by
Mark Savage
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[...] He picked on L. She blushed. She was usually quiet in class. But after some prompting she went on to talk more than I'd ever heard her talk before. Her voice was scratchy and thin, and her sentences would periodically drift into uncertain noises, rather than come to a deliberate end. But her ideas were quite original, and I could have listened to her for much longer. To her, Monday was dark blue, Tuesday was yellow, Wednesday orange, Thursday brown, Friday green, Said black, and Sunday white. An animated discussion ensued, as members of the class volunteers: their own thoughts. One kid disagreed completely with L's version. I put my hand up to say that I agreed with L that Tuesdays were yellow. (While I remember her spectrum well, I don't remember the rest of mine, perhaps because I wasn't as taken with the premise as she; perhaps because I was more taken with her than the premise. I do remember that none of my days were black or white, and that Saturday was, and remains, Ferrari red.) I glanced over. L wasn't looking but Vicki was grinning at me. We agree on Tuesday, I thought. After that, I examined our behaviour more closely than usual on Tuesdays, looking for examples of extra rapport. One Tuesday in cal March, L swung her bag onto her shoulder and it lightly hit my arm. Sorry, she said, and looked at me very briefly. My fault, I said. I began to imagine that our first kiss would be on a Tuesday, but then I realised that any focus on this idea removed six days from the calendar of potential.
in a footnote. god so funny
Dijonnaise's title has no obvious connection to the subject matter, unless we see it as a clue to what is in the man's bowl. The cut-and-shut combination of the words Dijon mustard and mayonnaise was actually a Friend invention, and he sold the name to Heinz in 1951 for an amount far greater than anything he received for his film. He repeated this trick of collapsing words together to invent a new one in order to title his next film, Brunch (1941), in which we see a woman eating a meal that is neither breakfast nor dinner, but somewhere in between, and with Ham-Fisted (1943), in which we see a man with a ham for a paw attempt, clumsily, to eat himself. The films were screened in basements and bars, or they would be sneaked into studio screening rooms late at night, an audience assembled by word of mouth, the titles being whispered like new words in the language for the first time, because that's what they were.
so funny and also so insightful!!
[...] Perhaps Friend's most lastingly memorable piece was At the Drive-In (1959), a documentary recording of a screening of Rebel Without A Cause at a drive-in theatre in California. After some shots of cars arriving and young couples buying popcorn, the camera finds a spot and doesn't move. Unlike much of the distracted audience, it simply watches the screen for the duration of the film. THe Technicolor melodrama of Rebel seems so distractingly different when seen in greys, and Friend's detached presentation of the excitable youths on camera (and on the screen on camera) articulates the confusion of the generation gap almost as well as Nicholas Ray's masterpiece itself, but from the other side: by this point Friend was well into his fifties.
For me, a strength of Opulence is also a point for which it received criticism: there is no explanation of where the money comes from, of how the country gets its riches. The film noirs were about the bad things that people would do for cash, but Opulence imagines a world where there is endless money. Desperate everyday calculations about work and finances are removed, and citizens have more time for pleasure and contemplation. This allows us, and them, to focus on the real question: if we have everything we want, what comes next? Isn't that an important idea in itself? But as audiences we've been trained to view wealthy characters with suspicion.
Inadvertent magic is, we think, the best kind: the hazy coincidence, the series of signs not quite decoded. It can be the first recording of a song, before the words have clicked into place, when the flawed syntax catches the edge of a chord, and the hum of a misplaced microphone spills into the mix. But there comes a point, and this can be dangerous, when the artist can fall prey to a confidence borne of this early fizzing success: she wants to harness the power without understanding it, and seeks a do-over, never understanding that the misplaced passes and fudged lines of the imperfect first incantation were vital to its construct.
Greil Marcus, Lost Locales
chapter quote. i have no idea if this is a real or fake quote and at this point i kinda dont want to know
[...] He must have smoothed over his footprints with snow in order to make this shot look perfect, Olga says at one point, referring to a composition called The Arrival. As the search goes on, they discover that some of the shots defy physics, particularly an image of Jan and the party on top of a peak looking up to the camera high above them, an effect that might be achieved with a modern helicopter shot.
foreboding
A Book of Books: Quotes, Aphorisms and Sayings From The World of Literature (Norton 1985). We used this book as a doorstep to keep the living room door open. I referenced it when my homework needed some extra juice. The more tired or distracted I was, the quicker I turned to it. In April 1993 Mrs White pointed out that while quotations should be ornamental rather than bearing the brunt of your story, lately yours have been bordering on the superfluous. It feels as if you've been shoehorning them into your essays where they are not needed. I nodded. Many a poem is marred by a superfluous word, I said. (Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, as quoted in A Book of Books: Quotes, Aphorisms and Sayings From The World of Literature (Norton 1985)). [...]
footnote 66; the previous two footnotes cite the same book [for random quotes from like virginia woolf and borges etc]
[...] There he found a group already churning out copies of Hollywood thrillers, and with them he'd make over five hundred films between 1948 and 1956. They were filmed in a mixture of English and Spanish, and starred American nobodies, European never-weres, and young Hispanic talent. These pictures were largely shot with Mexico City standing in for LA, Chicago, or New York, and with their pulpy concentration of crime and lust became known as Sexy Mexys or Sexiguns. The group made several films simultaneously, with as many as thirty in production at once. Sometimes the cast and crew did not know which film they were working on, and some films are clearly a collage of several others, causing their plots to be a hash of tangled clichés and narrative non sequiturs. No matter who acted as director (and as many as twenty might serve the role on any one film) the films are attributed to a fictional director, Hermoso Equipo (inverted Spanish for beautiful team). The group found strength in this approach, with Jensen even believing that the more different films we get in one film, the more authors involved, the more plots we refer to... the closer to the centre of fiction and humanity we get. These quotes were originally attributed to Hermoso Equipo, as if he were a real person, in an interview with the LA Times in 1961.
god why is this so funny
[...] They'd never find it. They'd never find me. I was strong. I was quick. I knew every shortcut. I was the town, I was a continuation of every cul-de-sac, and I was the point beyond every dead end, the thread in the stitching. I was underground, below everyone, able to move unseen, cover my mistakes with more mistakes, able to divert and subvert. I was the future of the town, its present, its past; I was a Saxon burial mound I was a Roman suffix, I was the dead centre of England, a bullseye. And tomorrow was L's birthday.
in a footnote. oh god.
Lara: I was trying to distract myself from L, but she was everywhere, her name shouted down the corridors of every film. She was the subtext that swelled to swallow the story, the footnote that spilled over many pages. I buried myself in films and recorded everything in my film binder. She showed up everywhere. An above average number of characters shared her name, or her face shape, or her walk. I tried to write to her, but didn't know what to say. There were many abandoned efforts filled with jokes, stories, and confessions. The ones I actually finished were more careful and restrained, like a soldier's letters home that had been redacted by his government. New school is fine. Not as good. Everything will be ok. Weather not bad. Write soon. They were so below par I couldn't send them.
footnote