May 16

Josh Brolin, whose career is as hot as any in Hollywood right now, and who has two films at Cannes -- Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeeps and Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger -- is making a strategy of working with the best film-makers (other directors who have cast him recently are the Coens and Gus Van Sant):

"...it was important for me to stick with great filmmakers," Brolin said. "Everybody's intentions in the beginning are great, and even great filmmakers can make bad movies. But you have less of a chance of making a bad film with a great filmmaker, whereas the odds are very low with a bad filmmaker that you'll make a great film."
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"I'm so grateful. You have no idea. Because they're easy. They're not difficult directors. It's the other guys who are difficult. The egos and the power struggles, all that. Then you see the finished product and you go, 'You've got to be kidding me.' And with these guys, amazing directors from Woody Allen to the Coens to Oliver, they're all in it for the same reason. They love storytelling."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100516/ap_en_mo/eu_france_cannes_josh_brolin

http://www.mylifetime.com/lifestyle/entertainment/josh-brolin-hot-actor-hot-career

The Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, best known for his Seventies erotic shockers In the Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion, was working fast and furious in the Sixties, making 14 theatrical features in the decade, and five of the least known outside Japan are in a new Criterion box set:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/movies/16Kehr.html

http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2008novdec/oshima.html

Gotta love an enigmatic, decadent, "bizarre and capricious" German Wildean visual artist known as "Alastair":

http://coilhouse.net/2010/05/a-decadent-parade-of-outrageous-fancies-alastair/#more-14874

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastair_%28Baron_Hans_Henning_Voigt%29

(Hat tip to {feuilleton}.)

There are times when I love the distinct look an artist can achieve through the use of unusual materials. I remember when I first encountered the incredible vividness of oil paintings on copper, which if well cared for lose no visual pop after hundreds of years. Christopher Cook is working "in liquid graphite (graphite powders, oil, and resin) on aluminum panels or coated paper," and the subject matter of his new show is offbeat, too -- road tunnels!

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38049

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38049

The publisher Harper Brothers tried an unusual concept for a series of hardcover mysteries it produced between 1929 and 1934: 

Each publication was to have a certain portion of the mystery story sealed off from the reader at a climactic point in the story. If the reader wished to continue to discover the author’s explanation and solution to the committed crime(s), the reader would then have to break the seal and read on. Should the reader lose interest in the author’s story and returned the book to the bookseller with the seal intact, the reader would be refunded the cost of the book.

http://mysteryfile.com/Sealed/Harper.html 

That's as awesome a concept as Dell Mapbacks! (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

Among notables born on this date are novelists Juan Rulfo (Mexico) and Arturo Uslar Pietri (Venezuela), poets Adrienne Rich and Friedrich Ruckert (Germany), journalist/historian Studs Terkel, anthropologist Edward T. Hall, statesman William H. Seward, politician Lowell Weicker, painter Tamara de Lempicka, tenor Richard Tauber, pianist Friedrich Gulda, jazz vocalist Betty Carter, jazz drummer Billy Cobham, rock guitarist Robert Fripp, rock violinist Boyd Tinsley, clarinetist/bandleader Woody Herman, pop pianist Liberace, pop singer Janet Jackson, menswear expert Alan Flusser, film director Kenji Mizoguchi, baseball player/manager Billy Martin, and actors Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan (who were once married), Martine Carol, Pierce Brosnan, Harry Carey Jr., Bill Smitrovich, Debra Winger, Mare Winningham, and Melanie Lynskey. Today's offering in sheer loveliness, Richard Tauber singing the Friedrich Silcher/Heinrich Heine song "Die Lorelei":