Chanced upon a heavily sanitized screening of Great Expectations on TV last night. When it came out a decade ago, not too many critics were crazy about Alfonso Cuaron's adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel of transformation. There's just too much baggage: the original novel and the 1946 film version by David Lean. But seeing this again ten years later makes me appreciate how Cuaron was able to successfully take the themes of Dicken's novel and make it work in the present day context. There's the amazement of viewing a richly visualized film (always, there is green), the score by Patrick Doyle that enhanced the storytelling (and Life in Mono!), and the artwork by Francisco Clemente that helped crystallize the desires of Finn and put it in display for all the world to see.
Cuaron did fine work with adapting A Little Princess (1995) and he was praised for the visual texture of his work. A lot of the reviews of GE: 1998 also focused on the lushness of the scenery--Paradiso Perduto was literally an abandoned Eden with its ivy and weeds taking over Miss Havisham's doomed wedding party, the first person point of view of the novel was retained in the voice over--later revealed to be done for free by David Mamet, as long as it was kept a secret--and the fluid camera work that mirrored Finn's point of view that largely cast Estella as the object of his desire.
But this was just his second American film, three years before he did Y Tu Mama Tambien and much later than his Harry Potter venture. For a lot of critics, the shadow of the David Lean version loomed large over this Mexican director. It's only later that it becomes evident that Cuaron did much more than a film version of the novel and the 1946 film, he transformed that world and took the same desires and values and put it in a more contemporary setting. Cuaron took Pip away from England's marshes and brought him to a Florida fishing town, and from uncouth and common orphan to London gentleman, Finn sought out success as an artist in late 20th century New York.
Janet Maslin of the New York Times considers the switch to the American setting to be "adventurous and even apt." She calls Cuaron a great visual stylist, "capable of wonder even when its wilder ideas misfire."
Salon's Charles Taylor was quick to note that Dickens is accessible to a lot of people of different ages. Although we first see Finn as a child, what Cuaron emphasizes is the sensuousness and sexuality brewing underneath and brings this desire to the surface. In that first encounter at the Paradiso Perduto, when young Estella urges young Finn to drink from the fountain, and later on she herself drinks from the same spout and French kisses him, we can see that this is not just about a desire to go up the social ladder. Finn wants to become a gentleman so that he can stand on common ground with Estella, so that he may deserve him. He thinks this is his destiny, and when things start to go his way (an offer from a mysterious person to foot the bill for a one man show in a New York gallery), he mistakenly takes this to be the universe (and Miss Dinsmoor) urging him to go to "Estella's New York", get the girl and what he deemed to be his rightful place in society.
The key here is that Finn "thinks" this is what this all means. He is an unreliable narrator. In the opening voice over, he declares: "I'm not going to tell the story the way that it happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it." That he is a visual artist and we see a lot of his work also clues us in on the workings of his mind. The first time that Finn sketches the young Estella, the camera leads us to see Estella in parts--eyes, lips, nose, mouth. This is later echoed in the New York apartment when the grownup Estella poses for him. She takes off her clothes and asks, "Do you want me to sit or stand?" He replies with a "whatever." He doesn't care, what he sees is the ideal Estella, the curve of her neck, the swell of her breasts, the strands of her pubic hair.
Estella is forever the dream (or the delusion) that Finn is chasing. In "Not Telling the Story the Way It Happened: Alfonso Cuarón's Great Expectations," Michael K. Johnson notes this disconnect in how Finn perhaps refusing to see Estella as she is. Since this is his remembrance of how things happened, we cannot trust him fully even in his depiction of Estella as dream/object of desire. In Finn's remembrance, even Estella expresses distance when talking about herself, like in this dialogue as she leaves him:
FINN. What's it like not to feel anything?
ESTELLA. Suppose there was a little girl. She was taught to fear daylight. One sunny day, you ask her to go outside and play in the sun and she won't. How can you be angry with her?
