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Wednesday, September, 29th |
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Birthday wishes to Michelangelo Antonioni and his wife Enrica.
Born 92 years ago in Italy, Antonioni lived through the years
of Italian fascism and went on to make post-war films of a different ilk from his Italian Neo-realist colleagues - De Sica, Rossellini
and Visconti. A master of composition, Antonioni advanced the
art of cinema and deconstructed screen narrative creating a rich
filmography including these films from the sixties - L' Avventura (1960) La Notte (1961), Il Rosso Deserto (1964) and the English language Blowup (1966).
Blow-up, set in swinging London of the '60's, was his commercial success for Warner Bros. The film, based on Argentine Julio Cortázar's short story, starred Vanessa Redgrave and David Hemmings, who went on to form his own film company, Hemdale.
Antonioni closed the Sixties with the wandering Zabriskie Point (1970), a film about student radicals alienation ending with repetitive, slow motion shots of an explosion of a modern house in the desert. Antonioni found his male lead Mark Frechette on a Boston street corner. Frechette was later convicted of bank robbery charges and died in the weight room of a prison in Norfolk, Massachusetts. He had been planning to stage an inmate production of "The Watergate Tapes" at the time. Frechette and his co-star, Daria Halprin, daughter of Bay Area dance therapist Anna Halprin, gave a 1969 interview in the last issue of a Boston underground newspaper, Avatar.
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Los Angeles, Tinsel City
One has to love a town where a hip neighborhood can have its very own film festival [flash alert].
On the other side of the Hollywood Hills,
the blue whale building is the location of a festival of a different color. West Hollywood's first conservative film festival will screen "Michael Moore Hates America," a $200,000 documentary partially financed by Brian Cartmell, who sold, eNic, his domain registration company to Verisign.
Asian Americans and Canadians
At MIT, this weekend another first, the Silkscreen Film Festival.
Right on the heels of the Toronto Film Festival is Vancouver.
A Global Fall Festival Season
In the Big Apple, the 42nd New York Film Festival will provide the
U.S. launch of Pedro Almodóvar's film, "La Mala Educación ." The New York Film Festival has long
been a cornerstone of international cinema exhibition.
NYFF is now followed on Long Island by a younger Hamptons festival. On the Korean peninsula there is Pusan; the emerald isle has Cork.
It's the Spanish who have the 49th Festival of Festivals in Valladolid. Pass the popcorn!
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Thursday, September, 16th |
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GNOME Summit 3
October 9 - 11, 2004
10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
Stata Center, MIT
WiFi in a building set upon a 4-ft thick concrete mat bearing on naturally deposited marine clay. Toilets that flush with collected rainwater. Such is
Building 32.
Gone is Building 20 leaving a rich legacy of science and invention. In its place stands the new $300 million home of MIT's merged Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Lab for Computer Science.
Stata in the evening
It seems only fitting that a GNOME Summit take place in this newly opened Gehry structure, the
Ray and Maria Stata Center.
Architect Frank Gehry has designed some unusual looking buildings - Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, the EMP-Experience Music Project in Seattle, a dancing "Ginger and Fred" building in Prague and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. It took a long time for the Disney Hall to get above ground, but more about that on another day.
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"Alphaville: Silence - Logic -Safety - Prudence."
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If Outland agent Lemmy Caution from Alphaville had investigated Fenway Park in Boston last weekend, he'd have found himself no longer in the land of black and white. Among thousands of Parrot Heads in Hawaiian shirts and shark-outfitted white limos, Caution would have arrived in the technicolor state of euphoria called Margaritaville.
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"Wasted away again in Margaritaville"
A large circling blimp advertising "lo carbs" marked the arrival
of Margaritaville in Boston. For those of you who have never travelled there, Margaritaville is an imaginary Caribbean theme and mardi gras atmosphere where mostly middle-aged inhabitants wear grass skirts, funny hats and flower leis. Inflatable birds and plastic palm trees abound.
Margaritaville, you see, is the music, travelling party and lucrative entertainment business of Jimmy Buffet . While the usual tailgate parties of Buffet fans in RVs (recreational vehicles) were not permitted in Boston, the bars were full before and after the concerts. For rum and tequila distillers, visitors to this fantasy island boost sales.
No one seemed to know the exact origin of a margarita.
These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes;
Nothing remains quite the same.
Through all of the islands and all of the highlands,
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.
- CHANGES IN LATITUDES, CHANGES IN ATTITUDES - Jimmy Buffett
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Speaking from a circular stage
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"He has a wonderful dog, Barney, that likes to visit the Oval Office a lot. And he contributes to the president's ability to meet his obligations."
-White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr., addressing the Youth Convention.
A Small Audience
A sparse audience gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Kennedy School of Government on Thursday night to watch George W. Bush accept the Republican nomination on a big screen TV. The president spoke from a stage similar to one used by Mick Jagger in the same hall last year.
The bleacher seats, that were filled for John Kerry's nomination acceptance speech in July, remained folded up against the wall and multiple flat screens around the room were all turned off.
Bush Audience
A less than sympathic international gathering, the audience was comprised mostly of graduate students involved in the study of policy making. Upon hearing the President's phrase, "This progress involved careful diplomacy" many of those watching burst into sneers. Unlike the DNC viewing, there was no popcorn machine, just bags of potato chips and a bowl of party mix.
Kerry Audience
Thanks to The Gothamist in NYC for their RNC wrap-up. We wish them a good sleep and pleasant dreams.
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