Author Archive
Monday, September 28th, 2009
Plan B for Spain: How to get robbed in Barcelona
11 tips for the tourist on how to help Spain’s underground economy.
Comments Off - Posted in Travel by pzingg
Friday, July 10th, 2009
Flamenco update
It’s been nearly a year since I posted about being swept away by Belen Maya in Carlos Saura’s “Flamenco”. Maya and her young Malaguena dance partner, Rocio Molina, recently performed their latest exhibition of Flamenco energy, “Mujeres”, at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass.
Due to good fortune (who says 2009 is unlucky?) the stars [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Film, Miscellany by pzingg
Friday, July 10th, 2009
Scott Walker: 21 Century Man
All right. I admit that I lost track of Scott Walker after “Make It Easy on Yourself” (Bachrach/David, 1965) and “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” (Crewe/Gaudio, 1966). I don’t think I ever picked up copies of Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3 or Scott 4, and I know I didn’t follow his cult-like [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Dylan, Film by pzingg
Friday, March 13th, 2009
When you click Delete All
Because of a dire lack of nutrients, I was in the mood to remove random posts from this blog on a Friday spring fever afternoon. Next time you try this on a Wordpress blog, you might think of doing a SQL backup. Luckily I am so word-tied that I have only posted seven articles (of [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Web Mongering by pzingg
Sunday, September 7th, 2008
Total art: Saura and Storaro
While I generally prefer films which are messy, with loose ends and imperfections that show that the filmmaker is trying to do more than he dare, occasionally I see one whose conception from start to finish could not posssibly be improved on.
Tonight I put Carlos Saura’s Flamenco on the wide screen–I had been trying to [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Film by pzingg
Sunday, November 11th, 2007
Road movies: the Salles view
The New York Times Magazine today published a reflection on the road movie genre by Walter Salles, who has directed three of the best. He mentions Hopper, Kiarostami, Antonioni, Wenders, Winterbottom, John Ford and others as masters who have pushed the genre to explore the movements of culture as well as characters. Now I have [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Film by pzingg
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007
Reality bites
If you go to the movies today, you are usually looking to have to
endure 150 minutes of flashy, overbudget, effects-heavy gimmicks
produced by the Hollywood machine. This unpleasant experience extends
even to “groundbreaking” movies, like those made by the Mexican
new-wavers Inarritu, Cuaron and Del Toro, all vying for 2006 Oscars.
Yes, they all have interesting stories to tell, [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Film by pzingg
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006
Zaha a Roma
Still under construction, this will be an extremely interesting
building for a number of reasons: the architecture, the concept (hey,
this IS the 21st century), and what it will do to a very backwater
neighborhood of Rome. There will now be an axis between MAXXI and Parco
della Musica (that includes the poor old Palazzeto dello Sport); who
will cut [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Architecture by pzingg
Monday, April 10th, 2006
The pay as you go future
Sometimes, even comfortable Brits can shake us out of our complacency. I just got around to seeing Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, which was first screened at the Venice Film Festival in 2003.
The screenplay, a cooperation between Winterbottom and his longtime writer associate, Frank Cottrell Boyce, hits on all the right cylinders: the cordoning off of [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Architecture, Film by pzingg
Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
The mother of all snowstorms
It was the best of times, even though, or possibly due to the fact that, life itself (as well as all the trains, boats and planes) was running at half speed. The only depressing note in this otherwise
strange world (strange in that it was almost identical to the feel of the Chronicles of Narnia movie) [...]
