fizzles

people queuing up for a delayed plane that hasn’t landed yet where they have *booked seats* what is going on.

‘My God, what a story it would make’: film-maker Kevin Brownlow on It Happened Here and Winstanley Brownlow is best known for restoring silent movies, but in conjunction with Andrew Mollo, he made two features, in 1964 and 1975, that look astonishingly prescient today

Brownlow is surely best known for It Happened Here and Winstanley? I mean I know Napoleon got publicity but I wouldn’t have said he was best known for his silent film restoration.

sundries: the accents are 👌 - hearing “gel” for girl in its native-ish environment will never get boring. british riviera was a hell of a thing. it’s not as strong as the books on the War’s enabling capacity to allow people to erase and reconstitute identity in semi feudal communities of trust.

ofc rigidly patrolled think/say boundary has v obvious problems and results in codes that communicate negative views of people without saying it out loud. the english class system is rife with this.

and it is interesting the following adaptation is the the poison pen letter one. because poison pen letters only really make sense in a world where there is a strong think/say code and veil. that impulse surely has an expression now, and we see it continually.

MARPLE says in one episode “but people *think* it, and some even *say* it” and it did remind me the substantial erosion of this distinction online (what would it even mean online) is… well it’s a hell of a change and in a sci-fi satire would have people ripping each other to pieces

portrayal of Slack is fantastic. despises the way the upper classes look after each other, contemptuous of non-professional people, his police work is - in any other setting - exemplary. there’s a touch of the widmerpool but he’s not entirely unsympathetic despite vivid lack of charm.

tweet caused me to watch MISS MARPLE (jh not gm - gm herself good, but i can’t stand the way they’re put together). few things.

Wait, Robert Crumb has become a paranoid old crank who hates modernity? Robert Crumb?? Damn, you never can tell

also means you can get experts in to fix the wiring and other odd jobs.

YouTube video by The Cinema Guild Trenque Lauquen - Official Trailer

while i’m remembering good things by god Trenque Lauquen was my favourite moviegoing experience in so many years. the first part is wonderfully novelistic in one way, the second in another way. great soundtrack as well.

absolute winner. nieces ftw (i have none - i have to make my own mistakes on the route to wisdom)

i know it had to come down a perch or two after the heights of 90s fetishism partly born of rarity but by i’ve had two martini cocktails and trout mask replica really fuckin goes.

(this the mince scene) and while i remember the love responded to with indifference of being a parent.

i just remember sitting in the cinema being absolutely mesmerised. how does she communicate such intense boredom and anger - spiritual in its intensity - *while also* communicating a purely mundane “this is every housewife’s lot”.

saw this this year and by god i loved it. i’m not quite sure how you manage to create such tension and dynamism from such quotidiana even *within* scenes. (potato peeling the obvious one). extraordinary film really.

the vital point there that tangible changes downstream of the new technology required new forms, new audiences.

a lot has changed in terms of distribution obviously, which has had a visible impact on media and culture, but the impact will only be fully realised through to 2034, not too distance from that 30 year time frame there.

a photo of a page from a book describing the transition from manuscripts to printed books, and the initial similarity in appearance between the two. it also states that it required new forms of literature to really drive the uptake of new text founts.

i find the dates here (1490-1520) fascinating. not because of the lag, but because of how fast it is. to take a (not particularly satisfactory) modern analogue, the BBC launched iPlayer in 2007, and even now studios and distributors are trying to unpick and rationalise their supply chain.

also, they are actually, you know, *doing* things. i may not like all or many of their policy choices, but the Tories had a series of budgets where they rolled back on key elements immediately after and by the end were visibly drifting with no sense of governing or policy.

he said he thought this showed orang-utans have a sense of sarcasm. i mean i don’t know. but it’s certainly v fucking funny.

he left to get some more equipment, came back, same two orang-utans, sitting on the same branch, with their arms folded, still looking at him. they had swapped positions.

i mean i know they’re extremely advanced but one of my favourite stories is a friend who was zookeeper and was working in the orang-utan enclosure. two orang-utans were sitting on a branch with their arms folded, looking at him.

The Grotesque in Art and Literature Buy The Grotesque in Art and Literature by KAYSER, Wolfgang (ISBN: 9780070334076) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

I imagine you already know this but just in case - Wilhelm Kayser’s book is v good

www.amazon.co.uk/Grotesque-Ar...

Ah!

iirr same place is literally the birth of the grotesque.

and that for magic (and art, and belief, and freedom) to be real it comes with constraint and cost. and that this gives real power to the various evils that appear in Earthsea.

beautifully written ofc - words with heft, spare sentences with rich detail, balanced paragraphs. a sense of space and the magic of the natural world. but i had forgotten that the first book is among many other things about the importance of the word, naming things carefully, painstaking writing.

going to see this lovely, v small (but free) exhibition of ursula le guin maps sent me back to earthsea - the trilogy a formative set of books for me (with the best yet to come as an adult).

www.aaschool.ac.uk/publicprogra...