You need to know, you're your personal alchemist

[sovay]

Short things:

1. I'd never even heard of Cyber Monday until this year. What is it? I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

2. R.I.P., Ken Russell. I should find somewhere to start with him that isn't The Lair of the White Worm (1988). The Devils (1971) is only coming out on Region 2.

3. I wonder why Roddy McDowall was not also cast in the film version of No Time for Sergeants. (Those are some of the dorkiest glasses in stage history.) The other two principals were: it made Andy Griffith a star. It's not exactly as though he was an unknown property.

4. I'm not sure I see the point of having a book on Derek Jarman reviewed by someone who clearly didn't like his films very much. I'm glad Bray finds his paintings important, because I know very little about Jarman's non-cinematic art, and I hope someday to visit his garden at Dungeness, ideally with rushthatspeaks, but seriously: difficult? Hard to sit through? Sententious gesture politics? Well-intentioned? I have to wonder if we saw the same movies—I am never sure what to do with criticism when that happens. (Did he miss how much of Wittgenstein (1993) is funny?) Personally, I'm looking forward to Sebastiane (1976); I have been since I knew it existed. Brian Eno did the music and it's in Latin.

5. Aphorisms by Kafka, which I hadn't even known existed. Commentary by Michael Cisco, who probably does.

I must catch a bus.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Cyber Monday: After the long Thanksgiving weekend, everyone goes back to work, fires up a web browser, and hits the shopping websites hard. I believe Amazon may have been an early noticer/adopter.

It creates a measurable, very large spike in traffic, and it was (and still is) more notable in areas where people do not have high-speed internet and computers at home.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Music and video regions are a wicked thing. So frustrating.

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

To quote my friend and colleague Sarit Kattan-Gribetz:

"[T]he purpose of the Roman calendar is essentially economic and, to a lesser extent, political and religious. That is to say, the two main parts of the calendar (the list of market days and list of festivals) are actually directed at commercial things. The calendar was instituted for business interaction primarily - to publicize market days, but also to denote days on which business is prohibited (e.g. festivals), when one can lend money and by when one must repay loans (e.g. the Kalends of each month), when rents are due (also the Kalends). So it is no wonder that the rabbis, in their own legal works, prohibit commercial interactions with pagans: part of what it meant to celebrate these Roman festivals was to be a part of the economic system and rhythm."

It's just the same in today's America. One of the important parts of Thanksgiving, perhaps the most important part, is the foodshopping in the days beforehand, and the goodshopping in the days afterwards. (On Thanksgiving itself, the shops are closed.) Then the process starts up again, immediately (in fact, overlapping), for Christmas. The first days of official shopping for Christmas are the same as the post-Thanksgiving shopping days.

[gwynnega]

Mahler and Savage Messiah are great places to start with Ken Russell, though pretty much anything by him before Tommy would work.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The Devils exists in various version on YouTube. There's also an excellent documentary fronted by Mark Kermode which includes the notorious "missing" footage.

Guess what I've been doing all afternoon.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Martin has Sebastiane. Jarman and Eno? I'll check it out.

Oh, Lair of The White Worm is utter pants, isn't it? Still, it could be worse; I heard part of an interview earlier where he was (I hope) mock-pitching a film called Bravetart and the Loch Ness Monster (feisty Scots prostitute meets Aleister Crowley, apparently)... Erm.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

1.

Glad it's been explained to you, sorry there's an it to explain in the first place.

2.

RIP. I need to watch The Lair of the White Worm through sometime--the once I had a chance to see it on late night RTÉ I was exhausted and only watched through the pub scene, cos I'd heard tell it might be an early incarnation of Oysterband. I can't even recollect if I thought it was or no.

DVD regions are so irritating.

3.

I hope you can find an answer.

4.

I wish I knew. It doesn't seem quite on. I suppose it's better than giving the book to a slavering fanboy, but surely there's someone available who's got both appreciation and interesting opinions.

5.

I'd not known Kafka wrote aphorisms, either.

Commentary by Michael Cisco, who probably does.

Probably. Of course, he could be a pseudonym used by Sir Francis Bacon, who definitely did not write Shakespeare's plays but did make a Philosopher's Stone. (Or, better yet, a pseudonym used by Kit Marlowe, who also did not write Shakespeare's plays but did end up living to the present day after being used as a test subject by some mad alchemist. And therein would lie a webcomic, could I but draw.)

I must catch a bus.

I hope you successfully caught the bus* and that all is going well, or at least adequately.

*I also hope this didn't require 10,000 pound test line, a flyrod made of some exotic composite material which was liberated from a CIA laboratory, and whatever fly a bus would bite upon. (That's my father's thing, not mine, so I have no useful advice on the matter, I'm sad to say.)