May 27

One of my favorite library books as a kid was Robert M. McClung's melancholy Lost Wild America, about our extinct and endangered animals. One species that specially interested me was the Sea Mink (more of a seaside mink really, not a truly aquatic mammal like the Sea Otter):

Joel Sartore's Rare: Portraits of America's Endangered Species is a modern equivalent of McClung's 1969 volume, with excellent color photographs by the author. Here is one of the last two individuals of the Columbia Basin Pygmy Rabbit subspecies (both have since died):

In an off-exhibit room at the Oregon Zoo, the staff was quiet, even reverent, as they brought in Bryn. She was one of two Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits left, and since both were old females, this was a solemn occasion. A keeper placed her gently on my black velvet background, and i began to take photos. I stopped to watch her from time to time, but she didn't move much. She wasn't even scared. Nearly blind, missing half an ear, and with fur falling out onto the cloth, she seemed to have already given up. The whole experience left me morose and extremely disappointed.

Illustrations such as Peter Parnall's helped teach me to care about animals when I was young:

http://theanimalarium.blogspot.com/2010/05/delicate-worlds.html

Research on this blog has put me in touch with a world of artistic prizes that I had known nothing about -- for example, the Polar Music Prizes (!) given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, going this year to two extremely worthy recipients, Bjork and Ennio Morricone:

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=29314&ew_0_a_id=362735

Although a building's "star quality," its ability to be photographed handsomely, is certainly not a bad thing, what it's like to live in and with it spatially is as or more important, but sometimes little discussed. Daniel Burnham's Flatiron in New York is undoubtedly one of the world's most memorable structures visually, and so it is very interesting to read people's thoughts about working there:

“I never, never wanted to leave,” said Matthew Shear, executive vice president and publisher at St. Martin’s, whose curved windows on the 16th floor at the prow give him a stunning panoramic view of the city and beyond. “I think [the new owners] were surprised by the response of people wanting to stay in this building, even with its foibles...You see these strange little offices. There’s nothing cookie-cutter here. I mean, did you see the 21st floor?” he asked, laughing. “It’s like a place you’d put your mad aunt. It’s a little quirky sometimes, and I think that’s a good thing...I think when authors or agents come in here, they feel that kind of quirky energy.”

http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=15465

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/realestate/commercial/26flatiron.html

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

"Quirky energy" is just the phrase to describe the British man of letters Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-1964):

Debt, alcoholism and a love of debauched living all featured heavily in his life.

http://hannahstoneham.blogspot.com/2010/05/life-writing-on-edge-fear-and-loathing.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_MacLaren-Ross

Staying on quirky, who more so than the irrepressible John Malkovich? The new DVD The Infernal Comedy is a...

...pseudo-opera -- actually a drama for one actor, two opera singers and an orchestra -- [that] recounts the life of Jack Unterweger, the Austrian writer and serial killer who murdered a number of prostitutes in Europe and Los Angeles...."The Infernal Comedy" imagines the killer coming back from the dead as part of a book tour to promote his latest memoirs. For much of the production, Malkovich is seated at a table where he recites a comic monologue about his character's life, loves and dangerous liaisons.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/john-malkovichs-serialkiller-opera-coming-to-dvd.html

Glenn Kenny enjoys the offbeat -- OK, quirky! -- release choices made by the British Film Institute's DVD branch:

...one area where the home video arm really excels is in very specifically British stuff that isn't necessarily gonna find a home at an American label. The staggering Jack Bond/Jane Arden films Separation, The Other Side of Underneath, and Anti-Clock (films I was so both exhilarated and flummoxed by that I found myself completely unable to write about them in a way I felt satisfactory to me, for which I apologize), for instance. Bill Douglas' should-really-be-seen-by-everybody Comrades, to name another example. And then there's the side label, BFI Flipside, devoted to "rescuing weird and wonderful British films from obscurity and presenting them in new high-quality editions."

One recent such release is of the 1970 groupie drama Permissive and the 1971 pop-music-and-pornography opus Bread.

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/1844  

http://www.dvdactive.com/reviews/dvd/permissive.html

Among notables born on this date are novelists Arnold Bennett, Dashiell Hammett, John Barth, John Cheever, Max Brod, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Herman Wouk, Tony Hillerman, and Harlan Ellison, historian Ibn Khaldun, scientist Rachel Carson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, statesman Henry Kissinger, golfer Sam Snead, baseball players Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas, painters Georges Roualt and Wols, dancer Isadora Duncan, composer Louis Durey, singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn, jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis, cinematographer Lee Garmes, and actors Christopher Lee, Lee Meriwether, Vincent Price, Louis Gossett Jr., Joseph Fiennes, and Paul Bettany. The great cinematographer Lee Garmes did beautiful work on the film noir Nightmare Alley -- the look of the movie seems like an extension of Tyrone Power's dark Irish cast: