Temperatures up to 40 degF (22 degC) above normal today across the East.
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) February 24, 2017
The warmest February day for 100+ years (since records begin). pic.twitter.com/nBLfL1twg9
In the running for best potato ever!!
Gerald Holtom's peace sign circa '58 (N.D.)
Une Femme Coquette may not sound like anything special—a 9-minute no-budget short film, shot on a borrowed 16mm camera by a 24-year-old amateur with no formal film school training. But the short, which was the subject of our article “Neither lost nor found: On the trail of an elusive icon’s rarest film” back in 2014, has for decades been a sought-after item for art-house buffs and rare movie fiends. Filmed in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1955, it was the first attempt at a narrative film by the iconic French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard—a pivotal figure in the evolution of movie style, who would make his feature debut just five years later, with the hugely influential and perennially cool Breathless.
Looking for something to take my mind off of the news I stumbled upon Detectorists, so far so good but I'm only one episode in. NYT: DETECTORISTS Britain (Acorn) - Mackenzie Crook’s melancholy comedy about the minor triumphs of a pair of friends who share a passion for metal detecting is the most delicate of shows — it feels as if it might float away while you’re watching it. In its second season, Mr. Crook and especially Toby Jones continued their marvelous work as small-timers who, most of the time, mask their frustration and rage in hilariously ineffectual diffidence. NETFLIX.
Triple treat: Eclipse, comet, full moon all coming Friday night
cafe clock Fez
From the outset, he was blatantly fraudulent. Reeking of unabashed insincerity, he cannibalised every -ism he encountered, chewed it up and joyfully spit it back into the faces of the establishment. David Bowie used to say that he wasn’t really a rock star, but an actor playing a rock star. The same could be said for Picabia: he played the role of an artist, producing an oeuvre of spectacular fakeness—fake Cubism, fake Surrealism, fake Social Realism, fake Romanticism, and finally, in his last works, fake Dadaism. For a half century, Picabia brilliantly trolled the art world. Everything he did was purposefully “wrong.”
best country ham sandwich in Virginia contest.
global arms trade doc trailer
The true story of Friends, Family, and 100 million hits of acid.
A Documentary feature on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group of friends out of Southern California that became the largest distributors of LSD and Hash in the world.
Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a “surrealistic” poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip. Like the America it portrays, Herriman’s identity has been poised for a revision for many decades now. Michael Tisserand’s new biography Krazy does just that, clearing the shifting sands and shadows of Herriman’s ancestry, the discovery in the early 1970s of a birth certificate which described Herriman as “colored” sending up a flag among comics researchers and aficionados. Tisserand confirms what for years was hiding in plain sight in the tangled brush of Coconino County, Arizona, where Krazy Kat is supposedly set: Herriman, of mixed African-American ancestry, spent his entire adult life passing as white. He had been born in the African-American neighborhood of racially mixed, culturally polyglot 1880s New Orleans, but within a decade Herriman’s parents moved George and his three siblings to the small but growing town of Los Angeles to escape the increasing bigotry and racial animosity of postbellum Louisiana. The Herrimans melted into California life, and it was there that George, with brief professional spates in New York, would remain for the rest of his life.
the aussie open turns back the clock to 2007 with dream matchups serena vs venus tonight and federer vs nadal tomorrow. unfortunately they are both (i think) set to start at 330 am on the east coast. sure to replay on espn2 the following morning. all four are 30 years old with venus, serena and federer post-35. to be eligible for the seniors tour in tennis one must be 35.
I saw La La Land over the holidays, and was kind of underwhelmed. An interesting effort, but didn’t really captivate me. The songs are clever and carry the story along, but aren’t memorable, and are more in a Sondheimesque musical-theater style than pop songs. And in comparison to musicals of yore the supporting characters don’t amount to much; John Legend is no Edward Everett Horton.
I do like musicals, especially for the psychedelic quality they often display, but in thinking about them I realized I was forgetting one of my favorite movies, until I noticed it was finally turning up on TCM: Robert Altman’s Nashville (Sat/Sun at midnight; DVR set.) It’s more like a back stage musical, with the songs occurring as performances instead of intruding into real life scenarios, but you would have to call it a musical of sorts. When it came out in 1975 I thought it was the best thing ever; I sat through it twice in a row. Funny, tragic, political, musical (with the actors writing their own songs.) I haven’t seen it in many years, and have had mixed reactions to some 70’s films I've watched again more recently, so interested to see how it holds up.
