Agent Palmer

Joseph Ferdinand Cheval was a French postman who spent 33 years building Le Palais idéal (the “Ideal Palace”) in Hauterives, France.

The building began in earnest in April 1879, at first with stones from his pocket. It gradually moved to stones in a basket and eventually included a wheelbarrow to move larger stones. It took him 33 years to build the palace, 20 of which were spent on the outer walls alone. From one stone to another along his postal route, he collected them while thinking to himself, “Since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture.”

Beginning with the heart-wrenching bus accident that claimed the life of Cliff Burton and then chronicling the band and its many players through the release of Death Magnetic, Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica by Mick Wall is brilliant.

Who better than Mick Wall, as classic a name in Rock journalism as there is, to chronicle the life and times of one of the biggest bands in the world.

Recently, I stumbled upon an amazing documentary housed in an equally brilliant site: Clouds Over Cuba which is hosted at www.cloudsovercuba.com. It’s been around for a while and was produced by The Martin Agency.

The documentary is an “interactive multimedia documentary” of the Cuban Missile Crisis, narrated by Matthew Modine, conceptualized by The Martin Agency and created by Brian Williams, Wade Alger, Joe Alexander, and Ben Tricklebank on behalf of The JFK Presidential Library.

It’s a movie that changed film making, ushering in a new era of computers and as the film tagline said, “an adventure 65 million years in the making.” Jurassic Park was released on June 11, 1993 to rave reviews by critics and the public alike. This PG-13 movie captured the hearts and minds of everyone, their children and their inner childs.

The beginning narration to the “Making of” special was done by James Earl Jones, and he stated, “With Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg recalled from extinction the greatest creatures our planet has ever known. Reborn before our eyes were living, breathing dinosaurs.” I couldn’t have written it any better myself.