Above, my Christmas present to myself this year: a 1991 Looney Tunes sculpture by Ron Lee. When the Warner Brothers Studio Stores still existed, I would visit whenever I was near one – almost never buying anything, but spending fifteen or twenty minutes admiring all the Ron Lee stuff in the back of the store, where two or three dozen of his latest sculptures would be on display. I think he produced well over a hundred Looney Tunes sculptures over several years, possibly approaching two hundred. They were too expensive for me back then, but their extraordinary quality and beauty were compelling. Like all his work, this is made of white metal with a solid polished onyx base, so it’s pretty hefty at nearly six pounds. It’s about ten inches high.
Lee has done a lot more than just Warner Brothers characters – he’s most well-known for clown sculptures (shudder) – but the Looney Tunes and Betty Boop designs are my favourites. I have four now – five if you count the Tweety duplicate I have over at my office.
Crawler-transporter in a widescreen 65mm Panavision frame from the found footage
A new documentary called Apollo 11 that features never publicly seen footage is in its final stages. That footage is part of a miles-long cache that’s been squirreled away in the National Archives ever since a planned MGM Studios project on the story of Apollo was cancelled in 1969. After the cancellation, some of the footage was used in the 1972 Moonwalk One documentary – included below – and the unseen footage being used now is the leftovers from both of those projects. Vanity Fair has the details on the discovery here.
A few weeks ago, the new film was selected as one of the documentaries that will be premiered at the Sundance Festival early next year. If I wasn’t in the final few months of my five-years-to-debt-free project, I think I’d give serious consideration to visiting Utah for the first time. I’d have to find something else to do as well, of course – I rarely make even a local trip without at least two purposes in mind.
From the Vanity Fair article:
In May of last year, [director Todd] Miller received a startling e-mail from [National Archive and Records Administration archive supervisor Dan] Rooney. “I was used to the way in which archivists and librarians communicate, which is typically very monotone, very even keel,” Miller said. “But I get this e-mail from Dan, and it’s just insanely long and full of exclamation points and bolded words.” Rooney’s staff had located a cache of old reels that he identified as the “65mm Panavision collection.” (In this format, the negative is shot on 65-mm. film and then printed as a 70-mm. positive.) “The collection consists of approximately 165 source reels of materials, covering Apollo 8 through Apollo 13,” Rooney wrote. “Thus far, we have definitively identified 61 of those 165 that relate directly to the Apollo 11 mission, including astronaut mission preparations, launch, recovery, and astronaut engagement and tours after the mission.”
Apollo 11 teaser trailer:
Moonwalk One full version, from 1972. If you’ve got Amazon Prime, a much better recently-restored copy is free there.
I’m a wee bit more interested in this film than First Man.
“Avaritia” from the Seven Deadly Sins series by Pieter van der Heyden (1558)
Continuing the title quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Method of Nature,” originally in a speech to the Society of the Delphi at Waterville College, Maine, 11 August 1841:
Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.
It came to mind today as I wrote to a bookseller from whom I had ordered, last Monday, the one book by Ricky Jay that I don’t own. After I got the “shipped” email from Amazon, the third-party seller cancelled and refunded my order, claiming this: “We were in the process of packing and shipping out your order from the warehouse when we discovered significant damage.”
You would be wrong if you thought I believed that. You would be right if you think I’d be hopping mad if I then actually caught them in the lie. Just now, I did…and I am. I composed and sent this message to them only after counting to ten (see the clip below):
People are so predictable. Once you discovered Ricky Jay had died, you refunded my $54 order for this book, claiming you found the “Good” book was not even in acceptable condition when you went to ship it. I have to tell you that I didn’t believe a word of it. Now, a week later – exactly as I expected – you’ve re-listed the Good condition book at more than three times* your original price.
Did you really think, in these days filled with avarice, that I would accept your inexpert explanation and forget about it? That I wouldn’t think to check for you re-listing it on Amazon? That I wouldn’t also see it re-list in places like Abebooks? I mean, I am looking to buy the book, right? Frankly, your optimism surprises me.
Ricky Jay, for forty years one of my few heroes and a serious book collector himself, probably would have summarized this behavior with one word: despicable.
I can’t blame you too much for yielding to the temptation to cash in on Jay’s death as so many others are trying to do. I am, however, disappointed that you ended up fitting so precisely into the mold I imagined you would. My cynicism level remains unchanged.
*After I sent this, they of course sent no reply but did increase the price to four times their original, so no conscience at all. Wouldn’t it be amusing and immensely satisfying if they’ve priced themselves right out of the market?**
