In Baudelaire's "The Voyage" and Mallarme's "Sea Breeze," we find the "signposts" of modernity through a growing skepticism regarding the "objective" nature of truth. Although Baudelaire and Mallarme express the longing for adventure that is as old as Western civilization, their expectations and discoveries are markedly different. We are not only dealing with variations on a theme, but two unique realities, both of which challenge the reader with a complexity of subject-matter and presentation. In order to gain a greater understanding of these texts, a comparative analysis will be utilized. We will compare and contrast the subject-matter of the poems by focusing on why the voyage is taken and what the voyage brings to us. Both Baudelaire and Mallarme explicitly display a longing for the beyond, a virtual plunge into the abyss, which accepts life and death. But, they are going to sea for different reasons. For Mallarme, natural, bodily and intellectual growth is insufficient. It is both tedious and sad. Baudelaire's departure is "bursting with resentment and bitter longing." We will also find that the saving grace for the travellers in Baudelaire (i.e. correspondence with the infinite), is thrown into doubt in Mallarme's poem. In Baudelaire, the voyage brings the reader a plethora of sensory experiences and material goods, but none of them deliver the voyager from the human dilemma. Baudelaire's voyage is, in part, a sharp criticism of humanity. In contrast, Mallarme is less concerned with the human dilemma, and more concerned with his own. We will address the stylistic differences in the texts, both of which serve as vehicles that bring the reader to the abyss. In the closing section we will briefly summarize what Baudelaire and Mallarme were trying to do with "The Voyage" and "Sea-Breeze."
The evolution of fragmented modes of consciousness in twentieth century American poetry is undeniable. The stage was set by the French Symbolists (and Freud) for this development, whereby different voices were emitted by the same writer within the same poem. Eliot took the objectification of the self to new levels in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land." In these poems, the reader is constantly challenged to determine who is speaking and thus the variegation of perspectives grows increasingly complex. One of the most perplexing figures within modernist poetry is Marianne Moore. Upon first glance, Moore appears to be utterly transparent when compared with the likes of Eliot and Rimbaud. Poems like "The Steeple-Jack" convey a purity of expression through a combination of visual imagery and observations on human nature. However, a closer reading of Moore will reveal a complex interaction of distinctive modes of consciousness. Although these modes of consciousness are less explicit than in the works of writers such as Eliot, they remain crucial to any critical understanding of Marianne Moore's poetry.
There are three "ideal types" of consciousness in Marianne Moore's poetry:
1) The presentation of the object as a thing-in-itself,
2) Direct commentary on the nature of existence (i.e. direct value-judgements), and
3) The presentation of the object as a metaphor for the nature of existence (i.e. indirect value judgements) as well as the absorption of the other two categories into the text.
Thus, the third category serves as the synthesis of the antithetical ideal types as well as the process by which this synthesis occurs. Through intensive textual analysis we will discover the inherent tensions between these modes of consciousness, but we will also find the dynamic energy that has rightfully brought Marianne Moore distinction as a great modernist poet. We will examine "Bird-Witted" as an "object poem" and "What Are Years?" as an example of a direct commentary on the nature of existence. We will then move on to examine "The Fish," and "The Mind Is An Enchanting Thing" as two poems where things (the sea or the mind) inherit moral content.
This very young married couple from Louisiana claim to have 'solved' the game Mastermind to two moves, and some websites were reporting it today. I don't know about that. I know that in 1993, Kenji Koyama and Tony W. Lai solved it to 4.340 moves.
There's a strategy flowchart here that helps you solve in 5 moves or less. You always begin with a guess of BBCC and then based on the response (awarding 1-pt for a white peg, 2-pts for black) use the chart to select the next optimal guess.
Somewhere, we think, on the East Coast somewhere on the East
Coast, out East. No one says for sure.
First seen or discovered as said history designates, was 1970
on the East Coast.
Film director Monte Hellman and [sensational] casting director Fred Roos audition dozens of girls for the part of "The Girl" in Two-Lane Blacktop.
One might note how many unsung were in this film, like Rudolph Wurlitzer. Rudy unsung for decades now. It’s said he doesn’t like to work. A Slow Fade.
“In New York we met Laurie Bird, and she seemed like a prototype for the kind of character we had in mind . . .
[a young female hitchhiker, nameless]
. . . it never occurred to us to that she could play the part . . . she was, ‘a teenager with a strange history that fit her role as a. . .’
[drifting hitchhiker]
we spent several hours recording an interview with her which we used in the creation of the part . .
[of “The Girl,” nameless]
later we couldn’t find anyone to play the part.” According to production notes she was:
“asked to fly to Little Rock, Ark., this time as a candidate for the role.
