Puff, the Magic Dragon (1963):
Blowin' in the Wind (1963):
Day is Done (1969):
He's always been a political activist, and here he is in 2011 at Occupy Wall Street:
He has a website here.
various and assorted miscellany
this thoughtful mix of mad surgery and tragic disfigurement is one of the best Frankenstein films ever, made when the studio was at the height of its creative powers. Peter Cushing alters his interpretation of the rash vivisectionist and Jimmy Sangster's intriguing script pulls in several fresh ideas.Rotten Tomatoes has a critics score of 92%.
Got on a bus in Memphis
Destination Rome
Georgia ain't no paradise
But a place I just call home
Some like Chicago some love Memphis Tennessee
Some like Chicago some love Memphis Tennessee
Give me sweet Dallas Texas where the women think the world to me
You may have your troubles I'm having my troubles too
You may have your troubles I'm having my troubles too
Yes I know how it feels when you're feeling so doggone blue
I'm not singing the blues I'm telling you the hard luck I've had
I'm not singing the blues I'm telling you the hard luck I've had
The blues ain't nothing but a good man feeling bad
Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury -a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past- arrives at Windy Hill, and everything changes.The New York Times closes with this:
Hilary, a newcomer to town, has inherited Mercury from her brother after his mysterious death. When she first brings Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everyone is struck by his beauty and prowess, particularly Viv. As she rides him, Viv begins to dream of competing again, embracing the ambitions that she harbored before she settled for a career in finance. Her daydreams soon morph into consuming desire, and her infatuation with the thoroughbred escalates into obsession.
Donald may have 20/20 vision, but he is slow to notice how profoundly Viv has changed and how these changes threaten their quiet, secure world. By the time he does, it is too late to stop the catastrophic collision of Viv's ambitions and his own myopia.
This is, in the end, less a book about mercurial change than mundane mismatch. There are the incongruities between the husband’s and the wife’s understanding of their marriage. There’s the difference between Viv’s aspirations and what the quotidian constraints of her life allow. And you could say that the novel suffers from a similiar flaw. It’s a book that doesn’t quite measure up to its ambitions.The Boston Globe concludes,
In constructing a narrator who is at once transparent (he reveals so much of himself, his limitations and his puzzlement over them, to the reader) and opaque (he is frequently emotionally unavailable to the people around him and even to himself), Livesey roots tension not just in the bones but in the very marrow of the book. In the end, this is not so much a crime novel as a novel about a trial: the story of one man’s austere endeavor to hold himself to account.The New Yorker says, "The novel explores themes of honesty and understanding by showing the impact that obsessions—grief, rapacity—can have on a marriage." Kirkus Reviews closes with this: "Uncharacteristically dark, yet more evidence of Livesey’s formidable gifts."
Still Life with the Window of the Workshop Open to the Port of Saint Tropez |
It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.The New York Times says, "The success of “The Dinner” depends, in part, on the carefully calibrated revelations of its unreliable and increasingly unsettling narrator, Paul Lohman. Whatever else he may be, likable he is not" and calls it "absorbing and highly readable". The Guardian says it's "a well-paced and entertaining novel". NPR concludes, "The best part about The Dinner was this tension taking place above the plates. As the meal wore on, I realized I couldn't get up from the table."
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act -an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children, and as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy.
A hideous accident kills the senior officers of the UNS Hibernia -leaving a terrified young officer to save three hundred colonists and crew aboard a damaged ship, on a seventeen-month gauntlet to reach the colony of Hope Nation. With no chance of rescue or reinforcement, Nicholas Seafort must overcome despair, exhaustion, guilt; he must conquer malfunctions, mutiny, and an alien horror beyond human understanding.
He must save lives. And he must take them, in the name of duty...
How pleasant it can be, alone in a first-class railway carriage, on the first day of a holiday that is to be fairly long, to dawdle through a bit of English country that is unfamiliar, stopping at every station. You have a map open on your knee, and you pick out the villages that lie to right and left by their church towers. You marvel at the complete stillness that attends your stoppage at the stations, broken only by a footstep crunching the gravel. Yet perhaps that is best experienced after sundown, and the traveler I have in mind was making his leisurely progress on a sunny afternoon in the latter half of June.You can read it online here. It was adapted for television in 2005:
He was in the depths of the country. I need not particularise further than to say that if you divided the map of England into four quarters, he would have been found in the south-western of them.
He was a man of academic pursuits, and his term was just over. He was on his way to meet a new friend, older than himself. The two of them had met first on an official inquiry in town, had found that they had many tastes and habits in common, liked each other, and the result was an invitation from Squire Richards to Mr. Fanshawe which was now taking effect.
The journey ended about five o’clock. Fanshawe was told by a cheerful country porter that the car from the Hall had been up to the station and left a message that something had to be fetched from half a mile farther on, and would the gentleman please to wait a few minutes till it came back? ‘But I see,’ continued the porter, ‘as you’ve got your bystile, and very like you’d find it pleasanter to ride up to the ‘all yourself. Straight up the road ‘ere, and then first turn to the left — it ain’t above two mile — and I’ll see as your things is put in the car for
You’ll excuse me mentioning it, only I though it were a nice evening for a ride. Yes, sir, very seasonable weather for the haymakers: met me see, I have your bike ticket. Thank you, sir; much obliged: you can’t miss your road, etc., etc.’
