[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Most Influential
Wow, tough question...
Book: gotta pick three. _Lord of the Rings_ for personal ethics in the face of
adversity, _Foucault's Pendulum_ for an appreciation of the human brain's
infinite capacity for finding patterns and constructing narratives, and Charles
Williams's _The Greater Trumps_ for a model of the cosmic dance and how
creative imagry relates to physical models which in turn relate to actual
reality.
CD: Peter Gabriel's _Passion_. Turned my mild interest in world music into
a... well, a passion. Also The Nields _Live at the Iron Horse_ introduced me
to the world of contemporary folk music, and Over the Rhine's _Till We Have
Faces_ had a *huge* influence on my life, since that led to my running their
web page, and making trips to various cities I wouldn't have done otherwise.
Movie: Tron, I think, had a huge influence on a budding 11 year-old computer
geek. Me and my friends used to gather up dozens of frisbees and throw them at
each other. (Ours, oddly enough, never came back, so we needed to have many on
hand to block each others' throws. :-))
TV show: Doctor Who. No question or competition.
As far as _The Warrior and the Empress_ goes (which is what the title of the
film *should* be. "The Princess and the Warrior" would be "Die Prinzessin und
der Krieger".), I thought it was fantastic. Much slower and more contemplative
than _Lola Rennt_, it plays with the idea of fate and connections at a deeper
level than Lola (I loved Lola; that's not a perjorative statement). It's not
as slow as Wintersleepers, and not as incomprehensible (if you can explain the
last montage in Wintersleepers, I would love to hear your scenario). I saw
_Krieger_ with my housemates, and we spent at least two hours talking about it
afterwards. One thing I need to look for next time I watch it is a translation
issue: at one point in the film, *I* remembered Potemka's character as saying
she needed to know if the accident that she survives is a sign that she needs
to change her life; i.e. that she needs to wake up and take more control. My
housemates remembered that scene as her saying she needed to know if her life
had been changed; i.e., that she was passive or a subject. My theory is that
they mistranslated something, because I wasn't paying attention to the
subtitles, and my housemates all remembered it differently than I did.
Yours,
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy." - John Whorfin
---------------
Unsubscribe by going to http://www.actwin.com/OtR/
Follow-Ups: