No þinge is meriar þen Ihesu to synge. — Richard Rolle
Austin in the 1950s. I saw the premiere of Malick’s A Hidden Life at the Paramount in 2019. Congress looks a little different now.
Speaking of title sequences, here’s a post on Disney’s.
For anyone who has spent time at Penn Station — and, for my sins, I’ve spent a good bit of time there over the years — it’s always a shock to be reminded what it used to look like.
My friend Austin Kleon has four notebooks, but I have only three: a planner, a journal, and a movie notebook. Whenever I watch a movie I write some brief thoughts on it. I started this practice just a few years ago, and I am now getting to the end of my second notebook. I love looking back through what I’ve seen and how I have responded — especially when I re-watch films, which I often do.
Eno, 1995:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
The absolute definition of being “in the pocket” is Al McKay’s rhythm guitar on “That’s the Way of the World.”