A screen test was arranged in Hollywood after she was rehearsed by Hellman and his wife...
A few days later she was signed to the picture.”
Principle photography commenced on August 13, 1970. Rolling Stone visits the set in October, 1970 and finds:
a 17-year-old high school graduate they pick up somewhere in Arizona.
JT finishes shaving, and sings a line or two from “Mean Mr. Mustard” to the desert.
Laurie, who looks like she has just gotten out of the hospital for some undiagnosed high fever (she has), picks up the song. She sings softly, privately, really to herself. “You know,
this is just how I imagined this movie would be. All I knew about it before I read the script was that it was about some people who drive cross-country, and sometimes their car breaks down and they fix it.And that’s just what’s happening.”
. . . she mutters something, and the sound man complains, ‘That’s too soft Monte, I’m not getting it.’
‘All she said was that she wanted some orange juice,’ says JT.
‘I know the lines. . . The first line is I wish we were back in Santa Fe. The second line is, San Francisco is groovy.’
She has been keeping a diary-a mixed media collage with annotations in different colored inks and she lets us read some of it:
‘Beginning of her story . . . although she has been on her own for two years and she hasn’t any plans of what to do. Now that she has broached this odd predicament, she has to find an answer right away . . . to bring herself into Summer happily!’
The conversation drifts predictably to the problems attendant on being a superstar. ‘I’ll have my day” 85 percent kidding. She smiles a private smile. . .
The last line is ‘No good.’
Film is released in 1971
1972, Montana: she writes dialog for a character in the film Dream of Passion. She was not cast in the film. The film was never completed...
1974. . .in Los Angeles she lives with Monte Hellman on Sunset Plaza.
They live next door to some porno mafia gangsters ala Cassavetes. She acts in The Cockfighter, screenwriter Charles Willeford will say, “Monte has a personal theory about being the director of repertoire films. He has used Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Pat Pearcy, Laurie Bird, and Millie Perkins in his other films
I could see why he wanted to use Laurie Bird for Dody White (they live together and her salary stays in the family, so to speak), but now there are three tall, skinny women playing the only three major female roles in the film.”
Later Monte Hellman will marry a . . .
In July 1975 the Bird meets Art Garfunkel
She makes the cover photo on his LP Breakaway along with the fast talking hitchhiker (Helena Kallianiotes) from Five Easy Pieces.
It’s worth noting that the screenplays for Five Easy Pieces, The Shooting, and Ride the Whirlwind were written by Carole Eastman, another unsung bird.
1977 she plays Paul Simon’s girlfriend in Annie Hall.
Paul Simon plays record producer Tony Lacey, a LA music biz type. The Bird wears all white and walks slowly towering above him.
. . . in 1978 AG and Laurie move from the West Coast back to New York.
March 1979, AG spends the next four months shooting on location in Vienna and London for Bad Timing.
. . . filming was to take place in New York in June. On June 15th she commits suicide in his penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park.
“She left a note indicating that she was depressed.”
Willeford writes that she: “leaped out of a window and killed herself in New York. She was with a famous pop singer when she defenestrated herself, and he was quite upset by her suicide.”
Hellman counters: “Although the overdose of valium was not accidental, Laurie expected Art Garfunkel to arrive momentarily and save her, and therefore didn’t intend to die”
. . . [too] curiously echoing Theresa Russell’s OD in Bad Timing. As does the photograph on AG’s LP Scissors Cut.
Drift is an impressionistic road trip shot from the point of view of the traveler, presenting each passage of scenery through his eyes.
Our trip starts in the Midwest, the camera photographs through a bus window, film slows and speeds as the landscape of middle America passes by in a hypnotic monotony. The soundtrack is the natural sound of chatter filtered through an echo effect creating a sense of immediacy at a distance. Experienced, but muffled by one’s own impression of the surroundings. A fellow traveler, a young woman is sometimes viewed through the camera, sleeping or watching.
The bus travels south, through natural beauty and an occasional city scene. A foreshadowing montage promises the possibility of exotic or imaginary landscapes. Stops in Denver, and other Southwest areas begin to show an evolving sense of contrast, change and decay of the city, poverty and emptiness. The bus trip ends and our film-maker and companion board a plane to South America.
The destination appears to be Peru, which seems to be the woman’s home. She interacts with family and friends in residential homes. The couple travels into the mountains and encounter indigenous mountain people. The means of travel changes from a bus to a boat, peacefully moving through the water of this land so far away from where we were at the beginning of the film. Scenes from the early montage come into play as we mentally revisit each place, the landscape, the social strata, its natural beauty and ugliness.
