Author: Peter Zingg

Technology Director in Kentfield since 2001.

Another voyage to Italy

Peter Zingg

http://www.criterionco.com/content/images/large_boxshot/278_box_100x140.jpg

Everyone knows how Marty Scorsese should have won at least one Oscar by now. He will probably be in that small group of old timers hung out to wait for a lifetime achievement award.

In 2001, he made an extraordinary introduction to postwar Italian cinema titled My Voyage to Italy. In four hours, he excerpts and comments on over 30 films by Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni, and leaves the viewer breathless to see them all. Beginning with Paisa’, the breakthrough film that created neorealism, he explains the impact of such totally conceived pieces as Stromboli, Viaggio In Italia, and L’Eclisse. The film is edited as expected by Scorsese’s longtime collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, who did win an Aviator Oscar while Marty watched and waited, and relies on footage and scripts provided by some of the original creators of these groundbreaking works, like Visconti’s screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amato. On Scorsese’s tour from Sicily to Rome (Rosellini) to Venice (Visconti) and back (Antonioni) there are side trips to early Italian epics of the teens and twenties. And a link to the next generation of directors who would stand on the shoulders of these giants: Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, Resnais and Oshima.

By the time you start Disc 2, you will have to get a membership to GreenCine, Le Video, or the Criterion Collection, the last of which is about to reissue L’Eclisse on DVD in April.

p.s. i love you

Peter Zingg

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I spent two nights in ps at the Caliente tropics, lair of the tiki gods and half-price mai tais. The second night, I walked the boulevards under starlight past huge adventist churches and the high school, the mega Ralphs and the frog-filled Tahquitz wash, fresh from Southern California’s wettest winter in recent history, to see Bruno Ganz play out Hitler’s last days.

After my required attendance at two days of lectures given by futurists and kindergarten teachers, I was able to hire a cab driver who had his life apparently ruined by the U.S. government and its mercenary contractors, to drive me around some of the north end of Palm Springs. With Palm Springs Weekend and the Palm Springs Modern Committee’s tour map in hand, we made our way around Donald Wexler’s steel houses, Frey’s collaboration for Raymond Loewy’s house, Craig Ellwood’s Palevsky house, Elvis’ honeymoon hideout (otherwise known as the House of Tomorrow) and the too-impeccably restored Kaufmann house by Neutra. (For those who don’t know, Kaufmann’s other house was a small one built a few years earlier back east out of concrete and stone in a wooded place in western Pennsylvania called Fallingwater). All as the sun went behind Mt. San Jacinto, the dust storms started to kick up and it was time to make stops for ATM cash and a date shake and head to the airport.

Why another blog?

Peter Zingg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0156106809.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/wildparrots/images/home_mark.jpg

What the world needs less of is another blog. Nonetheless, I am going ahead just as other bloggers are showing the white flag. I want to try to address some of the things that have stricken me for better or for worse in our decadent, technological, capitalist society.

Maybe every noun in this blog should have three adjectives, since it seems as though for each positive, exciting possibility of urban (and even suburban) 21st century American life, one can find at least two negatives.

Or maybe it’s just springtime in 2005 and I feel like writing. It’s the negative ions I picked up by spending two days in the Coachella Valley. Anyway, I hope to cover my hopes and dreams for Nature, Architecture, Science and Technology, and Community in these pages. Or else like Calvino’s baron in the trees, or the student of the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, I just don’t feel like there’s any other way to live but this one.