Overcast today - here and there a patch of sky shines slightly blue. Now and again it rains, heavily.
I've a day off from work today - it's half-term this week for the school I teach at on Tuesdays. I've been reading a book of interviews The Solitary Walker lent me (oh dear, if he reads this he'll remember...), Herzog on Herzog (Ed. Paul Cronin). Werner Herzog is my favourite film-maker (to date - I'm not a great film buff so my all-time favourite may yet to be discovered).
As Cronin says:
"...the number of false rumours and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing... I confess to having deviously longed to trip him up, ... but to no avail. I now conclude that he's either a master liar, or more probably, he's been telling me the truth. ... He is not insane, nor is he eccentric. ... Rather, he is an extremely pleasant, generous and modest man who happens to be blessed with extraordinary vision and intuitive intelligence."
You do scratch your head when you read Herzog's accounts of, as a young man, smuggling televisions (and a colt revolver) into Mexico, of working as a rider in a rodeo, of Klaus Kinski shooting at a shed full of extras during the making of Aguirre. Then there's the time he ate his shoe - American film-maker Les Blank made a famous short film of the event.
Last night I watched Herzog's Nosferatu. The DVD had a brilliant "extra" on it - this short film about the making of Nosferatu (it turns out it's also on Youtube). It's doubly good if you've read the Cronin book as it illustrates things Herzog talks about in those interviews about the way he works:
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I wrote a poem today.
In Our Town
In our town
when it rains
young girls
text in shop doorways
the light they hold
in their hands
shines on their faces while inside
shopkeepers stand plastic buckets
between the aisles
In our town
when it rains
the pessimists climb trees
the lonely people
balance broken cups
on dry-stone walls
and the policemen
run for cover
In our town
when it rains
the statues weep clichés
and the flowers grow
Handel Rigaudon
5 years ago