We wanted publicly to thank Lazarus ("Laz") West, our all-time favorite paparazzo (yup, that includes Marcello Mastroianni), for his excellent work on our new banner.So this is what a facelift feels like.
Laz managed to encapsulate the entire ethos of our blog with that image of the cat using a corncob as a scratching post. It tells you everything you need to know.
And what we know is that we are very grateful indeed.
¡Gracias, Laz!
8 comments:
My pleasure!!
Love it!
Not to be a bitch, but Marcello Mastroianni didn't play a paparazzo. There was a character in La Dolce Vita named Paparazzo; he was the photographer who went around with Mastroianni, and his name is where we get the word from.
Does this mean Laz is a Blog Plastic Surgeon? The Nip/Tuck of the digerati? Shall we call you Sean or Christian, which do you prefer? Excellent work, looking forward to much more.
It looks awesome. Great work, Laz.
It works on so many levels. It's like a metaphor, cubed.
Yay!
Conor, possum, fear not; you are not being a bitch (but even if you were, this is definitely the right blog for it).
I'm delighted that you caught the Fellini reference. I've seen the film a number of times (I even own the soundtrack), and I enjoy it, though I have a difficult time taking it seriously. (It's rather difficult to be convinced of the horrors of soullessness and decadence when the soulless and decadent look so damned good in sunglasses at night, or when their "self-exposure" is scored to anything as jaunty as Perez Prado's "Patricia." But I digress.)
As for the substance of your comment, you are absolutely correct that Mastroianni did not play Paparazzo. Mastroianni's photographer adjunct was played by Walter Santesso.
Where we disagree is on whether Marcello is a paparazzo. I believe that he is, despite not being the one wielding the camera. If Harvey Levin and a TMZ cameraman are standing outside Les Deux waiting for Britney Spears to come out, Harvey Levin is no less a paparazzo because he isn't handling the camera.
From the opening helicopter sequence, to the Via Veneto scenes, the gallivanting with Anita Ekberg, and the investigation of the spurious "miracle," Marcello is a "reporter" on the trail of the sensational and superficial. That is consistent with my understanding of what a paparazzo does. Professor Kemmer, a linguistics professor at Rice, uses this definition: "A reporter or photographer, esp. a free-lance one, who doggedly searches for sensational stories about or takes candid pictures of celebrities for magazines and newspapers."
I think that suits Marcello.
At any rate, I'm just glad that Amuse-Biatch has such literate readers. Thanks for reading, possum, and don't hesitate to call us out when you think we've made a mistake.
You will get no argument from me about Marcello's soullessness (a word that might have been coined by Colicchio for Hung!), though the final shot of the young girl from the country restaurant smiling at him across the inlet gives me the impression that he at least wants to find something more meaningful than sensational, but I still think that even if the term paparazzo can be applied to reporters like Marcello now, he wasn't one in the movie. Because, you know, there was no such thing as paparazzi, just one Paparazzo.
I love that there is a reality show blog on which I can debate semantics and Italian post-neorealist cinema.
Post a Comment