matteo's profile (website)
Info
Joined:
February 26, 2001
About
What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
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He's the architect of the French New Wave who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "the greatest film ever made", duly censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "the first modern film of sound cinema" (Eric Rohmer), shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "to stop death in its tracks" (French language link), even if only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of la bande dessinée who learnt English by reading comic books and in the Seventies dreamed of making "Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the MGM old-school musical nut who
. His new work, just shown at the Venice Film Festival where his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film inspired by an English play with 54 scenes and characters who don't know each other, including some who may never meet". The old SF fan commissioned the film score to the X-Files Mark Snow. (more inside)
______
"It began as an idea... I wanted to do something different — I wanted to go into somebody's office or studio and photograph them in their milieu, to see the whole thing either realistically or symbolically reflecting their character and what they did in life."
He took portrait photography out of the studio and into the subject's own environment,
Igor Stravinsky sitting at a piano (an image that was turned down by his old mentor Alexey Brodovitch, Harper's Bazaar art director)
has died at the age of 88.
_______________
"I'd like to destroy this premise that cinema is fiction"
Shoehi Imamura, the maestro of Japanese cinema and pioneer of Nuberu Bagu (the Japanese Nouvelle Vague), the pacifist who cheered when the Emperor declared on the radio that the war was lost, the two-time winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or who didn't really like awards, has died yesterday at the age of 79.
whose vision of his motherland was that of a tiny island populated by a sadistic, incestuous family, a nation whose recent history could only be narrated by a hooker. A place where the hero is a serial killer and your best friend is a eel.
(for years, In America, his films were treated as exotic soft-core porn—a dubbed, recut version of Pigs and Battleships was originally released as The Dirty Girls and later as The Flesh Is Hot.)
In his twilight years, the maestro found time to sponsor the work of Takashi Miike and to give us his take on September 11, ie that sometimes history has already happened in a Tu Fu poem.
__________________
_______________
"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. There is nothing for me to do but to die."
On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis, Adam Czerniaków was made head of the 24 member Judenrat, (Jewish Council) responsible for implementing German orders in the Jewish community(interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942, the Judenrat received instructions that all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to East (exceptions were made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom". More inside.
********
Of course, Czerniaków was not able to obtain an exemption for orphans. He returned to his office and took one of the cyanide capsules he had been keeping for just such an occasion.
*
Raul Hilberg video:
*
London Review of Books: "Every Single Document"
*
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
*
Jewish Resistance song (.pdf):
_______________
'This is our platform, our place to speak our faith and live our faith. This is a special gift from God, to play baseball, and if we can spread God's word by doing that, then we've almost fulfilled our calling." Trot Nixon, Mike Timlin, Tim Wakefield, Jason Varitek, Curt Schilling, Doug Mirabelli, Bill Mueller, Matt Clement, John Olerud, Mike Myers, Tony Graffanino, Chad Bradford: each Boston Red Sox player considers himself an evangelical Christian who believes in the sacred authority of the Bible and the promise of Jesus Christ as his savior. 'In terms of coming to Bible study and chapel, this team has more guys involved than any team I've ever been with," said Olerud, who has played for five teams over 17 seasons in the majors.
http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2005/08/31/faith_binds_many_on_sox/?page=full
__________________________
Defining Defeat
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/626385.html
"The German people must learn to un-learn all that they have been taught, not only by Hitler, but his predecessors in the last hundred years, by so many of their philosophers and teachers, the disciples of blood and iron…". -- Vice President Henry Wallace, December 29, 1942. From the book "In the House of the Hangman
The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949", by Jeffrey K. Olick
_____________________
Mozart's Women: His family, his friends, his music, by Jane Glover
_______________
***
"One could go on, and one will -- praising (...) the National Center for Jewish Film for releasing all four of Edgar Ulmer's Yiddish films in restored editions. But the DVD player is beckoning, and I think it is time for me to get back to the couch".
