Old Style

Friday, October 8, 2021

Sunday, February 28, 2021

sunday morning with tim o'brien #hero #patriot #art

I think he was also proud in a sense. ... Humans are such complicated people. He never expressed himself on the issue one way or the other verbally to me. He never said he liked my books. He never discussed with me the content of the books, the events that happened in the books. I don't know why. I'm not completely sure he ever read them all the way through. Maybe he did. Maybe not. It's a mystery to me, as so much of my life is a mystery to me.

Friday, July 31, 2020

Barry Lyndon ('75)

Scorsese (thoughts on the film circa '01)

I'm not sure if I can say that I have a favorite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep coming back to Barry Lyndon. I think that's because it's such a profoundly emotional experience. The emotion is conveyed through the movement of the camera, the slowness of the pace, the way the characters move in relation to their surroundings. People didn't get it when it came out. Many still don't.

Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you're watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness - and it's all a matter of simple, elemental survival. It's a terrifying film because all the candlelit beauty is nothing but a veil over the worst cruelty. But it's real cruelty, the kind you see every day in polite society.

His audacity is to insist on slowness in order to recreate the pace of life, and to ritualize behavior of the time. A great example is the seduction scene, which he stretches until it settles into a sort of trance, what always struck me is the ballet of emotions of the film, watch the tension between the camera's movements and the characters body language orchestrated by the music in the scene.

Friday, July 10, 2020

are past and gone

For reasons better discussed in the history books, in the Spring of 2020 Gillian and I dusted off an old tape machine and did some home recording. Sometimes we bumped the microphone, sometimes the tape ran out, but in the end we captured performances of some songs we love. Five are first takes and five took a little more doing, but they all helped pass the time and held our interest in playback enough that we wanted to share them with you. We sincerely hope that you enjoy

ALL THE GOOD TIMES

- David & Gillian