The Movies

Best film of 2008: Slumdog Millionaire



9 January addendum.

(But Gran Torino is pretty damn good. Not quite as good as I had expected it might be. Who over the past decades has directed himself as lead in so many quality films. He's never won the award for acting; of course if half the hype is true, it will be Mickey Rourke. Hope to catch that one soon, and Revolutionary Road as well.)

Carolyn Cassady speaks of Jack Kerouac

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/today/hi/today/newsid_7760000/7760097.stm

Rebecca Jones on BBC Radio 4 interviews the wonderful Carolyn Casssady.

Clive Meachen

Dominic Williams sent me this link to his film, a nine minute tracking shot, recording Clive Meachen, walking the walk and talking the talk in the hills above the village of Old Goginan, in Wales, where he lives with his family, only recently retired from his position teaching American literature at The University College, Aberystwyth. From the Tottenham neighborhood of London, Clive matriculated at the U. of Essex where he studied both with Ed Dorn and Robert Lowell. Early on, he became an Olson scholar, and Allen Fisher published his still useful, rarely-read, and quite idiosyncratic monograph titled CHARLES OLSON: HIS ONLY WEATHER as a Spanner - number 23, in 1983. Meachen's other essays and reviews have appeared over many years in pretty much every Anglo-Welsh magazine and journal published in the UK. He and his wife, Maureen, from Belfast, accompanied Robert Creeley on his reading tour of Ireland. His monologue discourse here is of iconic American writers, Whitman, Kerouac, Ginsberg.... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fdnXZaDEIhE

"Blue Skies Gone"

Dominic Williams is a singer-songwriter who has played folk clubs in the North of England for over 30 years while teaching for DeLaSalle College in Manchester, and, later, at Liverpool Institute, until taking early retirement for medical reasons. He has played in the Belfast and Edinburgh Festivals, and in the latter, the New Bracken Band, of which he was one of three members, won the folk group competition. He continues to study Spanish classical guitar. His song "Free Tibet" was released as a part of a casette issued by Branch Redd in 1991, and remastered this summer in Liverpool, shortly to be released as part of a CD titled "Five Poems Five Pieces" which features five of his songs and five of my poems. Dominic also has taught music to Tibetan refugees in India. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-GomVyiQrd8