Though I was considering an immersion into my "freedom and culture" essay, between Thursday, yesterday and today this has definitely turned out to be an educational audio-visual weekend. It's relaxing, it's low-budget and it's something I'd never really done before I set out on my own.
Thursday night I rented and watched The City of Lost Children, a suitably foreign film with incredible artistic vision and a passably semilinear plot. For those of you who know the movie, my favorites were the incessant tritone emission of the Cyclops' eyepieces and - no surprise, here - the beautifully aged Octopus sisters. No official site exists, though you can get a glimpse of both the film and nostalgia-laced early HTML on a fan page. As with many other foreign films, the film at first blush began to exhibit diffusion towards the end, as if Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the creation staff grew bored with stringing together events to form a narration. As in, Hey, we've been exploring a fantastic Neverland for seventy minutes. Why don't we complete the story arc of every single supporting character and antagonist with violent, ironic death. Let's do it in less than fifteen minutes. After all: we're French!
The French. Worthless in practical matters, they nevertheless win my vote for obscure, watch-every-five-to-ten-years art cinema and film noir. My salute, the ten-minute still-frame La Jetté:
...Mais un homme du futur...
Perfect.
It just so happens that when I rented the movie from Hollywood Video, the clerks quietly informed me that Blockbuster is actually the better store for miniseries and television collections. Good advice, it turns out: last night I found the store to run rings around poor old Hollywood. No Star Trek: The Next Generation series packages for rent, but I was immediately shown to Tom Hanks' post-Apollo 13 HBO extravaganza, From the Earth to the Moon. After a second trip to Blockbuster to have the theft-protection devices removed from the DVD case (I knew the transaction went to quickly!), I was ready to watch, root beer and potato chips in hand.
I've gone nearly halfway through. Apollo 9 and 10 succeeded at the finale of Part Five of Twelve; Neil and Buzz and the third guy whose name the nominally familiar can't remember are up next. After being inundated with the pathos, heartwarming and enormous budget of Band of Brothers, this series required a slight adjustment. Each episode, as it were, is composed of numerous subchapters, too - unlike Brothers - so the looseness threw me a bit. Multiple directorship varies much more dynamically in To the Moon, to the point where I nearly gave myself a headache rolling my eyes at Part 4. I'm not sure who it was, but he obviously missed the 1990s where EVERY LAST PIECE OF STOCK FOOTAGE DETAILING THE MISGUIDED ANGER OF 1960S RADICALS WAS JUXTAPOSED WITH THE DEATHS OF RFK AND MLK, ALL TO ACID-ROCK OVERDUB. The irony, at one time, was supposed to evoke old memories, long-suppressed by synthpop and Ronald Reagan's stellar windup for USSR-TKO. Clinton's in office! He almost admitted to doing drugs and protesting - and he commands the baby-killers, now, man! Kids are wearing retro! Boy, were we right all along. The 1990s, like any other incendiary, burned themselves out before being suddenly and finally destroyed by reality as it descended in the form of hijacked jetliners murdering thousands.
But I digress. The point in the episode was to focus squarely on one line, a telegram from an American to NASA. "You saved 1968," she said. Now, that is poignant: I don't know if I needed the art-video inlays of five different screens of protest and Vietnamese sorrow intermingled and substituted at alarming frame rates to really get it, unfortunately.
All in all, very interesting. I'll press forward later on this evening. Interestingly enough, the actor who played Gus Grissom - rather well, as a matter of fact - played Drake in Aliens. Poor guy had less than twenty minutes of screen time in the 1986 sci-fi flick and he's forever typecasted. I kept expecting him to grunt and flirt with Vasquez. Best of all: When Grissom's NASA presence was related in story posthumously to a Senate inquiry, we all found one more reason, fictionally derived or not, to hold utter contempt for Walter Mondale.
Before I sat down to translate my intriguing little life (operative word in that one is yours to choose) into a weblog entry, I swung by the library for some music. I had 1980s synthpop in my head, probably as an antidote to all the bad 1960s revolution garbage (see above). Couldn't find any. So I went wild, relatively speaking, and picked up music that I wouldn't normally listen to: Brian Eno; Genesis; traditional Chinese music; an old favorite absent in my CD collection, Ralph Vaughan Williams; Robert Schumann.
The kicker was a CD I picked up in the ethnic section, The North Coast Pipe Band Pipes Up! You guessed it: wall-to-wall bagpipes. Naturally, it went right into the disc player for the ride back; immediately, "Scotland the Brave" was blaring out of my PT as only bagpipe companies can. I was considering entering myself into the Guiness Book of World Records as "First Man in Northeast Ohio to Ever Blast Bagpipe Music out of His Operational Motor Vehicle Whilst Absent any Ironic Intent."
I've got to tell you: cranking bagpipe music is a funny thing. Nobody in the immediate vicinity knows how to react. Guys my age in duly attractive cars are supposed to play rock music and other suave endeavors - not bagpipes. That's the first problem; the second is what we can safely call "bagpipe prejudice." People walking down the street crane their necks, twisting this way and that, trying to figure out where the hell the parade is coming from. Then they follow the sound to the street, see me, wonder why a guy my age isn't taking advantage of his duly attractive car by playing rock music et al, and stare. Oh, the stares.
It's all right. I know I'm hip. All the same - should the coolness of bagpipes be considered a Consitutional right? Let's sue all the way to the Supreme Court.
Maybe...not. We can rely on social mores and respect for tradition to keep it current and respected.
I just finished the first Vaughan Williams and have the Chinese music in. Soon after, I'm off to choose my own adventure: guitar, computer, book, Apollo 11. Gung Bay Fat Chow!