Brendan Kredell

Month: November 2017

  • Overheard on a Disneyworld shuttle bus: near-insurrection over the lack of order to the theme park experience. Hard not to hear echoes of broader political currents: substitute “fast passes” & “shuttle buses” for “health care” & “tax reform,” & it’s basically the same argument.

  • Following up on a student question from today, I spent some time reading the research errata at the @ctrvisualmusic website. Were it that every research field had such a comprehensive, accessible web resource. http://bit.ly/2hFeN2l

  • In the same vein: I’m not the type to fastidiously check Google Doodles, but this summer’s Oskar Fischinger project is pretty cool. https://www.google.com/doodles/oskar-fischingers-117th-birthday

  • Prepping for class tomorrow, rewatching Florey & Vorkapich’s *The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra*. A bonkers film. Kudos to Brian Taves @librarycongress, for pointing out the work of a 23-yr old Gregg Toland on camera. http://bit.ly/2zU7tKr

  • Listening to (terrestrial) radio at home in 2017 is not as easy as I figured it would be. I’m going to have to exhume something from my basement to make this work…

  • This is the reel with the FBI’s files on Chaplin…

  • Reading through some of the “reviews” written by FBI agents on the hunt for communist influences in mid-century Hollywood films. Even in the glory days of film criticism, it must have been tough to get a job you could feel happy about.

  • (N.B. that’s only counting cities on the Woodward corridor: Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge, Huntington Woods, Berkley, Royal Oak, Birmingham, Bloomfield Township, Bloomfield Hills, Pontiac.)

  • Correlation of Yes votes from Oakland County on 2016 @RTAMichigan ballot question to distance from bus stop at Woodward/8 Mile: r= -0.64. Pontiac is the outlier; eliminate it from the analysis and the correlation between distance and support was -0.91.