The Cellar, 1964
This is an excerpt from an NFB documentary entitled In Search of Innocence about how Vancouver’s poets and painters look at life and art. It’s also the only surviving film footage of The Cellar, Vancouver’s premier jazz club in the late 1950s and early 1960s at 222 East Broadway. The band is the Al Neil Trio, with Neil on piano, Don Thompson on bass, and Glenn MacDonald on sax.
Source: MrDrewlips on YouTube
Samsara: One of only three or four must-see-in-the-theatre movies I’ve got lined up this summer. Looks like a stunning new addition to the Koyaanisqatsi family tree.
Faulkner was a postmaster, Kafka an insurance agent, Brontë a governess. The day jobs of famous authors.
Wildly reassuring.
Put This On Season 2, Episode 2: PTO Man: Lewis Lapham
Profile of editor Lewis Lapham from Put This On. Lapham is the publisher of Lapham’s Quarterly, and was the longtime editor of Harper’s. He says that when you’re dressed well, you can engage any subject.
Flaubert, even at his poorest, carried two gold coins in his pocket, to give him “a sense of weight.” For Lapham, a suit gives him this same sense.
I love it when stuff I dig hangs out with other stuff I dig.
Victor Hugo might have been running a bordello on the side…
Literary bedrooms…
1. Victor Hugo : Dark, rich and red - Hugo’s bedroom at his home on the Place de Vosges in Paris is all that you would expect from a writer heavily influenced by the Romanticism movement.
2. Ernest Hemingway: Light floods the Nobel Prize-winning author’s bedroom at his Key West home.
3. Flannery O’Connor: The author did most of her writing at the desk in her bedroom. The aluminum crutches were used to help her get around her parents’ dairy farm.
4. Sylvia Plath: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author stayed for several months at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. This image is taken from an advertisement for the hotel and suggests what Plath’s room may have looked like at that time.
5. Henry David Thoreau: Intent on simple living, Thoreau furnished his 10’x15’ home with only the necessary basics - a bed, a table, a desk, and three chairs.
6. Virginia Woolf : Full of details — the bookshelves house the author’s artful collection of books, many of which she recovered with colored paper.
7. Emily Dickinson: Most of the poet’s writing was done at a small writing table in her bedroom.
8. Marcel Proust: A victim of asthma and severe allergies, Proust’s bedroom was a masterwork in shelter and seclusion. All apertures were shielded or sealed, and the walls and ceiling were covered in cork to protect the author from the dust and noise of the outside world.
9. William Faulkner: More of an office with a bed — the Nobel prize-winning author outlined the plot of The Fable on the walls of the room and then shellacked his notes to preserve them.
10. Truman Capote: The author’s bedroom at his Hamptons beach house is simple, but elegant.
More here.