– Do you play? – Try me.

“Roy, this is the land of milk and honey for the health racket. Every woman in California thinks she's either too fat or too thin or too something.”

– 'Doc' Banton

A mathematics focused movie for National Mathematics Day, India.

 

Mahagonny is filmmaker, artist, musicologist, and alchemist Harry Smith's mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp's masterpiece La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even], aka Le Grand Verre [The Large Glass], which was completed in 1923. It is set to Brecht and Weill's opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny [Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny] from 1930, which was an opera Smith was obsessed with while living in New York's Chelsea Hotel.

“My cinematic excreta is of four varieties:–batiked abstractions made directly on film between 1939 and 1946; optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950; semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962; and chronologically superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and they should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever—they made me gray.”

– Harry Smith, via

Read an interview with Jonas Mekas about Harry Smith and his Mahagonny.

“We say hip, hooray, Hip, hip hooray, For fat!”

– Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, The Fat Song

The main character is a “short girl” [I do not agree with the infantilizing wording] on Short Girl Appreciation Day, USA.

The great Gloria Swanson (4'11” – 5ft 2 / 1,49 m) – fabulously decked out by Edith Head (5'1” / 1,55 m) with an endless parade of platform shoes – in Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950).

“I am big. It's the pictures that got small.”

– Norma Desmond

Also starring, Buster Keaton, who was 5'5” / 1,65 m.

– This guy's got a lot of class.

– Yeah? If he's got so much class, what's he doin' with you?

Filmed in Alabama: Alabama Day. In what he dubbed “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”, George Wallace, Alabama governor, blocked Black students from walking into the University so he could uphold his inaugural promise of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. This prompted a national crisis, resulting in the President issuing Executive Order 11111, making the #NationalGuard step in.

“Come Senators, Congressmen, Please heed the call, Don't stand in the doorway, Don't block up the hall”

– Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin (1964)

In a then-groundbreaking new documentary format, Robert Drew and associates followed President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the crisis. And they filmed everything; from tense phone calls, private discussions, private moments (one of RFK's daughters on the phone with a bemused “Kerry”, Dept. Nicholas Katzenbach), and many, many shots in which nothing – which is everything – is said.

The National Guard shows up: U.S. National Guard Birthday, USA.

A European camera crew follows a diverse group of American minor dissidents – pacifists, feminists, communists – who are given the choice to spend decades in federal prison, or three days in Bear Mountain Punishment Park, chased by National Guardsmen and law enforcement officers. If they manage to capture the American flag, they're free to go.

“America is as psychotic as it is powerful and violence is the only goddamn thing that will command your attention.”

– Defendant Lee Robert Brown

While the washed-out 16mm footage and references to #Nixon may tell you otherwise, Punishment Park remains a gut-punching portrait of a timeless America.

… for keeping the girls away.

 

Someone has bad breath on National 12-hour Fresh Breath Day, USA. “When he shows the 1978 film Always for Pleasure, about the food, music and indigenous culture of New Orleans, [Les Blank] has been known to whip up a pot of red beans and rice in the back of the theatre. [cont. below]

“Can you smell the garlic?”

– Alice Waters. During screenings, the audience would reply with “YES!”

“At presentations […] Blank can occasionally be spied tossing several heads of garlic into a toaster oven so that the aroma wafts over the audience at just the right mouth-watering moment.” (via)

“I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.”

– Waldo Lydecker