Posted in Art, Art-house Cinema, Inspiration, Literature, Movie Reviews, Movies, Psychology, tagged David Lynch, Philosophy, Foreign Films, Film Classics, Film School, Criterion Collection, Ingmar Bergman, Persona, Fanny and Alexander, Swedish Films, Mulholland Drive, August Strindberg, A Dream Play, Dreams, Theater, Robert Schumann, Classical Music, Existentialism on July 15, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Anything can happen; all things are possible and plausible. Time and space do not exist: over a minute patch of reality imagination will weave its web and create fresh patterns…”
–August Strindberg, Preface to A Dream Play (1902)
This spring I arrogantly went through my own self taught film school where I explored critically for the [...]
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Posted in Art, Art-house Cinema, History, Inspiration, Movie Reviews, Movies, Psychology, tagged Carl Dreyer, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Catholocism, Criterion Collection, Danish Cinema, Film Classics, Film School, Foreign Films, French Heros, French History, Joan of Arc, Maria Falconetti, Mysticism, Religion, Richard Einhorn, Saint Joan, Saints, Silent Films, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Voices of Light on June 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Re-watching Carl Dreyer’s silent classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), was the final piece of my self-taught Spring Film School that started in April with The Third Man and continued in May and June with M, Metropolis, The Big Heat, The 400 Blows, The Innocents, Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Citizen Kane and finally Dreyer’s film. One of [...]
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Posted in History, Inspiration, Travel, tagged Civil War, Day-Tripping, Delaware River, Fort Mifflin, Ghost Hunters, Ghosts, Haunted Philly, Haunted Places, Historic Sites, Philadelphia, Revolutionary War on May 19, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Recently featured on the TV show Ghost Hunters, Fort Mifflin always finds itself at the top of the list of most haunted places in Philadelphia. Built in 1771, the fort was an important outpost during the Revolutionary War designed to defend Philadelphia from British ships. During the Civil War, the fort was turned into a makeshift [...]
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Posted in Art, Baseball, History, Inspiration, Sports, Travel, tagged Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, Lake Ostego, Ty Cobb on April 5, 2008 | 2 Comments »
In honor of the opening week of baseball season, I took a road trip with my brother and a friend up to Cooperstown, NY to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. It was the first time I had been back since I was a child. Though cold (and rainy on the last day), it was the [...]
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Posted in Art-house Cinema, History, Inspiration, Movie Reviews, Movies, Pop Culture, tagged Alexander Korda, Alida Valli, Anton Karas, Carol Reed, David O. Selznick, Film Classics, Film Noir, Film School, Graham Greene, Joseph Cotten, Kati Marton, Orson Welles, Post WWII Occupation, The Third Man, Trevor Howard, Vienna, Zither on April 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »
CAPTION: In 1949, this Valli was located in GreeneLand.
CAPTION: In the best of film noir, a viewer can actually feel the dampness and breathe in the darkness.
The Trouble with Harry Lime, 1 April 2008
Author: David H. Schleicher from New Jersey, USA
I initially felt a fool for not having seen The Third Man earlier. However, in retrospect, [...]
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Posted in Art, Book Reviews, Books, Inspiration, Literature, Publishing, tagged Caleb Carr, Dublin, Dubliners, Edgar Allan Poe, Elsie Sheridan, Graham Greene, Ireland, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Matthew Pearl, Novels, Philip Pankov, Short Stories, The Dead, The Poe Shadow, William Faulkner on March 1, 2008 | 8 Comments »
CAPTION: Man dies from boredom on Dublin’s Ha’Penny Bridge while reading a very long novel. *Photo courtesy of Philip Pankov (www.philpankov.com) and www.thenocturnes.com.
Kurt Vonnegut once said of novels that “reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody else knows or cares about.”
I couldn’t agree more while I find myself in a laborious relationship with The [...]
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Posted in Arts and Entertainment, Awards, Book Reviews, Book to Film Adaptations, Books, History, Inspiration, Literature, Pop Culture, tagged Bram Stoker, Graham Greene, Harper Lee, Irene Nemirovsky, Iris Murdoch, Nick Tosches, R. L. Fisher, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner on October 27, 2007 | 10 Comments »
Halloween always brings to mind that classic of gothic literature, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
This is a novel that has so enamored me over the years I once took a class dedicated solely to the study of it line by line. The mythology it created is still alive and well today (witness the recent box office champ 30 Days [...]
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Posted in Baseball, History, Inspiration, Pop Culture, Sports, tagged Boston Red Sox, New York City, Rivalry, The Bronx, Yankee Stadium, Yankees on August 29, 2007 | No Comments »
Above: Yankee Stadium in the Past
They say every baseball fan worth their salt should go at least once to a game at Yankee Stadium. After last night (8/28/07), I can say that I did–perhaps just in the nick of time as construction has begun on the new Yankee Stadium next door. Not only did I go [...]
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Posted in Art, Arts and Entertainment, Book Reviews, Book to Film Adaptations, Books, Inspiration, Literature, tagged William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Kurt Vonnegut, Quint Buchholz on August 12, 2007 | No Comments »
I feel the work of art displayed below, “On the Way, Open Book” by Quint Buchholz accurately displays the mindset I was in this summer while reading and writing…
During this long, hot seemingly endless summer while nursing the early stages of a new novel into being, I also dug deep into the classics for inspiration and went on [...]
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So apparently for the past few years they’ve been compiling a list of finalists and close to 100 million people from all over the world have been voting by internet and by phone to determine the New Seven Wonders of the World. I had no idea this “Architectural/Monument Idol” was going on, but found the results [...]
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