (which will inevitably be compared to the television series Big Love):

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-bold.html

Reproductions of art in books or online cannot capture scale effectively; tiny paintings and wall-sized paintings can wind up looking alike. So in looking at digitized versions of Roni Horn's "pigment drawings," keep in mind that these are huge pieces ("up to eight by ten feet in size"):

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37912  

http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/666/roni-horn/view/

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

Among notables born on this date are composers Lou Harrison and Alvin Lucier, film directors George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, Sofia Coppola, and Mrinal Sen, rocker David Byrne, pop singer Bobby Darin, conductor Otto Klemperer, jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet, social reformer Robert Owen, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, playwright Maria Irene Fornes, baseball player Roy "Doc" Halladay, and actors Sian Phillips, Tim Roth, and Cate Blanchett. Although I'm not that keen on how Robert Zemeckis's career has gone since Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I still think his second feature as a writer-director, Used Cars, is one of the best and funniest of all American film comedies. The screenplay (co-written with Bob Gale) is an intricate contraption in which every seemingly stray line and visual bit pays off, and the execution is supremely high-spirited. Most fans' favorite scene, for good reason, is the last in a series of increasingly outrageous pirate car commercials. "Look out, Marshall Lucky, it's High Prices!"