A ballet for searchlights and speakers
Too soon,
I was late last time. And now the first Sunday is right at the beginning of the month. So this might seem a bit sudden. Sorry. Anyway.
Five things:
I’m always trying to get people to write presentations by starting with the final slide; the thing you’re asking people to do. And then you make everything point at that. Here’s a parallel:
“Here it is: the edit of The Traitors is done in two sections. And they do it backwards.
The first edit is of the round table scene at the end of each show (the climactic confrontation between the contestants, where they level accusations at each other and attempt to root out the rats in the nest). The editors cut together this part first, even though it’s the end of the show. Once that sequence is ‘locked’, they go back and make the events of that round table scene seem inevitable, by editing the day’s footage to set up the dramatic payoff that you see at the end.
That’s why it seems narratively strong. It’s always going one way: towards that ending. Even though the makers don’t visibly interfere with the contestants’ actions during the day, the ‘characters’ in the show have strong story arcs, leading to the moment at the end where – as a television effect – the host leaves the room, and a bunch of ordinary members of the public seem to spontaneously improvise a gripping Twelve Angry Men style chamber piece that pays off all the day’s events.”
From Joel Morris’ newsletter. Shared by Hugh.
I’m still loving Kate Molleson’s Sound Within Sound. Here she is on Else Marie Pade’s Lyd og lys (Sound and Light)
“She described it, rather magically, as a ‘ballet for searchlights and speakers’.”
And here she is on Galina Ustvolskaya:
“According to the composer Valentin Silvestrov, her music is like a naked person standing on the street shouting: ‘Don’t look at me! Don’t look!’”
I don’t really like food, but I love Rachel Roddy’s writing. Here she is on the visit of a friend:
“Joanna, came to stay for a few days, bringing with her a suitcase the size of a few weeks and the itinerary of an architect. We spent her first three days negotiating maps, disconcerting curves in the river and other tourists in search of fluted columns and flights of steps.”
While I’m sharing lovely writing. From The Undercurrents by Kirsty Bell (thanks James)
“I broached the subject of our happiness. My husband’s answer, remote and dulled, seemed dredged up from an ocean bed. Ich bin nicht unzufrieden. I am not unsatisfied. So many things were left unsaid.”
And a bit later, a wise thought:
“The second summer in the new apartment, the boys delivered to their father for his share of the holidays, I decide to walk the canal’s banks. We are still adjusting to the disjointed format of our newly broken family, my anguish at being now only a part-time mother. It helps to have a clearly formed task, with well-defined start and endpoints, to give the day some shape.”
And here’s Mayra Davey, from Index Cards. I know many of you do this:
“There is a flânerie of reading that can be linked to the flânerie of a certain kind of photographing. Both involve drift, but also purpose, when they become enterprises of absorption and collecting.”
If you like the sound of that, it’s what I’m trying to do with Slow Findings.
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russell
(There are 1004 of you. In 1004 A Danish Viking fleet under Sweyn Forkbeard landed in Norfolk. Ealdorman Ulfcytel ordered his Anglo-Saxon troops to burn the raiding ships. The plan failed and Ulfcytel's small army was defeated by the Vikings.)