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And she's hooked to the silver screen
Yesterday was friends and movies. It was wonderful. I need more days like that.
In the morning, I met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 for lunch at the Thai restaurant around the more-or-less corner from her apartment,* and after several hours of the kind of conversation that remind me that I need to see friends more than once every couple of weeks (and in some cases, years), we went home, waited for the cable guy, pieced together patter songs from Gilbert & Sullivan, and watched Russian Ark (2002). Cut for more of a review than I had originally intended.
I can say definitively that this is one of the stranger films I have seen recently, and I loved it. If you dropped acid immediately upon passing your exams in Russian history, Alexander Sokurov's ninety-minute, single-shot drift through three centuries in the Hermitage Museum is rather like what might happen to your brain. Its protagonist is never seen, a bemused voice-over who awakes from a dimly remembered accident into snow falling from a clouded sky and the sumptuous commotion of carriages arriving at the Winter Palace in time for a ball. Following these laughing young hussars and their elaborately dressed ladies inside, he proceeds to wander as easily through time as through the museum's endless rooms, accompanied by the sardonic, flamboyant, rustily black-clad figure of the nameless Stranger (whose biographical tidbits identify him as the Marquis de Custine), a French ex-diplomat from the early nineteenth century who paces through the centuries caustically unimpressed with the culture around him—he gravitates toward Italian sculpture, criticizes the tsars as barbarians, and complains that Russian music gives him hives—and nonetheless serves as guide and foil to the narrator's camera eye, a cranky Virgil in an underworld of history.
Around them, layers of time shift as fluidly as Chrysom's maze,** without the usual markers of fades or dissolves or even changes of location, so that the narrator can glimpse Catherine the Great at two different ages little more than five objective minutes apart; closed doors can open onto court ceremonies or family dinners or the frozen hell of war-blasted Leningrad, and in some galleries the period is indistinguishable and unimportant. The strains of a waltz by Glinka, played at the ball in 1913, are heard in the same room where the narrator attempts to prevent the passionately Catholic Marquis from hectoring a startled twentieth-century student about religion; a nervous clerk from the eighteenth century trails them suspiciously into a conversation with two modern sailors and a blind woman who seems as timeless as the art she cherishes. And time flows around them, eddying, quietly pooled, recursive and intrusive and presently out to sea.
If I had one complaint about the film, it was with the subtitles. The major lines are all translated, but in a movie filled with overlapping dialogue—the narrator's dreaming wonderment against the Marquis' constant potshots at Russian culture, background chatter from various time periods, and in one scene a whispered conversation which the narrator interprets for the Marquis—I would have appreciated knowing what most of it meant. If nothing else, I might have felt less confused in terms of time-frame; often I had to rely on costumes to tell me the era, which meant I could be accurate within, oh, about a hundred years. But that's a problem easily fixed. If nothing else, there's always, asrushthatspeaks suggests, the screenplay.
**Patricia McKillip, The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991). The book is worth reading for its mythscape alone.
And in the evening, I saw This Movie Is Not Yet Rated withgaudior and rushthatspeaks at the Kendall Square Cinema. I cannot recommend this documentary highly enough. If you don't see it for its information, see it for the interviews with directors and actors; and if not for the interviews, for the animated explication of the MPAA ratings system, for God's sake. The movie left me disturbed by its import, cautiously hopeful that it existed at all, and wanting to see any number of films that were excerpted or discussed therein. And unexpectedly, at least to me, pieces of it were hilarious. (See aforementioned animation.) We dropped in on nineweaving afterward. A good time was had by all.
And so far today, my life has has mostly involved laundry. Tonight there will be apples and honey. Momentarily, there is a silly quiz.
. . . Is it a sign of intelligence and/or ego that I object to the misspelling of "craziness" in my own ingredient list? Or is there optional pedantry salted on the rim of the glass? I want a slice of lime.
Hey, years have started on stranger notes.
*Even now that I've been there twice, I'll need better evidence before I believe that the ordinary laws of geography apply to its block. It could be a pocket universe: I wouldn't be surprised.
