May 17

I hear that director Andrea Arnold is at work on a new film version of Wuthering Heights. I loved Red Road and have heard nothing but good things about Fish Tank, but Wuthering Heights -- that's a tricky beast. Many adaptations go astray by not including both generations of the story, which completely loses the point; and almost all of them err by substituting a Charlotte Bronte-like romantic tone for Emily Bronte's wildness. Jack Pendarvis at The Rumpus captures the real tone of the book:

...her people [are] coo coo bananas down to the very last one....It’s an amazingly cruel book....and a mad book, and nobody tells you it’s jeweled with poisonous humor....The overall tone is blasphemy and damnation. 

http://therumpus.net/2010/04/jack-pendarvis-the-last-book-i-loved-wuthering-heights/

Forget the whole love-on-the-windswept-moors cliche; Pendarvis is right. I do think that Andrea Arnold is fully capable of capturing the madness and cruelty, but covering both generations in one movie screenplay is challenging (television miniseries allow for that more easily), and every single character is difficult to cast....We shall see. Here is a run-down of some earlier versions:

http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/watch.htm

This helpful web-page does not include the 1962 or 1967 BBC versions, or the looser foreign language transmutations -- Luis Bunuel's Abismos de Pasion (great title!), Jacques Rivette's Hurlevent, and Yoshishige Yoshida's Arashi-ga-Oka.

I like the lushness of Peter Bialobrzeski's tropical photographs:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38084

http://www.m97gallery.com/artist/?artist=peter_bialobrzeski

Another artist who is working within an interesting palette is the Dominican Republic painter Julio Valdez:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38086

http://www.junekellygallery.com/current.htm

Beth Carswell at Abebooks provides a droll rundown of villainous animals in fiction. (I love the entry for The Wind in the Willows: "The opportunistic chief weasel is a jerk who amasses a band of weasels and takes over Toad Hall.")

http://www.abebooks.com/books/murderous-bad-mean-antagonist-fiction/animal-villains.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-h00-amlvilA-_-01cta

John Coulthart has great things to say about Steven Berkoff's 1992 production of Oscar Wilde's Salome, preserved on DVD:

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/05/17/steven-berkoffs-salome/

Among notables born on this date are novelists Robert Smith Surtees, Dorothy Richardson, and Henri Barbusse (France), poet Jacint Verdaguer (Catalan), television playwright Dennis Potter, graphic novelist Dave Sim, composers Erik Satie and Werner Egk, horn player Dennis Brain, soprano Birgit Nilsson, bluesman Taj Mahal, rocker Trent Reznor, singer/songwriter Enya, scientist Edward Jenner, baseball player Cool Papa Bell, sportscaster Jim Nantz, and actors Dennis Hopper, Jean Gabin, Maureen O'Sullivan, Grace Zabriskie, and Bill Paxton. Although Enya only played with her family's band Clannad for a brief period around 1980, I'm going to use her birthday as an excuse to embed the group's beautiful version of "Down By the Sally Gardens," from their sensational 1979 live album Clannad in Concert. Her sister Moya sings lead: