William Carlos Williams; Song

beauty is a shell
from the sea
where she rules triumphant
till love has had its way with her

scallops and
lion's paws
sculptured to the
tune of retreating waves

undying accents
repeated till
the ear and the eye lie
down together in the same bed

Serge Chaloff: Body & Soul, April 4, 1955

The standard ballad “Body and Soul” has long been a common musical podium where jazz improvisers step up to make their own signature testament – not necessarily with that intent, but certainly with an awareness of the different takes on it that have come before.

My personal favorite is baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff’s version from his “Boston Blow Up” record. As I see it, Hawkins, Rollins, Coltrane and the rest need to step aside for this one.

Chaloff’s statement; alternatively tender, raw and harrowing – like someone suddenly overcome with memories of a love affair long put aside in the interest of “carrying on”.
Serge stood apart from other baritonists (ie. Mulligan, Pepper Adams, Cecil Payne etc.) in that he consistently chose to play the full range of the instrument high to low. The varying textures in different registers give drama to the change in dynamics and emotion in his “story line”.
There are times when he moves too suddenly from a gentle line to a harsh, blasted note. Having heard this version a thousand times over 30 odd years, I now anticipate it and prepare myself, but in the totality of the song it makes perfect sense – it almost breaks from “music” and becomes a voiced, unpremeditated confession.

Serge tops off his masterpiece, ending the with a short a cappella cadenza: he descends deftly down a stony stairway after having made his statement on the windy heights and jumps headlong into the bottom Bb – disappearing into a jazz eternal night, leaving naught but the ripples.
(did I just say that?)

* 2 landmark records of Serge have been released in one cd package by Definitive records out of Spain: his masterpiece, Blue Serge – with Sonny Clark, Philly Joe Jones, and Leroy Vinnegar; together with Boston Blow Up (with a stellar cast of Boston bebop players of the time), not as great in its totality but worth it just for Body and Soul

Three Nines for Mr. H.

Nine Liverpool Streets


Fearnside
Fazakerley
Lapwing Court

Ash Crescent
Combermere
Rymers Green

Pimbley Grove
Penny Lane
Bootle


Nine Emanations of Favorite Byrds Tune


She
She Don’t
She Don’t Care
She Don’t Care About
She Don’t Care About Time
.......Don't Care About Time
................Care About Time
........................About Time
..................................Time


Nine North Carolina Rivers


Swannanoa
Hominy Cree
Nolichucky

Nantahala
Great Pee Dee
Roanoke

Shalotte
Roaring
French Broad


* pictured above; liverpool ladies cleaning doorsteps, 1954
and graffiti from Bologna, Italy - photo by Aly Artusio-Glimpse

If I Could Only Remember My Name

An apt-titled record if there ever was one...but not only in the,"If you remember the 60's you weren't there" sense you might think.
The solo album of David Crosby from 1970-71 still cycles round to my playing lists after lengthy sojourns, like a long-lost friend who travels the world. No amount of obligatory prattle about Crosby's personal-life excesses will budge me an iota from marvel at his musical accomplishments here. In homage to Crosby, who just had a 65th birthday a few days ago, I recall the aphorism of some grizzled Indian seer, "What cares the lion about the croaking of frogs?"

The review of the record by a fan like Scotty Ryan leaves me laughing but eloquently strikes a chord;

"If every speck of weed were to disappear from the planet tomorrow, it would still be possible to get stoned just from this CD. (Strictly speaking, you wouldn't even have to listen to it; you could pick up a contact high just from holding it in your hand.)"
and....
"If the first thirty seconds of "Tamalpais High (At About Three) doesn't leave you stunned and transfixed, then you and I aren't from the same home planet -- and I don't especially want to visit yours."
Now, I might tarry a little longer on some of these planets than Scotty but...
In the spirit of the proceedings I might add, taking first a swig from my own poteen, "In the last 30 seconds of 'Song Without Words' the Guitars of Garcia, Kaukonen, Crosby, and Casady, gently collide and collapse into harmonic shards...there is a silent pause and then the
acapella voices of "Orleans" knead the already realigned cranium into starry-eyed humility. If this doesn't move you, I'll be the first to put a dollar in the jar for your soul transplant."

The record was produced by Stephen Barncard at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco, while he was simultaneously working "American Beauty" with the Dead. Barncard still speaks with amazement at the focus and inspiration of Crosby at these sessions, but his own contribution - free of the later over-kill of 70's rock/pop records - really makes for a sonic milestone.
"If I Only..." has a cast of thousands of Cosby's musician friends, but the steady- core group that really gives the record its character consists of Crosby on guitars and vocals (sometimes harmonizing with himself), Garcia on lead guitar and pedal steel, Lesh on bass, and Kreutzmann on drums (all from the Grateful Dead), with the addition of Jorma Kaukonen sharing the leads with Jerry, and, also from the soon to dissolve Airplane, the great Jack Casady on bass.
The stellar cast doesn't crowd and jostle the proceedings, which are far more intimate and elegant than the works of their "home" bands. What I would've given to see this ensemble make a few more records.

Master-touches of the session:
Garcia's understated but majestic pedal steel solo on "Laughing" - enhanced seamlessly by Barncard's sound chamber.

The harp and (?) dulcimer of Laurie Allan weaving around Crosby's vocals and guitar on "Traction in the Rain"

The chordal vocal harmonies of Crosby and occasionally Nash on "Tamalpais High", "Song Without Words", the title track at the end, and "Orleans" - the borrowed french folk-song melody sung in french - which turns out to be a mere list of cathedrals....(some residual memory of the Byrds and "Bells of Rhymney"?)

The idosyncratic guitar tuning that Crosby uses on "Tamalpais.." and "Song.." - EBDGAD - the same which lent uneathly beauty to "Guinnevere" on the 1st CSNY session.

Last but not least, Crosby's use of silence to great effect. An oft-forgotten musical
element.


* thanks to Scotty for his kind permission to use his quotes

Jean Dufy

Back in the wayback I hardly gave a wink at Raoul Dufy's paintings. I'd take a peripheral glance and decide that they were just naive, superficial cottony fluff that must have dashed off his brush while he was mincing about in his pajamas and munching on a pink ice cream bon-bon.

Some time later, in the early 80's I saw quirky movie shot in black and white with some surrealistic premise. Now I don't remember the name of it but I do recall Bill Murray had a cameo role as a bus driver who(don't ask me how) took tourists on a jaunt to the moon. One of the main characters was a young artist who was obsessed with Raoul Dufy. Somehow this got me round to looking a little closer at Dufy's work and i wasn't displeased. But, I didn't pursue it further.
(By the way, if anyone out there has seen this movie and knows the name, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know because I've scoured cinephile brains in vain)

Then about 4 years ago I saw a major collection of diverse painters at the Phoenix Art Museum - when I came into the room with the large Raoul Dufy painting of his studio, I was transfixed and had to continually return and bathe in the holy light of it.
Then and there he finally reached me - the lines and colors were so simple but filled with grace and light like a breeze from another planet.

So what does Jean Dufy have to do with it? Well, I kind of blundered across some of Jean's paintings while looking through a catalog of Raoul's. Of course Jean was a younger brother of Raoul and he revered him as a master teacher - among others - and, at first glance there is little to distinguish Jean's paintings from Raoul's. After awhile, a subtle difference can be seen.
Interestingly, though Raoul's paintings were often musically inspired Jean actually was a musician; he played classical guitar and jazz bass.

So in honor, of guitarists, jazz bassists, painters, and - perhaps - lovers of pink ice cream bon-bons, I dedicate this blog to the littler-known Jean Dufy.

Jean and one of his paintings above....

