Posted on: March 25, 2009
Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig
A bit of synchronicity and chance today. About half way through Zweig’s excellent Beware of Pity, I decided to take a break and watch The Cake Eaters, primarily because Kristen Stewart is in it. Almost right from the start, I could see her role echoed Zweig’s story in some important ways. Stefan Zweig’s novel centers on a young woman who is paralyzed, and befriended by a young lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army. Befriended, at first, because of his sense of pity, duty, honor, guilt. Because he had asked her to dance at a lavish party, not knowing she was too crippled to. She goes into hysterics and he flees from the house in shame. But comes back out of guilt. The book travels through the Hungarian countryside as well…
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Posted on: March 19, 2009
Kate Bush
Kate Bush’s first album came out when she was just 20 years old, in 1978. She had been “discovered” prior to that by David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd fame. I imagine it wasn’t that difficult to notice how unusual she was, how eccentric, cerebral, gifted, and glowingly strange. Many of my favorite female singer/songwriters from the 90s were influenced a great deal by her. Milla Jovovich, Tori Amos, and P.J. Harvey, especially. And she was quite the buzz in the literary circles of two colleges I attended. Which made sense. Sound and sense. Kate Bush utilized literary sources for many of her songs, and recently contributed to the songtrack of The Golden Compass. Dickens,…
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Posted on: March 16, 2009
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York
Baffling, surreal, and haunting, Synecdoche, New York presents a world within a world, a stage within a stage, doubled, tripled, extended, bounded and unbounded by dream logic and existential dread. It is a film that needs to be seen more than once. More than twice. I know because I watched it yesterday for the first time …
and it’s still banging around in my head.
Charlie Kaufman, the writer behind Being John Malkovich; Adaptation; and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directs for the first time from his own script. And it’s a Vianesque doozy.
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director in Schenectady, New York. Cotard is married to Adele Lack (played by Catherine Keener), an artist of miniatures. They have a daughter,…
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