The National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) is a unique nonprofit motion picture archive, distributor and resource center housing the largest, most comprehensive collection of Jewish-theme film and video in the world. In their archives you can discover the works of Leo Fuchs, the "Yiddish Fred Astaire", restored gems (scroll down) like "Motl the Operator" and re-releases like "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg". (More on Greenberg, the Jewish kid who challenged Babe Ruth’s homerun record here, more on the NCJF inside).
Truly a "Bridge of Light" between two worlds.
The ongoing mission of NCJF is to gather, preserve, catalogue, and exhibit films with artistic and educational value relevant to the Jewish experience, disseminating these materials to the widest possible audience. NCJF’s first priority continues to be the preservation and restoration of rare and endangered nitrate and acetate films. The Center has long been recognized as a leader in the revival of Yiddish cinema, rescuing watershed films like The Dybbuk (1937) and Tevye (1939) from virtual oblivion. By producing and distributing pristine film and videocassette editions of such historic works with new English subtitles, NCJF effectively reintroduces modern audiences to a unique cultural and cinematic experience.
***
Clement Greenberg was a thirty-year-old who wrote poetry (none of which was published), a novel (similarly unpublished) and a few hack adventure stories (including one, about Pancho Villa, that appeared in Esquire under a pseudonym). He worked for an insurance company (fired), as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle (fired) and for his father in the wholesale necktie business (quit). After a rash, disastrous marriage in California, he ended up back in New York, where he landed at the U.S. Customs Service, where he had to appraise arriving shipments of liquor and wine.
A Marxist and an anti-Stalinist, a brawler intellectually and, on occasion, physically, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald, who encouraged him to turn it into an article.
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" appeared in the fall, 1939, issue, and it made Greenberg famous. More inside.
***
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" is one of the most muscular pieces of criticism ever written. Greenberg essentially ripped modernism—the work of Picasso, Kandinsky, Joyce, Eliot, Gide, Stevens, Hart Crane, and so on—out of the context in which it was created, and redefined it as art about art, as work that meditated on the nature of its own medium. Thus abstract painting could be understood as an exploration of the possibilities of figure and ground, paint and canvas. Greenberg thought that painters no longer attempted to imitate objects for the same reason that Horkheimer and Adorno offered: because realism had been co-opted by the culture industries of the modern state. It wasn't that he enjoyed abstract painting more than represen- tational painting, he said. It was that under current historical conditions abstract painting was the only genuine painting possible—just as, for Adorno, atonal music was the only form for genuine music to take.
******************
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-wk-screen26jan26,0,4904699.story?coll=cl-movies-features
http://www.google.it/search?q=%22Long+Is+the+Road%22+%22israel+becker%22&start=0&ie=utf-8&hl=it&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:it:official
http://www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm/Catalogue/yiddishaz.htm
http://www.israelemb.org/cultural_affairs/news.htm
_______________
_______________
_______________
He's the architect of the French New Wave who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "the greatest film ever made", duly censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "the first modern film of sound cinema" (Eric Rohmer), shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "to stop death in its tracks" (French language link), even if only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of la bande dessinée who learnt English by reading comic books and in the Seventies dreamed of making "Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the MGM old-school musical nut who
. His new work, just shown at the Venice Film Festival where his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film inspired by an English play with 54 scenes and characters who don't know each other, including some who may never meet". The old SF fan commissioned the film score to the X-Files Mark Snow. (more inside)
______
"It began as an idea... I wanted to do something different — I wanted to go into somebody's office or studio and photograph them in their milieu, to see the whole thing either realistically or symbolically reflecting their character and what they did in life."
He took portrait photography out of the studio and into the subject's own environment,
Igor Stravinsky sitting at a piano (an image that was turned down by his old mentor Alexey Brodovitch, Harper's Bazaar art director)
has died at the age of 88.
