She Blogged By Night

The 15th Annual Buster Keaton Celebration is Friday, September 28 and Saturday, September 29, at the Bowlus Fine Art Center in Iola, Kansas.

Buster Keaton was born October 4, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas. Piqua (pronounced "pee-quay") is a tiny town in southeast Kansas. In 1895 it was a railroad stop with a large hotel. Like many small town railroad stops, the hotel featured variety and Vaudeville shows. Joe Keaton and his wife Myra didn't live in Piqua, they were performers in a medicine show that happened to stop in town on October 4th of that year; Myra missed performing that night, as she wound up giving birth to little Joseph Frank Keaton. Keaton's father later recalled the medicine show was moved from the hotel to the "Catholic hall", due to a tornado that ripped through town the day Buster was born.

As a child, Buster was no stranger to accidents and falls. After a few minor injuries at work, his parents decided to keep him home with a guardian instead of taking him along to the theater. In one day Buster seriously injured his head and hands in separate falls, and then was unceremoniously whisked up by a tornado. The tornado thankfully plopped him down unharmed several yards away, but it was enough to make his parents change their minds: Buster was obviously safer on stage. At the age of three he began his act, being tossed and tumbled around the stage by what the New York Telegraph in 1909 called "a merciless father". This background provided Keaton with his trademark physical comedy, as seen in this still from "Steamboat Bill, Jr." (1928).

Keaton's legacy will be celebrated during the two-day festival in Iola, which is just a few miles from Keaton's birthplace in Piqua. The hotel is no longer in Piqua, having long been replaced by the co-op, but a field dedicated to his memory, along with a plaque and a small museum, mark Piqua's most famous son. Iola has held the Keaton Festival since 1993.

Links & Credit:
The Buster Keaton Museum
The 15th Annual Keaton Celebration
The Official Iola Keaton Celebration Site
Damfinos: The International Buster Keaton Society
Keaton and Chaney photo courtesy amy_jeanne at LiveJournal

This year's alt.movies.silent benefit calendar is on sale now! The amazing Rodney Sauer of The Mont Alto Picture Orchestra has organized the calendar every year since 2003, with profits going to benefit various silent film preservation projects. You can pre-order the calendar here.



The calendar began as part of a fund-raising project on alt.movies.silent, the Usenet group dedicated to silent movie discussion. While it's still officially the AMS calendar, it has become a favorite of silent film fans all over the Internet, not just denizens of Usenet. The calendar is always stunning, and is filled with important silent-era dates. Each month features gorgeous photographs provided by collectors of silent film memorabilia. Previous years proceeds have gone to the UCLA Film Archive, Library of Congress, Film Preservation Associates, and the George Eastman House. Buy your calendar now!

She Blogged By Night is my personal blog, a record of my journey through films and culture, focusing on lesser-known and hard to find films.

SBBN is a low-traffic blog. Begun on September 24, 2007, on January 1, 2009 SBBN had received over 36,700 unique visitors, and on January 23, 2010 it had received 125,218. It gets on average 165 unique hits per day, 350 on days I manage to post something. Ahem. Many visitors come via Google Image Searches.

POSTS:

There will be spoilers.

The content on SBBN is not intended to be neutral, it is intended to reflect my opinion and observation.

SBBN has one primary goal: To provide information on rare, hard to find, or forgotten films. Secondary goals include various film projects of mine, galleries of photos and screencaps, as well as brief posts on recently watched films. The categories of posts on SBBN are:

• Executive Summaries: Summaries with a bit of reflection and review in them, along with screencaps, photos, links, and even research information if I have the time or ability. I call them "executive summary" posts because they are usually very long, the exact opposite of what an executive summary should be, which I think is funny. Such is my sense of humor. These summaries are not intended as full fledged reviews unless specifically noted, so please keep the bitchy comments about how I don't do a proper review to yourself.


• Recently Watched: Self-explanatory. I try to avoid spoilers in these.


• Projects: As of January, 2010 I have 2 official projects, The Marie Prevost Project and The Bette Davis Project. A couple more projects will be introduced this year. Follow the tags on the sidebar to see all posts for a specific project.


• Photo Galleries: Dude, I have a metric freakload of pictures. Sometimes I just have to post a bunch of them to get them out of my pending list.


• Screencaps: Some with quotes, some without. The movies in my screencap posts are always films I enjoy. The quotes accompanying the screencaps may not seem like they're positive, but they are intended to be.


• Halloween: I post something every day during the month of October. The first year was 2009, and I swear to you I actually lost readers when I posted every day. Let's see if we can repeat that in 2010, shall we?

Hello, and welcome to She Blogged By Night. I'm your host, Stacia. You may know me from such blogs as LiveJournal and Food & Movies, as well as the darker corners of Usenet. While I enjoyed posting on Food & Movies quite a bit in the last few months, I decided I needed a real, permanent, official, oh-yeah-that's-the-stuff blog... and that's why I'm here.

She Blogged By Night will focus mainly on film. I've got some exciting stuff in store: posts I hope you will like and a fabulous new look, too. Some posts from my previous blog will end up here eventually, but I plan to create new content as much as possible. Stick around!