![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Apr. 30th, 2010 02:15 pmAt some point watching Lost became like chewing your gum too long, where all you taste anymore is your own saliva.
Timbaland/lakes' "your body's like a carryout" song isn't well-conceived. It can only, but doesn't, mean organ-harvesting.
Everyone likes this Soul Sister song because it modulates well (misused musical term #1). What is the right term for that, keeping things largely the same for a few iterations then changing some one thing, like switching to sharp or flat or whatever? I say "aw yeah" inside every time I hear that repetition of the same notes three times in a row late in "Take on Me" but then that fourth just a little different. It's like you're detained then released, some mini-version of what happens with the leitmotif in Tristan und Isolde that never gets completed till the end, and all your itches get scratched at once in a sea of deathbalm (misused musical terms #2-5).
And that may be part of why I love "Return to Innocence"--the Enigma parts are godawful, they're a kind of prison you're in, but then you're suddenly released into the singing of that ecstatic old Taiwanese man, like in the 1984 movie with that sudden hillside. That latter effect was plagiarized by the Hughes Bros. in From Hell, but it worked there too, one of the few things about that film that did. It's one of those effects that can't not work, perhaps, that's incompetence-proof like the reversed motion in the Return to Innocence video, or in that movie Hillary and Jackie (sp?). Reversed film connected to lost time is so strong...Bryan Adams walking out of the past toward the camera does something similar in the 1969 video. Fuentes decribes the novel as a shaping of time, somewhere. And of course that was one of the things Lost did so well when it did things so well. So you can fuck it up, but perhaps only by doing it over and over the same way? Even lost time can bore us if it doesn't change.
Recently reread All the Pretty Horses, having read it first in I believe 2005. Maybe I shouldn't have, it was pretty triggering in regard to fathers and women and life and whatnot. It was one of the first of his I read, I think, maybe the second after Child of God if that wasn't Blood Meridian. I'd seen the movie with my father when it came out and we both liked it, so I gave him a copy of the book after reading it and he liked that too and I gave him the rest of the Border books and Blood Meridian. One of his obsessions was Western history and topography--he won awards for his work on both--and he said trying to figure out exactly where everyone was (and criticizing McCarthy's ignorance, at times) was the only way he was able to handle getting through Meridian. He and McCarthy were born in the same year but their temperaments definitely contrast.
A character in season 2 of Damages (watchable for scary Glenn Close and pretty HD on Blu-Ray, little more) seems to be named Suttree. A villain.
I'm lazy and suspicious when it comes to books, so I usually have a sort of prehistory or courtship with any author I end up reading. My first exposure to McCarthy was when they opened a Borders in my town and I spent many evenings browsing in it. They had comfortable chairs. All the Pretty Horses had been such a hit that Vintage released all his books in paperback in its wake, the ones still in print today: stark black and white for the Border trilogy, dark brown and white bindings for his first five. They stood out from the other books, attracted my eye. This must have been 1994 or 1995 because I remember reading the beginning of The Crossing and finding the quotation-markless dialogue kind of annoying--this back when I was either rejecting all poetry for not being prose or all non-rhymed poetry for not being rhymed. Formalistic reservations combined with disgust when I picked up Suttree next and read the melonfucking episode. Turned me off of him---how people change--till someone had a copy of Blood Meridian on the set of the short film we were extras on. Extra work apparently involves sitting around all day, so I read a good chunk of it, was enthralled.
Timbaland/lakes' "your body's like a carryout" song isn't well-conceived. It can only, but doesn't, mean organ-harvesting.
Everyone likes this Soul Sister song because it modulates well (misused musical term #1). What is the right term for that, keeping things largely the same for a few iterations then changing some one thing, like switching to sharp or flat or whatever? I say "aw yeah" inside every time I hear that repetition of the same notes three times in a row late in "Take on Me" but then that fourth just a little different. It's like you're detained then released, some mini-version of what happens with the leitmotif in Tristan und Isolde that never gets completed till the end, and all your itches get scratched at once in a sea of deathbalm (misused musical terms #2-5).
And that may be part of why I love "Return to Innocence"--the Enigma parts are godawful, they're a kind of prison you're in, but then you're suddenly released into the singing of that ecstatic old Taiwanese man, like in the 1984 movie with that sudden hillside. That latter effect was plagiarized by the Hughes Bros. in From Hell, but it worked there too, one of the few things about that film that did. It's one of those effects that can't not work, perhaps, that's incompetence-proof like the reversed motion in the Return to Innocence video, or in that movie Hillary and Jackie (sp?). Reversed film connected to lost time is so strong...Bryan Adams walking out of the past toward the camera does something similar in the 1969 video. Fuentes decribes the novel as a shaping of time, somewhere. And of course that was one of the things Lost did so well when it did things so well. So you can fuck it up, but perhaps only by doing it over and over the same way? Even lost time can bore us if it doesn't change.
Recently reread All the Pretty Horses, having read it first in I believe 2005. Maybe I shouldn't have, it was pretty triggering in regard to fathers and women and life and whatnot. It was one of the first of his I read, I think, maybe the second after Child of God if that wasn't Blood Meridian. I'd seen the movie with my father when it came out and we both liked it, so I gave him a copy of the book after reading it and he liked that too and I gave him the rest of the Border books and Blood Meridian. One of his obsessions was Western history and topography--he won awards for his work on both--and he said trying to figure out exactly where everyone was (and criticizing McCarthy's ignorance, at times) was the only way he was able to handle getting through Meridian. He and McCarthy were born in the same year but their temperaments definitely contrast.
A character in season 2 of Damages (watchable for scary Glenn Close and pretty HD on Blu-Ray, little more) seems to be named Suttree. A villain.
I'm lazy and suspicious when it comes to books, so I usually have a sort of prehistory or courtship with any author I end up reading. My first exposure to McCarthy was when they opened a Borders in my town and I spent many evenings browsing in it. They had comfortable chairs. All the Pretty Horses had been such a hit that Vintage released all his books in paperback in its wake, the ones still in print today: stark black and white for the Border trilogy, dark brown and white bindings for his first five. They stood out from the other books, attracted my eye. This must have been 1994 or 1995 because I remember reading the beginning of The Crossing and finding the quotation-markless dialogue kind of annoying--this back when I was either rejecting all poetry for not being prose or all non-rhymed poetry for not being rhymed. Formalistic reservations combined with disgust when I picked up Suttree next and read the melonfucking episode. Turned me off of him---how people change--till someone had a copy of Blood Meridian on the set of the short film we were extras on. Extra work apparently involves sitting around all day, so I read a good chunk of it, was enthralled.
