In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later, was filled with curious artifacts, including a street atlas of the city marked up with routes of unusual walks, mystical tracts, and papers inscribed with many languages, including hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and a “Comparative Table of Greek and Phoenician.” Rodinsky’s Room, by artist Rachel Lichtenstein and writer Iain Sinclair, is a poignant, impossible-to-categorize, brilliantly written collaborative work of historical detection. Lichtenstein and Sinclair, writing in alternate chapters, try to find out what happened to Rodinsky. Treating Rodinsky as a haunting presence, the writers investigate vanished elements of their city.

My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin’s ‘docu-fantasia’ film about Winnipeg, Manitoba, should be out on DVD soon. Apparently there’s a book in the works as well. If you don’t know Maddin’s work, it might be described as Canadian ice cream noir, blending outrageous narrative stunts with antique cinematic effects designed to make his films look like they were produced in the Silent era. His Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary …more

The PBS investigative documentary series Frontline presents some of the best television produced in America. At its web site (here), you can watch over 70 episodes of the program, all for free. In one recent installment (available in full here), The Hugo Chavez Show, Frontline went in depth on the man John Lee Anderson calls ‘the world’s first virtual president.’ You get to see HC in rare form at his own weekly TV show, ‘Hello, Mr. President.’ In this segment, the names of people who supported opposition to Chavez were leaked to the internet, resulting in dire consequences for some:

A truly terrible song must be: a) insanely catchy, b) ridiculously soulless, and c) absolutely serious about its own genius. Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ takes the cake. (The astonishing video is here.) That song has lyrics like ‘JFK / blown away / what else do I have to say?’ (as it turns out, Billy has a lot more to say). Other frequently mentioned nominees are Starship’s ‘We Built This City’ and Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings,” according to CNN here. Meanwhile, scientists are developing The Most Annoying Song Ever (see Wired’s article here.) And here below is ‘Broken Wings’:

This pre-election comment still pleases me:

Here’s why you should vote: you are going to really love it, the whole strange procedure. You get to walk right into a building that you would never normally be allowed in, often an elementary school. You can pause in the hallway to look at all the weird school-art and feel the eerie vibe of hundreds of kids living their endless kid lives right nearby. Then you follow the arrows to the voting room and look at the faces of the volunteers – who are these people? There is a hush of secrecy, the voting booth is clunky, the whole thing seems fake somehow. You consider filling in all the bubbles, like you did on the SATs. But you don’t. You vote. You walk back outside feeling like you just gave blood or something, lightheaded from citizenry. You are wearing a sticker that says “I Voted” and you wish you could continue to get stickers like this throughout the day: I Ate Dinner, I Went To Sleep, I Got Out Of Bed, I Went To Work.

From mirandajuly.com.

So, like, what’s your favorite love scene from the movies? I would like to know yours. Mine is this motel seduction sequence from Bottle Rocket. I believe that part of its imperfect perfection lies in the choice of music, “Alone Again Or,” by Love, with its mariachi horns absurdly invoking the allure of Inez. The Love song was inspired in part by Prokofiev’s ‘Lieutenant Kije Suite.’ Prokofiev based the suite on his music for the 1933 film of the same name, which was based on a Soviet novel. One common thread between the novel, the 1933 film, the suite, the song, and Bottle Rocket is this: lovers get separated.