"But there was nothing about the little, low-rambling, more or less identical homes of Northumberland Estates to interest or to haunt, no chance of loot that would be any more than the ordinary, waking-world kind the cops hauled you in for taking; no small immunities, no possibilities for hidden life or otherworldly presence; no trees, secret routes, shortcuts, culverts, thickets that could be made hollow in the middle – everything in the place was right out in the open, everything could be seen at a glance; and behind it, under it, around the corners of its houses and down the safe, gentle curves of its streets, you came back, you kept coming back, to nothing; nothing but the cheerless earth."
Thomas Pynchon, "The Secret Integration"

This is Ian Mathers' Tumblr. I live in Canada. I've written about music and other things for Stylus, PopMatters, Resident Advisor, the Village Voice, and a few other places. Hi.

imathers@gmail.com

 

People get the wrong idea when they ask if Pink Floyd meant for Dark Side of the Moon to be synced with The Wizard of Oz. The mysterious thing is that they do sync— they sync inside your head. I have heard complaints about The Shining Forwards and Backwards experiment— for example, that it isn’t conclusive, because it doesn’t take into account the deleted hospital scene or the shorter cut shown internationally. But the most important aspect of superimposition isn’t author’s intention; it’s watching something familiar in a new way— or ways, seeing two points of view simultaneously and continuously. It’s a dance, beautiful and social.

Sadly that tale of a monastic order living inside an artificial wooden planet filled with cathedrals and wheat fields is now one of the great what ifs of cinema. That said, it is likely that if the producers had pursued that version all the way then it would have been extremely interesting, probably brilliant, but an absolute commercial failure. Even by 1992 it is doubtful that cinema audiences were quite prepared for a mentaloid Name Of The Rose in space involving nightmarish, Hieronymus Bosch-like imagery that included sheep with human faces where their arseholes should be.

This whole article on Alien 3 is excellent, and has convinced me that I need to track down the director’s cut, but maybe my favourite thing about it is that now I have another never-to-be-made movie to obsess over.

senortacos:

Samuel L. Jackson struggled to remember his lines when he started shooting superhero action blockbuster The Avengers - because he could only recall half the script page.  The movie star admits the eye patch his character Nick Fury wears played tricks with his mind - and he eventually had to learn his lines with one eye covered.  He tells Entertainment Weekly magazine, “I was trying to remember my lines, but when I got there, I put the eye patch on and could only see half the page in my head.  “I didn’t figure it out until halfway through the day. I had to take it (script), cover my eye, and relearn the lines… There was just something in my brain that wouldn’t let me learn it with two eyes and then put the patch on and remember them. It was f**ked up.”

All I can think of are all the examples Merleau-Ponty used in Phenomenology of Perception and how much he would have loved this one.

(Source: imdb.com)