My Q & A with Peter Biskind about his latest book, My Lunches With Orson, is now live at Rural Intelligence.
Biskind, who lives in Spencertown, is known locally as the head of the Chatham Film Festival, and nationally as a film critic for Vanity Fair and author of various books of Hollywood history.
The book is Biskind’s selection of the most illuminating moments culled from three years of taped conversation between Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom.
Six years ago this fall, PBS aired Two Square Miles, a one-hour documentary about Hudson in the tumultuous years around the turn of the 20th Century. The film is not readily available on DVD, nor found on Netflix, Hulu, etc.
But on Friday at 7 pm, Basilica Hudson will screen this film about how the Hudson of today was forged in the kiln of of the cement plant struggle. After appearing to have a “done deal” in place, Swiss-owned St. Lawrence Cement spent $60 million to impose its will on a small community, and failed.
For those who were not around during these endlessly trying times, the screening is a rare glimpse into the making of the Hudson of today, whose steady improvement is easy to take for granted. And with much pug mill water down the sluice since the fight ended in 2005, those who have seen it before may see some of the events and characters in a different light.
One sees former Alderman Quintin Cross in combative, charismatic and reflective modes—above saying “I dislike you, Sam”. (The local viewer now knows that Cross’s path of transformation was soon disrupted by a conviction for stealing from the City via credit card, and by a new arrest more recently for allegedly breaking into City Hall.) Red Dot owners Perry Cooney and Alana Hauptmann getting into it with 5th Ward Alderman Doc Donahue. Rick Scalera talks about his “sputtering political machine.” The Walthours talk movingly about their ambivalent family history with the Atlas cement company, which went out of business here in the 1970s.
And Linda Mussmann of TSL engages in what now looks an awful lot like situational ethics, taking her then-nemesis Scalera to task for accepting campaign support from the cement company while negotiating contracts with them. (Mussmann of course went on to lose her hard-won position as Democratic chair after negotiating in private with St. Lawrence to hand them the keys to the Waterfront, and eventually even to get married by Scalera himself.)
Basilica Hudson is located just south of the Amtrak Station near the Hudson waterfront on the east side of the tracks.
The Bank of America on the corner of 6th and Warren in Hudson was reportedly robbed today. As noted by 3rd Ward Supervisor Ellen Thurston, this same building was the target of a bank robbery gone bad in the Robert Wise movie Odds Against Tomorrow, starring Harry Belafonte and Ed Begley. (Belafonte is said to have lived at Curtiss House with his daughter during the filming, and later had a house in the Chatham area.)
The New York Times Magazine has published a new interview wwith Marina Abramović, the subject of the new documentary The Artist is Present, and who of course is planning a major performance art (or rather, performing art) institute in Hudson.
The interview by Andrew Goldman is lively, but he seems a bit more intent on gathering gossip about the artist’s love life and appearance than having a substantive discussion of her art. Perhaps as a result, the comments so far on the article are pretty much of the know-nothing, dismissive variety that Abramović has endured for much of her career, and of which the documentary (shown recently at the Berkshire International Film Festival) makes mincemeat.
The Albany Times-Union reports that appointed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (formerly of Greenport) is siding with Hollywood and music industry lobby groups over, well, pretty much everyone else when it comes to internet censorship. The PIPA and SOPA bills in Congress have inspired numerous sites (from Wikipedia to Boing Boing to Reddit) to go "dark" for the day. More than a passive supporter, Gillibrand actually co-sponsored PIPA in the Senate.
As if to illustrate what such censorship might be like, a reader reports that comments about these bills were being erased from Gillibrand's Facebook page, though now it appears they are coming too fast and furious for monitors to keep up with.
Public outcry has already caused some initial supporters, such as hosting provider Go Daddy, to withdraw support from these measures (which would help rich entertainment businesses eke out a modest improvement in profit, at the expense of free speech). A former attorney for Big Tobacco, Gillibrand has a history of changing her noxious positions if there is enough pressure: she formerly opposed gay marriage, and held anti-immigrant positions such as making English the "official" U.S. language.
But such pressure has rarely come from Hudson Valley Democrats, who have tended to value their personal access to a "local" politician over their own political principles. Will Columbia County Dems hold Kirsten's feet to the fire on this huge issue?
At this link Google has an action page for speaking out to Congress.
A trailer for The Man at the Counter, an independent short film shot largely at The Cascades in Hudson, can be viewed by clicking here. It's about “a young boy who spends the summer working at a coffee shop in a small town.” The project was funded in part via Kickstarter, which has a short video about the making of the film here.
Mary Stuart Masterson’s The Cake Eaters is said to be showing tonight at 7 pm at Hudson’s Iron Horse bar—one of the locations that Masterson used during her 2006 shoot. It’s a leisurely, understated and thoughtful drama about three romantic relationships among the members of two intertwined Upstate families.
When I saw The Cake Eaters at the Green Mountain Film Festival back in 2008, the film was still looking for a distributor according to screenwriter Jayce Bartok, who was staying at the same Montpelier B&B. During the screening, I jotted down the following list of identifiable local locations:
Greene County residents will no doubt spot a lot more, since most of the shooting took place on that side of the River, though the filmmakers bunked at the increasingly run-down St. Charles Hotel during their stay.
“The Horse” is one of the more popular movie locations in the Hudson Valley, having been included in Paul Newman’s Nobody’s Fool and several indie films. A few local residents appear in Cake’s credits, such as Otto Stockmeier (who like the Coen Brothers is a Simon’s Rock grad and is now making movies of his own).
Those under the age of 20 know this once-obscure but now frequently-Netflixed film because one of its stars, Kristen Stewart, later went on to fame in the wildly-popular Twilight vampire movies. She here plays a teenager living with a debilitating neurological disorder, making it something of a curiosity to Stewart completists. Her newfound popularity is reflected in the cheezed-out new DVD cover design (below, right) which is much less appealing than the original (at left).
From Michael Moore's most recent movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," a proposal made by FDR one year before his death...