FINN. I knew that little girl. I saw the light in her eyes. No matter what you say or do, that's still what I see.
ESTELLA. We are who we are. People don't change.
She refers to herself in the third person, in the first person plural, or even the more generic "people." For Estella, and for Finn's vision of Estella, there is no "I."
Even in the film's ending, seven years after the New York incident, Finn goes back to Florida and Paradiso Perduto and finds Estella, he still refuses to let go. Estella stands on the beach, the bright sun obscures her face, but she will always be girl in his paintings, bright eyed and lips parted ever so slightly, the girl in the plane looking down on the forlorn Finn drowning out in the rainy New York streets. And when she says, "Will you ever forgive me?" he replies with "Don't you even know me?" and takes her hand in his. It seems like he's never learned his lesson on "the fantasy and the wealthy." Miss Dinsmoor has already informed him early on, Estella would only break her heart. But the best he could do is to take our hands, place it on his chest and declare, "Do you know what this is? This is my heart, and it is broken."
For me, this adaptation brings Finnegan Bell closer to Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, who observes the green light representing the object of his desire from across the lake. No matter how bright the suit he wears or how high he jumps in the air, the Other will not notice, will not take heed, but he will not give up. This is a lover in love with sadness, and though we should know better, we also can't do anything but witness with knowing sadness that we know how this will turn out.
What follows is my favorite scene from the movie. It is Finnegan Bell's opening night. His show is sold out, he is now a successful artist in New York. But the present is unraveled by the appearance of a person from his past, Joe, the man who raised him in Florida. Joe is too loud and careless and basically doesn't fit in Finn's new sophisticated environment. When he leaves the gallery, note how Finn and Joe are positioned, up and down, in and out, but the past refuses to disappear from the present.
Sunday, June 8
Saturday, June 7
Story and Structure
Architect Bernard Tschumi best sums up why I love reading film scripts: "because of the conciseness of it, and the fact that you can always break a film down into separate parts: sound without image, text without cinematography."
Story and structure. And he was reading Godard's "Breathless" too. Can't get anything better than that.
Story and structure. And he was reading Godard's "Breathless" too. Can't get anything better than that.
Friday, June 6
The Retro Tech Allure of Typewriters
In the last days of the old millenium, I still cranked out class requirements in what was probably 12 point pica, from the portable my mother bought me in high school. One classmate was amazed upon receiving her workshop copy. "How retro," she said.
For me though, it was more a necessity than fashion or aesthetic considerations. I couldn't afford computer rentals and printouts all the time. But the lasting impression of seeing "black words on white paper rolling up in front of my gaze," as writer Frederick Forsyth said, is never lost on me, and in my mind, has always been connected with the act of writing. Also, I tend to type really hard, even on computer keyboards, which is bad, but something that I can't help doing.
In the digital world, one expects typewriters to be almost extinct. Although sales have been declining steadily, I was surprised to learn that there's still a steady base of customers for typewriters. Most of them are "old people," who probably can't get the hang of using computers, and the occasional student who opts to spend on one instead of a laptop.
Somewhere in our house sits that old portable, probably gathering dust and a colony of ants. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, with coins on the back of my hands. In the beginning, you could hear metal clanking on the floor all over the typing room. It was the early '90s, and in the high school I attended, which was big on office and commerce skills, typing upwards of 70 words per minute was a minimum requirement.
Then Windows 95 came and computer classes no longer involved booting the system cold from copies of DOS and Wordstar in 5 inch floppies.
But we still had regular typing classes, and every day, we had drills which focused on two things: speed and accuracy. With speed, we busied ourselves with high word turnouts, with accuracy, we went slower and made sure that there were no erasures or typeovers. It seemed like an archaic skill to learn on the brink of the digital revolution and the new millenium. But we learned this along with stenography, salesmanship and bookkeeping. Later on, the school would change the names of these skills to reflect the present/future situation: office management, entrepreneurship, and accounting.
