ira joel haber-cinemagebooks: May 2011

Notebook page the end of May 2011

Leonora Carrington. 1917-2011

art workshop with 6th graders

Me and Daniel are in the spaceship.

I'm finishing up a 4 week workshop that I've been doing with 6th graders at Dewey Middle School here in Brooklyn. I gave them the project of doing self portraits but they also had to include me in the drawings. Here are some of the results. They were a charming bunch of kids for the most part.

New Notebook page. May 2011

Blue Valentine 2010 and The Marrying Kind 1952

Dank, dark, claustrophobic and very unappealing. Blue Valentine directed by Derek Cianfrance who makes his feature debut with this film is another entry in the sub genre of movies about the disintragration of a marriage. The film spans the unhappy marriage of Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams and goes back and forth in time which is usual with this kind of movie. Both actors are ok in their roles, but they’ve both done much better work else where. I think the film takes place in Brooklyn but there is absolutely nothing about the narrative flow that gave me the feeling of where the film takes place. That is the fault of the director who I also have to blame for the claustrophobic and dark interiors of most of his scenes and the ordinary screenplay. There are many better Marriage on the rocks films including Penny Serenade, Two For The Road, Shoot The Moon and George Cukor’s sweet but tart elegant little movie that he made at Columbia in 1952. The film stars the great Judy Holliday and Cukor’s “discovery” Aldo Ray making his screen debut. Holliday and Ray play Florance and Chet Keever who when the film opens are on their way to a divorce, and in flashbacks they tell their story to a sympathetic judge played by Madge Kennedy. The film begins light and airy with the telling of their brief courtship and hasty marriage, and Cukor gets a terrific performance from Holliday who gets to show off all her skills as an actress. There are some very nice on location shots in New York including the lovely Central Park sequence where the couple first meet. The screenplay which is very good is by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin who did many films with Cukor and know how to mix comedy with tragedy (there is one gut wrenching scene that should move viewers to tears). The supporting cast is terrific with small bits by Peggy Cass, Phyllis Povah, & Mickey Shaughnessy who stands out as the couple’s butcher brother in law and delivers a swell monologue on why his life has meaning while dressing up a rack of lamb. With no nonsense black and white cinematography by Joseph Walker.

Bay Ridge Window

These are some photos of my window in progress which I finished yesterday. All 20 of the windows will be on view starting monday. May 16th to June 13th. Its part of the 2nd annual Bay Ridge art walk which showcases 20 artists from Brooklyn who picked out stores to do window installations. I picked Long's Wines and Liquors.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150183398346244.307520.643581243&l=5fdae87e2a

http://www.bayridgesaw.org/map/

New Notebook page. May 2011

untitled painting 1982 Recently photographed.

untitled painting 1977 Recently photographed

Dolores Fuller 1923-2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/movies/dolores-fuller-actress-and-muse-of-ed-wood-dies-at-88.html?ref=todayspaper

New Notebook page. May 2011

Arthur Laurents 1917-2011

Sada Thompson 1927-2011

untitled painting 1982 Recently photographed

Broadsided

This is nice. The collaboration that I did with the poet Catherine Swanson for Broadside Press and who wrote a poem inspired by my drawing has been posted on a tree down under in South Australia. Always wanted to be posted on a tree.

In The Heat Of The Night 1967

What’s wrong with this movie is this movie. Set in a small sleepy town in the Deep South during the waning but still potent days of segregation, and still a threatening and dangerous place if you’re black comes the debonair and quietly intense Virgil Tibbs played by Sidney Poitier, who has come to the town... to visit his mom. As he sits on a bench outside the empty railroad station late one night waiting for his train that will take him back north he is accosted and arrested by the sheriff’s deputy played by Warren Oats on the suspicion that he’s just murdered a Chicago industrialist who was down there to build a new factory. Poitier who bides his time as he is handcuffed, humiliated and brought before the chief of police played by the gum chewing (this little gimmick got on my nerves after the first 10 minutes) Rod Steiger who also humiliates Poitier by calling him boy and questioning the amount of money he’s carrying. It seems besides being murdered the industrialist was also robbed. Finally Poitier blurts out that he is a homicide detective from Philadelphia and a shocked Steiger can’t seem to understand how a Negro could be a police officer and make $162.00 a week. So doubtful is Steiger that he places a call to Poitier’s commanding officer in Philadelphia just to make sure that he really is who he says he is. Poitier is pressured by his captain to stay and help solve the murder, which at first Steiger resists but he finally gives in, and this is what sets the film in motion. The film directed by the light weight director of mostly fluff Norman Jewison tries to get steam out of this kettle but the murder is flat and flabby, and didn’t grab me the way it should. It also is a “political” and socially conscious film but it’s so full of stereotypes that it doesn’t work on that level either. Poitier of course has some bad run in’s with racists teens not once but twice, and the second time was not necessary. There is also the famous slap down between Poitier and a rich racist cotton tycoon played by the always good Larry Gates who thinks nothing of slapping the uppity “colored” which gets him a good hard slap back from Tibbs. I remember the clapping and applause that this generated from the movie audience back in 1967 when I first saw the film. Steiger as the chief of police bellows and blows hard as usual but he’s more subdued than usual, and makes me think that Jewison must have sat on his chest to him quiet down. This is the film that finally won Steiger his long sought after Oscar which he picked up at the 1968 ceremony delayed 2 days because of the murder of Martin Luther King. The supporting cast is good with Lee Grant in a now you see her now you don’t bit as the industrialists wife who demands that they find the killer of her husband or she will cancel the building of the factory. There is one nice moment late in the film, when Steiger and Poitier spend an evening together at Steiger’s dump of a house, and Steiger opens up telling Poitier how lonely he gets, a real moment in time, in an otherwise ordinary film. This was the big Oscar winner of the year winning Best Picture over the vastly superior and important Bonnie and Clyde, but Jewison lost the director award to Mike Nichols for The Graduate which also would have been a better choice for Best Picture. The film also won Oscars for the adapted screenplay and for Hal Ashby’s smooth editing. Cinematography by the great Haskell Wexler and the title song sung by Ray Charles also give the film a lift.

Centrifugale Eye

Centrifugal Eye has just posted their latest issue and have used one of my AIDS doodle collages for the cover + one of my drawings inside. You can check out the entire issue at this link.

http://centrifugaleye.com/

Broadside Press. Respond to the earthquake and Tsunami In Japan

Once again Broadside Press honors me by selecting this notebook drawing of mine for their writers respond to the earthquake and Tsunami in Japan. Writers feel free to check out the images and maybe write a poem inspired by my drawing or the other ones posted.