Passages

[flyonthewall2983]

Joni Mitchell’s response is the one to look for. Tributes are flowing already.

[Penti Mento]

Van Conner, Screaming Trees bassist and co-founder.

And Mark Lanegan less than a year ago, too.

This bit in the linked obit puzzles me, though

The son of video-store owners, Van was born on March 17, 1967

Okay, maybe his parents owned a video store in... 1982? 1985? Certainly not when he was born. It seems common journalistic or biographic practice to list parents' occupations in proximity to when the child is born. Odd.

[brundlefly]

I'm being sarcastic, because of their ongoing social media war

Right, right. Which she was, and he came at her first, so.

Anyway, always liked Crosby for his part on The John Larroquette Show, which was trying to get at uncomfortable truths in a format not known for that at that time.

[Aunt Peg]

Veteran Korean actress Yun Jung-hee, 79, who made a much lauded comeback in the film Poetry (2010) https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20230120003300315?input=tw

[hearthesilence]

The self titled CSN album (sitting on the sofa) I still throw on from time to time. So many great tunes

"Long Time Gone" is easily my favorite CSN(&Y) song by Crosby. I was very happy he played it the one time I saw him live (in 2019). I had low expectations for that show and it far exceeded them.

[hearthesilence]

Veteran Korean actress Yun Jung-hee, 79, who made a much lauded comeback in the film Poetry (2010) https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20230120003300315?input=tw

That's heartbreaking. I absolutely love that film and she was the center of it.

[colinr0380]

From 14th January, the novelist Ronald Blythe at 100, whose paen to the English countryside, Akenfield, was made into a film.

[Aunt Peg]

Agusti Villaronga, 69 https://www.screendaily.com/news/agusti ... ferrer=RSS

One of the greats of contemporary Spanish cinema.

[colinr0380]

Agusti Villaronga, 69 https://www.screendaily.com/news/agusti ... ferrer=RSS

One of the greats of contemporary Spanish cinema.

I have not had the chance to see any of his more recent films but In A Glass Cage is an astonishing horror film and kind of the film that the adaptation of Stephen King's Apt Pupil should have been but pulled its punches too much to be. That premise involves an ex-Nazi child torturer (played by Gunter Meisner, who played Mr Slugworth in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory!) living in exile who in the opening scene tries and fails to kill himself after killing his latest young victim (whilst watched by a third-person Halloween POV shot) and ends up in an iron lung machine being tended to by his ambivalent about his survival sister (played excellently by Almodovar stalwart Marisa Paredes) who occasionally 'accidentally' turns his machine off and watches him slowly suffocate. When a mysterious young man comes to the door wanting to be a carer to the man, the sister falls for his charms and the chance to offload her responsibilities and accepts his offer. However the young man is the person whose POV shot we were in during the opening, has stolen the man's journal that recounted his crimes from his attempted suicide scene, and now wants to both be taught about the ways of evil by the 'master' and get involved in disturbing sub-dom games of proving that he can surpass the mentor he has chosen in depravity.

There are some fun cat and mouse games involving the sister creeping around the old dark house trying to turn the electricity (and the iron lung machine!) back on all whilst being stalked through the building by the young man, and there is also a weird romantic subplot that develops between the young man and the daughter of the family. Though most of the film is about the tense dialogues between the young man and the trapped in his iron lung Nazi going from master to passive victim himself, particularly in the most notorious scene of the film where the young man lures a young boy into the house and quite graphically and harrowingly murders him through a lethal injection of air in front of the helpless Nazi. It is one of those films that pushes the boundaries of a horror film so far that it turns into a weirdly stylised film about transcendence through transgression, perhaps the darkest film about that kind of subject matter until Martyrs came along, but it leads to a strangely ambiguous and ineffably strange, yet coldly beautiful, final scene.

Villaronga's early films are always crossing that boundary between grounded and fantastical, innocence and corruption, and naivete against fundamental betrayal of confidence. Thankfully the Cult Epics label in the US has put all of his main early titles out on Blu-ray now with 1986's In A Glass Cage, 1989's Moon Child and the incestual ghost story 99.9 from 1997, but it would be great to see any of his most recent films including 2000s El Mar (with Ángela Molina, just coming off of Almodovar's Live Flesh) and his move towards more historical Spanish Civil War set films in the last decade. There's definitely scope there for a good first English friendly boxset of those films now by some enterprising label, especially since his works are very much in the same territory as Guillermo del Toro's Spanish-language work, just with a nastier and bitterly, brutally unsparing edge to their fantastical imagery.

[L.A.]

