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.
no subject
I've wondered what someone not attached to the original series would make of that specific season as, basically, a different series, though.
no subject
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