Over at my Pegasus Pulp blog, I have a post on the renaissance of short fiction, inspired by a recent New York Times article on the subject.
The Huffington Post has a great article by Caribbean writer Karen Lord about being a writer from an other culture. Found via SF Signal.
The Golden and Silver Bears have been awarded at the Berlin film festival. This year saw lots of wins for Eastern European films. For example, the Golden Bear, i.e. the main prize, went to the Romanian film Pozitia Copilului (The Child’s Pose), while the grand prize of the jury and the award for the best actor both went to the Bosnian film Epizoda u životu bera?a željeza (An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker). The award for the best actress went to the Chilean film Gloria, which is apparently a feel-good film about women enjoying life after fifty. The full list of winners may be found here.
Actually, these results show exactly why I like the Berlin film festival, namely because it tends to award truly unusual films from countries that are not normally places that come to mind as cinematic superpowers, whereas Cannes and Venice tend to go for the predictable and award whichever big art house director is presenting his latest oevre at the festival. Meanwhile, Berlin gives the Golden Bear to a Romanian film and the best actor award to a Bosnian Romani who is not professional actor at all but a guy makes his living collecting scrap metal, while big art house names like Gus van Sant (who did win both the Golden Bear and also the Teddy Award for the best GLBT film in the past) or Ulrich Seidel go home with an honourable mention (van Sant’s film about fracking) or empty-ended (Seidel).
British actor Peter Gilmore died last week aged 81. He was best known for playing Captain James Onedin in the BBC series The Onedin Line, which is a personal favourite of mine and still the benchmark against which I measure subsequent costume dramas. And the fact that I like The Onedin Line and current fare like The Paradise so much more than I ever liked the more popular Upstairs, Downstairs and Donwton Abbey also helped me to realize that I vastly prefer historical drama about people finding wealth and success by their own work (hence I adore The Onedin Line about a Liverpool sea captain turned shipping magnate and The Paradise about a luxury department store in Liverpool) to historical drama about rich people being rich and snotty and their servants being servile. Of course, it didn’t hurt either that Peter Gilmore was very handsome and that The Onedin Line had lots of wonderful footage of historical ships.
The obituary in The Telegraph reveals that Peter Gilmore was married to Anne Stallybras who played his wife in The Onedin Line. This pleases me quite a bit, because they always made such a lovely couple on TV.
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God, the Onedin Line. Yes! And Silas Marner or whatever that series was called…
I was a huge fan of The Onedin Line back in the day. It still holds up remarkably well, too, or at least it did when NDR reran some episodes a while back.