Open Culture–Great Site for Free Film Noir

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One of my favorite films is “Out of the Past,” the 1947 classic with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, and Rhonda Fleming. I’ve watched it many times, and enjoy it so much that when I re-view it now the scenes seem to unfold like movements in a symphony. Because I love it do much, I’m always on the lookout for other noir-ish standouts. If you don’t know “Out of the Past,” please see the visuals below, the box on my old VHS copy of the movie, and the jacket of the pseudonymous Geoffrey Homes’ book, Build My Gallows High, which he adapted in to the screenplay, under his real name Daniel Mainwaring. Given my fondness for film noir, and crime and detective fiction, I was recently delighted to discover that OpenCulture.com, which describes itself as “The best free cultural and educational media on the web,” has assembled a site with access and links to 475 movies, many noir flicks, all free of charge to watch.

As indicated in the tweet above, Kyle and I saw a good one last night, chosen almost at random from among Open Culture’s offerings. Set in San Francisco, Brian Donlevy plays a husband who survives a murderous attack on him by his adulterous wife’s lover. Minutes later, the attacker is himself killed, and Donlevy, who had first been assumed dead, later surfaces alive, only to be accused of murder. It’s filled with surprises and twists, and excellent performances–from the avuncular Charles Coburn as a police detective with an Irish brogue and Ella Raines, a beauty we had never seen on screen before, as Donlevy’s love interest, counterpoint to his vindictive wife. The sound and picture quality were excellent. It’s clear we’re going to be working our way through Open Culture’s vast collection.
* If, like me, you’re big fan of Robert Mitchum, I must also recommend Lee Server’s galvanic biography, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” (the subtitle is a line from “Out of the Past”).
Out of the PastOut of the Past back coverBuild My Gallows High

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Update on Alamo Drafthouse Cinema–They’re Really Coming to Manhattan!

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Alamo MetroIn the past year I’ve blogged twice about the announcement and expectation that Austin-based Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is really going to renovate the Metro theater in my Manhattan neighborhood and show movies there. However, despite press releases from Alamo that I’ve cited in my coverage, there’d been no sign of progress, leaving myself and others in the area unsure if it’s really going to happen. Finally, a banner on the old marquee I spotted the other day (pictured at the left) seems to make their plans clear at last: They’ll be opening in 2014. Here’s what I wrote about Alamo last summer:

[They’ve] begun seeking the city permits required to begin gutting the interior and renovating the space to accommodate the five screens and viewing spaces they envision for the theater which first opened to the public in 1933. For readers unfamiliar with the site, the classic Art Deco marquee–[seen below] in a photograph and below in a painting by my wife Kyle Gallup–has landmark status and will be preserved as is, though the interior has no similar exemption. I’m very pleased with this news, and look forward to having them in the neighborhood, perhaps in 2013, or the next year.
Metro-Theater-marquee-Kyle-GallupMetro-Theater-Alamo-fb-page

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Turk Pipkin’s Documentary “Building Hope” Builds Empathy & Community

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Turk Pipkin 2On a recent Tuesday night I went to the Tribeca Cinema for a screening of “Building Hope,” a documentary written, directed, and narrated by actor and author Turk Pipkin, who with his wife Christy also operates  The Nobelity Project. The film chronicles the building of the Mahiga Hope High School in rural Kenya, which now completed, is educating more than 800 students  each year. The film got an Audience Award at SXSW in 2011 and it’s easy to see why–it’s very watchable and moving, with a genuinely uplifting message, all without lapsing into saccharine simplicities. The school they designed and built with the labor of local tradespeople is also a model for sustainability, as they engineered an adjacent basketball court whose roof catches and saves rain water, providing much of what’s needed for the entire facility, in this region prone to drought. I highly recommend the film for anyone interested in education, the progress of young people in the developing world and sustainable design. It’s also a tight narrative with many memorable characters, just a fine nonfiction film.

At a restaurant near the Tribeca Cinema afterward I met an Austin native now living in Brooklyn, musician and singer Kat Edmonson, who wrote a song that’s in the soundtrack of “Building Hope.” It was fun talking with Kat and her boyfriend, Aaron, also in the music biz. Since that night I’ve enjoyed listening to her music. At Kat’s website, you can listen to a free download of her winsome love song, “Nobody Knows That.” When Turk sat down at our table, it was clear that she and Turk go back a ways. A thoughtful, friendly Texan, Pipkin’s visit to NYC coincided with the availability of the companion Building Hope book, and the imminent availability of the documentary in ITunes. I’m surprised to say, though Pipkin has written 10 books, I wasn’t familiar with him until Jette Momant of PR by the Book in Austin invited me to the screening. I’ve since learned he had a stand-up career doing comedy on the road with Rodney Dangerfield; appeared as the ping pong ball juggler in “Waiting for Guffman,” Christopher Guest’s 1996 mockumentary; written many TV shows; played a recurring character in “The Sopranos”; published two novels, one with Algonquin Press; and co-authored The Tao of Willie, with Willie Nelson, who also appears on-screen in “Building Hope.” Here’s a clip from this exceptional documentary, and below the video are photos, most of which I took at the screening, some of the film itself on screen: (Please click here to see all the photos.)