It's old fashioned now, but when it was new, the ability to type really fast and accurate was revolutionary, specially for women. The females first ventured into the work space at the end of the 19th century as typists or secretaries. According to Neil Hallows of the BBC, "[i]t was a limited emancipation. The new employees (often called "type-writers" themselves) were accused of stealing jobs from men, depressing wages and sexually tempting the boss, and their chance of career progression was often nil. But for women to have any job outside the home was revolutionary."
So the women's liberation movement got their big push with typewriters, whose "retro" appeal does not end with seeing words come up on paper. More importantly, in a time when computers are plugged to the internet, productivity becomes more difficult. Specially for writers with deadlines and then faced with websites with little links you clink. Before you know the day has passed and you have watched more videos of lizards eating fruits of the pandan tree than you care to acknowledge.
The distraction afforded by the internet paved the way for software to make your computer seem like a typewriter, or at least, a very early version of the unwired computer with the black screen and green blinking cursor. As one commenter said:
via
For me though, it was more a necessity than fashion or aesthetic considerations. I couldn't afford computer rentals and printouts all the time. But the lasting impression of seeing "black words on white paper rolling up in front of my gaze," as writer Frederick Forsyth said, is never lost on me, and in my mind, has always been connected with the act of writing. Also, I tend to type really hard, even on computer keyboards, which is bad, but something that I can't help doing.
In the digital world, one expects typewriters to be almost extinct. Although sales have been declining steadily, I was surprised to learn that there's still a steady base of customers for typewriters. Most of them are "old people," who probably can't get the hang of using computers, and the occasional student who opts to spend on one instead of a laptop.
Somewhere in our house sits that old portable, probably gathering dust and a colony of ants. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, with coins on the back of my hands. In the beginning, you could hear metal clanking on the floor all over the typing room. It was the early '90s, and in the high school I attended, which was big on office and commerce skills, typing upwards of 70 words per minute was a minimum requirement.
Then Windows 95 came and computer classes no longer involved booting the system cold from copies of DOS and Wordstar in 5 inch floppies.
But we still had regular typing classes, and every day, we had drills which focused on two things: speed and accuracy. With speed, we busied ourselves with high word turnouts, with accuracy, we went slower and made sure that there were no erasures or typeovers. It seemed like an archaic skill to learn on the brink of the digital revolution and the new millenium. But we learned this along with stenography, salesmanship and bookkeeping. Later on, the school would change the names of these skills to reflect the present/future situation: office management, entrepreneurship, and accounting.
It's old fashioned now, but when it was new, the ability to type really fast and accurate was revolutionary, specially for women. The females first ventured into the work space at the end of the 19th century as typists or secretaries. According to Neil Hallows of the BBC, "[i]t was a limited emancipation. The new employees (often called "type-writers" themselves) were accused of stealing jobs from men, depressing wages and sexually tempting the boss, and their chance of career progression was often nil. But for women to have any job outside the home was revolutionary."
So the women's liberation movement got their big push with typewriters, whose "retro" appeal does not end with seeing words come up on paper. More importantly, in a time when computers are plugged to the internet, productivity becomes more difficult. Specially for writers with deadlines and then faced with websites with little links you clink. Before you know the day has passed and you have watched more videos of lizards eating fruits of the pandan tree than you care to acknowledge.
The distraction afforded by the internet paved the way for software to make your computer seem like a typewriter, or at least, a very early version of the unwired computer with the black screen and green blinking cursor. As one commenter said:
A laptop for a writer is like a typewriter with a TV, stereo and library attached--and thousands upon thousands of channels, songs, articles to choose from: laptops anywhere near wifi are an endless procrastination device, an infernal tool of distraction for undisciplined souls such as myself. Indeed, I've even thought of disabling the internet on my laptop just so I won't be distracted.It makes me want to hunt up that old portable. It might be difficult now to hunt for the two tone ribbon (black and red) and some wipeout, but hearing the clacking of keys and seeing words on paper is suddenly alluring and can well prove to be the cure to internet distraction.