_______________
"I'd like to destroy this premise that cinema is fiction"
Shoehi Imamura, the maestro of Japanese cinema and pioneer of Nuberu Bagu (the Japanese Nouvelle Vague), the pacifist who cheered when the Emperor declared on the radio that the war was lost, the two-time winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or who didn't really like awards, has died yesterday at the age of 79.
whose vision of his motherland was that of a tiny island populated by a sadistic, incestuous family, a nation whose recent history could only be narrated by a hooker. A place where the hero is a serial killer and your best friend is a eel.
(for years, In America, his films were treated as exotic soft-core porn—a dubbed, recut version of Pigs and Battleships was originally released as The Dirty Girls and later as The Flesh Is Hot.)
In his twilight years, the maestro found time to sponsor the work of Takashi Miike and to give us his take on September 11, ie that sometimes history has already happened in a Tu Fu poem.
__________________
_______________
"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. There is nothing for me to do but to die."
On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis, Adam Czerniaków was made head of the 24 member Judenrat, (Jewish Council) responsible for implementing German orders in the Jewish community(interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942, the Judenrat received instructions that all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to East (exceptions were made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom". More inside.
********
Of course, Czerniaków was not able to obtain an exemption for orphans. He returned to his office and took one of the cyanide capsules he had been keeping for just such an occasion.
When the Germans left, the Chairman sat in his chair, a broken man. For almost three years he had tried to fulfill every Gestapo command, hoping that by compliance the Jews would make themselves indispensable to the Nazi war effort, however long it lasted. He had compromised more than one principle for the sake of the ghetto, but he drew the line at cooperating in the evacuation of its children. He rang for the night clerk and asked for a glass of water. She saw that he was as white as a sheet. His hands were trembling as he took the glass. Attempting a smile, he dismissed her with "Thank you" -- his last words.
Like Korczak, Czerniakow kept poison available. He had twentyfour tablets of potassium cyanide locked in his drawer, one for each member of the Council should they ever be asked to do anything that went against their conscience. That moment had arrived for him. He wrote two notes. In one, he asked his wife to forgive him for leaving her, and to understand that he could not do otherwise. In the other, he explained to his fellow Judenrat members that he was unable to hand over helpless children to the Germans. He hoped that they would not see his suicide as an act of cowardice. He could no longer bear what was happening.
Shortly afterwards, the cashier, who was working in another part of the building, was surprised that no one answered the incessant ringing of the phone in the Chairman's office. Opening the door cautiously, he found Adam Czerniakow dead in his chair.
That night the Gestapo ordered an emergency meeting of the Judenrat to elect a new Chairman.
*
Raul Hilberg video:
"As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed. At first there were laws. Then there were decrees implementing laws. Then a law was made saying, ‘There shall be no laws.’ Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes. Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers. Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral. And finally, there were no orders at all. Everybody knew what he had to do."
*
London Review of Books: "Every Single Document"
The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow provides an enthralling day by day account of Czerniakow's untiring efforts to placate an ultimately implacable enemy.
*
The Polish underground thereupon contacted the Ghetto. The answer of the Jewish leaders was that perhaps 60,000 Jews would be deported, but that it was "inconceivable that the Germans would destroy the lot." The Jews had one request, which the Polish Home Army was glad to fulfill. They handed to the Poles an "appeal addressed to the world and to the Allied nations in particular." The Jewish leadership demanded that the German people be threatened with reprisals. The appeal was immediately transmitted to London, but the BBC maintained complete radio silence. As we shall have occasion to find out later, the Jews did not have many friends in London, or for that matter, in Washington.
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
*
Jewish Resistance song (.pdf):
Never say there is only death for you.
