Pottermore takes the “book companion website” to a whole new level
For a while now, I’ve been collecting examples of what I call the “book companion website”. The new “pottermore” website is probably going to become a very popular one, and if this intro video is any indication, this site will take the whole idea to an interesting new level.
Vieux Carre’ by The Wooster Group
This weekend, I saw a performance of Tennessee Williams’ “Vieux Carré” by The Wooster Group. The Wooster Group is an ensemble of experimental theater artists. They are based in New York City at The Performing Garage in Soho, and their productions tour nationally and internationally.
The video, from the groups video blog, is a mashup of text from reviews of the play, script and stage directions.
The text below is their description of the play (I’ll try to add one of my own to this post sometime soon).
Like Williams’ first big success The Glass Menagerie, Vieux Carré (1977) is a “memory play,” set in the boarding house in New Orleans where Williams himself stayed as a young man during the Depression. The young writer, as narrator, remembers his artistic and sexual awakening there. Inhabitants of the house swirl up out of the writer’s mind as archetypal Williams characters, longing for release and haunted by thwarted dreams. In The Wooster Group’s version of Vieux Carré, the Group experiments with new modes of expression for Williams’ lyric voice.
Space is the Place
Sun Ra had registered as a conscientious objector when drafted to fight in the Second World War, citing the absence of African-Americans on the draft board as his reason. After witnessing endless post-war civil rights abuses from his vantage in Birmingham, Alabama, Sun Ra came to the conclusion that Earth was a no-win situation for Black people, and that the future would inevitably see a new African diaspora—in outer space.
Video of “Mr Bradley Mr Martin Hear Us Through The Hole In Thin Air”
A video interpretation of William S. Burroughs’ “Mr. Bradley Mr. Martin Hear Us Through The Hole In Thin Air” created by Eclectic Schlock.
Nosferatu
Nosferatu is a 1922 German silent film about a vampire. The film has entered the public domain, so, you can watch it here.
The Night of the Living Dead
I hope, dear reader, that you love zombie movies as much as I do. That is to say, if you really really enjoy them for their gore, their violence, the shotguns and the way its alright to blow half the head off of a zombie, to hear the slurping sound as its parts slide off — then you don’t enjoy zombie movies as much as I do. I like them for more than that. I like them for their potential to make a kind of social commentary. The image of “living dead” … America, that’s you!
Sadly, this is an image that has been discarded in favor of the images most often prefered in most movies. (David Bowie once described American movies as “Tits and Explosions”) From the film review posted in the archive:
Romero and his disciples like Raimi somehow missed the point of their own beginnings and went on to make ludicrous self-parodic gorefests in the 70′s and 80′s (e.g. Evil Dead, the most trivializing title imaginable for a horror film). But the problem of the “living dead” remains–we must incorporate them into our cultural narrative, at our own psychic peril.
The one, and only zombie movie you’ll ever need is “Night of the Living Dead” you may like to know that the movie has entered the public domain. You can download “Night of the Living Dead” on the internet movies archive.