Although a laptop's often purchased to be used chiefly as a word processor, one all too easily whiles away the hours on websites like this one--when one should be writing. A typewriter, on the other hand, offers no such distractions. It's just there, it has no cut/paste/erase, no itunes or internet, and one must face the bloody thing on its own terms. There are far fewer excuses with a typewriter. Far, far fewer.
via
New books
Lookie at the my new purchases! Haven't bought this many books since the start of the year, effectively repealing my self-imposed book ban. But it's not so bad, as almost all of them are from Booksale. The most expensive of the bunch, Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, came from Powerbooks, and that's already after 60% off.
A lot of the new acquisitions are scriptbooks (4/13): There is the aforementioned Brokeback Mountain, which contains the original Annie Proulx short story which first appeared in The New Yorker, with essays on the transition from page to screen by Proulx and the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All of them are united in the idea that (1) The film did not murder the original material and in fact added to it, (2) short stories, not novels, make for better adaptation materials.
Also got John Hodge's screenplay for The Beach, based on the novel by Alex Garland, Andrew Niccol's script for The Truman Show, and the script for I Heart Huckabees, which I haven't seen yet but will read anyway.
There seems to be a lot of script books floating in Booksale stores. I wasn't able to get the triptych by Mike Figgis. Of the three, only Leaving Las Vegas was familiar to me. But still, I have ended up with a lot of books to read.
Also got books about writing: Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman, The Practical Writer by Therese Eiben and Mary Gannon of Poets & Writers Magazine, and The Elements of Fiction Writing: Plot from the Writer's Digest Books.
Trevor Corson's The Secret Life of Lobsters is the lone nonfiction book not related to the craft of writing. I was hoping to find a copy of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. But hey, this is still about lobsters.
And the last bunch of books are all fiction. Two issues of Story Magazine (Winter 1997 and Spring 1999) cost me Php25 combined. Also got Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and other stories. Then there's Murder on the Menu edited by Peter Haining. This last one contains crime stories by Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Agatha Christie, P.D. James and even Roald Dahl. Enlisted myself in the crime fiction writing class this term, so this will form part of my reading list.
All told, the thirteen books unloaded me of Php800. Not too bad. But then again, will probably impose the book ban again and not buy anything until I've read most of them.
A lot of the new acquisitions are scriptbooks (4/13): There is the aforementioned Brokeback Mountain, which contains the original Annie Proulx short story which first appeared in The New Yorker, with essays on the transition from page to screen by Proulx and the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All of them are united in the idea that (1) The film did not murder the original material and in fact added to it, (2) short stories, not novels, make for better adaptation materials.
Also got John Hodge's screenplay for The Beach, based on the novel by Alex Garland, Andrew Niccol's script for The Truman Show, and the script for I Heart Huckabees, which I haven't seen yet but will read anyway.
There seems to be a lot of script books floating in Booksale stores. I wasn't able to get the triptych by Mike Figgis. Of the three, only Leaving Las Vegas was familiar to me. But still, I have ended up with a lot of books to read.
Also got books about writing: Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman, The Practical Writer by Therese Eiben and Mary Gannon of Poets & Writers Magazine, and The Elements of Fiction Writing: Plot from the Writer's Digest Books.
Trevor Corson's The Secret Life of Lobsters is the lone nonfiction book not related to the craft of writing. I was hoping to find a copy of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. But hey, this is still about lobsters.
And the last bunch of books are all fiction. Two issues of Story Magazine (Winter 1997 and Spring 1999) cost me Php25 combined. Also got Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and other stories. Then there's Murder on the Menu edited by Peter Haining. This last one contains crime stories by Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Agatha Christie, P.D. James and even Roald Dahl. Enlisted myself in the crime fiction writing class this term, so this will form part of my reading list.
All told, the thirteen books unloaded me of Php800. Not too bad. But then again, will probably impose the book ban again and not buy anything until I've read most of them.
