Looking forward to the past here
I am in favor of guillotines this evening.
I woke up sicker than when I went to bed. My plans for today reduced to visit pharmacy, otherwise try not to move. Visiting the pharmacy turned out to entail having to catch a taxi, thanks to the present inadequacies of the MBTA. I arrived at the pharmacy to discover that the medication I was hoping to start tonight was not covered by my insurance, which no one from the pharmacy had mentioned when calling this afternoon to tell me it was ready to pick up. Out of pocket, it's unaffordable. I would not have left the house if I had known. I would have stayed literally in bed. I would not have waited in the cold or burnt equally unaffordable money on a taxi. I left the pharmacy without my medication and caught the first bus home. I feel much worse than when I went out and I don't have the medication I was hoping to take in order to feel better.
I think it would be fun to live in a society that doesn't treat me, both general and specific, as so carelessly disposable. Under the circumstances, I've got links and a fever and that's basically it.
1. I read this article on Egon Schiele back-to-back with this article on Hilma af Klint. The past isn't dead, etc. I might as well add this article on Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Kasimir Malevich.
I hadn't known, and can't believe I didn't know, that Chagall was involved in An-sky's ethnographic work in the Pale of Settlement. It makes sense in the way that feels like secret history: what else for an artist so strongly identified with that vanished world of The Dybbuk and Fiddler on the Roof? It made me think of the last gesture of the NYTF's Fidler afn dakh, how the eponymous fiddler plays Tevye's family out of town until the very last jaunty sob of the strings, when Tevye gives a nod and the fiddler with his cap and his long coat and his violin tucked under his arm runs to follow them offstage. He's the tradition. Of course he travels with them. (Thank God, there is going to be a cast album. I can't wait.)
That in turn reminds me that the one thing we didn't do at the Hanukkah party was watch Lights (1984), the short animated TV special that starred the voices of Judd Hirsch and Leonard Nimoy and formed my first ideas of the holiday. Judaism there, Jewish culture, is represented as fire-flickering letters of the Hebrew abjad which drift like sparks from the pages of books and the wicks of candles and the music of a flute, shimmering steadily in the seven branches of the menorah. Hellenic culture is gold letters of the Greek alphabet that chime and gleam when shared freely in the time of Alexander but clank dully when thrown to replace the snuffed-out lights in the time of his successors. It's a small, simple, strong-colored version of the story with almost no names, not even the Maccabees, just the lights and the Greeks and the people of Jerusalem. A brother and sister and their family, an old scholar, a shepherd, an impressionable young man who lets himself become complicit in the eradication of his culture until the moment before the darkened menorah when he's made to choose between a Greek sword and the red-gold little aleph that bats anxiously about his shoulders like a heartbeat; he catches the light in his hands to keep it safe and runs. It is the same living light that will make a sealed flask shine from within when all the rest have poured out dead cold Greek-gold letters. "So, every year, about the time when all these things happened, there's a festival of lights." It holds the important points of the story for me.
2. I feel weirdly vindicated by this exhaustively researched article on the awful object at the heart of Richard Fleischer's Follow Me Quietly (1949). Among other things, it confirms that there was a deliberate pattern of obsession and identity and doubling present in the original script; most of it was stripped out in successive drafts, resulting the metaphorically fractured movie I watched last month. It interests me that although the word golem did not survive the rewrites, the sense of the thing itself did. I may agree with the authors that even though the dummy-comes-to-life scene would have made a hell of a lot more sense in its original context, it's a more effective example of the uncanny without it.
While I am thinking about noir: I wouldn't have been able to make any of the screenings, but I'm glad Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) has finally gotten its well-deserved restoration, even if it wasn't by the Film Noir Foundation. I am still inclined to feel that the cheaply beat-up print I saw at the Brattle in 2016 was existentially the right way to see it.
3. Because Tumblr has not yet turned out itsnipples lights, I fell down a brief rabbit hole in the course of which I ran into an excerpt from a letter by Vera Brittain to her brother Edward in 1917. I understand I may be blowing past the point of the post, but I couldn't help being arrested by the line "But where you and I are concerned, sex by itself doesn't interest us unless it is united with brains and personality; in fact we tend to think of the latter first and the person's sex afterwards." Please tell me some biographer has unpacked this. It may or may not have turned out to be true of Brittain's brother, but I assume she would know when speaking of herself. It is the kind of statement I am inclined to believe, anyway. I just usually don't see people making it outside the internet or my family.
4. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust: this photoset from CBS' Beauty and the Beast (1987–90) does in fact look like an anime I would watch. Should I try to watch the episode instead?
5. I am not sure how I missed an article about a Russian fishing village being slowly swallowed by sand.
P.S. Tom Cruise vs. motion smoothing.
I wish my ideas for the evening were not so thoroughly, after the guillotines, go back to bed.
I woke up sicker than when I went to bed. My plans for today reduced to visit pharmacy, otherwise try not to move. Visiting the pharmacy turned out to entail having to catch a taxi, thanks to the present inadequacies of the MBTA. I arrived at the pharmacy to discover that the medication I was hoping to start tonight was not covered by my insurance, which no one from the pharmacy had mentioned when calling this afternoon to tell me it was ready to pick up. Out of pocket, it's unaffordable. I would not have left the house if I had known. I would have stayed literally in bed. I would not have waited in the cold or burnt equally unaffordable money on a taxi. I left the pharmacy without my medication and caught the first bus home. I feel much worse than when I went out and I don't have the medication I was hoping to take in order to feel better.
I think it would be fun to live in a society that doesn't treat me, both general and specific, as so carelessly disposable. Under the circumstances, I've got links and a fever and that's basically it.
1. I read this article on Egon Schiele back-to-back with this article on Hilma af Klint. The past isn't dead, etc. I might as well add this article on Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Kasimir Malevich.
I hadn't known, and can't believe I didn't know, that Chagall was involved in An-sky's ethnographic work in the Pale of Settlement. It makes sense in the way that feels like secret history: what else for an artist so strongly identified with that vanished world of The Dybbuk and Fiddler on the Roof? It made me think of the last gesture of the NYTF's Fidler afn dakh, how the eponymous fiddler plays Tevye's family out of town until the very last jaunty sob of the strings, when Tevye gives a nod and the fiddler with his cap and his long coat and his violin tucked under his arm runs to follow them offstage. He's the tradition. Of course he travels with them. (Thank God, there is going to be a cast album. I can't wait.)
That in turn reminds me that the one thing we didn't do at the Hanukkah party was watch Lights (1984), the short animated TV special that starred the voices of Judd Hirsch and Leonard Nimoy and formed my first ideas of the holiday. Judaism there, Jewish culture, is represented as fire-flickering letters of the Hebrew abjad which drift like sparks from the pages of books and the wicks of candles and the music of a flute, shimmering steadily in the seven branches of the menorah. Hellenic culture is gold letters of the Greek alphabet that chime and gleam when shared freely in the time of Alexander but clank dully when thrown to replace the snuffed-out lights in the time of his successors. It's a small, simple, strong-colored version of the story with almost no names, not even the Maccabees, just the lights and the Greeks and the people of Jerusalem. A brother and sister and their family, an old scholar, a shepherd, an impressionable young man who lets himself become complicit in the eradication of his culture until the moment before the darkened menorah when he's made to choose between a Greek sword and the red-gold little aleph that bats anxiously about his shoulders like a heartbeat; he catches the light in his hands to keep it safe and runs. It is the same living light that will make a sealed flask shine from within when all the rest have poured out dead cold Greek-gold letters. "So, every year, about the time when all these things happened, there's a festival of lights." It holds the important points of the story for me.
2. I feel weirdly vindicated by this exhaustively researched article on the awful object at the heart of Richard Fleischer's Follow Me Quietly (1949). Among other things, it confirms that there was a deliberate pattern of obsession and identity and doubling present in the original script; most of it was stripped out in successive drafts, resulting the metaphorically fractured movie I watched last month. It interests me that although the word golem did not survive the rewrites, the sense of the thing itself did. I may agree with the authors that even though the dummy-comes-to-life scene would have made a hell of a lot more sense in its original context, it's a more effective example of the uncanny without it.
While I am thinking about noir: I wouldn't have been able to make any of the screenings, but I'm glad Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) has finally gotten its well-deserved restoration, even if it wasn't by the Film Noir Foundation. I am still inclined to feel that the cheaply beat-up print I saw at the Brattle in 2016 was existentially the right way to see it.
3. Because Tumblr has not yet turned out its
4. Courtesy of
handful_ofdust: this photoset from CBS' Beauty and the Beast (1987–90) does in fact look like an anime I would watch. Should I try to watch the episode instead?5. I am not sure how I missed an article about a Russian fishing village being slowly swallowed by sand.
P.S. Tom Cruise vs. motion smoothing.
I wish my ideas for the evening were not so thoroughly, after the guillotines, go back to bed.
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*hugs* Fuck eeeeverything. Except that cast album.
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It is not an inhaler, unfortunately for this plan: it was a kind of combination topical anaesthetic and anti-inflammatory for use on my sore throat, which I was really looking forward to. I have no idea who manufactures it and I am unclear on my insurance's excuse for not covering it, since I really don't think I could have mixed myself up an over-the-counter equivalent without at least access to your bitters. It has become obvious over the last two weeks that I cannot achieve the same results with hot herbal tea and honey.
Fuck eeeeverything. Except that cast album.
*hugs*
Amen.
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If you pass out while building your portable holiday guillotine, because you're sick, you will at least wake up to a decent sized fragment. I am not all entropy.
*hugs*
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I have no idea. I'm not sure I've ever tried it. Cepacol and menthol both make my mouth itch.
If you pass out while building your portable holiday guillotine, because you're sick, you will at least wake up to a decent sized fragment. I am not all entropy.
You aren't entropy at all. It just seems to fall on your life, in the form of laundry and dudes on public transit, with unnecessary frequency.
