THANK YOU GEORGE WASHINGTON!!!!

Just a brief Fourth of July message, lasting less than a minute. I want to post something later tonight or tomorrow (the fourth) that has nothing to do with this, but I don't want the holiday to go without comment.

RAY BRADBURY ON "ACRES OF BOOKS"

Many thanks to Jenny for letting me know that the city of Long Beach is going to bulldoze Acres of Books to make way for yet another stupid shopping mall. Acres of Books is the largest used book store in California, and is one of the largest in the world. I've gotten dozens of hard-to-find books there, books I'd never have known about if I hadn't seen them on the shelf at Acres. I can't believe Long Beach could have let this treasure slip through their hands!





Used book stores are completely disappearing from American cities and the few that remain tend to favor the better quality books, the ones that have their original covers. That's a shame because some of the best and most hard to find old books survive only in coverless editions, and the lack of covers made the rare books affordable.

I'm always shocked when I hear people say, "You can find anything on the internet." No you can't! That's ridiculous! What you find on the internet is what the mass culture puts there. Not much that's select and special. The other day I searched for Rube Goldberg and found very,very little, and part of that was what I put up myself. Goldberg is one of the most original cartoonists ever, but you'd never know it from the net. When I wrote the blog about Blackstone I tried to look up something that would explain the theory of monarchy to me. No way. Look up monarchy and you'll turn up a lot of drivel about Princess Di. I could name dozens of examples like that!

Even libraries aren't very good at preserving the past. They have to make room for the latest best sellers. Used bookstores are vital custodians of the past, and their passing is a national catastrophe. Hooray for Ray Bradbury who took the trouble to try to do something about it!

"THE BIG STORY" AND "BOB'S BIRTHDAY"

Here's the best stop motion short done in the last twenty years, the best I know of, anyway. it's by Tim Watts ("Corpse Bride") and Dave Soten, with voices by Frank Gorshin. It spawned a few great commercials and nearly won an Acadamy Award in the mid-nineties, but I'm surprised that it didn't do even better than that.

The style easily lends itself to computer animation and demonstrates that 3D features needn't have confined themselves to kiddie subjects like penguins. Imagine what a Kirk Douglas enthusiast like John Kricfalusi could have done with a look like this!!!! Imagine, of course, what Tim and Dave could have done!





I was curious to see what animated short beat this film for the Oscar. Somebody speculated that it was "Bob's Birthday." I just watched it, and it's not horrible. What do you think?

VINTAGE MUPPET COMMERCIALS!

Wow! Mike Fontanelli sent me some Jim Hensen commercials for Wilkin's Coffee! Whaddaya think?









I threw this one in for good measure. Boy, the Muppets sure had a way with monsters! Here's (above) a collection of the best monsters-eating-people scenes.

ROMANTIC INTERLEWD

This was done really quick and dirty, just for fun. It's a minute and forty seconds long.

Boy, how did I ever get along without an isight camera?

A PORTFOLIO PIECE FOR A DRAMATIC ACTOR

Here's (above) what they call an "Actor Demo Reel." YouTube is full of them. The Hank Harris example I used here is far better than most and yet it still disappoints on some level, (actually, the first example on the reel isn't so bad) and I was curious
to understand why.

The answer it seems to me is that Harris geared himself up to play the kind of "post-modern" roles that TV offers now. Post-modern man perceives himself as a statistic, a victim, a cork on the waves of social and psychological forces. That's so different than the way people perceived themselves in the golden age of fiction when it was believed that man possessed free will and was on the Earth to undergo a trial, and when people still believed in good and evil.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhoaSrrA6YQ


But it also has to do with tapping into weird, supernatural forces. Harris is always believable and appealing in the parts he plays in the demo, but is that all there is? Didn't Margaret Hamilton transcend "believable and appealing" when she played the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz?" Wasn't Peter Lorre more than simply scary and convincing in "Stranger on the Third Floor?" How about Garbo in "Grand Hotel?" It seems to me that it's an actor's job to bring to the project a pre-existing character of great power and iconic significance.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoyEHyB4MnQ&feature=related


Then there's technique. It seems to me that a good actor lays down a tone and a rhythm that other actors can bounce off of. Actors playing a scene are like musicians in a jazz combo. They're laboring to create sounds that combine into a beautiful, satisfying whole. In my opinion you can learn more about this from the great character and supporting actors than from the stars.

I admit that I don't know anything about dramatic acting. If I did I'd probably have a lot more respect for what Harris did in the demo.


NOTE: In order to publish this post I had to delete my two previous ones dealing with solo dancing and Jim's sense of film. I started this post before I began the others (then saved what I'd done as a draft) and now, when I try to publish it, it will only post beneath the others where it won't be seen. The only thing I could do was to delete the top posts. My deepest apologies to commenters on the two deleted posts.

"THE LATE-NIGHT INTRUDER"

Wow! Here's the video I did with Jim Arnold, the amazing guy who did the YouTube video I posted about called "Robber's Apprentice." We never actually met, this whole video was done via emails and shared Quicktime footage. What an age we live in!

Next time I'll put up some of Jim's raw footage. You won't believe how skilled this guy is!

BTW, the video might look compressed on some computers. I don't know why that happened, but if you click on it the right way it should take you to YouTube where you can see it in a normal format. If you hear two soundtracks at once just ...well, just fiddle with it. it'll turn out OK.