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Thirteen signature Hitchcock techniques are compiled here from a wide variety of documentaries and books about Hitch, including Francois Truffaut’s book-length interview with the director. A fascinating read.

Dialogue Means Nothing
One of your characters must be pre-occupied with something during a dialogue scene. Their eyes can then be distracted while the other person doesn’t notice. This is a good way to pull the audience into a character’s secretive world.

“People don’t always express their inner thoughts to one another,” he said “a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person thinks or needs.” The focus of the scene should never be on what the characters are actually saying. Have something else going on. Resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise.

Camera is Not a Camera
The camera should take on human qualities and roam around playfully looking for something suspicious in a room. This allows the audience to feel like they are involved in uncovering the story. Scenes can often begin by panning a room showing close-ups of objects that explain plot elements.

This goes back to Hitchcock’s beginnings in silent film. Without sound, filmmakers had to create ways to tell the story visually in a succession of images and ideas. Hitchcock said this trend changed drastically when sound finally came to film in the 1930’s. Suddenly everything went toward dialogue oriented material based on scripts from the stage. Movies began to rely on actors talking, and visual storytelling was almost forgotten. (Truffaut) Always use the camera as more than just a camera.

Film Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock
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Leave it to Wikipedia to give us the scoop:

Spencer Elden (born on June 27, 1991) is the model who appeared on the cover of Nirvana’s album Nevermind. Nirvana considered using a stock photograph of a swimming baby, but when that proved too expensive, they hired photographer Kirk Weddle. Weddle’s friends, Renata and Rick Elden, allowed their son Spencer to be photographed for about $200. The hook, line, and dollar were superimposed later. After seeing the photo, Kurt Cobain (Nirvana’s lead singer) and his wife Courtney Love agreed that they would take Spencer out to dinner when he got older.

In 2001, Elden re-created the Nirvana album shot for Rolling Stone magazine, for Nevermind’s tenth-anniversary. Elden has since appeared on the cover of cEvin Key’s The Dragon Experience in 2003.

In a September 2006 interview with NME, Elden expressed his interest in meeting up with the remaining band members, and seems to be a fan of Nirvana, saying “Nevermind is fifteen years old now, but you still hear the singles being played on the radio and it just doesn’t sound dated. Most bands around today can’t even get near to what Nirvana did on that album, and I’ll always be happy to be a part of it.”

And leave it to Coudal to dig this story up.

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(Thanks to everybody for sticking with Your Daily Awesome site through my vacation.)

Beloved Visitors to Your Daily Awesome:

Chas

I’ve always found the term “white trash” to be particularly offensive, both when it’s applied perjoratively to people on the low end of the economic food chain, and when people use it boastfully to refer to their own heritage, as if it were a badge of authenticity that has suddenly become ironically chic. But until this article, I had no idea that it was such an old phrase, nor where it came from.

Is it, as John Waters once said, “the last racist thing you can say and get away with?” Or has it transformed into a symbol of something like ethnic pride? Or is it just a comical phrase used to condemn—or sometimes excuse—bad behavior, like too much drinking, cussing, fighting, and general screwing around?

And why should we care, anyway? What makes any of this white trash talk anything more than mere pop culture trivia? To answer these questions it helps to look back to the past, to see when and how the term arose, to think about the uses to which it has been put, by whom, and why. Surprisingly, the answers have a lot to do with our changing ideas about sex, class, and gender.

Whether they use the term white trash or not, most Americans are unaware of its long and ugly history. If you had to guess, you’d probably say that the term arose in the Deep South, sometime in the middle of last century, as a term that whites coined to demean other whites less fortunate than themselves. Yet most of what we presuppose about the term is wrong.

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This wallpaper is pretty amazing. I guess it just means you can’t rearrange your living room too often.

Wallpaper is placarding—why not react? Paper is sloppily slapped onto walls, disregarding the surface. Windows, doors, and switches rip holes into patterns, disrupting their continuity. Our product dissolves limits between architecture, wallpaper and hangings, with the wallpaper functioning as sensitive gobetween. So it’s time to warp your room!

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Paper Cuts is a new blog from the senior editor of the New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner. He starts things off on an interesting note with a look at some of the book advertisements from the paper’s pages from the years 1962-73. “Why those dates? The books - and the ads for them - were terrific: fresh, pushy, serious and wry, often all at the same time. There was a new sense of electricity in the culture and in the book world.”