La Vie En Rose

Edith Piaf's La Vie En Rose is a song that has been popular long enough, far and wide enough, to be a cliche and fodder for amusing parody, while retaining the soul to still sneak up, unsuspected, at just the right moment and pierce the heart.
For the French who lived through the German Occupation Edith Piaf songs have a special emotional pull because of her efforts to help the Resistance and prisoners of war.
Edith Piaf was essentially a child of the streets, rising up from a near homeless existence, singing as a sideshow to her sidewalk-acrobat father. She managed to educate herself, reading on the fly, amid a torrid, mixed-up life. When she died in 1963 "her funeral procession drew hundreds of thousands of mourners onto the streets of Paris and the ceremony at the cemetery was jammed with more than forty thousand fans. Charles Aznavour recalled that Piaf's funeral procession was the only time, since the end of World War II, that Parisian traffic came to a complete stop."
So it is doubly affecting to note that, basically, she herself came up with the melody and lyrics.

Many Americans have only heard the English version of the lyrics, as sung by Louis Armstrong and others:
"Hold me close and hold me fast
The magic spell you cast
This is la vie en rose...." and so on
Actually the original lyrics are quite different, though similar in sentiment.
Here is the begiining of the French/Piaf version - the intro in the first paragraph and the familar melody beginning with "Quand.."- and a very literal English translation after:



Des yeux qui font baisser les miens
Un rire qui se perd sur sa bouche
Voilà le portrait sans retouches
De l'homme auquel j'appartiens

Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas
Je vois la vie en rose
Il me dit des mots d'amour
Des mots de tous les jours
Et ça m'fait quelque chose


The eyes that make mine lower
A laughter that gets lost on his mouth
There is the portrait unretouched
Of the man I belong to

When he takes me in his arms
He speaks to me low
I see life in pink
He tells me words of love
The every day words
And that made me something




* at the top, Raoul Dufy's painting "La vie En Rose"

Orvieto: Slow City

We came to the Italian hill town/city of Orvieto in western Umbria on our jaunt to the coast. It was one of the "unscheduled" delights of the trip - winding medieval streets with walls bedecked with flowers, shops, bars, bookstores, restaurants, young people dressed in everything from solid colors, punkish, scarved, or neo-hippie threads all in an an unassumingly elegant styl, (sprezzatura, again);everywhere friendly laid-back people, patient with my earnest but creaky italian, who went out of their way to guide and give directions.
Beneath the city, dating from Etruscan times, lies a "subterranean city", a staggering maze of paths, cellars, grottos and shelters, carved from the resilient volcanic tufa stone that is the base of the town's buildings.
We left with a contented mellow buzz, reflecting, even now, on our luck. As we left we gazed back at Orvieto from a distance through the rolling hills of fruit trees and cypresses, looking like a town from a fairy-tale, nestled outside of time, high on the steep cliffs.

It was only after we got back to Arizona that I found out that Orvieto was a Slow City , one of some 50-plus Italian cities belonging to the "Citta Slow" movement. The Cittaslow grew out of the "Slow Food" movement which still thrives and was, essentially, a reaction against the burgeoning fast food "americanisation" of Europe. Cittaslow encourages an appreciation of the individuality of place rather than quick-fix global, corporate, sameness running roughshod over the unsuspecting. At the same time, it acknowledges the use of 'green' technologies and does not intend to step aside from the modern world and turn these towns into quaint tourist museums.

Quoting an article from The New Internationalist magazine Mar 2002,
"The Slow city program involves enlarging parks and squares and making them greener, outlawing car alarms and other noises that disturb the peace, and eliminating ugly TV aerials, advertising posters and neon signs.
Other priorities include the use of recycling, alternative energy sources and ecological transportation systems. The movement rejects the notion that it is anti-progress and holds that technologies can be employed to improve the quality of life and natural urban environment."
Of course "indigenous" traditional crafts, and cuisines are encouraged, and support of local growers.
Though obviously a tourist draw, these cities are managing to use the influx to benefit the continuity of local culture. Many younger 'exiles" of these towns are returning to work in the revived economy. If anything, a shortage of available workers has been a concern.
There are still a lot of kinks to work out but the movement seems to be gaining ground, slowly...

