Another day may shine with brighter light

Reading that Lauren Schmidt and Greta Gerwig credit Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017) with inspiring the temporal structures of The Witcher (2019–) and Little Women (2019) reminded me that I never wrote about one of my favorite moments in Nolan's movie, which exists only because of the cross-cutting of time.

I mentioned it in my original review: how the interplay of the three timelines that run in tandem on different scales "almost seems to recall a character from the dead." I should perhaps have said conjures. Someone we hadn't even known existed seems suddenly and hauntingly present, as miraculous and undeniable as the little ships themselves. ( Keep coming round. )

No wonder I associated the film almost subliminally with the Archers. That is, after all, the entire point of A Canterbury Tale (1944).

After I'd reviewed it, I actually went back to see Dunkirk for a second time in theaters. I wanted to observe the structure now that I knew the gist of it; what I felt I ended up observing was the emotion. It's not a cold movie for all its chronological complications; in fact much of its horror and poignancy is mined not from suspense but from the clicking into place of information gathered, as if accidentally, from later moments in time. It holds up to rewatch on more than the puzzle-level. I am curious now what similar effects The Witcher and Little Women derive from their juxtapositions and revisitings. Also I want to rewatch Baccano! (2007). Anyway, I don't necessarily think in linear narrative, so I always enjoy seeing other people also not do it. This continuity brought to you by my restored backers at Patreon.

The coffeeshop or the square, love, I'll meet you there

I saw a radio play for Valentine's Day.

The PMRP were performing at Boskone for the first time this year and spatch was playing several roles in the ensemble, so technically I ghosted an evening of Boskone, although mostly I accidentally lobby-conned. We had dinner beforehand at Penang, both because we love their food—I tend to order the nasi lemak with a durian shake, Rob gets the beef rendang with Malaysian iced coffee, we split the roti canai—and because with the recent racist nonsense affecting Chinatown businesses, we wanted to show our support in the way that works best under capitalism. We did not freeze to death at any point in our journey, which I regard as a significant achievement with the wind-chill factor in the negative degrees. Then he went off to register before his call time and I was trying to figure out what I should do with my hour and a half and no dealer's room to mooch around in and the next thing I knew I was walking around the art show with Steve Berman and then I spotted ladymondegreen and akawil and several other people apparently just as one of them finished saying my name and then pecunium was showing me the yarns he spins and sells and then dramaticirony and Gillian Daniels and John Chu happened by and then nineweaving and teenybuffalo and eventually I tore myself away to watch the PMRP's The Silver Shade: Help from the Shadows whose audience included negothick and ron_newman; in short, I think I got all the socializing for which I didn't have time at Arisia and it was very nice. So was the show, which I have hopes will get restaged somewhere that isn't scheduled across from an opening night reception. It drew a decent audience nonetheless and featured a middle-aged makeshift superhero I should like to see more of. (She can't exactly walk through walls: she walks through the spaces where the corners of the walls don't quite meet. A significant percentage of her costume is yoga outfit. Most of the time she teaches high school.) I did not have the stamina afterward to attend the filk session I'd been invited to, but I got home to find that rushthatspeaks had sent me the transfixingly mythic music video for Foals' "Neptune." Rob has photographic evidence of the holiday, first in the form of the Love Dragon and the Skeptic and then the two of us.

It may be that I have never written about Singin' in the Rain (1952) not only because it is the first movie I ever saw and therefore my impressions of it formed long before I knew how to think about film, but because I might then have to talk about how many of my ideas of how to be a person were shaped by Cosmo Brown.