Thank you.
*hugs*
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*sends immature bitters just in case* This jar is in no way prone to catching available oxygen on fire when opened. Reports have been exaggerated.
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An extremely important specification.
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Let us spray.
...all over my monitor
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It has variable writing, but the actors carried it well, and of course there's Roy Dotrice...
I hope you feel better soon!
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I have never seen any of the show, and in fact know relatively little about it compared to some other retellings of the story. Based on the evidence of the photoset, however, I agree with you about the hair.
Unfortunately the stills are from the third season.
Alas.
(Is the third season not good, or did something else happen?)
I hope you feel better soon!
Thank you!
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There's an album--Of Love and Hope--that has poetry read by Ron Perlman and music from the series. It's available on YouTube.
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I've wondered what someone not attached to the original series would make of that specific season as, basically, a different series, though.
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Really, it's ripe for fanfic AUs starting right after the end of the second season, but that was still the printed fanzine era.
I blame George RR Martin. It's simpler. :P
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So long as you know Vincent is Very Sad because of [spoiler], and he's being hunted, ditto, it's perfectly straightforward. And has Roy Dotrice *and* Ron Perlman's voice. And Jo Anderson looking like Scully before Gillian Anderson got around to it.
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And Armin Shimerman acting with his own face, which always confuses me when it happens!
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Oh, interesting! The way you described the final product, I thought maybe a pot-boiler script with an image thrown in but not connected to the rest. Instead it's the other way around, and was meant to hit as hard as it did you. It's neat to find out how it got that way.
Sympathies on the illness. I hope you get better soon somehow. Tucking up warm at home is usually a good start.
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It was totally unclear from the finished film! I really enjoyed finding out which way it was meant to go and why it didn't. It is probably not terrible that I didn't know at the time of my review, but I'm glad somebody did the research.
Sympathies on the illness. I hope you get better soon somehow. Tucking up warm at home is usually a good start.
Thank you. I have done absolutely nothing of any use this evening and am hoping it helps.
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b) On point 4)-- I haven't seen the 80s _Beauty and the Beast_ since the 80s, but I was quite fond of it then, in large part because of how it played with shadows on very thin people's faces. Also, it had great voices. Anyway. Um, not sure, but it couldn't hurt?
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Thank you. It was just a bad day for doing something I didn't have to.
I was quite fond of it then, in large part because of how it played with shadows on very thin people's faces. Also, it had great voices.
I consider these all valid reasons to be interested in a piece of art, says the person who watches a lot of film noir.
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(But I, too, an extremely delighted to hear that there will be a Fiddler afn dakh cast album!)
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Thank you. It was just unnecessary. I already felt like hell!
(But I, too, an extremely delighted to hear that there will be a Fiddler afn dakh cast album!)
I will throw money in its direction at lightspeed as soon as it's relevant. In the meantime, I may be able to borrow the libretto from someone. If so, would you be interested in a copy?
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OH, relatedly - if you still wanted the text+translation of the second volume of Klezmer,
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Awesome! I'll let you know if it works out, then.
if you still wanted the text+translation of the second volume of Klezmer, genarti has printed out a physical version!
I would adore that. Thank you!
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Further details!
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It makes a difference!
I hope you're able to get some decent sleep.
Thank you. I've had a quiet, somewhat blank day since. I'm hoping it helps.
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Thank you.
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That essay about the golem figure in Follow Me Quietly is fascinating.
Motion smoothing is the worst. When I got my new TV this year, I was horrified by how it made movies look until I figured out how to switch off that setting.
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Thank you. I just wouldn't have even tried if I'd known.
That essay about the golem figure in Follow Me Quietly is fascinating.
I had not expected the extent of the edited-out material, but I think it's wonderful that the authors could track the story so closely from draft to draft. I would have watched that original version with interest.
Motion smoothing is the worst. When I got my new TV this year, I was horrified by how it made movies look until I figured out how to switch off that setting.
I did the same thing for my parents' TV earlier this year. I don't understand why people even want it. I have never seen it do anything but make otherwise inoffensive or even attractive moving images look like crap.
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Thank you, and you're welcome!
but that must have chimed then, as it seemed very familiar again now, because yes. Even if the reasons for her brother's feelings were somewhat different!
Neat! I haven't read much Vera Brittain: I am aware of Testament of Youth in a cultural sort of way, not I actually picked up the book. I'm now sort of disproportionately curious.
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I do second
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Thank you. I couldn't see another explanation.
I found this page which gives the full medical details, including a list of ingredients so you can see if you think it would be OK for you.
And thank you! To my knowledge, I have no negative history with benzocaine—I am pretty sure I was put on Orajel as a small teething child without ill effects. I wonder if we get blackcurrant in the U.S.
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The FDA is worried about a rare-but-serious side effect of oral benzocaine, especially for those two and under.
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Well, in the early 1980's I did not die of it, and since my mouth is full of the stuff right now, I'll keep an eye on the color of my fingernails.
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I'm glad!