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Windy Hudson River Bike Ride Photos

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I shared a couple of these photos on Instagram earlier, but here are two others. They were all taken on a break during a very windy bike ride this past Saturday. Standing on a bluff above the Hudson River as as an intense, dramatic sunset glowed across the whole skyline, I am in upper Manhattan at about 165th Street, looking south down the river back toward the city. Though I’ve often ridden in strong wind along the Hudson, the gusts usually come from one direction. Saturday, they swirled and came from all points of the compass.

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Fun Night of Live Music with Mona’s Hot Four

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This past Tuesday night I had a great time at the Rockwood Music Hall for a combined launch of a new documentary and CD. The film is called “Tuesday at Mona’s” as is the new CD, a live recording, and they feature a jazz quartet called Mona’s Hot Four, who have a long-running weekly gig on Manhattan’s Lower East Side at Mona’s Bar on Avenue B between 13th and 14th streets. The basic outfit is clarinet, piano, stand-up bass, and guitar, and is regularly supplemented by additional players on various instruments.

This launch had originally been planned for the week Superstorm Sandy hit NYC, but was of course canceled. Mona’s frontman, clarinetist Dennis Lichtman reported that Rockwood was forced to cancel 81 shows because of Sandy. They were able to reschedule, and the boisterous crowd did not seem at all diminished by the change. Just after 8 PM a film screen was unrolled on stage, and a projector was clicked on to screen the new documentary. About 30 minutes long, the film tells the feel-good story of how an  eclectic tribe of jazz players ended up finding at Mona’s the ideal venue and audience for their passionate enthusiasms for tunes of the halcyon pre-bop era. There are several extended songs and a number of interviews with musicians, fans, bartenders, and Wall St. Journal jazz critic Will Friedwald, who touted Mona’s Hot Four and the scene at the bar in an 2011 diary-like piece, “After Midnight at Mona’s”:

11:30 p.m. Within a few numbers (“Margie,” “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me”), it’s abundantly clear that this group is immersed in the early New Orleans jazz idiom…. 1 a.m. The room is packed with young men sporting beards and slender women with Bettie Page bangs and abundant tattoos. There must be 100 people crammed inside this tiny bar, with seats for maybe 15, and only a fraction of those either sitting or standing can actually see the band. The room is dense with young musicians carrying instrument cases, or wearing their saxes around their neck, waiting to be called. “I think it’s amazing that we’ve become a mecca for those who love this music,” Mr. Lichtman says….2:30 a.m. The band is starting to thin out, and plays two numbers just to delight the record collectors in the crowd, “Dardanella” and “Hang Out the Stars in Indiana,” the latter fetchingly sung by Ms. [Molly] Ryan.

Once the film ended, Mona’s Hot Four took the stage, with clarinetist Lichtman introducing his band mates: Gordon Webster (piano), Jared Engel (bass), and Nick Russo (guitar). Their playing is a joy to hear with clear melodic lines on standards like “My Blue Heaven,” tasty licks on “Sugar Blues,” and fluent ensemble work on “Up a Lazy River.” Though Rockwood is not the Hot Four’s usual venue, many additional players showed up to supplement the quartet. In the set that followed the documentary, they were joined on stage by a caravan of players on trombone, trumpet, banjo, snare drum, and a number of talented vocalists. Among this retinue was singer the aforementioned Molly Ryan and banjo player and vocalist Jerron Paxton.

Lichtman fronts another group, Brain Cloud, which I had enjoyed and posted about during the Brooklyn Folk Festival last May. I hope I have another chance to hear them sometime, as they have a semi-regular gig at the Rodeo Bar in Manhattan. That group also plays some jazz, though with a different flavor than Mona’s Hot Four, as well as Western swing, klezmer, and songs from Tin Pan Alley, with vocalist Tamar Korn (who also sang with Mona’s Hot Four this week). After the documentary and an abbreviated set of music, Lichtman announced that Mona’s Hot Four would later that night they’d be camped out at Mona’s Bar for their usual late Tuesday night set. I wasn’t able to migrate to Mona’s on this night, but I do hope to hear them there some other week. If you’d like to buy the DVD/CD which includes the documentary and live album in one package, you can order it via this link, and listen to some of the Monas’ hot stuff.

Here’s a 2010 video of Mona’s Hot Four I just found online:

On my way back uptown, I stopped in at another great spot, the 11th Street Bar, to hear what live music they might have on in their back room. I was delighted to discover a band there led by guitarist Teddy Kumpel, whose band of drums, bass, and another lead guitar, was having fun playing an infectious melange of funk and blues. You can hear a sample of his groove at this page on his website. Please click through on this link to see all photos I took during this fun night of live music.

