very interesting looking Blast of Silence on TCM late tomorrow....

Having to work within the thinnest of shoestring budgets, Baron elected to use, as few filmmakers had before, the expressive potential of New York City; bringing his camera into the streets of midtown Manhattan at Christmastime, to Rockefeller Center, Harlem, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. Whether it was a conscious strategy or the result of having no resources to create a setting for his tale from scratch, this unglamorous, rather desolate photography of the city by Merrill S. Brody (who also acted as the film's producer) worked immeasurably to Baron's advantage. Indeed, as a directorial debut, Blast of Silence is an altogether prodigious achievement...

& earlier, Sean Connery & a crack team of UK thesps chew the scenery old-school in Sidney Lumet's super-intense WWll brig opera

The Hill, quite possibly the shoutiest movie ever made...

Dirt Dogs and Jinegar: A New Baseball Dictionary--

Baseball slang is an avalanche of skewed logic. The commonest words take
on very precise meanings. "Stuff" refers quite specifically to the
totality of a pitcher's arsenal: his array of pitches and the velocity
and movement with which he throws them. A pitcher can easily have good
stuff but not succeed if his "command"--the ability to locate pitches
accurately--is erratic. Terms associated with dirt and filth are highly
complimentary. A hitter respectfully calls an excellent pitcher
"filthy," a term that evolved out of common adjectives from a decade
ago: "nasty" and "dirty." "Dirtbags" and "dirt dogs" are consummate
hustlers, guys with perpetually soiled uniforms and caps and batting
helmets stained with sweat, tobacco juice and pine tar. Naturally,
dirtbags and dirt dogs play "dirtball." A player who is "pretty" is the
opposite of a dirtbag, as is a "muffin." Food references are as
prevalent as the television announcers who longingly mention the
hallowed postgame buffet in the players' clubhouse. The ball itself can
be an egg, apricot, apple or stitched potato. "Jelly beans" are rookies
and inexperienced kids, the type a veteran might relentlessly call bush
for a year before acknowledging him properly. Reaching base for your
team's big hitters is "setting the table." "Fat" pitches are hittable
ones, almost exclusively delectable treats, my favorite being
"ham-and-cheese." And then there's the colorful (although unfortunately
out of fashion) term for pep or spirit: "jinegar." Forms of kinship lurk
suggestively, with positive connotations only for the hitter. Batters
aspire to find their "cousin," the pitcher they manage to hit
inexplicably well. In the early 2000s the Yankees' weak-hitting utility
infielder Enrique Wilson found an unlikely cousin in the Red Sox's
masterful Pedro Martínez, and Pedro's tough luck against the
Yankees culminated in his admitting in an infamous interview that the
Yanks were his "daddy." It was a rare moment of hearing baseball slang
invented in real time...

don't miss the chance to hear the complete Warner Brothers recordings of Richard Pryor...

excerpt--

That N**ger's Crazy album (Part 1)

via Carl Wilson: Everything Tracy Jordan Said

“Petey Pete, for letting us use the sound booth, please accept this chinchilla coat.”

“Look. I grew up here, Larry, in the days before Starbuck. And if Wall
St crashes, it’ll be the 1970’s all over again. People will get mean.
The streets won’t be safe. It’ll be graffiti everywhere. And the movies
will only cost 3 dollars.”

Viva El Indio

Few recognize that the lusty, predatory Mapache was played by an incredibly important figure in the Mexican film industry — actor/director Emilio Fernandez. Fernandez not only spear-headed the Golden Age of Mexican cinema by directing a powerful series of films during the early 1940s but he had actually participated in the tail end of his country’s revolutionary period in the early 1920s. In other words, Fernandez lived long and large, with his life and career spanning the real history of the revolution to a fictionalized version of it...

Local trees

a great one on on TCM this pm...Robert Mitchum & Susan Hayward in The Lusty Men (1952, Nicholas Ray)