Posts Tagged ‘Hollywood’
Lucha Libre!…
Mike Powell and Juergen Horn are living a peripatetic dream…
We’re lucky enough to have jobs that don’t require a steady address and since we both love traveling, we’ve decided to see the world… slowly. Always being tourists would get lame, but eternal newcomers? We can live with that. So, our plan is to move to an interesting new city, once every three months. About 91 days.
They are currently in La Paz, and are documenting their stay– from the Valley of the Moon to the inmate-run prison, San Pedro— on their blog, for91days.com. The highlight of the visit (at least for your correspondent) is their visit to the the local wrestling palace…
We recently attended the famous Lucha Libre at a sports facility in El Alto. Bolivians are wild for wrestling; posters of famous American wrestlers are everywhere, and you can’t go a block in La Paz without seeing seeing it on a curbside television set. Bolivia doesn’t have a professional league on the same level as the USA’s WWE, but El Alto’s Sunday afternoon Lucha Libre makes a solid substitute….
Rayo Azteco, Hombre Lobo, Mr. Atlas and Commando fought and provided plenty of fun, but the show really got going once the cholitas* were introduced. Alicia Flores was the first to enter, dressed in traditional garb, dancing around the ring to the delight of the fans. Her opponent was a guy, her assistant was a midget woman and, once the fight got going, none of them held back. Face-slapping, ball-grabbing, midget-stomping, high-flying action. It was awesome. At one point, after throwing the guy against the ropes, Alicia lifted her skirt in his face, knocking him to the canvas in shock.
The evening’s highlight was the Cholita vs. Cholita main event: Jenifer Two-Face against La Loca. No one has ever so completely owned her nickname as La Loca. This woman was crazy. As soon as the fight started, it got out of control. La Loca threw Jenifer over the barriers, into the foreigners section. Then she hopped over herself, grabbing coke bottles and spraying them over the crowd, howling like a beast. She kept at it, throwing chairs into the crowd and smashing Jenifer’s face into the bleachers just a meter away from us. Jenifer was a game fighter and brought the match back into the ring, but La Loca was just too loca. Soon enough, foreign objects had entered the melee, and the (fake) blood began to fly. With a little help from the evil ref, La Loca eventually pinned her opponent and exited the arena to the boos, whistles and shocked applause of the crowd.
* “Cholita” was coined by colonialist Spaniards as a denigration of the Andean population– in this feminine form, Andean women– but has since been adopted by the very people it was meant to injure.
As we practice our pins, we might recall that it was on this date in 1988 that Die Hard premiered. Directed by John McTiernan with the precision of a Hong Kong action film, Die Hard was a huge hit; building on lead Bruce Willis’ wise-cracking TV (Moonlighting) persona, and on the precedent of Mel Gibson’s half of the “buddy duo” in the prior year’s hit, Lethal Weapon, it cemented the place of the funny, flawed hero in Hollywood action pictures. Die Hard introduced American audiences to Alan Rickman… and, of course, made an A-List star of Bruce Willis.
Getting in touch with one’s inner auteur…
Harboring creative impulses that struggle for release? Ready for your close-up? French television channel and film production company Canal+ rides to the rescue with flowcharts (well, advertisements made by Gregory Ferembach for Euro RSCG)…
larger version here
One can also find guidance on how to make an animated movie, a horror flick, an action epic, even… well, an “erotic” film.
Roll ’em!
[TotH to Flavorwire]
As we Just Do It, we might that it was on this date in 1914 that the first of the “Dream Palaces,” the Mark Strand Theater– or “The Strand, as it was known– opened in New York. Hitherto, “movies” had been shown in storefront “nickelodeons”; by contrast the Strand was large (3,000 seats) and luxurious. Designed by Thomas Lamb and built at a cost of over $1 million, it became the model for Picture Palaces nationwide. Indeed, by 1916, over 21,000 large movie theaters across the U.S. were showing feature-length films (instead of programs of shorts) in order to justify premium prices. The movie-palace boom (and the corresponding demise of the nickelodeons) laid the foundation for the rise of the studio system, which dominated Hollywood from the 1920s into the 1950s.
There are eight million stories in the Naked City…
From 1910 to 1930, police photographers in New South Wales took over 2500 “special photographs,” mostly in the cells at the Central Police Station in Sydney. Their subjects, men and women recently plucked from the street, seem to have been allowed– perhaps invited– to position and compose themselves for the camera as they liked…
William Cahill, 30 July 1923, Central Police Station, Sydney
Group of Criminals, 1921, Central Police Station, Sydney
Mug shot inscribed 'Hayes'. No details known. Early 1920s, presumably Central Police Station, Sydney
These and many more “portraits” were exhibited at the Justice & Police Museum in Sydney from November 2005 to January 2007, then collected by Peter Doyle with Caleb Williams into their book, City of Shadows: Sydney police photographs 1912-1948. Readers can find them– and dozens of other historic police photos online at Historic Houses Trust. Down Under never looked so… well, down under.