Though leadened skies may be concealing days of blue
Because the hour we have hungered for is near
_______________
'This is our platform, our place to speak our faith and live our faith. This is a special gift from God, to play baseball, and if we can spread God's word by doing that, then we've almost fulfilled our calling." Trot Nixon, Mike Timlin, Tim Wakefield, Jason Varitek, Curt Schilling, Doug Mirabelli, Bill Mueller, Matt Clement, John Olerud, Mike Myers, Tony Graffanino, Chad Bradford: each Boston Red Sox player considers himself an evangelical Christian who believes in the sacred authority of the Bible and the promise of Jesus Christ as his savior. 'In terms of coming to Bible study and chapel, this team has more guys involved than any team I've ever been with," said Olerud, who has played for five teams over 17 seasons in the majors.
http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2005/08/31/faith_binds_many_on_sox/?page=full
__________________________
Defining Defeat
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/626385.html
"The German people must learn to un-learn all that they have been taught, not only by Hitler, but his predecessors in the last hundred years, by so many of their philosophers and teachers, the disciples of blood and iron…". -- Vice President Henry Wallace, December 29, 1942. From the book "In the House of the Hangman
The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949", by Jeffrey K. Olick
_____________________
Mozart's Women: His family, his friends, his music, by Jane Glover
_______________
***
"One could go on, and one will -- praising (...) the National Center for Jewish Film for releasing all four of Edgar Ulmer's Yiddish films in restored editions. But the DVD player is beckoning, and I think it is time for me to get back to the couch".
The National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) is a unique nonprofit motion picture archive, distributor and resource center housing the largest, most comprehensive collection of Jewish-theme film and video in the world. In their archives you can discover the works of Leo Fuchs, the "Yiddish Fred Astaire", restored gems (scroll down) like "Motl the Operator" and re-releases like "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg". (More on Greenberg, the Jewish kid who challenged Babe Ruth’s homerun record here, more on the NCJF inside).
Truly a "Bridge of Light" between two worlds.
The ongoing mission of NCJF is to gather, preserve, catalogue, and exhibit films with artistic and educational value relevant to the Jewish experience, disseminating these materials to the widest possible audience. NCJF’s first priority continues to be the preservation and restoration of rare and endangered nitrate and acetate films. The Center has long been recognized as a leader in the revival of Yiddish cinema, rescuing watershed films like The Dybbuk (1937) and Tevye (1939) from virtual oblivion. By producing and distributing pristine film and videocassette editions of such historic works with new English subtitles, NCJF effectively reintroduces modern audiences to a unique cultural and cinematic experience.
***
Clement Greenberg was a thirty-year-old who wrote poetry (none of which was published), a novel (similarly unpublished) and a few hack adventure stories (including one, about Pancho Villa, that appeared in Esquire under a pseudonym). He worked for an insurance company (fired), as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle (fired) and for his father in the wholesale necktie business (quit). After a rash, disastrous marriage in California, he ended up back in New York, where he landed at the U.S. Customs Service, where he had to appraise arriving shipments of liquor and wine.
A Marxist and an anti-Stalinist, a brawler intellectually and, on occasion, physically, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald, who encouraged him to turn it into an article.
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" appeared in the fall, 1939, issue, and it made Greenberg famous. More inside.
***
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" is one of the most muscular pieces of criticism ever written. Greenberg essentially ripped modernism—the work of Picasso, Kandinsky, Joyce, Eliot, Gide, Stevens, Hart Crane, and so on—out of the context in which it was created, and redefined it as art about art, as work that meditated on the nature of its own medium. Thus abstract painting could be understood as an exploration of the possibilities of figure and ground, paint and canvas. Greenberg thought that painters no longer attempted to imitate objects for the same reason that Horkheimer and Adorno offered: because realism had been co-opted by the culture industries of the modern state. It wasn't that he enjoyed abstract painting more than represen- tational painting, he said. It was that under current historical conditions abstract painting was the only genuine painting possible—just as, for Adorno, atonal music was the only form for genuine music to take.
******************
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-wk-screen26jan26,0,4904699.story?coll=cl-movies-features
http://www.google.it/search?q=%22Long+Is+the+Road%22+%22israel+becker%22&start=0&ie=utf-8&hl=it&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:it:official
http://www.brandeis.edu/jewishfilm/Catalogue/yiddishaz.htm
http://www.israelemb.org/cultural_affairs/news.htm