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Donald Trump is “the Clown of New York” to a Defiant Scotsman

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Update: After publishing the blog post below, I dug a bit deeper and discovered a quite nuanced view of the controversy that was published just as it began to heat up in 2007. It’s an excellent piece by UK journalist Ed Caesar that originally ran in the Times of London, now found at Mr. Caesar’s own website. At that juncture five years ago, Trump was awaiting several of the local approvals required to build the gargantuan complex that would hold not just a golf course, but 900 vacation cottages and a ten-story hotel with 450 guest rooms. Michael Forbes was then a pesky annoyance to Trump, while many Scottish politicians favored the development. Some of it has since been built, but Forbes is still standing strong, and just won Scotsman of the Year, as noted below. While it seems that the village of Balmedie was then leaning toward support of Trump’s project, it appears that trend has since flipped in favor of the antis, of whom Forbes is the most visible symbol. The familiar dynamic has kicked in where Trump’s obnoxious personalty and bloated rhetoric has become the dominant element in the story. If you have some time, I recommend you read Caesar’s piece, as well.
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The website Common Dreams reports that Donald Trump has angered lots of people in Scotland with his determination to build profit-making golf courses on pristine land that many locals do not want developed in this way. A farmer in Aberdeenshire, Michael Forbes (pictured above), has defied Trump’s demands to sell him acreage from his land, prompting the rude American to denounce Forbes as “a village idiot” who “lives like a pig.” Now, Forbes has won a national contest as Scotsman of the Year, being named over such luminaries as Wimbledon champion Andy Murray. Forbes is quoted by Common Dreams:

“I went right off him the first time I met him. He was being all nicey, nicey and talking about how successful he was and how much money he had. That was it for me. I took an instant dislike to him. He called me a village idiot …but I think everyone knows by now that he’s the clown of New York.”

The press in Britain have lionized Mr. Forbes a 21st century ‘local hero,’ reminiscent of the Scottish character in the 1983 Bill Forsyth film with Burt Lancaster and Peter Riegert “Local Hero,” who convinces his town to resist the siren song of an oil company’s money. Sticking to the film analogy, a documentary has been released on the golf course controversy, “You’ve Been Trumped.” Here’s a trailer for it:

An advocacy group has also been formed to push back against the development, Tripping Up Trump. I’ve been to Scotland several times over the years and admire people I’ve met there and remain entranced by the countryside, even seeing it only in photos. Kudos to those saying, “No” to Donald Trump! H/t Don Van Natta, Jr. (@DVNjr) who shared the Common Dreams piece on Twitter.

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Teasing “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”

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Update: One day after I published the post below about “The Hobbit,” the NY Times published this interesting piece today about the Tolkien archive, which is housed in the US, at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Also, please note an earlier blog post of mine, J.R.R. Tolkien Renounced Racial Politics in 1938 Letter to a German Publisher.
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Some readers of this blog may recall that I happen to share a birthday with J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbit protagonists Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, having written about that literary link in a piece on this site labeled Personal History. Since my teens I’ve been a fan of Tolkien’s work and then enjoyed Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy. My wife and son and I already have tickets to see “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” when it opens late next week. I’ve seen a trailer or two for the film but have steered clear of reading much about it, not wanting to have the element of surprise hijacked by reading details I don’t need to know yet.  Still, I crossed paths today with a very encouraging Hobbit teaser on Nerdist.com, the website of Chris Hardwick, ebullient host of “The Talking Dead” fan show that is boradcast on AMC TV after the zombie-apocalypse program “The Walking Dead.”

What’s good for the book is also good for the film–a sense of humor. Though some of LOTR‘s self-importance is being retroactively returned to the tale, Bilbo is simply a much more fun reluctant-hero than Frodo, whose dewy-eyed earnestness was way too goody-goody at times. Martin Freeman [cast as Bilbo] also played Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that character–quite correctly–shares spiritual DNA with this Hobbit, who wants to live out the simplest pleasures of the countryside, but gets whisked into something bigger, and complains all the time. It also feels like the themes here are more tangible for kids to relate to than abstract ultimate-good versus ultimate-evil, such as the benefits of going outside and making friends instead of sitting around the house (granted, LOTR had a team of friends too, but it broke up rather quickly. This group stays together).

I greatly enjoyed the 2005 film version of Douglas Adams’ modern SF classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, directed by Garth Jennings, which featured not only the aforementioned Martin Freeman, but also Mos Def, Zooey Deschanel, Sam Rockwell, and the voice of Alan Rickman. So, if Peter Jackson’s new Hobbit film can conjure up some of that cinematic pleasure, then we’re in for a treat.

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Woody Guthrie, New Yorker

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Wonderful to think of Woody Guthrie playing music on NYC’s subways. H/t @grescoe on Twitter and Hajimero on tumblr for sharing this image that appeared in LIFE magazine in 1943.

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