In 1967, Saul Steinberg was invited to be the Smithsonian Institution’s first and only artist-in-residence. Unimpressed by the museums and Washington DC, Steinberg stayed only four months, creating 36 drawings on the Smithsonian’s letterhead. the results are quintessential Saul:

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When I found out that I was going to be out of town for Dan Deacon’s upcoming Portland gig, I was pretty disappointed. But now that I’ve seen this video of the Baltimore electrospazz on a Maryland morning news show, I’m pretty damn close to crushed. This is great television.

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John Stezaker is fascinated by the power of images and questions the authority of pictures found in books, magazines, postcards and encyclopaedias by directly intervening into their ordinary status. Through the handcrafted act of splicing together, inverting, or simply adjusting an image Stezaker embarks upon ‘a process that cuts it off from its disappearance into the everyday world’.

The collaged works shown here, taken from his City, Mask and Reparation series, have a playful and dreamlike presence reminiscent of the uncanny quality of Surrealist works. Through processes of deconstruction and reassemblage, Stezaker offers a fragmented and mediated experience of the world that creates a strange and disjointed reality.

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(Yes, I know. I’ve posted things about either Miranda or the Blow on a seemingly bi-weekly basis ever since Your Daily Awesome launched. But they’re major talents, and a lot of this site’s readers [myself included] are fans. Even so, I’m thinking this might be overkill, but I’m posting it anyway. It’s a good interview.—Chas)

MIRANDA JULY: Another beautifully sad lyric on that record is the one that goes, “If something in the deli aisle makes you cry…”

KHAELA MARICICH: What’s funny is that I made that up in my head around you.

MJ: Really?

KM: Yeah, we were in the Whole Foods, when I was visiting you in Portland one time, and I was staring at the overwhelming mass of all the food, kind of personal but really so impersonal. I had that really overwhelmed feeling; just wanting someone to come up and see that, and see me, and see that they should walk me outside.

MJ: Right, but I guess I didn’t walk you outside, did I? That’s not the punch line: you were waiting and then I walked you out? You probably didn’t even tell me.

KM: I don’t think I would have taken the risk to expect that from you at that point. I think my eyes were a little watery, and I was like, “Do you ever want someone to walk you out the door? Just put their arm around you and walk you out?”

MJ: I was probably like, “Get it together, Khaela!”

KM: You were just like, “We need food.”

MJ: That’s so funny, because I’ve imagined those two women in the deli aisle. So just say the lyrics so we have it.

KM: [in a normal speaking voice] If there’s something in the deli aisle that makes you cry / You know I’ll put my arm around you and walk you outside / through the sliding doors / Why would I mind?

MJ: OK, but you sing it much less flip. I love the “why would I mind?” part. It implies that someone else is saying “Do you mind doing this for me? Is this OK?” That’s the part that breaks my heart, because it’s very female to feel like that’s too much to ask.

KM: Yeah, yeah, totally.

MJ: Even in your fantasies there’s an implicit apology. That’s the extra part that you probably don’t even think about, I’m guessing. I don’t, when I’m writing. When people ask me, “Is there a female point of view in your work?” I’m always like, I don’t know. I’m just me, and am I even human? But when I heard that line, I was like, Oh, no guy would have that fantasy of someone saying, “Why would I mind?”

KM: It seems like a lot to ask.

MJ: Yeah, it’s so much to ask! [Both laugh]

read the whole interview
photograph of Khaela by yours truly

A fascinating video portrait of a man who makes prosthetic eyeballs for a living.
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“The Ring” by Swedish collective Masquerade
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After beginning his working life as a printer’s apprentice, Louis Crucius (or Crusius) completed the necessary requirements to graduate as a pharmacist in 1882 and a doctor in 1890 in St Louis, Missouri. While he was studying he worked in a pharmacy and made humorous sketches that were placed in the window of the store. A collection of these drawings was published in 1893 (’Funny Bones’).

30 of the Crucius ‘dance of death’-inspired drawings were used to make 5 years worth of Antikamnia Chemical Company calendars - between 1897 and 1901. They had a fairly aggressive marketing campaign in which the calendars (aimed at the medical fraternity) as well as postcards and sample packs were distributed to doctors in the United States and overseas.

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