Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Friedrich --

* Tim Hulsey gives Wesley Clark a little -- no, make that a lot of -- what-for, here.

* Francis Wilson reviews Lesley Branch's new biography of a famous Regency London courtesan, here.

* Kurt Thometz interviews the droll Fran Lebowitz here.

* I find webpages of video clips like this one here more exciting, or at least more promising, than most theatrical movies these days.

* Theater critic Alfred Hickling explains the difference between French and English farces here, and hopes neither tradition is coming to an end.

* More on parking! Virginia Postrel has a column about downtown Dallas and its ugly-parking lot dramas here, and the Cranky Professor writes about campus parking pressures here. Maybe it's becoming a genuine web meme.

* Ian Hamet has enlightening things to say about story structure (here) and "From Dusk till Dawn" (here).

* Martine is making eager if anxious plans to move into a house together with her boyfriend Blork, here.

* Aaron Haspel has been giving thought to story structure too (here), as well as to Alexander Pope (here). My favorite recent Aaron posting, though, is here -- a bizarre kind of blogger's autobiography.

* Alexandra Ceely does one of her priceless compare-and-contrast postings, this one looking at three versions of The Ecstasy of St. Francis, here.

* Lynn Sislo tells the story of the medieval composer Hildegard of Bingen, here.

* Terry Teachout hears from a reader who has actually lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, here. Short version: it was beautiful and uncomfortable.

* Did you know that Victor Salva, the writer/director of the "Jeepers Creepers" movies, is a convicted pedophile? Michelle Malkin (here) and Alan Sullivan (here) have observations to make.

* Elizabeth Loftus, who a few years back helped blow the whistle on the absurd recovered-memories-of-sexual-abuse fad, is interviewed here.

* Scott Chaffin, making proud mention that his wife has won a Dallas best-blogger award, here, gets in some funny jabs at the local press.

* In an interview here, computer-usability guru Donald Norman talks about color vs. black and white, robots, fuzzy logic, and how videogames are beginning to turn into a kind of literature.

* Will Duquette reinvents the movie medium courtesy of Imovie and his son's stuffed python, here. It's a three-part tale, all of them very amusing.

* Deb English (here) sensibly decides that The Iliad reads like an action-adventure novel.

* Polly Frost reads a book-length interview with the horror-movie director John Carpenter and does some thinking about audience-centric art, here.

* Hallelujah -- The Oldie lives online, here. Founded a decade or so ago by Richard Ingrams as a kind of dodderers' version of The Spectator, The Oldie features rambling memoirs, meandering put-downs of what the world's become, and out-of-it scraps of this and that. It's the anti-celebrity, anti-edge, anti-youth publication, and one of the most amusingly eccentric things I've ever seen. Really, I love it: if Ralph Richardson were a magazine, he'd be The Oldie.

* Steve Sailer thinks current immigration policies are probably bad for the arts (here), and distills the history of Western philosophy down to four paragraphs (here).

* David Sucher notices that the Bellevue Art Museum (a piece of "starchitecture" by Stephen Holl) is closing, here.

* Jook Leun's interactive, panoramic, 360-degree photographs are amazing examples of this new artform. Here's a page of samples.

Best,

Michael

Thanks for the Tim Hulsey and Fran Liebowitz links. Both of their pieces are hilarious.

Posted by: Friedrich von Blowhard on September 25, 2003 11:27 PM

Jook Leun's interactive, panoramic, 360-degree photographs are amazing examples of this new artform.

No bull-bleep! My goodness, what an interesting idea. I love wide angle lenses and panoramas. I've thought about experimenting with cylindrical paintings. This stuff is amazing, check it out.

As you can tell, my head is buzzing.

Posted by: Friedrich von Blowhard on September 25, 2003 11:54 PM

Did you know that Victor Salva is a convicted pedophile?

I did indeed. That revelation came out about seven or eight years ago when his earlier film Powder was released, and the star of the film he'd made prior to that demanded a boycott of the film cos he'd been the one Salva had been convicted of buggering. What I didn't know was that his film career was still flourishing after all that. The Malkin article is a good example of the hyperbolic (ab)use of adjectives if nothing else.

Posted by: James Russell on September 26, 2003 4:00 AM

God games? Does Donald Norman mean like the Barbie Dream House and Hot Wheels tracks? Fantasy baseball leagues?

Not that Norman's musing weren't another interesting read in a top-notch list of links.

Posted by: j.c. on September 26, 2003 10:07 AM






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