for more info on Cittaslow;
http://www.slowmovement.com/slow_cities.php
www.slowfood.com

Joe Gould's Poem

Saw the movie "Joe Gould's Secret" last night (with Ian Holm as Joe), the homeless NY writer of "The Oral History of the World". There's a great scene in the movie where Joe and Joe Mitchell from the New Yorker magazine enter a Greenwhich Village poetry reading. When the proprietor sees Joe enter, he mutters in disgust something about Joe, "..only coming in for the food". A rather stodgy elderly woman is droning on with a reading as Joe is in the rear, back turned from the podium, scarfing up a storm at the snack table, mumbling disparaging remarks in between bites. Joe's running chatter grows more disruptive; pandemonium ensues as the proprietor and outraged patrons try to usher Joe out the door. Joe breaks free and runs to the front of the room. "I HAVE A POEM!" Things seem to quiet a bit, as people stare in disbelief....

In the winter
I'm a buddhist

In the summer
I'm a nudist!


(actual picture of Joe above)

Lester leaned....

Found a Lester Young story i hadn't heard in the (updated) Jazz Anecdotes: Second Time Around by (bassist) Bill Crow - published by Oxford University Press -

Lester went into a jazz club to hear some friends play. He didn't bring
his saxophone. He just wanted to listen. he intentionally sat in a dark
part of the room, hoping not to be recognized, but someone noticed him
and he heard them whispering, "Wow, that's Lester Young!""Maybe we can
get him to sit in!" Lester leaned over to the table and whispered,
"i don't dig being dug while I'm digging."

Browning Versions

Pete Browning was Tod Browning's uncle. Neither seemed to have any relation to the poet Robert Browning - that would've been too much on the odd juxtapositions meter.

Pete Browning was one of the greatest batters in 19th century baseball. He had a lifetime batting average of .341 - the 4th highest of any righthander in history. More famously - though there is some dispute about it - Ol' Pete was known as the original "Louisville Slugger". His moniker adorns the most famous type of bat in baseball, made by Hillerich and Bradsby. Pete gave Biblical names to his bats and "retired' them when he felt they'd exhausted all the hits fate had allotted them - only fitting that baseball's most famous bat was initially (it is conjectured) made for him.

Pete was not "running on the beaten path" shall we say...a severe case of mastoiditis left him almost entirely deaf since childhood. This condition indirectly lead to pain-numbing alcoholism (a flask of whiskey habitually tucked in his baseball jersey, and one local paper continually addressed him as "Pietro Redlight District Distellery Interests Browning"), a reputation as a bumbling fielder, and the adoption of a defensive position that involved standing on one foot and sticking the other outward in the air - Monty Python Ministry of Silly Stances? No, he was defending himself against oncoming runners or fielders whom he wouldn't hear.

Now on to the nephew, Tod Browning (pictured at the top, and note the Browning ear similarities), who lived 2 houses down from Pete in Louisville.
Under the spell of a "side-show queen" Tod left home to join the carnival and shine in such roles as the Hypnotic Living Corpse - he was put in a trance and "buried alive' on the carnival grounds to be miraculously disinterred 3 days later. From there it was on to vaudeville, movie-acting, and finally, behind the camera, as an assistant to D.W.Griffith. He struck out on his own and teamed up with Lon Chaney, "the Man of a Thousand Faces", to make a series of bizarre and incomparable films - long on improbable plots and high on the atmospheric. The Unholy Three,West of Zanzibar, and The Blackbird are still raved about in silent film circles.
If Tod Browning is remembered by J.Q.Public at all today it is as the director and creative force behind Dracula(with Bela Lugosi) and Freaks (which was altered to be a more of a "horror" film than he intended, by the studio heads).