Spanish director Eugenio Martín has died at 97.

[colinr0380]

Spanish director Eugenio Martín has died at 97.

Most famous as the director of the excellent brainsucking zombie film Horror Express which manages to include jewel thieves, autopsies, runaway trains, cossacks, Rasputin-style mad monks, poodle-wielding Countessas, hypnotic transferrence, zombie hordes and the de rigeur train crash finale!

As well as the Carroll Baker-starring giallo film The Fourth Victim.

[flyonthewall2983]

The self titled CSN album (sitting on the sofa) I still throw on from time to time. So many great tunes

"Long Time Gone" is easily my favorite CSN(&Y) song by Crosby. I was very happy he played it the one time I saw him live (in 2019). I had low expectations for that show and it far exceeded them.

The documentary Cameron Crowe produced and interviews him in is a really special film for me, justifying my sense the first time I listened to his 2014 album Croz that he was reaching for something more then just merely coasting on his legacy. The fact it was really for him a matter of life and death and knowing the end was coming, is one of those things in life that just throw someone me for example, into perhaps areas of reflection that are maybe impossible to face but necessary in knowing how to live.

[fdm]

Marshall Tucker

[beamish14]

Donn Cambern, who edited 3 films in Criterion’s Lost and Found/BBS set: The Last Picture Show, Easy Rider, and Drive, He Said

[beamish14]

Sesame Street co-creator Lloyd N. Morrissett

[L.A.]

Sylvia Syms.

[colinr0380]

Sylvia Syms.

She has had a surprisingly big presence on television over the last decade, as the occasionally archly cutting narrator of the BBC's Talking Pictures series that re-packages interviews from their archive with figures from the world of film.

Her most famous role was probably the very Wages of Fear-esque (though not as ironically nihilistic) Ice Cold In Alex, which had its (spoiler) classic final scene that explains the title turned into an advert! She re-teamed with John Mills again a few years later in the racial tension drama Flame In The Streets, directed by Roy Ward Baker. And she appears in one of the best stories in the best of the Amicus horror anthology films, Asylum (also directed by Roy Ward Baker).

[beamish14]

Gregory Allen Howard, writer of Remember the Titans and credited story author of Ali

[FrauBlucher]

Tom Verlaine passed from cancer. It hasn’t been reported yet. A friend of mine is a friend of Verlaine’s friend.

Television is one of my favorite bands

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

Oh, no. Sorry to hear. One my all time faves too and one of the all time greats. He made some unforgettable solo albums, also. Glad I got to see him live once with Television, though without Lloyd who had then left. Do you know what happened to the Television album that they had supposedly been working on since the early 2000's when they started touring again?

[hearthesilence]

Tom Verlaine passed from cancer. It hasn’t been reported yet. A friend of mine is a friend of Verlaine’s friend.

Television is one of my favorite bands

Oh man, what a gut punch. I love Television, but for whatever reason, I've never caught any of their shows, which I severely regret.

Love all three of their studio albums (the debut is obviously one of THE great albums), and their bootlegs are priceless.

[hearthesilence]

Also his solo albums too. Jesus, I feel awful. 2023 has already seen some major figures pass away - Jeff Beck and David Crosby were both key figures in two bands I love, the Yardbirds and the Byrds - but this feels even worse.

[jegharfangetmigenmyg]

You probably already own it, but if not, I highly recommend Kino's DVD release Music for Experimental Film, where Verlaine - with Jimmy Rip who replaced Lloyd in Television - did the music for a number of experimental silents, including Ballet Mecanique. It's very very good.

I also agree that all Television albums are great, including the underrated S/T from the 90ies. I obsessed over his soloing in this live version of Words from the Front for a while: https://youtube.com/watch?v=pPdKHo2Oico

One of the most unique guitarists ever. The only other guitarist I've heard who had a somewhat similar approach to solos, is the great Richard Thompson.

[FrauBlucher]

Tom Verlaine passed from cancer. It hasn’t been reported yet. A friend of mine is a friend of Verlaine’s friend.

Television is one of my favorite bands

Oh man, what a gut punch. I love Television, but for whatever reason, I've never caught any of their shows, which I severely regret.

Love all three of their studio albums (the debut is obviously one of THE great albums), and their bootlegs are priceless.

It has now been reported... Variety

I caught the show at The Academy (which is no longer around) in 1992. Not sure if that was the show that was used to record the live album from that time. My friend thinks it was. It was a terrific show

This is crazy. I found this. Set lists from all bands that played at The Academy over it's six years. Television's included

[agnamaracs]

Alfred Leslie