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Showing posts from July, 2011

Hudson, Apple and Jonathan Ive

Apple's headquarters with its wonderful address. Because we've moved so far away from LA and Hudson's friends in Topanga Canyon, we wanted to make sure that Hudson's seventh birthday - which happened this past weekend - was fun and extra-special this year. Given Hudson's love  of the W Hotel - and their kindness and generosity to him - we decided to take the family to the W San Francisco to celebrate (see a separate post coming soon above). Then I had a thought. Hudson also loves Apple and the astonishing technology he has grown up with and loves to explore so intelligently (he recently reformatted a Mac Mini from disk entirely on his own, then installed all the software he wanted). Apple's headquarters are in Cupertino , just south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley, so I thought maybe we could combine the W Hotel treat with a visit to the place where the iPhone and iPad were created. I knew that Apple , one of the world's

Random Thoughts About Insignificance

Theresa Russell as Marilyn Monroe in Insignificance. Random thoughts following my post about the new Criterion edition of Insignificance: 1.  I particularly remember the thrill, while we were shooting at night outside Carnegie Hall (the location for the original, iconic sequence in which Marilyn Monroe's dress is aroused by the air blowing up from a subway grating in The Seven Year Itch ), when legendary Broadway and film choreographer/director Bob Fosse came by the set. It was my honor to escort Mr Fosse around, and although he was more interested in talking about Insignificance than his own work, we did chat a little about his astonishing movies, Lenny and All That Jazz. I watched All That Jazz again recently, and aside from being blown away - as always - by the vast casting call opening scene, in which dancers are whittled down from a vast crowd to a few, to a background of George Benson's amazing rendition of On Broadway, I love the entire movie's huge ene

Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance - The New Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray

Insignificance: the new Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray I am very excited by the release of the beautiful new Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray transfer of Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance , a film I was lucky enough to executive produce...without ever really having intended to be a producer. The film, which is about a remarkable (and entirely imagined) meeting between Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Senator Joe McCarthy (the characters are never named, other than "The Actress," "The Professor," etc) one hot summer night in New York in 1954, was based on a play by British playwright and director, Terry Johnson. I happened to see the play at London's remarkable - and fairly radical - Royal Court Theatre while I was working on a series of video musicals. I had just finished writing my first novel, Glory B. (a little-known confection, much inspired by Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get The Blues; it came before my more controversial "first novel,&

A Vision of Hope (Revisited Anew)

This was one of the most popular posts I wrote for my blog, originally called A Wolf At The Door  and later renamed, more positively (in the sense of embracing our troubles rather than simply fighting them), Loving The Wolf. It reflects the heady yet deeply disturbing background against which the presidential race in 2008 was fought - and my personal belief that President-Elect Barack Obama offered the best hope for a nation that was already in deep trouble. I still believe that, despite disappointments that he has not taken on Wall Street and much-needed regulation more forcefully, and that he has been unable to change the acid climate in Washington (a task that looks more Herculean by the day). But I am very glad that he is our president. Simply by winning the presidency, he changed forever the face of America, making it more inclusive of all people - and I believe that he has done a pretty good job (given the obstacles he has faced, both from opposition in Congress and from a

Revisiting A Wolf At The Door

As the United States approaches the possibility of defaulting on its debts, on August 2, 2011, according to the Treasury Department, and President Obama's White House works, as best it can, with lawmakers from both sides of Congress to simultaneously deal with the deficit and raise the nation's debt ceiling, the Huffington Post quotes Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as warning that rapidly reducing federal outlays in the event of a default "would likely push us into a double dip recession." At the same time, a Medici -like drama is unfolding in the immensely powerful House of Murdoch (two of his key executives and longtime allies, indeed almost "family members," resigned yesterday, Friday, July 15, 2011 - see The Guardian's Rupert Murdoch's Bloody Friday ) and there is a sense, at least in the case of Murdoch, and by extension his most powerful US "voice," Fox News, that some of the chickens may at last be coming home to roost.