Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Butterflies Aren’t Free
Most famous lepidopterist (photo by Giuseppe Pino)
2 July – A Day of Loss – Vladimir Nabokov (22 April 1899 to 2 July 1977) He was the most luscious wielder of words in our time. Raised in a manner akin to the upbringing of George Amberson Minifer, VN was a precocious prodigy who grew a coat of hard varnish when he lost his home, his inheritance, his country (although he remained fond of Mother Russia, he deprecated her barbaric minions) and, in Berlin, his father (to an assassin’s hand). He moved around but never really settled and his moorings became his wife and his works. His works are superb….
Continue Reading →Remembering Charles Laughton
1 July 1899 – 15 December 1962 Today we recall the great Charles Laughton, an immense, thick, boiled ham, but top-notch ham none the less. David Shipman described him as a “big, brazen, show-off actor. He went overboard sometimes…but as well as the bold, daring gesture – the hallmark of the great actor – he could perform with infinite delicacy.”* He was superb in big-time historical roles, playing Henry VIII, Rembrandt, and Captain Bligh; or in lush, epic sagas such as Les Miserables or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but he could quite good in comedy as well – see It Started With Eve,…
Continue Reading →White Rabbit
Songs in Our Heart # 19 White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane) (Written by Grace Slick; released June 1967) [A Lewis Carroll-LSD inspired whirligig. Used to great advantage in The Game.]
Continue Reading →Sunday Morning Coming Down
Songs in Our Heart # 18 Sunday Morning Coming Down (Kris Kristofferson) (Written by Kris Kristofferson; released 1970) [We find Monday morning coming down more mournful, personally, but this song is still sidewalk poetry par excellence.]
Continue Reading →Dracula
(by Bram Stoker) (1897) (Dir. Tod Browning) (1931) It was, perhaps, an unlikely brace of circumstances: odd that a 19 year old (Mary Shelley) would create one of the two most potent horror figures of our epoch – Frankenstein, and equally odd that a clerk-turned-impresario, Bram Stoker (1847-1912) would the other. Dracula evokes all the lip-smacking pleasures of pure, endogenous evil, and combines myth, misanthropy and eroticism with the false promise of immortality. The Universal film, made about 500 years after the birth of the man who inspired the book (Vlad the Impaler), is the definitive classic version, an eerie, atmospheric, surreal,…
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