Hendonblog

Well, I have given thought for some time to Marienbad, and I only have a few things to say. Aside from the fact that it is a difficult movie, there has been much written about it and there is little a novice such as me could add. So. If you have not seen it, it [...]

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When I posted my comments “On Black and White” I got a query from Gardner: What did I think of “Last Year at Marienbad?” At that point I had not seen the movie and now I have. I am not yet ready to comment–even on the issue of black and white much less the movie [...]

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I recently watched again the great movie The Third Man (1949) directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Wells, and Trevor Howard. It is a commonplace to say that such films show the power of using stark images in black and white, but it struck me anew in watching the movie. [...]

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Micheal Atkinson, a movie maker and critic, has written an article about gaming. He notes that 68 percent of American households played video games. In these homes 41 percent of all video gaming involves mission/action/narrative gaming while 47 percent of gaming (mostly older people) involves solitaire, word games, and similar things. Could there instead be [...]

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Last December I bought a Blue Ray version of the 2001 restoration of Fritz Lang’s classic film “Metropolis.” So it is with mixed feeling that I now learn of an even better restoration. The 1926 original version was 153 minutes and was not a commercial success. To improve ticket sales it was repeatedly cut and [...]

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  I have just read R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated.  Now, those of you who are conservative in your reading of the Bible might be offended by the idea that Crumb, creator of Mr. Natural back in the 60s (above), would do this, but it is a serious effort.  Crumb says that he [...]

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I have begun exploring the Europeana site maintained by the European Commission (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/). It contains images, texts, sound, and video from archives, museums, and libraries from around Europe. This includes the Rijksmuseum, the British Library, and the Louvre among others. With it I can read a 1777 universal history in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich. Or [...]

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The April 8 issue of The New York Review of Books has an article entitled “The Corrupt Reign of Emperor Silvio”  written by Alexandre Stille, a professor of journalism at Columbia. It is about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his enduring popularity in the face of repeated scandals. It may just be the Italians, but [...]

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If I understand McLuhan correctly, electronic media change the way we experience the world. We get beyond sequential, linear thinking and restore an earlier, almost mythical, way of dealing with the world but at an enhanced level. We recover the tribal and move toward a global village. I am ambivalent about this. I think I [...]

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I found much that I thought was good in the Nelson essay on Computer Lib, there are some things in the rhetoric that evoke skepticism in me. First, what did I like? I certainly agree with the comment that compute systems need to be simple for the user. Secondly, I agree that it is good [...]

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