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"As far as Harry was concerned, Victor Ramdass Singh was just another Nervous Camera director, who worked tirelessly to make the audience realize at every moment that the picture was indeed being directed." This passage appears in Don Carpenter's 1975 novel The True Life Story of Jody McKeegan. No one who reads the eight other novels or the volume of short stories Carpenter published during his twenty-year career could ever call him just another Nervous Writer. You can comb through his work for flourishes and not find any showing off. Mostly, as John Wayne says of Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo, he's good enough not to have to prove it.--Charles Taylor in The Nation, reprinted in PowellsBooks.Blog

"A police officer contacted UFO experts after claiming he saw three aliens examining a freshly made crop circle in Wiltshire...."

Soundtrack: Donald Fagen's "IGY"

I've been planning a post devoted to some of the screamers I've been compiling from the Farber anthology, but first Duncan Shepherd from the San Diego Reader:

"It is highly salutary to read what was written about such movies before any ossification of critical orthodoxy. The close-up and in-context view of, let's say, Casablanca from Farber and from Agee will offer a truer perspective than its placement on a pedestal in spot number two on the AFI list of the 100 Greatest American Movies. Observes Farber: "Bogart's humanitarian killer, who was disillusioned apparently at his mother's breast, has to say some silly things and to play God too often to be as believably tough as he was in his last eight pictures." The titles of the articles alone can be priceless: "Blaboteur" for Saboteur, "Tinkle" for For Whom the Bell Tolls, "Hamburger Hell" for The Postman Always Rings Twice..."

See also: Ken Tucker in EW, Dante A. Ciampaglia in Forbes

Haven't jotted down the firehose of details I'm still catching listening through the EMI Beatle remasters, but I enjoyed this podcast with Nik Cohn, who was always more of a Stoner, and poses the most reasonable push-back...

Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney's iPhone (slideshow).