The Friday 10/15/2021

Lou Reed: The Velvet Underground (Apple TV+)

My piece for the Scarecrow blog this week, and etc.

The Velvet Underground. “What Haynes is really conjuring here is a kind of utopia, a realm in which art is devoured and created and shared.”

We’re in the midst of another Scarecrow Academy semester – a free online discussion series (no homework involved) presented by Scarecrow Video; the subject is “The Art in Noir: Film Noir and the Director (Part 2).” We convene on Saturday, Oct. 16th, at 2 pm Pacific Time, for a talk about Ida Lupino’s 1953 The Hitch-Hiker, with some mention of our second feature, the 1960 Twilight Zone episode, also titled The Hitch-Hiker (but unrelated to Lupino’s film). It’s free, and you can sign up on the Academy page. I intro the event here:

Two additions to my other website, What a Feeling!, this week: vintage 1980s reviews of Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, offered in the spirit of William Shatner’s real-world voyage into space; and Richard Loncraine’s Brimstone & Treacle, a Dennis Potter script starring Sting.