May 30

RIP: Dennis Hopper. Hard to believe, an era-ender:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100529/ap_en_ce/us_obit_dennis_hopper

The eventual biography ought to be something else. Hopper was one of a kind. I forget what city it was -- Chicago? San Francisco? -- where I attended some screenings in a Hopper retrospective a number of years ago, and was lucky enough to see The Last Movie in 35mm. Now there's an underrated film! The Wikipedia entry on it is interesting:

With hours and hours of footage, Hopper holed up in his home editing studio in Taos, New Mexico, but failed to deliver a cut by the end of 1970. Hopper was in a period of severe alcohol and drug abuse (as shown in an extremely rare and barely released documentary called The American Dreamer, which was directed by Lawrence Schiller), but managed to put together a fairly straightforward cut in terms of conventional storytelling. He was mocked over it by his friend, cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who urged him to edit the film unconventionally and attempt to break new cinematic ground, which caused Hopper to destroy that edit and craft the more disjointed narrative that is known today, and he finally completed that final edit in the spring of 1971.

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

I saw The American Dreamer as part of the same retrospective, and will never forget Hopper wandering naked around Taos, or telling a group of women he was hot-tubbing with that he was really "a lesbian chick" at heart. The Jodorowsky story is easy to believe; The Last Movie is contemporaneous with The Holy Mountain and shares its DNA (particularly with respect to their similar illusion-vs-reality endings).  

For all the fun you can have talking about him, since he provided such great material, Dennis Hopper was also one of the most significant presences in American culture of his time.

Cropsey, an independent documentary about a series of child disappearances on Staten Island in the Seventies and Eighties, has received mixed notices but sounds interesting for its subject matter alone:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/movies/30cropsey.html

My inner true crime buff is easily hooked by this sort of puzzle, even at the most hoked-up City Confidential / 48 Hour Mystery level. I found further details about these crimes here:

http://notcontent.blogspot.com/2008/04/alice-pereia-missing-since-july-7-1972.html

With my enthusiasms for classic noir and for animal stories, a graphic novel series crossing the two is bound to hit many of my buttons:

Originally published in France and written and illustrated by two Spaniards, Blacksad follows a grimy, smoke-ringed 1950's private investigator, John Blacksad. ...the big news is artist Juanjo Guarnido. The research that must have gone into creating and rendering the cast of characters is exhausting. Foxes, ferrets, grizzly and polar bears, deer, rabbits, roosters, Bengal tigers, Dalmations, owls, crows, turtles--each character has his or her own effortlessly expressed personality mixed with the instincts of the animal they possess. These are human emotions as seen through the animal kingdom, but set in the very human 1950s. It shouldn’t work--or, rather, it should be much more difficult to take seriously, but Guarnido’s confidence and skill take command of every panel. Cobblestones are individually detailed while entire cities stretch above them and behind windows when scenes take place indoors. When characters flirt, their eyes fill in the blanks left by sparse, playful dialogue. Guarnido’s ability to convey a spectrum of emotions via facial and body language puts to shame the often dead-eyed superheroes at the top of the charts.

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2010/05/graphic-novel-friday-pitch-blacksad-noir.html

In the world of Medrie MacPhee's paintings, everything is appealingly colored but alarmingly askew:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38294

http://www.vonlintel.com/index2.html

I don't talk about dance enough here at PMD, partly because it is the art form I possess the least knowledge about, and partly because it is especially difficult to experience in any other manner than live performance. I've twice seen Twyla Tharp's masterpiece In the Upper Room in person and been enthralled; on video it doesn't have the same impact. 

Still, I write plenty here about performance events I won't get to see. I wish I could see the revival of the Merce Cunnibgham/John Cage collaboration Roaratorio:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/john-cage-and-merce-cunningham-roar-once-more.html

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-ca-merce-cunningham-20100530,0,77059.story

Among notables born on this date are film directors Howard Hawks, Franklin Schaffner, and Agnes Varda, film producer Irving Thalberg, jeweler Peter Carl Faberge, poet Countee Cullen, voice artist Mel Blanc, country singer Wynonna Judd, sciencefiction novelist Hal Clement, football player Gale Sayers, baseball player Manny Ramirez, basketball coach Billy Donovan, cultural critic Randolph Bourne, anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, jazz clarinetist/bandleader Benny Goodman, composer Pauline Oliveros, and actors Keir Dullea, Hugh Griffith, Michael J. Pollard, and Colm Meaney. As an aficionado of basketball coach fashion (PMD, July 20, 2008; March 29, 2010), I have heard through my grapevine that ace coach Billy Donovan doesn't take the sheer personal delight in dressing well that his rival Jay Wright does. But there is no faulting the way he turns himself out: