WHOOPS...
I slipped out to buy a laptop & a fashionable suit this afternoon. Damn, some of those sales guys talk up a storm, don't they?
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MUTES
A friend of mine at college kept a diary. We shared a room for an impecunious few weeks & every night before sleep he would sit at the end of his bed & make an entry. If he judged that nothing of consequence had happened during the day, he would write down whatever entered his mind at the moment of the fountain pen touching the paper. These entries he would then read out with slight bemusement, as if they were messages received from unknown sources. I remember only one. It read: ‘Blind beggar in market place is deaf to song of nightingale’. We both assumed it to be Chinese in origin.
He called his diary ‘Mutes’. The word, he claimed, meant a single turd shed by a bird in flight. He liked the notion of thoughts & reflections falling singly with the arbitrariness of avian droppings. I shall adopt it for posts that comprise a group of random entries. Such as these.
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I’ve just been watching Lost in Translation again. I was in the middle of it a few months back when the DVD player suddenly lost all colour balance leaving only green. (I have since disposed of the machine - it’s best if you drop them on one corner because the top flies off & everything falls out rather satisfactorily - & bought a £30.00 replacement).
What an extraordinary movie it is. It eschews narrative for a montage approach, sequences of varying length – some mere tableau shots, others protracted linkages of action - each self-contained either side of cuts rather than fades. They follow more or less chronologically but because of the avoidance of any direct elision of one sequence with another, the cumulative effect is dreamlike, almost hallucinatory in places.
This is intensified both by a haunting soundtrack by Brian Reitzell & by the representation of Tokyo as a city of lights, most of the scenes being nocturnal. Brooding panning shots across the glittering skyline from upper storey hotel windows alternate with frantic hand-held street scenes in which at ground level Tokyo seems like a giant fully wired circuit board. And at the centre of it all, rather like a couple of renegades from a Chekhov play, wander the wearily sardonic Bill Murray & the lonely, restless Scarlett Johansson, both exquisite.
As with a good book, I’m really looking forward to picking it up again. Provided I can work out how to work the skip function on the new, supposedly idiot-proof DVD player.
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Playing in the background is Brian Eno’s First Light, from Music for Films, his groundbreaking album from the mid-‘70s when the term ambient music belonged entirely to his output. Burned 15 times onto a CD, the piece plays continuously for 70 minutes. I alternate it with Eno’s Discreet Music & occasionally a couple of Harold Budd CDs. In spite of the plethora of ambient material produced during the past 30 years – the digitalisation of music increasing the output massively – these two pieces remain absolute staples for me
11:06:35 PM 
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