I don my rose-colored spectacles, and like to remember Tod as the nephew of Ol' Pete and I imagine they tossed a few balls around and shared some stories. Of course there's no record of it....

Lord Buckley; Post-Trip

Came across an article in an Utne Reader about the early, pre-hippie days of LSD research.
Psychiatrist Oscar Janiger was funded by the Sandoz Corp. to administer the drug to a variety of personages in the Los Angeles area in the late fifties and report back their experiences. Among a fair assortment of artists, writers, and performers selected for the "sessions" was the great -attempting here to describe the ineffable-"beat monologist/comedian" Lord Buckley.

After his first "trip", Buckley reported the effect in relation to events of the following day: (some familiarity with the singular voice and countenance of Buckley is proper requisite for full impact of this vignette)

"I was opened up to the beauty in people who had never seemed beautiful before. The next morning at the Pancake House, I walked up and bowed to four nuns. I had never spoken to nuns before - i couldn't penetrate their cloak of reverence. I walked up to them, and loved them, and they were sure I owned the place, and gave me their orders for breakfast. When the waiter came and I sat down at my table, it shook them.
But i spoke to them again and told them i saw them as Sisters of Beauty. They tittered and giggled and blushed, well-pleased."

Sara Tavares

I just stumbled across a very cool record, "Balance" by singer/songwriter, Sara Tavares. Sara is from Portugal hailing from second generation Cape Verdean immigrants. Her music is a mix of Cape Verde and Portuguese styles with the modern sounds of Soul, Bossa Nova, and Funk. Very gentle, but it kicks.
Check out the nice little videoclip of Sara doing the title track at
http://www.worldconnection.nl/wclayout/index.php?site_id=25
(scroll down to the bottom of the page)

Tops of the Pops: July

Ok, a break from my Italy raves -
Here are my top song rotations for the last 2 Weeks;

I'm Waiting For the Man - Velvet Underground from
The Velvet Underground & Nico 1967 -
I gotta hear this one continuously. Wish the whole record was like this,; I'm guessing this cut in particular was an influence over many.

Night and Day - Joe Henderson from Inner Urge -
Joe is really talking through the horn here and playing the tune in a lower key (sonorous for him) than normal. Exquisite Elvin jones laying down the carpet. Its rare carpet from the Mountains of the Moon.

With A Song In My Heart and Time On My Hands -
from Sonny Rollins (various titles) 1951 -
I live with this record ALL year round; these 2 tunes in particular. Sonny's sound and feeling here are like bread, water, air, rain...and wine.

Bruce Cockburn; The Instrumentals -
A friend compiled this for me. Cockburn has a great original guitar style and is always a delightful surprise.

The Tarot Garden

The Tarot Garden of Niki De Saint-Phalle lies just off the coast of Tuscany in a wooded area connected to an old quarry.
Niki De Saint-Phalle was initially inspired by the Park Guell of Gaudi in Barcelona which she visited as a child, as well as the fabulous garden of Bomarzo outside of Rome. With the help of many artisans and laborers from around the world, Niki spent 18 years planning and constructing the sculptures of the Garden - basing them on figures of the Tarot. For a time she lived inside of the giant Empress figure - known also as the Sphinx - designing and supervising construction. Her husband, the artist Jean Tinguely, assisted with much of the work and built kinetic sculptures that are motion activated by your strolls in their proximity.

The Garden was must-see goal of our trip to Italy and we drove many miles from Assisi to see it one day. We stopped in the old Umbrian hill-town of Orvieto on the way and, as the hours drifted by, we realized we were "cutting it close"! It was almost 7pm when we made it to the coast and, after despairing of finding the place at all, we arrived at the Garden parking lot nestled in at the end of a country lane. I bounded up the hill and jumped for joy to see that we still had a half-hour before closing!
Wow!