In the morning, I met
fleurdelis28 for lunch at the Thai restaurant around the more-or-less corner from her apartment,* and after several hours of the kind of conversation that remind me that I need to see friends more than once every couple of weeks (and in some cases, years), we went home, waited for the cable guy, pieced together patter songs from Gilbert & Sullivan, and watched Russian Ark (2002). Cut for more of a review than I had originally intended.I can say definitively that this is one of the stranger films I have seen recently, and I loved it. If you dropped acid immediately upon passing your exams in Russian history, Alexander Sokurov's ninety-minute, single-shot drift through three centuries in the Hermitage Museum is rather like what might happen to your brain. Its protagonist is never seen, a bemused voice-over who awakes from a dimly remembered accident into snow falling from a clouded sky and the sumptuous commotion of carriages arriving at the Winter Palace in time for a ball. Following these laughing young hussars and their elaborately dressed ladies inside, he proceeds to wander as easily through time as through the museum's endless rooms, accompanied by the sardonic, flamboyant, rustily black-clad figure of the nameless Stranger (whose biographical tidbits identify him as the Marquis de Custine), a French ex-diplomat from the early nineteenth century who paces through the centuries caustically unimpressed with the culture around him—he gravitates toward Italian sculpture, criticizes the tsars as barbarians, and complains that Russian music gives him hives—and nonetheless serves as guide and foil to the narrator's camera eye, a cranky Virgil in an underworld of history.
Around them, layers of time shift as fluidly as Chrysom's maze,** without the usual markers of fades or dissolves or even changes of location, so that the narrator can glimpse Catherine the Great at two different ages little more than five objective minutes apart; closed doors can open onto court ceremonies or family dinners or the frozen hell of war-blasted Leningrad, and in some galleries the period is indistinguishable and unimportant. The strains of a waltz by Glinka, played at the ball in 1913, are heard in the same room where the narrator attempts to prevent the passionately Catholic Marquis from hectoring a startled twentieth-century student about religion; a nervous clerk from the eighteenth century trails them suspiciously into a conversation with two modern sailors and a blind woman who seems as timeless as the art she cherishes. And time flows around them, eddying, quietly pooled, recursive and intrusive and presently out to sea.
If I had one complaint about the film, it was with the subtitles. The major lines are all translated, but in a movie filled with overlapping dialogue—the narrator's dreaming wonderment against the Marquis' constant potshots at Russian culture, background chatter from various time periods, and in one scene a whispered conversation which the narrator interprets for the Marquis—I would have appreciated knowing what most of it meant. If nothing else, I might have felt less confused in terms of time-frame; often I had to rely on costumes to tell me the era, which meant I could be accurate within, oh, about a hundred years. But that's a problem easily fixed. If nothing else, there's always, as
rushthatspeaks suggests, the screenplay.**Patricia McKillip, The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991). The book is worth reading for its mythscape alone.
And in the evening, I saw This Movie Is Not Yet Rated with
gaudior and rushthatspeaks at the Kendall Square Cinema. I cannot recommend this documentary highly enough. If you don't see it for its information, see it for the interviews with directors and actors; and if not for the interviews, for the animated explication of the MPAA ratings system, for God's sake. The movie left me disturbed by its import, cautiously hopeful that it existed at all, and wanting to see any number of films that were excerpted or discussed therein. And unexpectedly, at least to me, pieces of it were hilarious. (See aforementioned animation.) We dropped in on nineweaving afterward. A good time was had by all.And so far today, my life has has mostly involved laundry. Tonight there will be apples and honey. Momentarily, there is a silly quiz.
| How to make a Sovay |
| Ingredients: 1 part intelligence 1 part crazyiness 1 part ego |
| Method: Layer ingredients in a shot glass. Add a little emotion if desired! |
. . . Is it a sign of intelligence and/or ego that I object to the misspelling of "craziness" in my own ingredient list? Or is there optional pedantry salted on the rim of the glass? I want a slice of lime.
Hey, years have started on stranger notes.
*Even now that I've been there twice, I'll need better evidence before I believe that the ordinary laws of geography apply to its block. It could be a pocket universe: I wouldn't be surprised.
no subject
no subject
As a small child, I used to steal them from the Chinese restaurant where my family not infrequently ate. I had a whole collection. I'm sure there are even a few battered and broken examples of the species lingering around our house even now; some things never get thrown away.
(Though the crushed ice is totally on point.)
So . . . you're surprised about the mercy, but not the crushed ice?
"If you are planning to throw yourselves on my mercy, be cautioned: my mercy is very small, and easy to miss."
—Professor Walker, Brandeis University