http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2010/05/show-with-spin-on-it.html
http://www.nola.com/tv/index.ssf/2010/05/treme_honors_franks_place.html
The premise of the series, which was a half-hour "dramedy" without a laugh track, was that a Boston attorney inherits a New Orleans restaurant from his long-unseen father, and goes to The Big Easy intending to sell the place, but winds up managing it. Frank's Place is splendidly atmospheric, richly peopled, funny, moving, and, not least, frequently quite daring. The episode about skin-tone prejudice within the black community ("Are you browner than a paper bag?") was an eye-opener, and perfectly judged in tone. The series clearly deserves to be on DVD, and a release is frequently mentioned as being in the offing, but because the score consisted of great New Orleans tunes, there are substantial music rights issues (as there are with Hugh Wilson's other great show, WKRP in Cincinnati, the most underrated popular show in television after Green Acres).
Colin Marshall, the host of the podcast The Marketplace of Ideas, writes a fine eponymous blog. In a recent post, he shares some favorite images from films and photographs by Tarkovsky (who played around with a Polaroid camera), Jarmusch, Kore-eda, Tsai Ming-liang, Greenaway, and Weerasethakul:
http://colinmarshall.typepad.com/blog/2010/06/tarkovsky-as-hipster.html
Arielle Bernstein at The Rumpus offers the most sustained defense I have seen of Lars von Trier's controversial Antichrist:
http://therumpus.net/2010/05/emotional-creatures-excess-restraint-and-deliverance-in-antichrist/
I laughed out loud at this entry in the ArchDaily Classics series, about Peter Eisenman's striking House VI, because it admits quite forthrightly that the house was a pain the ass to live in:
Purposely ignoring the idea of form following function, Eisenman created spaces that were quirky and well-lit, but rather unconventional to live with. He made it difficult for the users so that they would have to grow accustom to the architecture and constantly be aware of it. For instance, in the bedroom there is a glass slot in the center of the wall continuing through the floor that divides the room in half, forcing there to be separate beds on either side of the room so that the couple was forced to sleep apart from each other....As annoying as the house was to inhabit, Eisenman was able to constantly remind the users of the architecture around them and how it affects their lives.
http://www.archdaily.com/63267/ad-classics-house-vi-peter-eisenman/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Eisenman
Linda McLean's play Any Given Day, on at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, sounds like a scorcher:
http://thomdibdin.co.uk/?p=1102
Marc Myers at JazzWax discusses Manny Albam's 1956 album Drum Suite, which was ahead of its time in its employment of multiple percussionists within a big band:
http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/06/manny-albam-drum-suite.html
Albam did arrangements for some of my favorite bandleaders -- Charlie Barnet, Stan Kenton, Count Basie.
I am a little too young to remember Twinkles, the breakfast cereal "in the storybook package" that was available from 1960-1965, although I might have eaten it as a toddler. It looks charming:
http://www.scrubbles.net/2010/06/09/twinkle-twinkle-little-box/
In the future, will we all be eating insects? Abundantly available and full of protein!
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/05/arguments-for-entomophagy.html
This concept doesn't gross me out at all. What is a lobster but a big underwater insect? Bring on the crickets!
Among notables born on this date are composers Tomaso Albinoni and Robert Schumann, pianist Emanuel Ax, singer/songwriter Boz Scaggs, pop singer Nancy Sinatra, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, painter Harry Holtzman, novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, poet Gwen Harwood, comedian Joan Rivers, and actors Robert Preston, Sonia Braga, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Alexis Smith, James Darren, and Jerry Stiller. Speaking of houses that are tough to live in, many of Frank Lloyd Wright's have that reputation:
...who wants to live in a house where everything in it reflects one person's taste, even if that person is a genius? Most people like to alter their interior decor to suite their own taste. Wright deplored that inclination -- one of the reasons he began designing furniture was because, much to his dismay, people living in his houses were outfitting them with their own tasteless furniture.
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2007/08/26/the_flaws_in_frank_lloyd_wrights_design_for_living/
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