Here is a first stab. It is in fact just Wikipedia’s article on the (Army of the) Twelve Monkeys. I was set up, and flipped into full sorority mode for two nights. So much seems real, but it is the paint. The fumes. They don’t dissolve my brain, and the images of parasites in my body are lies too, as are the contorted words—you’d think I’d learn—that form threats against family and friends, inasmuch as the screenplay allows these things to exist. But it is almost entirely faked. However, that doesn’t stop much of this coming from a serious plot pointed toward me in one way, and then there’s the whole world thing as well.
It is a ridiculously exciting story, but for me, some sleep and serious teaching! And that sweet revenge I have been dreaming up, it will stay a dream to exactly the same extent that this is all in the same dream, an insidious fiction that spiralled out of usual control, with, in all relatively, my friends being flung like off the netted Escher Möbius strip with the ants walking around it; but with sharper edges and more wear and tear showing, and desperation in others, and the print changing slightly, and yes I thought I the spectrographs were cool, but I suppose just the sounds were. At least I can hit the big apple this weekend to catch up with the friends some of whom I mentally maligned but at least only uttered these things in a strange voice, kind of imagined as pathos from the marathon of Monday, my secrets secretly being a cat leaping from a blackened bridge, not as subtle as that of the friars in London in the Propaganda Due lodge utter crashing and the hanging of a token from the appropriate London bridge. Is falling down falling down.
So, to relax, stop noticing the giant eyes of Erebus and thinking of the Charles as Styx or any other 70s band. I listened to a track called “Dream on” which I know I made in 2005 and flipped linearly in the frequency domain around 1/4 the sampling rate and sprinkle Grimm Bros. image magick on it and thought short but hard, like Zoolander bringing to mind Frankie goes to Hollywood, the chilling is where the killing is to be made, and jobs for me are done well or not started. A mistake? No. The job has started even if it is in Kafka’s mind on a boring day, apple lodged in insect-Kevlar shell, but to fester in a focused way. Mrs A will be proud of me, though I do not plan to fall.
Here is 12m, material from the active W.
Then:
[I’ll finishing this purloining later, I’m tired, other important things spring to mind, such as the film Memento, electroconvulsive therapy...]
From Wikipedia, and I thought I had the concept of “Instruction Manual” (a tiny Korean book with baby writing in it):
so SD is SD is SD. What caught my eye here other than dangling fishhooks at the door was (a) I was brought up in Otago on a Prophet 2002 Sampler, and as soon as I was at Harvard—I have to say, in the last month or two, I am remembering like no one’s business, except it is my business, things we said to each other as kids—are these transplanted or silicone memory implants to make for better mental porn?—I noticed in my Electronic Music Class with Ivan Tcherepnin that kids would cluster and not really talk, and girlfriends/boyfriends would be traded off with the only silence of anger being a moment of ritual, and the over-exuberant “other” manager—I got to know Slide, not... was it Andy Lee—the same name as Helen’s brother, and the “hint” I took with a student (1/2 Finnish, 1/2 East Asian I think) Anders Lee—excitedly saying, “you have a Prophet Five?” kind of out of the blue. Like it was code. Well, the Prophet Five is a apparently the coolest Kurzweil [that’s in the spell check!] vintage item. I still have a Prophet 2002 with some ROM expansion kit I haven’t launched, and a Prophet 2500S keyboard. How peculiar. And there I was thinking a/v here snuck the devices around. It can’t be the dehumidifier under the grandpiano—whose reflections I think I need (and “Reflets dans l’eau” by Debussy, old notes I made in Rome when I lived with Cam at via Parenzo 23, appartamento 8... 00153 Roma I forget, make me think of other reflections, or Refractions, or Shards of mirrors for reflection, or Whispering Silence, or Longing which bears the phallic stamp, little wonder circumstances prevailing before me)—like a dehumanifier I mean the moisture sucking and pumping conterpart, would be FUCK yikes where is it safe.
The other eyecatcher was the 47. The 4117 from the other day. The server 47 on a 747—a ratings-savings episode, IIRC—I think of 77, as in 77 Mass Ave for MIT. The number 77 cropped up a few times in the last week, I just hope 380 or whatever has no connection with MIT. Where the 77, aside from on 7.7.77 at 7.07 for 7s I drew a 7 and still have it! I am the 5-person too, as I was born at 5:55a on 5/5 so in 2005, 05/05/05 at 05:55a it was my... 37th birthday, which is 5x5 (hex, a crazy math). AND it is part of Theosophy, AND there is an article by Robert Gauldin (of Eastman School of Music? He wrote a counterpoint/harmony text) on Stravinsky’s “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas” to which a colleague Elliott Gyger wrote a paper either apply 5 to anything or anything to the Dylan Thomas piece. Jim Morrison, One in Five... I wonder. Oh, 20 percent, which has been some ?libertarian aim on the right for a long time, I think. Or... that is how much of the world should survive with clever osmotic genetic drift in the manner of oceanic extremophiles (think Ron Howard’s Cocoon) well, off the deep end again. Why would someone say their father was a “Tycoon”?—A very odd choice of word that gave me electric shocks to the legs, but I now recall Rachel and at least one other could play tricks with my nerves, directly. The latter used pheromones to seduce me, with a fairly basic epistemology.
But the 77s and 38s. Oh, building 38 must be RLE? Yes, I think I even had a dream of standing atop it once. Not saying. Here is some RLE copyright material, sorry:
I’m getting a lot of Fs (fails), the notion of a fair child, I know there is research there into non-invasion brain ?pulse-magnetic neural network alteration as I think DT worked on that despite being the vacuum tube (valve) guru, sucking’em dry those crania. And an SOM, which is funny because Somerville starts that way, but I was chatting about the important of CMOS circuits today. Unless I am a bozoid, which is possible, S.O.M.—they are possibly the most famous BIG, modern, slightly boring I think, architectural firm in the world, nothing like Zahir Hadid or OMA or Gehry or or or—did the building for Entrapmentwith Catherine Zeta Jones and Sean Connery, the twin towers of the national petroleum company in the capital of Malaysia. If I lived at Harvard’s only twin towers—Leverett (means “baby hare”! and incoming sophomores are called rising rabbits) when the WTC twin towers were done in and down (by whom? “The Cell” is it or is it pronounced “The Network”—I recall thinking of Jennifer Lopez!), I had a series of nightmares—which I think a induced sometimes—by tiredness no less—in which the Petronas Towers were crashed into by a double decker plane in an act of what I called CVS (Cerebral V__ Supremacy but I forget the V, or is it 2010S but nothing to do with Consumer Value Stores from Woonsocket RI despite the pliability claim of their name...) MIT RLE.
Rules. For Peter. Switch imagination off. Get bureaucratic stuff done. Post on as many blogs as possible... haha. I mean, get the recording, oh it’s up, many of them are, with the clear sonic modification—not just phase-canceling fractal filters to form the images, arrow writing, tumbling (funny how we watched gymnastic tumbling and synchronized swimming for the 2008 Olympics!), and the rest, but actual layers of sound—added voices, and in the same way as the visuals, and words, and lives, and general parasitic nature I call it—like the clever parasites David Attenborough has, when not doing the Bird of Paradise or Lyre bird in all its mimicry, that has spores entering the brain of some creature, changing its brain, then sprouting fungal agony branches—how the word “dendritic” is one of those relationship resonators, I hope we have some semantic closure here... like limit the dendritic structure of dendritic structure to 10 levels, former love of mein. It is a scary image.
s th rls r n mgntn fr th rst f tdy. no proof reading yet. Hey, especially easy one: answers are buried in questions for the knowing, right? D’uh, the word “yes” is right there, kind of elides with ESP, which is MIT’s special teaching program that a few friends/exes have given seminars at with well-innuendoed descriptions... how not to have volcanoes erupting, and earthquakes shattering... or was that a dysentery reference? Verbally, yes, I suppose.
Speaking indelicately of that, I had the misfortune of having campylobacter enteritis in NZ. Get it, like more coded jargon, compiler entry? Or pyles~cells or batteries, or lobe, or act, or amp__ that one goes anyone though I think amphibole went into the ear of an ex-gf geologist sitting an exam when I first knew her; she maintained she didn’t know the answer but heard my voice sasying amphibole. Ebola, (sounds like) fib, amphibious, Bola (the anti-cyclone that wiped out my coast of the NI of NZ), eloquence upended I’d say. And so the addict(ionarie)s life goes, butter in the churn, letters in the square box, read them R->Le like Hebrew (reminds me: time for a brew of tea and to check up on my nephew, but churn—which might be short for butter churn— makes me think of earning money or be cremated. In any case after the pre-cam. ent. hospitalization where there nurses had that maximally shit job in the world, there was the month-later day surgery, for an anal probe and it felt as if they had left a scalpel in there (which is still how I feel about my London hernia, done at the Middlesex hospital, where a nurse stole half my demerol and IIRC kind of had some fun with me, he did, in the old man’s just-lost-their-bladders ward, after the operation appeared to partially fail, given the gushes of blood from the barely stitched exterior wound—ALW, my girlfriend, took good control of the scene. Anyway, Mr Knight (surgeons are called Mr, not Dr, in New Zealand) did a fine job I am sure with my sigmoidoscrapy, but it did feel like something surgical was left to tickle in that non-tickly way. I barfed for hours upon rousing, and a giant tampon of fully blooded cotton swabs made its way out. I then passed out. Again. Very unlike me.
I never mentioned the swollen ankle swellings, and more importantly how I passed out twice in the basement of Paine Hall, Harvard Music Department, TWICE in EXACTLY the same spot, the only two times I have been in that spot, kind of a dead end opposite my office which was B4 down a go-nowhere corridor. How once in London, in the late 1990s I think, I won’t say where, I had my period very seriously yet again. I told Mum. She seemed sympathetic. David agreed with my theory it was the raspberry pie from MacDonald’s, readily. NO, and it wasn’t hr.s either as I have never had those. The clot gets thicker.
Oh, it is spring verging on summer today, and with some delicate rain today, passing some leaf-ferns today reminded me very much of home, in our “shade house” Dad would build wherever we lived, for the unfurling of fronds and other fernlike things, just the right thing for a Kiwi, where the silver fern is our national plant, our netball team, the koru is the stylized version on Air New Zealand planes, and it looks like a curled up coch-lea or something that would go in one or near one, such as the “coily croimaster”—the curled up end of the teste that lee40 would call cremasters (or croimasters) (which are smallish, apparently, I guess as a counterweight, like the muscle—we saw Cremaster II when we were first together, on Cammy’s suggestion—about Gary Gilmore, with quite some uterine scenes among other claustrophobic Moments). And plot analogies.
Time to unorbifold my lobes (actually, they bulge). Mites in the heart, mitochondria—actually, chondria is the gut in general I think, and some Generals have gut. You had to have guts to sit my generals (comprehensives) in Harvard Music Theory—as in hypochondria, under the chondria.
It is a ridiculously exciting story, but for me, some sleep and serious teaching! And that sweet revenge I have been dreaming up, it will stay a dream to exactly the same extent that this is all in the same dream, an insidious fiction that spiralled out of usual control, with, in all relatively, my friends being flung like off the netted Escher Möbius strip with the ants walking around it; but with sharper edges and more wear and tear showing, and desperation in others, and the print changing slightly, and yes I thought I the spectrographs were cool, but I suppose just the sounds were. At least I can hit the big apple this weekend to catch up with the friends some of whom I mentally maligned but at least only uttered these things in a strange voice, kind of imagined as pathos from the marathon of Monday, my secrets secretly being a cat leaping from a blackened bridge, not as subtle as that of the friars in London in the Propaganda Due lodge utter crashing and the hanging of a token from the appropriate London bridge. Is falling down falling down.
So, to relax, stop noticing the giant eyes of Erebus and thinking of the Charles as Styx or any other 70s band. I listened to a track called “Dream on” which I know I made in 2005 and flipped linearly in the frequency domain around 1/4 the sampling rate and sprinkle Grimm Bros. image magick on it and thought short but hard, like Zoolander bringing to mind Frankie goes to Hollywood, the chilling is where the killing is to be made, and jobs for me are done well or not started. A mistake? No. The job has started even if it is in Kafka’s mind on a boring day, apple lodged in insect-Kevlar shell, but to fester in a focused way. Mrs A will be proud of me, though I do not plan to fall.
Here is 12m, material from the active W.
12 Monkeys is a 1995 science fiction film directed by Terry Gilliam, inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 short film La jetée, and starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, and Christopher Plummer.
After Universal Studios acquired the rights to remake La Jetée as a full-length film, David and Janet Peoples were hired to write the script. Under Terry Gilliam's direction, Universal granted the filmmakers a $29.5 million budget, and filming lasted from February to May 1995. The film was shot mostly in Philadelphia and Baltimore, where the story was set.
The film was released to critical praise and grossed approximately $168.4 million worldwide. Brad Pitt was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and won a Golden Globe for his performance. The film also won and was nominated for various categories at the Saturn Awards.
Plot
James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a convicted criminal living in a grim post-apocalyptic future. In 1996–1997, the Earth's surface was contaminated by a virus so deadly that it forced the surviving population to live underground. To earn a pardon, Cole allows scientists to send him on dangerous missions to the past to collect information on the virus, thought to be released by a terrorist organization known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. If possible, he is to obtain a pure sample of the original virus so a cure can be made. Throughout the film, Cole is troubled with recurring dreams involving a chase and a shooting in an airport.
On Cole's first trip, he arrives in Baltimore in 1990, not 1996 as planned. He is arrested and hospitalized in a mental institution on the diagnosis of Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). There, he encounters Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), a fellow mental patient with animal rights and anti-consumerist leanings whose father is a renowned virologist. Cole tries unsuccessfully to leave a voicemail on a number monitored by the scientists in the future. After a failed escape attempt, Cole is restrained and locked in a cell, but then disappears, returning to the future. Back in his own time, Cole is interviewed by the scientists, who play a distorted voice mail message which gives the location of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and states that they are responsible for the virus. He is also shown photos of numerous people, including Goines. The scientists then send him back to 1996.
Cole kidnaps Railly and sets out in search of Goines, learning that he is the founder of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. When confronted, however, Goines denies any involvement with the virus and suggests that wiping out humanity was Cole's idea, originally broached at the asylum in 1990. Cole vanishes again as the police approach. After Cole disappears, Railly begins to doubt her diagnosis of Cole when she finds evidence that he is telling the truth. Cole, on the other hand, convinces himself that his future experiences are hallucinations, and persuades the scientists to send him back again. Railly attempts to settle the question of Cole's sanity by leaving a voice mail on the number he provided, creating the message the scientists played prior to his second mission. They both now realize that the coming plague is real, and make plans to enjoy the time they have left.
On their way to the airport, they learn that the Army of the Twelve Monkeys is a red herring; all the Army has done is delay traffic by releasing all the animals in the zoo. At the airport, Cole leaves a last message telling the scientists they are on the wrong track following the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, and that he will not return. He is soon confronted by Jose (Jon Seda), an acquaintance from his own time, who gives Cole a handgun and instructions to complete his mission. At the same time, Railly spots the true culprit behind the virus: Dr. Peters (David Morse), an assistant at the Goines virology lab. Peters is about to embark on a tour of several cities around the world, which matches the sequence (memorized by Cole) of viral outbreaks. Cole, while fighting through security, is fatally shot as he tries to stop Peters. As Cole dies in Railly's arms, she makes eye contact with a small boy: the young James Cole witnessing the scene of his own death, which will replay in his dreams for years to come. Dr. Peters, safely aboard the plane, sits down next to Jones (Carol Florence), one of the lead scientists from the future, who tells him that she is in "insurance."
Development
The genesis of 12 Monkeys came from executive producer Robert Kosberg, who had been a fan of the French short film La jetée (1962). Kosberg persuaded the film's director, Chris Marker, to let him pitch the project to Universal Pictures, seeing it as a perfect basis for a full-length science fiction film. Universal reluctantly agreed to purchase the remake rights and hired David and Janet Peoples to write the screenplay.[1] Producer Charles Roven chose Terry Gilliam to direct because he believed the filmmaker's style was perfect for 12 Monkeys's nonlinear storyline and time travel subplot.[2] Gilliam had just abandoned a film adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities when he signed to direct 12 Monkeys.[3] The film also represents the second film for which Gilliam did not write or co-write the screenplay. Although he prefers to direct his own scripts, he was captivated by the Peoples' "intriguing and intelligent script. The story is disconcerting. It deals with time, madness and a perception of what the world is or isn't. It is a study of madness and dreams, of death and re-birth, set in a world coming apart."[2]
Universal took longer than expected to greenlight 12 Monkeys, although Gilliam had two stars (Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt) and a firm budget of $29.5 million (low for a Hollywood science fiction film). Universal's production of Waterworld (1995) had resulted in various cost overruns. To get 12 Monkeys greenlighted, Gilliam convinced Willis to lower his normal asking price.[4] Because of Universal's strict production incentives and his previous history with the studio on Brazil (1985), Gilliam received the right of final cut privilege.[5] The Writers Guild of America was also skeptical of the "inspired by" credit for La Jetée and Chris Marker.[6]
Casting
Gilliam's initial casting choices were Nick Nolte as James Cole and Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey Goines, but Universal objected.[3] Gilliam, who first met Bruce Willis while casting Jeff Bridges' role in The Fisher King (1991), believed Willis evoked Cole's characterization as being "somebody who is strong and dangerous but also vulnerable."[2] The actor had a trio of tattoos drawn onto his scalp and neck each day when filming: one that indicated his prisoner number, and a pair of barcodes on each side of his neck.