Drift is a dream state document of contrasts, the wide array of experiences, landscapes, and lives that co-exist in our world.
DRIFT is a film on DVD submitted to The Howling Hex by mail. Although we may not have the time to write in response to every item, we appreciate all submissions of music, film and other art.
Peter Watkins has been censored, banned, erased from encyclopedias and cast into cinematic exile. For many years Watkins' films were impossible to obtain. Recently, a few titles have been daringly released, giving this peaceful warrior a new chance to battle.
The cool and coherent 1970 film The Gladiators depicts all the military leaders of the world assembled in order to cheerfully direct their troops to kill each other for "The International Peace Games" a Saturday night television program operated by the ICARUS war machine. Any of the entertainment implied by this short description of the film dissolves when the peace game becomes an absurd spectacle of wartime politics, refusing to pander cheap action, or violence, and has no main character.
A steady undertow of suspense, builds towards where one would expect a war movie to go-the killing-but when the moments arise, a piercing beep sabotages the soundtrack or freeze frames are used to prevent a typical war movie climax.
The imaginative yet simplistic structure allows viewers to see through the cracks in the rigid rules enforced upon most television and cinema. Liberating us from conventional forms and processes of media, advising not to simply surrender to the vastness of the problems or go blind to the simplicity of some solutions.
A political-fantasy examining the oppression of interchangeable power systems sharing the same self-perpetuating goal, while simultaneously confronting the tendency of anti-war films to glorify what they set out to denounce. The Gladiators forces the viewer to contemplate the way the system swallows us all. Time and time again we see the legend of David replacing the oppression of Goliath. We can join 'em, bite 'em, smoke 'em if we got 'em, but when will we ever beat them? And if we do, what then?
Peter Watkins describes the media crisis and offers suggestions with this intensive public media statement here: Peter Watkins' Statement...
"Society at large still refuses to acknowledge the role of form and process in the delivery and reception of the mass audio/visual media output. …The language forms structuring the message contained in any film or TV program, and the entire process of delivery to the public are completely overlooked, and are certainly not debated." -P.Watkins
Ah, the Sichuan Peppercorn. Call it "szechwan" and you're doomed to White American suburban Chinese food for life. Go eat some Chop Suey or Chow Mein.
The FDA had banned its import to the US from 1968 til 2005. And unless you've eaten this peppercorn, you've never tasted anything quite like it (no culinary elitism, it's the truth!). How does one describe something completely different from ordinary experience? To me it tastes like spicy cilantro that blooms in the mouth. Fellow diners have likened it to some variety of Evergreen, and the friendly Wikipedia hints at its "lemony overtones". To eat it is to forge a new neural pathway, to teach the brain in its old age that sometimes new experiences are beyond its capacity to avoid. Plus, it makes your mouth go numb.
Living with a rhinovirus for the past week has really put a cramp in my breathing style. Sinus congestion is miserable. But I've never before really considered the plight of the everyday mouth-breather. Just as there are many GUTs (Grand Unified Theories) of the physical universe, like the "string theory" of the past few decades, there are also GUTs of illness. Some people believe that the food we eat keeps the body's ph level too acidic, and creates the breeding ground for all things bad. Well another such theory, it turns out, holds that breathing through the mouth instead of the nose is the source of many of our ailments.
One of the most fascinating aspects of evolution, biological and social, is the idea that the same phenomena can arise independently all over the world at around the same time, without knowledge of one another. A sort of global consciousness, if you will. Dissenters insist that this is false, that a single great idea can be spread by the trade winds, and one profitable adaptation can populate the world. Either theory may be true, though I suspect something more like a combination and dialogue, too complicated to really unravel, so theorists prefer to just pick sides.
Anita O'Day died in her sleep on November 23, 2006. One of the first pieces of music I ever heard was her version of Lady is A Tramp. My parents used to play her records at parties while they thought I was sleeping. Therefore, I wanted to mention her passing.
The complications of alcohol kept making her take years to get her voice back, yet survival was the lifetime achievement of her life. How many people realized in her teens, with her highly stylized honeysuckle hair, that she would be killing nearly so long onstage before she would be received at last? O'Day began in her prime, strolled out of the poor hospital of her birth and started singing.
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Living with a rhinovirus for the past week has really put a cramp in my breathing style. Sinus congestion is miserable. But I've never before really considered the plight of the everyday mouth-breather. Just as there are many GUTs (Grand Unified Theories) of the physical universe, like the "string theory" of the past few decades, there are also GUTs of illness. Some people believe that the food we eat keeps the body's ph level too acidic, and creates the breeding ground for all things bad. Well another such theory, it turns out, holds that breathing through the mouth instead of the nose is the source of many of our ailments.
