Video for Badly Drawn Boy's "Once Around the Block"

The Fall - "Two Steps Back"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 9

F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924)







From Senses of Cinema:

Der Letzte Mann tells the story of the emasculating downfall of a doorman at a fancy hotel, played by Emil Jannings. The film begins with an exhilarating sequence in the rain, introducing us to the fast-moving world of the hotel and the swirling business of a 1920s city. The rhythm of the scene is set by the constant spinning of a glass revolving door that separates the chaos of the outside elements from the glittering and efficient atmosphere of the hotel lobby. The doorman stumbles and strains under the weight of a particularly heavy piece of luggage and is forced to come inside, have a drink, and take a rest. When he returns to his post at the front of the hotel, we see the extreme pleasure he takes in his job. Jannings, whose massive presence and broad expressions are perfectly suited to the role, preens in his brass buttoned coat. He smartly salutes the guests as they enter the hotel and exults in escorting two attractive young ladies – one clinging to each arm – to a taxi. On his walk home he is a man of respect in the neighborhood, condescendingly patting children on the head and nodding at his friends and neighbors. On the following day, it becomes clear that his difficulty with luggage has not gone unnoticed. There is a new porter in front of the hotel and the stunned doorman staggers to the manager's office. He is informed that he will replace the lavatory attendant, the oldest staff member at the hotel, who is being sent to a pensioner's home. The doorman pleads to remain in his old job as the manager impassively puffs on a cigar. Finally the manager tires of these entreaties and he forcibly strips the doorman of his magnificent coat and forces him to go to his new post. Utterly bereft, the doorman clings to his old identity, stealing his old coat so that he can walk home and still maintain his former status.



Drunk dreaming

Video for "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" by The Smiths.

Eels - "Jeannie's Diary"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 8

A taste of F.W. Murnau's Phantom (1922)

Mirah - "Sweepstakes Prize"



Mirah talked to The Morning News in October of 2004:

Since you often sing of consummate love, chivalric struggle, and wayfaring loneliness, I fancy you as a fan of medieval lit. Or maybe just a sucker for a fairy tale? I guess what I’m asking is, what do you like to read?

Well, when I appeared on the Nickelodeon game show Double Dare in 1987 and Marc Summers asked me what kinds of books I liked to read I answered “fantasy books.” My favorite books when I was little were The Hobbit, Watership Down, A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia—those sorts. I never considered myself a follower of science fiction, but I was always a fan of mythical beasts, strange lands, general pageantry, weird happenings, and fancy outfits. Hence my 12-year-old term “fantasy books” (now that sounds kind of dirty). I liked books that traveled and that taught me something and I liked to relax into my active imagination and to foster what would later blossom into full-blown adult hopeless romanticism syndrome. Books that I’ve loved as an adult tend to be more educational and less fictional.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever read any medieval literature. Maybe I should. I think my tendency towards high-drama imagery in my lyrics comes more from other music that I listen to or being in amazing-looking places or caught in thunderstorms than from what book I might be reading.

Air's video for "Playground Love"

Merle Haggard - "Sing A Sad Song"

Ween - "Stay Forever"

Ween - "It's Gonna Be (Alright)"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 7: товарищи, объединитесь! Edition

Sergei Eisenstein's Strike (1924)





Vsevold Pudovkin's Mother (1926)

Yo La Tengo - "Everyday"


Ira Kaplan talked to Inkblot Magazine about And then nothing turned itself inside-out:


Inkblot: Is the album autobiographical?

Ira: No. The songs represent moods more than actual incidents. We didn't know that there was a theme to the record until we read it on the advance CD.

Excerpt from Fellini: A Life, PART 5

"When I make a picture, I am healthy, happy, don’t need anything except sex. I live in a dimension in which I am absolved, taken by life. When crisis begins when a pictures finishes, when I am again with my real problems—God, wife, women, taxes—until a new light comes to announce a new game and it takes me again."
--From Fellini: A Life by Hollis Alpert

The Beatles - "Thank You Girl"

At the Drive-In plays "Invalid Litter Dept." at Shibuya On Air East in Tokyo. January 18, 2001.

Excerpt from Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, PART 2

On his first visit to the US, Ray met a number of American directors and writers. In New York he had long chats with Elia Kazan, Paddy Chayevsky and Sidney Lumet, and in Hollywood talked to Stanley Kubrick, George Stevens and Billy Wilder who was then shooting Some Like It Hot. “You won a prize at Cannes?” were his first words to Ray. “Well, I guess you’re an artist. But I’m not. I’m just a commercial man, and I like it that way.” Ray visited all the major studios, becoming “absolutely terrified by the plethora of equipment and personnel,” despite the forewarning impression he had received from Renoir in 1949. Two aspects of his trip particularly lodged in his mind: there were no “poets” among those he met, and virtually no one had more than “the vaguest notions about India.” An MGM executive he lunched with in the studio’s basement cafeteria had proudly confided to him his casting for a film about the Buddha – Robert Taylor! As Ray remarked in a letter to the Sri Lankan director Lester James Peries in December 1958, after he got back home to Calcutta: “One realizes what the Indian film-maker is up against – a colossal ignorance and only a moderate inquisitiveness. It is a miracle that Pather Panchali is doing so well at the Box Office. The notions about Japan are equally nebulous, and this airing of ideas about Kabuki etc. is just sheer pretence. The East is still as far away from the West as it has ever been…”
--From Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson

Jawbreaker plays "Accident Prone" at Foufounes Electriques in Montreal. 1995.

The Raspberries play "Go All the Way" and "I Wanna Be with You"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 6

Anna Karina watches Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in Jean-Luc Godard's My Life to Live (1962).

Dirty Three - "I Offered It up to the Stars & The Night Sky"

The New Pornographers - "The Body Says No"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 5

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) Directed by Otis Turner

The United States of America - "Hard Coming Love"

Lambchop - "Grumpus"




Kurt Wagner talked to Comes With a Smile in the Spring of 2001:

So have any of your songs ever been directly inspired by a movie?

Not really, although going to the movies and films do sort of inspire me in general... They make me feel like doing things. I don’t know why that is, but they provoke some kind of thought process that makes me sort of, y’know, want to go and write things. It’s not anything direct, so like, I don’t want to suddenly write something about The Third Man or something like that. It’s just like I find even reading …this is odd, but I was thinking about this yesterday …I was reading the ‘New York Times’ book review, and I was thinking ‘Well isn’t this great; here are all these synopses about all these different ideas that people have’, and in sort of a general way, it’s like flipping through 30 people’s minds about ideas they’ve had, and I think it’s like really a neat way to get a general idea about approaches and ways of looking at the world.

Death Cab for Cutie - "Company Calls"

Superdrag - "Some Kind of Tragedy"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 4

The Peach Girl (1931) Directed by Wancang Bu.



From SilentFilm.org:

Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood, or The Peach Girl as it is more commonly translated, is a rarely screened classic from the Lianhua Film Company, one of the most successful studios in 1930s Shanghai...Naturalistic lighting and delicate camerawork are skillfully employed to tell a uniquely Chinese story in which class and gender ultimately determine destiny. The lovers are played by two stars of the early Shanghai studio system: Jin Yan, considered the Valentino of his time, and Ruan Lingyu, often referred to as the Asian Garbo. Appearing in 29 films in just seven years, Ruan Lingyu received critical acclaim for her moving portrayals of prostitutes and underclass women, and developed such widespread popularity that she came to symbolize "the suffering of China." The fame and adulation she received proved to be her downfall - in 1935 she took her life at the age of 25.