raven72d's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Listenbourg, The Best Jokes Are All About The Bars In Montevideo Right now Enya is doing "Evening Falls". A good song for a crisp, clear late-winter night here by the lakes. It has that whole sense of the ephemerality of things. No one's used the term mono-no-aware in years, but "Evening Falls" evokes mono-no-aware in the best sense. I watched "Poor Things" last night. Let's just say I was vur' impressed and thrilled. I'm glad I bought a DVD of the film. "Poor Things" is vur' much something I want in my permanent collection. I haven't yet spoken with Mister Taylor about the film, but I'm looking forward to that...even though I know Mister Taylor and I will have very, very different takes on it. Let's just say that I loved the setting and the cinematography. I loved the cuts between b/w and colour, and I loved the colour tones. I loved the steampunk background settings. (Airships! Funiculars!) And of course I liked the little mutant and/or surgically-altered animals Willem Dafoe's character has created in his laboratory. I mean...how can you not love a little goose-dog? Needless to say, Emma Stone did a brilliant job, and I'll note that my longstanding (all the way back to "Easy A") crush on Ms. Stone has been intensified. Those eyes! Those legs! Those amazingly kissable shoulders! Those brilliantly twisted and funny sex scenes-- and Ms. Emma's deadpan narration! Now if only her character had ended up with Margaret Qualley (the leggy Spahn Ranch hippie girl from "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), who has a small role as Willem Dafoe's other Frankenstein-ette creation... And I love the clever things Ms. Stone's character does with language as her new brain absorbs the world around her. Mister Taylor liked the novel that was the underlying basis of the film-- Alasdair Gray's "Poor Things". I've never read it. I remember seeing a review of it (maybe the London Review of Books?) when it appeared, but I never quite got round to finding a copy. I think that in those days I was in a non-fiction mood-- something that seems to have stayed with me. Maybe I will have Amazon get a copy for me-- or the library. I need to avoid my habits from the Plague Year, the Time of the Red Death-- Amazon packages arriving every day. A library copy of the novel will have to do, I think. Eric Andersen is on iTunes-- "Belgian Bar", "Hills of Tuscany", "Ghosts Upon the Road", and "Rain Falls Down in Amsterdam". Brilliant, brilliant dark neo-folk. I'd never heard of Andersen until one day years and years ago when I heard "Ghosts Upon the Road" in a long-defunct record store. I heard the song and just froze. I immediately asked who that was and bought the CD. We're talking...what? Almost thirty years, I think. It's still a song I'll listen to late at night. And "Belgian Bar" remains a great romantic song. "Rain Falls Down in Amsterdam" is one of the most chilling political songs I've ever heard-- even more than Bruce Cockburn's "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" and "How I Spent My Fall Vacation". Ghosts upon the road, just ghosts upon the road... I can still recite the lyrics. And that, troopers, is something I do fairly often late on Friday nights. Please, friends out there over the aether-- do listen to Eric Andersen. Listen and tell me what you think. Many a long year ago, there was a girl here at the site who corresponded with me for a bit. I have no clue whatever became of her. She'd have been in her mid-twenties in those days, and she was living in Los Angeles. She was lovely-- she did some modeling --and she was delightfully exotic. If my memory is holding up at all, she was part-Asian and part-Native American, from a Northern California tribe. As I said-- I have no clue whatever became of her. When she and I were exchanging letters, she was living in a by-the-week motel room filled with books. She recommended that I read a biography of the French surrealist poet-novelist Raymond Roussel. I hadn't known anything about Roussel, but I read the biography and enjoyed it. Roussel was part of the Surrealist world, and I grew up fascinated with the Surrealists-- and he was an influence on the Oulipo movement, which I discovered through Twitter. Anyway-- I'm still grateful for the book recommendation. She vanished somewhere around the Year Seven. She said she was off to Europe with her new partner, a Dutch fashion/art photographer, and that they'd be moving to Dubai after that. I have no idea if she ever did go there, or where she might be now. I do know that I was excited by the idea of living in a motel room filled with old books. I was thrilled in those days by the idea of exiles' rooms, of living out of a couple of carry-on bags, of living in some part of a city built for the Lost and Nomadic. Yeah, I know-- a vur' Wm. Gibson fantasy of coffin hotels and 1-K rooms in Chiba City. But those mid-Noughts years were like that for me. Lots of Escape Fantasies, lots of longing for anonymity in rented rooms filled with books. Again-- no idea whatever became of her. No memory of either her name or her screen name. She liked Surrealism, and she had a girlfriend for a while who was doing ANE (Ancient Near East) studies. I envied her a girlfriend who was studying cuneiform and Hittite inscriptions. God, I envied her her skills at living out of a carry-on bag. Mark Ford, "Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams". That's the book. I had to think about it for a moment. "Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams". It came out c. 2000. Maybe I'll read it (and Roussel's own novels) again some day. Yes...I may have mentioned this. This is so like me. I was rummaging in my hall closet for a blanket a few weeks ago and found...well...a good carry-on bag from Land's End, still pristine in its packaging, albeit with dust enough to make me think I'd had the bag since I moved in to the lakeside flat. Escape Fantasies die hard. God, I remember dancing to that with Miss Ginny. And dancing long ago to the song with Lacey. Some people have memories triggered by scent or taste-- see, e.g., Proust and those damned pastries. For me, it's songs from the past. I can't remember things at the office that happened more than twenty minutes ago, but give me a song from my Lost Youth and I can describe the club where I heard it, who I was dancing with, what she was wearing, and all the books that the original sent me off to find. I have no idea what any of that means. 9:40 p.m. - 2024-03-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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