As we note that no continent has a corner on crime, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that Los Angles police were summoned to the home of silent film director William Desmond Taylor by a call about a “natural death” that had occurred the night before. When they arrived they found actors, actresses, and studio executives rummaging through the director’s belongings… and Taylor lying dead on the living room floor with a bullet in his back.
Mary Miles Minter, a teenager, had become a star in Taylor’s films and had fallen in love with him– much to the dismay of her mother, Charlotte Shelby. After Taylor’s murder, a love note to Taylor from Minter was found in his home, along with her nightgown in the bedroom. Then other damning facts came to light: Minter had once tried to shoot herself with the same type of gun used in Taylor’s murder; Shelby had previously threatened the life of another director who had made a pass at her daughter; and most portentously, Shelby’s alibi witness received suspiciously large sums of money after the murder. Still, no one was ever prosecuted for Taylor’s death– the case remains officially unsolved.
Mary Miles Minter and William Desmond Taylor (source)
Knowing what’s unknowable…
We’ve known for quite awhile that there’s a limit to what we can know… Werner Heisenberg discovered that improved precision regarding, say, an object’s position inevitably degraded the level of certainty of its momentum. Kurt Gödel showed that within any formal mathematical system advanced enough to be useful, it is impossible to use the system to prove every true statement that it contains. And Alan Turing demonstrated that one cannot, in general, determine if a computer algorithm is going to halt.
Now David Wolpert, a physicist working as a computer scientist at NASA Ames, has elaborated on that limit. As Scientific American reports, Wolpert’s work show’s that
…the universe lies beyond the grasp of any intellect, no matter how powerful, that could exist within the universe. Specifically, during the past two years, he has been refining a proof that no matter what laws of physics govern a universe, there are inevitably facts about the universe that its inhabitants cannot learn by experiment or predict with a computation. Philippe M. Binder, a physicist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, suggests that the theory implies researchers seeking unified laws cannot hope for anything better than a “theory of almost everything.”
…
Wolpert proves that in any such system of universes, quantities exist that cannot be ascertained by any inference device inside the system. Thus, the “demon” hypothesized by Pierre-Simon Laplace in the early 1800s (give the demon the exact positions and velocities of every particle in the universe, and it will compute the future state of the universe) is stymied if the demon must be a part of the universe.
Researchers have proved results about the incomputability of specific physical systems before. Wolpert points out that his result is far more general, in that it makes virtually no assumptions about the laws of physics and it requires no limits on the computational power of the inference device other than it must exist within the universe in question. In addition, the result applies not only to predictions of a physical system’s future state but also to observations of a present state and examining a record of a past state.
The theorem’s proof, similar to the results of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing’s halting problem, relies on a variant of the liar’s paradox—ask Laplace’s demon to predict the following yes/no fact about the future state of the universe: “Will the universe not be one in which your answer to this question is yes?” For the demon, seeking a true yes/no answer is like trying to determine the truth of “This statement is false.” Knowing the exact current state of the entire universe, knowing all the laws governing the universe and having unlimited computing power is no help to the demon in saying truthfully what its answer will be.
Read the full story here.
As we reconcile ourselves to incompleteness, we might console ourselves that it was on this date in 1929 that the Hollywood Sign was officially dedicated in the hills above Hollywood, Los Angeles. It originally read “Hollywoodland ,” but the four last letters were dropped after renovation in 1949. Recently threatened with demolition for want of maintenance funds, the icon was saved by a donation from Hugh Hefner.
The sign in it’s original form, as seen from Beachwood Canyon (source)
Now See The Major Motion Picture!…
From Tim McCool (a Boston College art student who “has been Photoshopping people’s heads onto other people’s bodies for nearly a decade”), via Hyperallergic (a nifty art blog overseen by husband and husband team, Veken Gueyikian and Hrag Vartanian), “Artists Go Hollywood: The Movie Posters,” a series of posters for artists’ biopics that might– nay, that ought to— be made. Consider, for example:
or…
See them all here.
As we smell the popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1889 that Charles Spencer Chaplin was born in London. Young Charles toured the U.S. in 1910 and 1912 with the Fred Karno troupe of vaudevillians, rooming with fellow performer Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who later became known as Stan Laurel. Jackson returned to England (later to return); Chaplin stayed… and became, of course, the most famous motion picture performer of his time, one of the most successful writer-producer-directors of the era, and one of its biggest entertainment moguls (having co-founded United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford).
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