July 23, 2003

High on my Souvenir Series

"In 1960 I began to experiment with the idea of constructing stories whose subject matter would consist of disparate elements and unrelated characters taken directly from life and fitted together as in a mosaic." That's Paul Bowles, in the preface to his collection of 1962 short stories, A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard, which Anne Galloway heaped praised on recently. [Anne also posts Bowles' complete preface.] Bowles' stories were intended as bridges or intersections between the "two worlds" spoken of...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2003

A: Yes, Reviews of Chekhov Have Been A Great Influence On My Work

"I had a professor once who said that as Chekhov got older he lopped off the eventful beginnings and twist endings of his early works and that quivering middle was the mature short story." -David Edelstein, SlateHere's to you, David Edelstein. Geez, I love you more than you could know. This sentence (the phrase "quivering middle," actually), in a movie discussion I'd already posted about, convinced me to some changes in S(J03). Ch-ch-ch-changes? Well, I lopped off the ending, for...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)

December 02, 2002

New Script, and the Souvenir Series

Early in the editing of Souvenir November 2001, I decided to eventually expand the short film into a related series of shorts, all ultimately interconnected a la Kieslowski's Dekalog (See the movie index for more references). A couple of weeks ago, it became clear that the original documentary project which spawned greg.org could fit in this Souvenir series in some way. The result of this confluence: Souvenir January 2003, a short film about a man's quiet appreciation of ironing. Look...
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Posted by greg allen at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)