I've been drowning the waves for you

[sovay]

It is grey and pouring and the winds keep slamming the telephone lines outside the window, a real nor'easter. We saw the T entrances near the waterfront piled high with sandbags last night. Now the downtown is underwater. The Aquarium station flooded. The glittering rich playground of the Seaport has the sea itself in the streets. I approve of this last in theory because the Seaport as a symbol of Boston's gentrification angers me, but since it sounds as though the storm is hitting the construction workers harder than the suits, in practice I'm glum. I don't know how long this weather is supposed to last. I'm hoping it will blow off by tomorrow morning: the Somerville caucus is being held at the high school and I want to be there, to stand as delegate again to the convention this summer and choose a gubernatorial candidate who's even better than an artichoke with ethics. My sleep schedule is borked, but I slept almost eight hours. The cats are in full rainy-day hibernation mode. I cannot blame them.

1. The current issue of Poetry comes with a mixtape. I have not yet tried listening as I read, but of the poems I am particularly struck by Carla Panciera's "And Standing before Those Canvases, He Said, I Would Feel This Tingling," Danez Smith's "sometimes i wish i felt the side effects," Camonghne Felix's "Willing in the Orisha," and Martha Silano's "Ode to Autocorrect."

2. Musicophilia has curated a lot of library music. I feel people who like Ghost Box should know.

3. Tracy Butler draws faces. Man, Boris Karloff had some recognizable eyebrows.

4. The HFA has announced—but not yet detailed—a series of German Films 1945–1957. Please God, let this include a print of Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951). The illustrating image seems to point that way.

In the meantime, while the organizing theme of Caught in the Net: The Early Internet in the Paranoid Imagination seems a reach when some of these titles were made long before there was an internet to be anxious about, any series which offers me an opportunity to catch both WarGames (1983) and Strange Days (1995) on a big screen is just fine by me. When a friend asked me to outline a (purely speculative) 'Thon of my own, both of those films were first-choice programming.

A series of Wim Wenders is also a fine thing. I imagine everyone on the planet will come to Wings of Desire (1983), including me—Otto Sander turned up in the first half of Das Boot (1981) last night, reminding me of how much I love him as Cassiel—but it might provide an equally good excuse to try for Paris, Texas (1984), The American Friend (1977), and Until the End of the World (1991), which I have been generally meaning to see on grounds of Harry Dean Stanton, Patricia Highsmith, and Talking Heads.

5. I know the title of this photograph is "Moonwalking," but she looks like the deep sea to me.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

Yeah, a lot of those strike me as very pre-internet. The two internet-paranoia films which have always stayed with me are The Net and Copycat – both ‘nineties movies, and both have to stack their decks by making the heroines reclusive agoraphobes, who pretty much only communicate via email, in order for their plots to work. Then again it’s probably a defining trope of the Paranoid Thriller that the protagonist either has no friends/family, or worse, friends/family who are really easily manipulated by the villains.

[gwynnega]

Danez Smith is great. Any mixtape that includes Nina Simone, Lou Reed, and the Jackson 5 is good with me.

[dhampyresa]

Man, Boris Karloff had some recognizable eyebrows.
He really did! Butler's Joséphine Baker is also amazing.

[thisbluespirit]

these titles were made long before there was an internet to be anxious about, any series which offers me an opportunity to catch both WarGames (1983) and Strange Days (1995)

I don't know whether this is about the content of the films, rather than the date - but the origins of the internet go back to the 60s and 70s and some of it was in place by the 1980s (not the wide use that we have now, of course - mainly military-academic?). I have a 1984 TV show that has internet use between war gamers being a plot point, for instance. And many SF writers like to pick up on things that are coming, or they think they are coming. DW had a proto-internet paranoia serial in 1966 (WOTAN is linked up to all the computers of the world and decides to take over!) and I really don't think that was very unusual. (There's a lot of various computers will kill everyone stuff from that era, although not usually via a proto-internet, which is why I mention that one. But it continues through the 70s, so by the 80s, pulling in the existing elements of the internet hardly seems early to me.)

Plus, 1995 was certainly not early at all, as I was on the internet right then and it had been in existence for a while already! I wandered into newsgroups full of people and used Netscape as a browser on the separate World Wide Web.

And I'd have thought a lot of the paranoia comes very early, cos after that it's just normal and the fear seems less plausible. (Unless it's turning accepted tech against us in a particular way, I suppose.)

(I don't know, I don't know any of the films. But it wouldn't strike me as too early for internet paranoia.)

[asakiyume]

Those videos! I had no idea. I showed them to Wakanomori and the Tall One (who visits on Fridays and who is headed your way on Saturday), and there were many exclamations. Hello sea. Welcome to Boston.

[asakiyume]

And speaking of Poetry, evelyn_b reported on this issue, too. I am feeling mighty tempted to subscribe.

[drwex]

I haven't seen Wings of Desire in a long time. It's one of my favorites, even if I'm un-hip to admit that.

Until the End of the World, though... I didn't like the original and the massive director's cut couldn't hold my interest long enough to finish it.

[kore]

IS THAT THE FIVE HOUR CUT OF UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD? ARE THEY ACTUALLY SHOWING THAT ON A BIG SCREEN? DAMN.

Paris Texas is great. It might actually be my personal favourite.

[kore]

I have been trying to think of The Internet is Evil movies but hand to God all I can think of is The Lawnmower Man which is a truly craptastic "adaptation" of a King story in which....well, I don't have the heart to summarize it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lawnmower_Man_(film)#Plot