Watching Lawrence of Arabia, Another Man Who Fell to Earth

Yesterday I watched for the first time in 30 years David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.

Random Thoughts on The Man Who Fell to Earth, Concluded

Finishing this up. My days turned to weeks. 9. Nicolas Roeg allows viewers much room to intuit connections in The Man Who Fell to Earth. The first few minutes are among the most illogical. All you have to go on is the title. Something seems to explode in the sky and crash into a lake. […]

Playing Favorites: Bowie-Yentob-Pullman

Other than being two of my favorites, David Bowie and novelist Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials, The Book of Dust) have nothing much in common beyond having been born in post-war England within a few months of each other (1/47; 10/46). That, and having interesting minds and reading widely. Now I find that BBC One, […]

Bowie Sighting: Philip Hoare. Public and Personal Bowies

Last January while waiting for Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant, I chanced upon Philip Hoare’s, The Sea Inside, and enjoyed it so much that after Serious Pleasures I returned to Hoare, this time The Whale (UK Leviathan), and hence to Melville’s Moby Dick, a wonderful book to live in for several weeks, when […]

Are You Lithuanian?

I’d always assumed that the “Are you Lithuanian” scene in Nicolas Roeg’s film of Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth was an episode of Roeg-ishness, a dialog equivalent of some of the odd visuals in the film. And then I read Walter Tevis’s novel. And, yes indeed, Bryce, the chemical engineer, does ask […]

Curiosity, Obsessional Reading, and 400 Books, Just for Starters

Nicolas Roeg recently said that you were “very studious” and took a lot of books to the set of The Man Who Fell To Earth. Oh God. But I had too many books. I took four hundred books down to that film shoot. I was dead scared of leaving them in New York because I […]