To visit the website of the Tarot Garden, go to www.nikidesaintphalle.com
There are many books on the work and life of Niki. Notably, Niki De Saint Phalle:
My Art, My Dreams an autobiography with assistance by Carla Schulz-Hoffman, and
Pierre Descargues

Venezia

Summer in Venice took me quite by surprise. I thought I'd been there enough in my mind after a lifetime of cliched gondola-and-canal imagery. It wasn't like that. I was surprised that the anomalous beauty of the place almost made me forget the hordes of summer tourists.

The buildings and bridges in winding pathways and along the water lie suspended between forms finely crafted in simple lines or oriental arabesques by human hand - in an array of colors never repeating - and patterns of time and decay making a meal of the material world. This, set against the milky green canals and the lagoon, turning different shades by the hour.

In his "The City of Falling Angels", John Behrendt captures arrival there in a nutshell:

"I had been to Venice a dozen times or more, having fallen under its spell when I first caught sight of it twenty years before - a city of domes and bell towers, floating hazily in the distance, topped here and there by a marble saint or a gilded angel."

"On this latest trip, as always, I made my approach by water taxi. The boat slowed as we drew near; then it slipped into the shaded closeness of a small canal. Moving at an almost stately pace, we glided past overhanging balconies and weatherworn stone figures set into crumbling brick and stucco. I looked up through open windows and caught glimpses of painted ceilings and glass chandeliers. I heard fleeting bits of music and conversation, but no honking of horns, no squealing of brakes, and no motors other than the muffled churning of our own.
People walked over footbridges as we passed underneath, and the backwash from our boat splashed on moss-covered steps leading down into the canal. That twenty minute boat-ride had become a much-anticipated rite of passage, transporting me three miles across the lagoon and five hundred to a thousand years back in time."

Bologna, Italia

Me in front of a poster of Lyda Borelli (aforementoned Italian silent film actress) in the Piazza Maggiore, Bologna c. June 19.
I may look pensive - wandering down a philosophical backroad - but what i'm really thinking is, "I reckon I'd like to have some more of them fried fritters."

Quoting Caravaggio

While in Italy I was reading "The Lost Painting" by Jonathan Harr. It's a true story presented as an "art detective-style" thriller (if such things thrill you) centering on a painting of Caravaggio's thought to be lost, "The Taking of Christ". I finished the book on the plane from Venice to JFK and, fittingly, "lost" it somewhere along with a journal I'd kept - probably in those damn pocket-pouch things that swallows up my stuff. (It was one of those "couldn't put it down, but when i did....." books)

Only in recent years has Caravaggio achieved his placement high up in the pantheon of classic Italian painters along with Raphael, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Titian, Michelangelo et al.
His neglect for centuries is due partially to the unconventional subject matter and style of his paintings. Though he was paid stupendous sums by his patrons, late renaissance and early baroque Italian art critics were not ready for him. It fell to the Dutch painters of the 17th century to carry his torch. Many appreciated and adapted his chiaroscuro, and dramatic natural style; most notably Rembrandt, through his teacher Peter Lastman.
During his lifetime and soon after his death Caravaggio was condemned for using prostitutes and street people as models. His combative personality was another strike against him.

Caravaggio left very little in the way of documentation about his personal life. After hearing the documented quotes of artists writing to their patrons, ie "I have completed the 10 cherubs on the border and, as you desired, included the gold leaf inlay on the robes..." - I take perverse enjoyment in relishing one of the few quotes attributed to Caravaggio. Apparently he was accosted by police for a carrying a dagger and sword. After presentiing his permit for them, he shot back in Italian, "Ti ho un culo!" - "Shove it up your ass!".

Morandi

Sent my friend, poet David Chorlton, a postcard from Bologna, Italy after i visited the Museum of painter Giorgio Morandi there 2 weeks ago. Early yesterday morning, having returned to Phoenix, I heard something drop in the mailbox and found this poem hand-delivered from David...

Postcard from Bologna

with thanks to Tom

A postcard arrives from the province of Morandi
whose borders are the walls
of the room with a population of one
and whose army consists of bottles
standing to attention in coats of grey paint
applied by the man who directs them.