The two miles to the Hall were just what was needed, after the day in the train, to dispel somnolence and impart a wish for tea. The Hall, when sighted, also promised just what was needed in the way of a quiet resting-place after days of sitting on committees and college-meetings. It was neither excitingly old nor depressingly new. Plastered walls, sash-windows, old trees, smooth lawns, were the features which Fanshawe noticed as he came up the drive. Squire Richards, a burly man of sixty odd, was awaiting him in the porch with evident pleasure ‘Tea first,’ he said, ‘or would you like a longer drink? No? All right, tea’s ready in the garden. Come along, they’ll put your machine away. I always have tea under the lime-tree by the stream on a day like this.’ Nor could you ask for a better place. Midsummer afternoon, shade and scent of a vast lime-tree, cool, swirling water within five yards. It was long before either of them suggested a move. But about six, Mr. Richards sat up, knocked out his pipe, and said: ‘Look here, it’s cool enough now to think of a stroll, if you’re inclined? All right: then what I suggest is that we walk up the park and get on to the hill-side, where we can look over the country. We’ll have a map, and I’ll show you where things are; and you can go off on your machine, or we can take the car, according as you want exercise or not. If you’re ready, we can start now and be back well before eight, taking it very easy.’
‘I’m ready. I should like my stick, though, and have you got any field-glasses? I lent mine to a man a week ago, and he’s gone off Lord knows where and taken them with him.’
Mr. Richards pondered. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have, but they’re not things I use myself, and I don’t know whether the ones I have will suit you. They’re old-fashioned, and about twice as heavy as they make ‘em now. You’re welcome to have them, but I won’t carry them. By the way, what do you want to drink after dinner?’
What we see of Japan in 1951 and 1952 defines the time in a fashion I am not sure I would have been as aware of had I seen the film in 1952. It is a world only seven years removed from Hiroshima. Nobody in an Ozu film, seems directly affected by the American occupation, but the American influence is everywhere, in second-hand clothes, in cigarettes, in the liberation of women.
Called to a mission of a lifetime, Peter travels light-years from his wife, Bea, to an astonishing new environment. He's to preach to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter's teachings. But when Bea's letters from home become increasingly desperate -natural disasters are rampant and governments are crumbling- her faith begins to falter. Peter, rattled and heartsick, is forced to choose: historic humanitarian work, or the love of his life.The New York Times concludes,
Replete with emotional complexity and bravura storytelling, The Book of Strange New Things is a powerful and haunting meditation on faith, love, and devotion.
Defiantly unclassifiable, “The Book of Strange New Things” is, among other things, a rebuke to the credo of literary seriousness for which there is no higher art than a Norwegian man taking pains to describe his breakfast cereal. As well as the literature of authenticity, Faber reminds us, there is a literature of enchantment, which invites the reader to participate in the not-real in order to wake from a dream of reality to the ineffability, strangeness and brevity of life on Earth.NPR calls it "a remarkable work of imagination and genius." io9 says, "this really is a great book about religious faith, and what it means to people, and how it can be both an enormous source of strength and insight, and at the same time a set of blinders". The Independent says, "The Book of Strange New Things offers no easy interpretations. It is at once rather blank and simple, Faber not being given to directing the reader in what he or she should think, and richly suggestive."
WHO YA GONNA CALL?MED SERVICE!
Scattered through the galaxy are thousands of worlds colonized by humans. Many have native microbes dangerous to the human immigrants. Others have diseases brought to them accidentally -or on purpose- by visiting ships. When millions of lives are threatened, it's a job for the Interstellar Medical Service, and a Med Ship is sent to solve the problem.
Calhoun is the best the Med Service has, and hard experience has taught him that often the major obstacle to curing the sick is ... the sick. And removing that kind of obstacle may take very strong medicine. To find a cure for a disease, Calhoun has the help of his small animal companion Murgatroyd, a tormal -a species with the most powerful immune system in the galaxy. But to find a cure for hysteria, prejudice, crime, and even war is much more complicated, requiring considerable ingenuity. Fortunately, ingenuity is something that Calhoun has in good supply...
City of the Mind is at once a poignant love story and a meditation on the city of London, which has seen destruction, loss, and quest over several centuries . The protagonist is an architect, intimately involved with the new face of the city while haunted by earlier times in its history.Publishers Weekly concludes,
Matthew Halland, divorced and lonely at the beginning of the novel, has a rich and moving relationship with his young daughter Jane, whom he sees as often as his visiting privileges permit. She offers a fresh perspective on love, loss, and even the city of London as she and her father visit its different neighborhoods.
As Matthew's prize new building in the Docklands area of London goes up, a ray of hope enters his life in the form of Sarah Bridges, an editor at a magazine for connoisseurs and collectors of furniture and objets d'art. This love story, so movingly portrayed, becomes the emotional core of the novel.
Matthew is also entangled with an array of fascinating characters through his work, from a corrupt real estate developer named Rutter to a child-survivor of the Holocaust who fashions the engraving that will adorn Matthews Frobisher House in the Docklands.
Matthew's relationships with Sarah and Jane anchor him firmly in the present, allowing his mind to rove freely over his own past as well as that of the city of London. While he builds a new life on the ashes of a failed marriage, he moves through a city where past, present, and even future interweave.
Some of Penelope Lively's earlier novels -including both the Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger and Passing On- have explored the ways in which the past affects the present. Now, in her most ambitious novel, Lively has created a wonderfully rich and audacious confrontation with the mystery of London, with the buried lives that make us what we are, and with a contemporary cast of characters as varied as any she has written about before.
The narrative becomes a meditation on time: historical time, time as perceived by children, as altered by crisis, or love, or memory. In chronicling Halland's passage from desolation to re-engagement, Lively affirms that our existences have meaning, even as we are succeeded by others in the dance of life.Kirkus Reviews describes it as "a serious, self-involved meditation on transience and immutability, with a map of London -present and past- laid on top."