Wednesday, June 4
Carried Away
In the official website, I was able to confirm my suspicion that Carrie upgraded her laptop. You can now even browse her
EDIT: Gadgenista argues that since Carrie's laptop doesn't use the Magsafe Adapter and does not have an iSight, it must be a G4, and therefore a Powerbook. But the website does say that Carrie is using a Macbook Pro. Oh well. The above photo was swiped from Gadgenista.
Saturday, May 31
Mostly Nothing Happens
"But mostly nothing happens, except in the sense that novelists and short-story writers understand. For them moving a character from not knowing that he’s unhappy to sort of acknowledging it qualifies as a pretty momentous event."
This comes from a New York Times article about the film "Smart People," which is about a depressed professor of literature who has an affair with a former student (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and lives with his precocious daughter (played by Ellen Page of 'Juno' fame), a good for nothing brother. It was written by Mark Jude Poirier, a fiction writer who now has to reluctantly call himself a "professional screenwriter."
I haven't really seen the movie. Just found the review because I clicked the links related to the reviews of the Sex and the City movie. Apparently, the "depressed academic" is a character that has surfaced in American film in the last few years, with the bar set high by Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Tripp in Wonder Boys and Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale. I saw both of these films and they both happen to feature frustrated academics-slash-writers. If these are the models, then maybe Smart People isn't too far off.
But what really got my attention is Poirier's shift from fiction writing to screenwriting, where generally, things have to happen. The article says that Hollywood had always wooed the big name literary writers--Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Truman Capote--but all these writers just go away puzzled. Hollywood asks them to write stories where a lot of things happen. But what about the epiphany? Epiphanies can be so subtle, if you wink you'll miss it. Poirier is from this school of writing: the only visible change is that the main character now recognizes that he *is* depressed, but acknowledging it doesn't make it any easier. No big transformations, no miracle happy endings.
What the article also makes known is that there really aren't too many fiction writers who can hack the writing of screenplays. Oh there's Larry McMurtry (whose script to Brokeback Mountain I have yet to finish reading), but there's just so few of them. Playwrights have a better batting average. So if the fictionists are having a hard time transitioning to the big screen, what about the reverse: do screenwriters make for successful fiction writers?
This comes from a New York Times article about the film "Smart People," which is about a depressed professor of literature who has an affair with a former student (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and lives with his precocious daughter (played by Ellen Page of 'Juno' fame), a good for nothing brother. It was written by Mark Jude Poirier, a fiction writer who now has to reluctantly call himself a "professional screenwriter."
I haven't really seen the movie. Just found the review because I clicked the links related to the reviews of the Sex and the City movie. Apparently, the "depressed academic" is a character that has surfaced in American film in the last few years, with the bar set high by Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Tripp in Wonder Boys and Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale. I saw both of these films and they both happen to feature frustrated academics-slash-writers. If these are the models, then maybe Smart People isn't too far off.
But what really got my attention is Poirier's shift from fiction writing to screenwriting, where generally, things have to happen. The article says that Hollywood had always wooed the big name literary writers--Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Truman Capote--but all these writers just go away puzzled. Hollywood asks them to write stories where a lot of things happen. But what about the epiphany? Epiphanies can be so subtle, if you wink you'll miss it. Poirier is from this school of writing: the only visible change is that the main character now recognizes that he *is* depressed, but acknowledging it doesn't make it any easier. No big transformations, no miracle happy endings.
What the article also makes known is that there really aren't too many fiction writers who can hack the writing of screenplays. Oh there's Larry McMurtry (whose script to Brokeback Mountain I have yet to finish reading), but there's just so few of them. Playwrights have a better batting average. So if the fictionists are having a hard time transitioning to the big screen, what about the reverse: do screenwriters make for successful fiction writers?
