“Antoine et Colette” (1962)
An essay from the Criterion website about this Truffaut film short (the sequel to his first film The 400 Blows). Written by Kent Jones, April 28, 2003…
On January 19, 1950, the seventeen- (going on eighteen-) year-old François Truffaut attended a 4 P.M. screening at the Cinémathèque française. He met a girl named Liliane Litvin. Truffaut was so smitten that he quit his job in the suburbs and moved back to Paris. According to his biographers Serge Toubiana and Antoine de Baecque, Liliane was an unconventionally beautiful young woman, so beautiful that Truffaut had to compete for her attention with his pals Jean Gruault (his future screenwriting partner) and Jean-Luc Godard. Liliane’s trio of suitors each individually tried to win her affection by spiking their conversation with literary references, but she promised herself to no man. Undeterred, Truffaut eventually installed himself in a hotel across the street from the Litvins’ apartment.
Toubiana and de Baecque reckon that it was with an eye to impressing Liliane that Truffaut began his dazzling rise to fame in the world of the Parisian intelligentsia. After winning an “eloquence competition” at the Club du Faubourg, he secured a plum job at Elle magazine (one of his assignments was a visit to the set of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest). He was already a Read the rest of this entry »
Adrian Belew – “Side Two” (2005)
An Oct. 26, 2005 PopMatters review by Zeth Lundy. Adrian Belew is probably one of the most underrated guitarists in the history of six-string bending theatrics…
He’s been there for decades, Zelig-like, on the sidelines, in the shadows, often in a jumpsuit, helping to turn rock’s eccentrics into downright iconoclasts. Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and Talking Heads all went through artistic transformations with his axe-as-chainsaw heroics at their sides: he cut his teeth piloting improvisations into the eye of Zappa’s on-stage maelstrom, fragmented the tension of Bowie’s Lodger, and sauced up the gonzo rhythms of the Heads’ Remain in Light.
He’s Adrian Belew, the artist with no earthly frame of reference, the man who operates his guitar like a power tool made of Slinkies. When he’s not playing the surrealistic pop art foil to Robert Fripp’s mystical mathematician in King Crimson, Belew makes solo records, whimsical slices of bizarro-pop that are often as underappreciated as his contributions to rock music as a sideman. He hasn’t released a collection of new original material since 1997’s Op Zop Too Wah, but you wouldn’t know it by this Read the rest of this entry »
The Beat Patrol 