sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2015-03-09 11:50 pm

It was all done with these 16-millimeter cameras you had to wind

The last thing I read before bed was the last few chapters and endnotes to Mark Morris' excellent Five Came Back (2014), a braided study of five Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—and the movies they made for the War Department during World War II. None of them was starting from the same place in life or even the same motives as his colleagues; each follows a very different trajectory, as does their work. I went into it knowing the least about either Stevens or Wyler and came out especially attached to the latter. If anything about the period or film history even faintly attracts you, highly recommended.

The last thing I looked at before leaving the computer was Underwhelming Lovecraft Monsters, which presumably explains why the only dream I can remember from last night reads like a Lovecraft parody: a visit to a reclusive academic in a house where stacks of books and papers are holding up the sagging walls; half of his face is not his face, it's a parasitic entity that speaks for both of them. I remember knocking down books and running; the pages had been rotted out from between the covers and that was more horrifying than alien possession. It just looks like metaphor now: ordinary on the outside, nothing within.

Most of today has been characterized by a gonging headache, but we did make a grocery run and then dinner: coconut pandan rice with chicken curry. Hard-boiled eggs would have happened with a little more organization. I am hoping to work up to nasi lemak.

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