Georges Perec lived at the apartment building at 13 rue Linné. When I passed it, I photographed the building from across the street, then crossed and took a picture of the courtyard, a bicycle visible inside the gate, leaning against a wall.

The urge to wander has struck me in every city I’ve visited, even those towns in the American west that lack event the most basic amenities for pedestrians (e.g., footpaths). While walking these towns and cities I’m motivated by two impulses: the impulse to get lost, to find new streets and corners of the city; and the impulse to map new territory, to utilise the newly discovered places of the city to aid future navigation. The getting lost is play: it is loose and undefined, and allows you to make mistakes and then correct them, without the pressure of having to conform to the framework of a map, an adherence to which may restrict your wandering.

Nevertheless, my journey this morning was also informed by a sketchy knowledge of the geography of the area: rue Monge runs along a steep hill, sloping down towards the Seine. In walking uphill, you are invariably heading south. Although, just to mix things up a little, this is not always the case: small hills derail you from any over-determined geography of the area, injecting a sense of play into proceedings once you realise you’ve left your map of Paris on the kitchen table.

My review of Emilie Bickerton’s A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma is on the 3:AM Magazine site here.

Yet, it seems to me that what the early Cahiers critics did so well was to bridge the gap between commercial concerns and personal visions, and to acknowledge the possibilities of a quick-witted director harnessing the potential of the studio system. In this way, the Cahiers critics were negotiating the contradictions of attempting to produce highly personal cinema in an era of increased consumer capitalism. This image of the director as auteur may have been wishful thinking on the parts of Truffaut and Godard, yet this convenient fiction allowed them to imagine themselves in the role of director, an effort of the imagination that is even more astounding for having actually materialised. Their cinema, in actuality, took a markedly different form from their heroes Hitchcock and Sam Fuller: fewer studio sets, more filming on the street; lower budgets, smaller audiences. Perhaps the lessons about negotiating the commercial aspects of filmmaking were forgotten by Cahiers in later years; when it couldn’t survive as an autonomous concern, it fully embraced commercialism – again, mirroring Toubiana’s leap from Maoist to pillar of the industry (he’s now the Director General of the Cinématheque française).

because the Marx Brothers are among the great comic artists in history, their accomplishments are revered internationally and in countries that place a high value on cultural contributions as opposed to simply bulldozing things in the name of progress, the Marx Brothers home would remain standing and affixed with a plaque.

Quite. There’s also a NY Times article about it here.

- Dennis Hopper pulled a knife on him just before the filming of the film Easy Rider; Torn left the movie, and his role went to Jack Nicholson.

- Later, Hopper claimed that it was Torn who had actually pulled the knife on Hopper. Torn sued, and won $475,000 in damages, Hopper appealed the decision, and subsequently had to pay another $475,000.

- Has had a couple of drunk-driving charges against him, but has only been convicted once.

- During the filming of Norman Mailer’s movie Maidstone, Torn hit Mailer three times on the head with a hammer. Then Mailer bit Torn’s ear. In the background, Mailer’s children could be heard screaming at Torn to stop. Unbelievable. You can watch the footage here. Be warned – it’s quite insane, and, perhaps more shockingly, contains some hep-cat-isms from Torn.

In the seventeenth chapter of “The Voyage of the Beagle,” Charles Darwin turned to the mating habits of the giant Galapagos tortoise. “When the male and female are together, the male utters a hoarse roar or bellowing, which, it is said, can be heard at the distance of more than 100 yards,” he wrote. This is also the most accurate description that we possess of the duet performed by Mick Jagger and Christina Aguilera in “Shine a Light,” Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the Rolling Stones.

Anthony Lane, review, New Yorker April 14 2008.