Saturday, May 17
But We Need the Eggs
This morning I chanced upon half of Woody Allen's Annie Hall on MGM. One of my favorite scenes there is the one leading to the break up. There's a split screen and we see Annie and Alvy in their respective therapists' offices. Annie is guilty that she's doing well with treatments which Alvy is paying for, and Alvy is stuck still with his own neuroses. The therapists ask them how their sex life is. They're both right on the count: three times a week. For Alvy, that's dismal, for Annie, that's frequent and more than enough. Later, in the plane from California going back to New York, we hear them thinking again. The relationship isn't going very well. Perhaps it would be better if they break up. Alvy agrees. A relationship is a shark, he says. It should keep on going forward. What they have in their hands is a dead shark. So they break up and it's only later, while making a huge stink with the lobsters with the new woman he's dating, that Alvy realizes his mistake. This new woman doesn't see what the fuss is about the lobsters. He gets on a plane and tries to convince Annie to get back together. On a health food cafe in an LA sidewalk, they finally break up.
Last week, also caught the parts of Manhattan. Manhattan starts with the voice of the Woody Allenesque character listing down all the things he loves about the city. What I like about that movie again has something to do with relationships. Isaac breaks up with his 17 year old girlfriend because he's fallen in love with his best friend's mistress. He tells her that she's way too young, and she should pursue acting studies in London. When the mistress goes back to the best friend, he suddenly misses Mariel Hemingway. He runs down New York's streets. But when he arrives outside her apartment building, she's already dressed up and headed to the airport. Isaac's profession of love comes too late, because she's been hurt, and she's now made up her mind to go to London. But if Isaac can wait six months...
I like it that both movies don't force on a reconciliation scene. Well, in Annie Hall, the Woody Allen character writes a play with characters who suspiciously re-enact the scene in the health food store, and instead of walking away from each other, they kiss and make up. But he does say that the things he can't control in life, he can at least correct in his writings. In both Allen movies, the (former) lovers either end up as friends, or they still move in the same small circles that they occupy. In Annie Hall, Allen says that he realizes that the relationships were wonderful while they lasted. As he stands in the street corner after having coffee with Annie, he tells us an anecdote about the man whose brother thinks he's a chicken. The doctor says, Well, why don't you turn him in so we can treat him? The man says, I would have done that, except I need the eggs. It's the worst possible case of can't leave with (it/you), can't leave without (it/you).
Which brings me to the Spanish film I watched this afternoon, Los Peores Anos de Nuestra Vida, which roughly translates to The Worst Years of Our Lives. It starts with Alberto's voice speaking into a recorder, starting chapter 1 of his novel. It reminds me so much of Manhattan's opening scenes as well. Also, Alberto is the goofy, not quite guapo young man with a more handsome brother and he does remind me a lot of a younger Woody Allen. Alberto's brother Roberto ends up with all the girls, even the ones which Alberto likes. So it comes to no surprise when both brothers fall for Maria, the mistress of a sculptor. Alberto wails and whines that he can't understand women, and though they find him funny, they wouldn't sleep with him. So Roberto gives his brother a hand. Together they plot the break up of Santiago and Maria. They send an anonymous letter to Santiago's wife. Maria gets depressed after the confrontation with Santiago's wife, who tells her empathically that Santiago stays with him, and it's really all for Maria's own good. Maria and Roberto share a kiss, but since Roberto is also busy with his own affair with an older woman, he decides to give his brother and Maria a push in the relationship direction. Then things go wrong, and there are Grand Romantic Gestures in the last few scenes involving a train ticket to Paris and sibling generosity, which I don't quite buy. I mean, real life doesn't afford us any quick turn arounds.
But this isn't a movie concerned with real life. One scene has Alberto watching a romantic movie, and he winces, guys like him don't get the girls in real life, so cinema is just a big piece of crap. The actors get disturbed and even the director turns to Alberto. He is trying to direct a movie, not aiming for cinema verite like De Sica before he got rich. So I guess that prepares us for the kind of ending The Worst Years of Our Lives has.
