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July 20, 2011
Today, Yesterday, Los Angeles: Pitches, Dreams, Log Lines, Drive & Money.
Alien, 1979, directed by Ridley Scott: "Jaws" in outer space.
Stills, 1989, novel by Samuel Hazo: Years after a celebrated war photographer loses his young wife to a stray bullet in Lebanon, disappears, and is presumed dead, he surfaces in Manhattan, and meets a young woman making a documentary about his life and work.
The Wizard of Oz, 1939, directed by Victor Fleming: Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2011
Washington, DC: It Never Lost Its Glow For Me. Not Once.
Law is the ultimate backstage pass. It's the new priesthood.
Make fun of D.C. all you want; but if you've never spent 3 to 4 years here, and ideally working and living downtown, you did miss something. Never a mere technician, a good Washington, D.C. lawyer is a thinker, doer, creator, planner, problem-solver, consiligere and true trusted adviser. And no lover of routine. His or her firm is not just a shop--but a laboratory for new ideas. Not for law cattle practicing cookie-cutter law.
The range of things lawyers do here is amazing. The variety alone can suck you in forever; each morning, it fires the imagination.
And I'm happily prejudiced. I was born here. I trained, worked and still live part-time here. I made lifetime friends and enemies here. But you won't meet better lawyers. Or people.
"Aggressive", generally, is a very good thing in this city.
"Professionalism" means putting clients first--not wimpy cocktail party civility that is "all about the lawyers" and the many local bar associations that straddle the area. Swearing--and even insults--here are often okay. Not unprofessional. It's not about the lawyers.
Screwing up is never okay. Very unprofessional. Folks won't tend to hide that for you. You're own your own, Jack. Try not to screw up. So sorry; we won't coddle your malpractice here. Go back home for that charade.
Lawyers are everywhere here; it's not enough just to be one. No one cares you're lawyer. They ask themselves--and the bolder ones will even ask you directly--this question: how good a lawyer are you really? Pecking order is complex, nuanced and important.
Talented and feisty folks choose to move to Washington; they are not "stuck" here, or here by default. The city brims over with energy and personality. A rich library of people with moxie and talent.
from past posts beginning June 2006
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Picasso, Guernica and the German Officer: "Did you paint this?"
Here's a WWII story I first heard in 1992 in Paris from a struggling young Irish painter named Richard hustling his drinks and a living by his wit, humor, charm and talent on a few choice blocks of the Right Bank. I never found out what happened to Richard. But ever since I've thought about this simple and apparently fairly well-known Picasso story at least once a week, and especially lately.
Thinking about the story accelerated in 2005.
In the Fall of that year, Julie McGuire and I were together in Madrid. We made time to see Guernica, very likely Pablo Picasso's most famous painting, and some other great modern Spanish works, at the Museo Reina Sofia in central Madrid. Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 after both German and Italian bombers shelled Guernica, in Spain's Basque Country, on April 26 of that year, during the Spanish Civil War. The bombing by Germany and Italy happened at the request of Spanish Nationalist forces. The painting is an outcry, protest and lament of the self-assured, polite, smooth and famously composed Picasso.
The smallest details of the story seem to change. But historians and journalists seem to agree on the following:
In 1942, during the 1940-1944 German occupation of Paris, German officers often visited Picasso's Paris studio at a time when some of his paintings were being burned as decadent. On one visit, an aggressive Gestapo officer found a simple postcard with an image of Guernica in the studio. The officer confronted the painter, and held before Picasso's face the postcard with its breathtaking indictments of war, national pride, meaningless death, pointless suffering, waste, government hypocrisy, inflamed leadership and self-destruction.
"Did you do this?", the officer asked.
“No, sir. You did."
(from a 6/1/11 JDH post)
Posted by Holden Oliver (Kitzbühel Desk) at 03:31 AM | Comments (0)
John Herschel Glenn, Jr: Happy Birthday to a Crowdpleaser's Crowdpleaser.
This, Willy Loman, is what well-liked looks like. Twelve years after his 1962 earth orbits, John Glenn began to represent Ohio in the Senate. No one I know can remember anything he did in those 4 terms. But he didn't need to do anything. My fellow Buckeye was hands down the the most popular American from 1962 until 1999, his last year in Congress. He out-Iked Ike, and even seized upon the power of television before JFK. Ballsy. Unflappable. Our only Superstar Astronaut.
Born July 18, 1921, Cambridge, Ohio.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:32 AM | Comments (0)