labingi

This quirky-fun-disturbing music video commenting on our polycrisis is by the band, Zimbru. One of the members is the brother of a classmate in my Degrowth Master's. Creative video!

When I first went to see Les Mis in what must have been 1991, my program confidently assured me that “in 1992, she will going to the cinema” (image of little Cosette holding theater tickets). I was very excited, and I waited eagerly throughout 1992 and 1993 and 1994.... They are twenty years late, but they got there, and it was worth the wait.

louderandlouder has already evaluated the Les Misérables movie very comprehensively in terms I would mostly agree with here and here.

I will try not to retread too much, but here are some overall thoughts:

* I was surprised by how much I liked it. My reaction in scene 1 was to stare quizzically at fake-looking galley stuff set to what seemed a rather quiet musical track (vs. seeing the play live). But early on, it carried me away, and I cried a lot. In fact, I had an odd dual sensation of being emotionally engulfed while simultaneously running precise technical criticisms in my head. Portrait of a true Les Mis fan maybe.

* It’s a great story. Victor Hugo was an exceptional writer, and Schönberg and Boublil did a very solid adaptation--as one friend said, better than most of the movie adaptations in terms of capturing the novel.

* It’s a very 19th-century story, not just set in the 19th-century but very 19th-century novelesque: the unironic praise for noble, good people and religious faith; the obligatory boring romance; the “lets lie to the womens for their own good” thing; the coincidental meetings with long-lost acquaintances; the almost complete absence of women as power players--all very 19th century. And oddly, I found this refreshing. I would certainly not want to live in that world, not in 19th-century France and not in a 19th-century novel, but after a long, long stretch of wading through indifferently written contemporary novels, just the taste of a real, consummately written classic was like a glass of water in the desert. Indeed, the unironic 19th-century moralizing seems to fit very well with the over-the-top Broadway musical-style narrating. This might be a large part of why the whole thing works.

( Read more... )

Rambles in which Gungrave and the Iliad are a central examples for thinky thoughts on the nature of narrative, archetype, modal displacement, history, and personality typing.

Now that I've lost all my readers...

Gungrave has made a whole lot more sense to me since I figured out that its theme can be summed up as Achilles and Patroclus if they broke up. Of course, Achilles and Patroclus don't break up. Why? This begs comparison between ancient Greek epic and contemporary seinen anime.

( Enneagram, Wheel o' Modes, Nature of Tragedy, Tori Amos, with Spoilers )

I have been rediscovering Tori Amos lately through Venus Orbiting, which has a fantastic re-visioning of the song, "Waitress." And it came to me that this song is just about the perfect L and B song, that is, B's POV of L.

( Lyrics and Further Thoughts )