The nice thing about Palimpsests

is that you can still make out what was written underneath.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest

Where Have All the Morricone Wannabes Gone?

Do you know how hard it is to find royalty-free music that sounds like this?

I’m trying to finish up the short film we shot last year (which looks nothing like the video above!), but I can’t find the right music. Every soundtrack on a royalty-free music site sounds like it belongs in the trailer of a Michael Bay movie. You know the kind–you can be making a sandwich in the kitchen and hear the film reacting to itself in the other room. There’s no need for the audience if you have a score that acts like the laugh-track on a sitcom.

I know that it is highly unlikely that anyone is making royalty-free music that sounds like it came from an Italian mondo/exploitation soundtrack, but if you know of anyone doing that sort of thing, can you leave me their info in the comments?

"Inception" Tells Me So

Two years ago this summer, Inception hit theaters, and I went to see it with my wife and our friends, Jon and Michelle. In the intervening two years I have spent quite a bit of time pondering the film from an academic perspective. Because I always felt like that one guy in class, that guy writing about Lacan and popular films–no, popular movies, actually–that guy writing about popular movies, my papers on Inception inevitably wound up being elaborate defenses of themselves. Here’s why we ought to view Inception through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, through the eyes of Slavoj Žižek, etc…

After a year of academic noodling, I have finally written the essay I needed to read, needed to have written: an essay about why I had to keep writing about Inception. In the process, I explore Žižek’s concept of interpassivity and what it means for the viewer of Inception. The essay also has flashbacks in it, if you go for that sort of thing.

The essay is here, at The Quarterly Conversation, a literary quarterly I need to spend some time gushing over on this site.

For me, Inception is a movie about choosing between competing realities, about trying to believe in something that one is unsure of. Like Corliss, this reading is based on my experience; unlike Corliss I don’t have an easily explainable reason for this reading. There are lots of reasons to think that Cobb is obsessed with making sure that he is not dreaming: he continually spins his reality-testing top to make sure he is awake. He says he wants to be in the real world because his children are there. But I’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out how to argue in the other direction. I believe Inception is a film about Cobb choosing to believe in his dreams over the waking world. I used to think I knew why this interpretation was important to me, but now I’m not so sure.

Click here for more.

7 Reasons "Red Lights" is a Modern-day Giallo Film (or at least in the vein of Italian horror)

Just saw the trailer for Rodrigo Cortes’s “Red Lights” (July 2012) and noticed that it shares quite a few characteristics with Italian thriller/horror films…

1. The color red is prominent

Cillian Murphy in “Red Lights”

Giancarlo Giannini in “The Black Belly of the Tarantula” (1971)

Looper's Levitt a Ladd Lookalike?

I Blame Mr. Mxyzptlk

Apparently “DC Comics hopes revamped heroes and digital will save the day.” From the piece at the LA Times Hero Complex:

“The walk-in, casual fans have gotten away from us,” DiDio observed. “We are down to just the die-hard buyers.”

Comic-book stores have become increasingly barren, with sales dropping consistently over the last three years and down an additional 7% so far in 2011.

Theories abound as to why. Some blame convoluted story lines, while others point to cynical publicity stunts like killing key characters only to bring them back a few months later. But the main culprit more likely lies beyond the page: Today’s youth is far more interested in spending its leisure hours in the digital worlds of YouTube, Xbox and Twitter.

While killing Superman (see how casual a fan I am, that’s the last major even I remember) and setting action in multiple time-lines could have possibly alienated casual fans, the article doesn’t cover one important facet of the comic book store experience: customer service.

In my experience, the staff of comic stores will carry on loud, arcane conversations about Mr. Mxyzptlk with someone who may work there or just live there (it’s hard too tell sometimes), while completely ignoring a casual fan (me) until they (I) get to the register. At which point, they don’t make conversation or eye-contact.

The Real Power is in the Text Anyway

Tim Carmody writing about the point of the Encyclopedia Brittanica at Wired makes a great point about the relationship between television and books:

When I was a child, my parent’s television was encased in a wooden cabinet. It was huge and sturdy, even more handsome and ornate than the simple bookshelves next to it, but clearly borrowing their prestige and power. Now, my parents’ TV probably looks much like yours: a flat screen, with a trim, dark bezel. … Now their television looks like a computer monitor.

What with Netflix and Hulu and Vudu, now the television becomes another computer monitor. The bookshelf has its prestige to itself again, but the balance of power has shifted. Now the book must borrow the prestige and power of the computer.

Meanwhile, the library gets rid of copies of John Hawkes, John Barth, William Graves, Arthur C. Clarke, Wm. and Hry. James, Kingsley Amis, D.H. Lawrence, Annie Dillard, Carson McCullers, E.B. White, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. I’ve filled two-and-a-half shelves in a month and a half. I can’t say I’m too displeased with the rise of the e-book at this point.

Shelf-Space and Pride of Place

Daniel S. Libman is interviewed by J.C. Hallman in this month’s issue of Bookslut and admits to managing his shelf-image:

I’m one of those people who go to your house and then goes through your bookshelf rather than having a conversation. I’ve got that joke in “Sentimental Values” where Eric tells his wife that her parents aren’t that smart because even though they have a shelf full of books, “most are by Dick Francis.” That gets a laugh when I do that story at readings, though I’ve enjoyed a lot of Dick Francis over the years. I just usually tuck those books in drawers and let Bullfinch’s Mythology sit on the bookshelves.

I’m always interested in what books people display vs. what books they enjoy. Not that Libman doesn’t enjoy Bullfinch or anything.

What books do you tuck in drawers or in a box in the closet? For my part, Jurassic Park and The Dark Half occupy the bottom shelf and are obscured by a big brown La-Z-Boy.

Did Rod Hilton Save Star Wars?

I got really, really excited reading “The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order” over at Absolutely No Machete Juggling.

The idea is that the series is best watched in this order: IV, V, II, III, VI. (Episode I is left right out. Thank the Maker.) This starts and ends the series with Luke’s story and preserves the Vader-as-father and Yoda reveals of the original trilogy. It just makes so much sense.

But there’s more. Mastermind Rod Hilton on the reconfigured narrative:

Best of all, this order actually makes a particular tension in Return of the Jedi stronger.

Remember, we see in Episode V that Luke’s vision in the cave on Degobah is that he turns into Darth Vader, then we find out Vader is his father. Then we watch Episodes II and III, in which his father turns to the dark side in order to protect his loved ones. After that we go back to VI, where eventually Luke confronts the Emperor.

The first time we see Luke in Return of the Jedi, he’s wearing all-black, just like his father did. He gives R2D2 and C-3P0 to Jabba the Hutt, much to their surprise. Luke isn’t exactly looking like a clean-cut Jedi like he claims. Then, when he finally enters Jabba’s palace, the musical cue sounds a bit like the Imperial March, and the way he enters with the light behind him makes it unclear if he is Luke or Vader. Then, he force chokes Jabba’s guards, something only Vader has done in the series! Nobody else sees him do this.

When he confronts Jabba, he warns him that he’s taking his friends back. He says Jabba can either profit from this, “or be destroyed.” Furthermore, he tells Jabba “not to underestimate my power.” The last time this phrase was used, it was by Anakin when dueling Obi-Wan. When watching Jedi on its own, Luke just seems a tad arrogant during these scenes. When watching Jedi immediately after watching Revenge of the Sith, the message is clear: Luke Skywalker is moving toward the Dark Side.

Why does this matter? Because at the end of Jedi, Luke confronts the Emperor. The Emperor explains that the assault on the new Death Star is a trap and that his friends are going to die, and he keeps taunting Luke, telling him to grab his lightsaber and fight him. The film is trying to create a tension that Luke might embrace the Dark Side, but it was never really believable. However, within the context of him following in his father’s footsteps and his father using the power of the dark side to save people, with Luke’s friends being killed just outside the Death Star window, this is much more believable.

Shortly after, Luke goes apeshit and beats the hell out of Vader, clearly succumbing to his anger. He overpowers Vader with rage and cuts his arm off, just like Anakin did to Windu in Episode III. Having the very real threat of Luke following in his father’s path made clear by watching II and III before VI heightens the tension of this scene, and it actually makes Return of the Jedi better. Yes, watching Revenge of the Sith makes Return of the Jedi a better, more effective film. Considering it’s the weakest of the original trilogy films, this improvement is welcome.

Too bad I sold off my prequel trilogy DVDs to Half Price Books. (And made my wife watch the films in episode order already.)

Good reason to have kids, I guess.

"The Third Reich" Is Just a Game… Or Is It?

Here’s a nice essay by Anthony Paletta on gaming in literature:

Gaming in literature tends to come in two varieties; the high-brow and highly abstract, and the demotic and irredeemably nerdy. Look to puzzles in Perec’s Life, A Users Manual or chess in Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense, for the former, and sci-fi literature for the latter. Historically-based wargaming has largely fallen through the gap; there is Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim’s effort to recreate the siege of Namur in Tristram Shandy but otherwise it is a hobbyist corner given little literary attention. Until, oddly enough, Roberto Bolaño’s latest exhumed English translation, The Third Reich. This novel, to be clear, takes its name not from that short-lived empire, but from a multiplayer strategy game depicting its span, of which the book’s protagonist is an avid devotee.

Udo Berger, vacationing on the Catalan coast with his girlfriend Ingeborg, is not particularly given to sunshine. He spends much of the novel in his hotel room, unfurling scenarios for “The Third Reich” and soon launching into a fraught match with a local. Reviewers of the novel, written in 1990, but released in an English translation late last year, seem to be at some loss to describe just what, in fact, Berger’s wargaming constitutes, with most quickly settling upon the notion that it is “obsessive.” That’s not inaccurate, but it’s a sort of obsession rendered by a clear kindred spirit, with a detail of gameplay description impossible to anyone who wasn’t deeply familiar with the topic.

Not that I’m deeply familiar with wargaming or anything, but my few months working at Fantasy Flight Games opened my eyes to the possibilities beyond the occasional game of Axis and Allies (forget Risk, it’s just die-rolling and amassing a huge army in Australia).

I guess I’m going to have to pick up the first two parts in The Paris Review (wouldn’t you know it, I subscribed right in the middle of their serialization of The Third Reich).