May 4: Special Follow-Ups Edition

A very impressive roster of American film-makers has called for the release of the still-jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi (PMD, March 3):

http://www.avclub.com/articles/seemingly-every-major-american-director-signs-peti,40680/

Last month, Panahi's fellow Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami wrote an open letter in his support:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/iranian-filmmaker-speaks-out-on-prisoners/

Another Facebook detractor heard from (PMD, April 27):

http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2010/05/fuck-facebook.html

Armistead Maupin and Olympia Dukakis reminisce about the Tales of the City mini-series (PMD, April 30):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/revisiting-tales-with-armistead-maupin-and-olympia-dukakis-.html

It's interesting to discover that Robert Altman was a huge fan of the innovative radio dramatist Norman Corwin, who turned 100 on Monday:

http://thrillingdaysofyesteryear.blogspot.com/2010/05/happy-100th-birthday-norman-corwin.html

JazzWax has some additional material from its lengthy encounter with Herb Geller (PMD, May 2), specifically relating to his friendships with pianist Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro, who died tragically young at 25:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/05/herb-geller-on-bill-evans.html

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

A fine obituary of the late jazz critic Gene Lees (PMD, April 26) -- Times U.K., again!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7113236.ece 

More on the Donner Party dust-up (PMD, May 2) (hat tip to Bill Crider):

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rarick-20100502,0,2579910.story?track=rss

The New York Times is impressed with the English National Opera's production of Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers (PMD, April 25):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/arts/05iht-Loomis.html

The ideas of the great sociologist Erving Goffman (PMD, April 30) come up again in Christine Rosen's essay on "The Death of Embarrassment":

In Behavior in Public Spaces, published in 1963, sociologist Erving Goffman described our public actions, from greeting friends on the street to answering questions posed by strangers, as signals of the strength of our commitment to our social communities.  "What the individual thinks of as the niceties of social conduct," Goffman argued, "are in fact rules for guiding him in his attachment to and detachment from social gatherings."  These are what mark us as belonging, or not. "More than to any family or club, more than to any class or sex, more than to any nation, the individual belongs to gatherings, and he had best show that he is a member in good standing," Goffman wrote.

http://incharacter.org/features/the-death-of-embarrassment/ 

Historian Tony Judt (PMD, March 23) is working on a new book about how railroads changed the world:

I've for many years fantasized about writing a study of the place of the railway in the modern world, economically, topographically, in town planning, in the creation of space and the idea of time, in movies and literature and so on. I knew some of this stuff in the abstract, but I've learned much more concretely about the astonishing degree to which the railway—literally the railroad, trains, the whole economy it created—changed our world in ways that planes, cars, the Internet, even electricity maybe didn't quite match. The very notion of society existing in terms of classes, in terms of collective life, public and private space, cities and the relationship between city and country; the idea of time, of time as something that organizes us rather than we organizing it—these were all railway creations. If you try to imagine the world that existed before 1830, before the first railway line in England, between Manchester and Liverpool, it's quite literally unimaginable. It takes an effort of will to realize that in Roman times the sense of distance was about the same as it was in 1780, let's say. For most of human history, people never came into contact, or did very rarely, with either someone who was not born where they lived or some artifact that was not made either by them or by someone they knew or in the town in which they were born. But within one generation they are living in a world that makes today's globalization look like nothing in terms of the transformation. That's the work of the railway, much more than anything else in the world, and that's what I want to try to capture in the book.

http://www.thenation.com/article/talking-tony-judt