Posts Tagged ‘Noel Coward’
“I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s the not knowing that makes it interesting”*…
Koyaanisqatsi is a 1983 wordless documentary primarily made up of slow motion and time-lapse footage. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the trailer here.
I wondered how easy it would be to make an internet version using random Giphy ‘gifs’ which have been tagged as slow motion or time-lapse, playing them along with the Philip Glass soundtrack…
Rico Monkeon has built a “random Koyaanisquatsi generator.”
* Philip Glass
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As we commune with the cosmic, we might send dandy birthday greetings to Sir Noël Peirce Coward; he was born on this date in 1899. A playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, he wrote more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theater repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theater works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward’s stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works.
For all that, he may be best remembered for his persona, for his wit, flamboyance– and for what Time magazine called “a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise.”
It takes one to know one…
With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare….
– George Bernard Shaw
Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.
– Noel Coward
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
– William Faulkner, on Mark Twain
The gifted can be so… ungenerous to each other: from Examiner.com, “The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time.”
As we consider that this may in any case be better than log-rolling, we might recall that it was on this date in 1982 that a member of the Hollywood nobility– two-time Oscar-winning actress, model, and anti-war activist Jane Fonda– released her first exercise tape.
Building on the success of her workout book, published the prior year, the tape helped Fonda popularize workouts for women, workouts in groups, workout videos, and indeed aerobics in general (a family of trends on which Richard Simmons, Judi “Jazzercise” Missett and many others have ridden). Fonda invested the proceeds of what became a fitness empire into the Campaign for Economic Democracy, an advocacy group founded by her then-husband Tom Hayden (of Chicago Eight renown). Fonda and Hayden divorced in 1989, and Fonda retired from the spotlight (though, of course, she has returned to the movie screen in the last few years).
Division of labor…
from As we try to recall why public schools have eliminated Civics classes, we might ignite the birthday footlights for the divine Myrna Loy (born this date, 1905)
…and for her brother-in-greasepaint, Peter O’Toole (born this date, 1932), to whom Noel Coward once remarked, “if you’d been any prettier, it would have been ‘Florence of Arabia’.”
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