He invents a horizon, places an arrangement
before it, and dresses his imagination
in camouflage. Morandi is the minister
of interior space, discipline,
defence, and modesty. His daily routine

is to declare peace by wrapping
simple objects in light from a bulb
that hangs on a cord
from the sun at the center of his ceiling.


- David Chorlton

David Chorlton's poems and paintings can be glimpsed at
http://www.geocities.com/evmanak/chorlton.html
and www.howlingdogpress.com

Lyric Nitrate/ Lyda Borelli

11 years before Decasia, Dutch film-maker Peter Delpeut released Lyric Nitrate , a poetic, personal tribute to silent film, assembled from movies and clips (spanning 1905-1915) long hidden in the attic of an Amsterdam moviehouse, where the noted collector, promoter, and distributor of old movies, Jean Desmet, had gathered them together for reasons only known to himself.

Like Decasia, Delpeut's film is made up of old nitrate footage in various states of decay - where it differs is that while Morrison's Decasia seems to focus on the interaction of decay with the figures of the film intensified by the mod-minimalist soundtrack, Delpeut takes a subtler route; choosing to linger over "intact" meditative, or dramatic, hand-tinted sequences before the final scenes that dissolve and flare into absolute abstract decay - with colors suggesting a high-speed flight across the surface of Jupiter.

Quoting movie critic Vincent Canby, "'Lyrical Nitrate' is the kind of homage that is best appreciated by people who are at a loss for words to express their appreciation for silent movies."
"By speeding up or slowing down the rate atwhich the clips are projected, he effectively deconstructs the original images, removing their meanings, in order to call attention to the delicate beauty possible, it seems, only with nitrate stock."
Using carefully selected musical pieces, and scratchy recordings of arias sung by Caruso (as does Woody Allen in "Match Point", come to think of it), interspersed with silences, Delpeut deftly underlines the sentiment, longing, and mystery of the scenes.

Among the most mesmerizing sequences assembled by Delpeut are scenes from the long lost Italian film (tinted in twilight blues) Fiore Di Male made in Italy in 1910. This movie features the opera singer/diva turned actress Lyda Borelli (pictured below), who pauses dramatically or moves with a natural physicality, as if she feels the scenes "musically"; sensible for an opera singer, and, in any case, silent movies were often filmed with a string quartet there on the set. There is a long sequence where Borelli falls to her death from a stab wound - Delpeut slows down, hold still the images, and starts again the film to accentuate her movements.
Delpeut was, in particular, moved by these Italian diva/films enough to later "assemble" another film from various films featuring Borelli, Pina Menichelli, and Francesca Bertini called Diva Dolorosa.

The Inverted Fountain

As the Arizona summer settles in and turns the brain to custard, I think on days and nights back in Los Angeles spent sitting in and around the Inverted Fountain at UCLA.

The Inverted Fountain sits on the far east side of the campus.
The fountain's architects/designers (I believe, primarily, Howard Troller of Jere Hazlett)were challenged to come up with a fountain that departed from the usual water-shooting-upward format. Howard Troller was inspired by the potholes and hotsprings in the bubbling waters of Yellowstone Park;
"Unlike traditional fountains, the water of the Inverted Fountain flows inward across a bed of mutli-colored rocks, handpicked by Troller in Claremont, Calif. The current then meets at an off-center well, creating a miniature waterfall plunging into a 12-foot wide, 5-foot deep center that recirculates the water at 10,000 gallons per minute. The water’s movement adds a natural, yet distinct, sound to the south end of campus –that of a flowing mountain stream." (this from http://www.uclahistoryproject.ucla.edu/Fun/ThisMonth

On the periphery of the fountain was an inset area that was perfect for sitting and letting the water wash over you. That fountain was a nourishing source, vivid to this day, that I, and I'm sure countless others can at least return to in their imagination.