Which also reminds me that since Woody Allen has probably exhausted all the possible locations in New York, he has turned his gaze on Europe. His next movie is set in Spain, starring Scarlett Johanson, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Saw the trailer of Vicky Cristina Barcelona in YouTube quite recently.
Monday, May 5
Virtual Age
Answered some questions thrown at me by the Life Expectancy Calculator. If you don't smoke, up a few years. Don't drink much, good. Use seatbelt only on occasion, bad. It's actually amazing to see your virtual age rise and dip with each question answered. I went as low as 19. After 34 questions, turns out my Virtual Age is 22.5 (Hear that belly? Ha, be gone you!). If the average life expectancy for Asians is around 74 years, I can expect to live another 5.5 years beyond that. I have some 18,800 more days to walk this earth, and maybe more if I shape up some.
The Virtual Age Calculator may be downloaded as a stand alone PC program. Sadly, it's a Windows program and not available for Mac.
via
The Virtual Age Calculator may be downloaded as a stand alone PC program. Sadly, it's a Windows program and not available for Mac.
via
The incredible life of elevators
The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten details the incredible life of elevators and those who make and ride them. The frame story tells about this man who took the longest ever cigarette break--41 hours, most of which he spent inside a stalled elevator. He asked for a beer when he finally got out, and then sued the building and settled for an undisclosed amount. What he didn't bargain for was that the ensuing trauma and law suit left him unemployed and with occasional media attention.
Elsewhere in the essay is a delineation into the kind of research that goes into building elevators. There is a minimum allowable space that a human must have, 2.3 square feet. Women can tolerate much less space, say 1.5 sq.ft, provided that it's mostly women. If men get in the picture, women cross their arms in an attempt to get more space. But the figures are much lower in Asia, where 25 Chinese people will "willingly" squeeze in an elevator meant for 11.
I'd hate to be trapped in an elevator, unless I'm Jeanne Moreau and sharing the car with me is Maurice Ronet in Ascenseur pour l'echafaud, aka Elevator to the Gallows, last viewed perhaps a decade ago in the French Spring film fest.
Elsewhere in the essay is a delineation into the kind of research that goes into building elevators. There is a minimum allowable space that a human must have, 2.3 square feet. Women can tolerate much less space, say 1.5 sq.ft, provided that it's mostly women. If men get in the picture, women cross their arms in an attempt to get more space. But the figures are much lower in Asia, where 25 Chinese people will "willingly" squeeze in an elevator meant for 11.
I'd hate to be trapped in an elevator, unless I'm Jeanne Moreau and sharing the car with me is Maurice Ronet in Ascenseur pour l'echafaud, aka Elevator to the Gallows, last viewed perhaps a decade ago in the French Spring film fest.
Sunday, May 4
At the Balay Negrense
This is a photo of Chaka Doll swiped from madmilkmargie, sitting eeriely in one of the rooms of the Balay Negrense, which we visited during our cultural tour of Negros last week. It was raining and the floor boards creaked a bit every time. What's amazing is that the floor boards are all of one piece from front to back of the house, so imagine how huge a tree that was. What's creepy is that this doll, along with some others in what used to be the children's room, stared at us with what seemed like a gash in her forehead. Creepy.
Later, we visited The Ruins, a huge stone house in the middle of the cane fields with the interiors gutted but still absolutely magnificent. According to the caretakers, the guerillas and the owners thought it best to burn the thing so that the Japanese wouldn't use it as their garrison. It took two whole days for the interiors made of hardwood to burn down completely. On one side of the house was a huge window, which used to have floor to ceiling glass, in a room that was specifically for watching the sun go down or up, I forget now.
The descendants of the owners had it fixed up a bit, when they found out that the kids would go there in the witching hours bearing drinks and waiting for ghosts to appear. Now there are little alcoves where you can sit down and eat little sandwiches and drink Cervesa Negra. Imagine living in that house, with ceilings so high and you can twirl around all you like without bumping into any of the solid concrete columns. Run to the veranda or the fountain in the wide front yard. Magnificence, right there.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)