Gilliam cast Madeleine Stowe as Dr. Kathryn Railly because he was impressed by her performance in Blink (1994).[2] The director first met Stowe when he was casting his abandoned film adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities.[3] "She has this incredible ethereal beauty and she's incredibly intelligent", Gilliam reasoned. "Those two things rest very easily with her, and the film needed those elements because it has to be romantic."[2]
Gilliam originally believed that Brad Pitt was not right for the role of Jeffrey Goines, but the casting director convinced him otherwise.[3] Pitt was cast for a relatively small salary, when he was still an "up and coming" actor. By the time of 12 Monkeys' release, however, Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), Legends of the Fall (1994), and Se7en (1995) had been released, making Pitt an A-list actor, which drew greater attention to the film and boosted its box-office standing.[5] In Philadelphia, months before filming, Pitt spent weeks at Temple University's hospital, visiting and studying the psychiatric ward to prepare for his role.[2]
Filming
Filming for 12 Monkeys lasted from February 8-May 6, 1995. Shooting on location in Philadelphia and Baltimore (including the Senator Theatre)[7][8] in the winter time was fraught with weather problems. There were also technical glitches with the futuristic mechanical props. Because the film has a nonlinear storyline, continuity errors occurred and some scenes had to be reshot. Gilliam also injured himself when he went horseback riding. Despite setbacks, however, the director managed to stay within the budget and was only a week behind his shooting schedule. "It was a tough shoot", acknowledged Jeffrey Beecroft (Mr. Brooks, Dances with Wolves), the production designer. "There wasn't a lot of money or enough time. Terry is a perfectionist, but he was really adamant about not going over budget. He got crucified for Munchausen, and that still haunts him."[7]
The filmmakers were not allowed the luxury of sound stages, thus they had to find abandoned buildings or landmarks in Philadelphia to use.[6] The exterior shots of the climactic airport scene were conducted at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, while the Pennsylvania Convention Center at Reading Terminal housed interior scenes. Filming at the psychiatric hospital was done at the Eastern State Penitentiary.[9]
Design
Gilliam undertook the same filmmaking style from his own Brazil (1985), including the art direction and cinematography (specifically using fresnel lenses).[4] The interrogation room where Cole is being interviewed by the scientists was based on the work of Lebbeus Woods; these scenes were shot at three different power stations (two in Philadelphia and one in Baltimore). Gilliam intended to show Cole being interviewed through a multi-screen interrogation TV set because he felt the machinery evoked a "nightmarish intervention of technology. You try to see the faces on the screens in front of you, but the real faces and voices are down there and you have these tiny voices in your ear. To me that's the world we live in, the way we communicate these days, through technical devices that pretend to be about communication but may not be."[10]
The art department made sure that the 2035 underground world would only use pre-1996 technology as a means to depict the bleak future.[5] Also, Gilliam, Beecroft, and Crispian Sallis (set decorator) went to several flea markets and salvage warehouses looking for materials to decorate the sets.[11] To create the majority of visual effects sequences, Gilliam awarded the shots to Peerless Camera, the London-based effects studio he founded in the late-1970s with visual effects supervisor Kent Houston (The Golden Compass, Casino Royale). Additional digital compositing was done by The Mill, while Cinesite worked on film scanning services.[2]
Music
The film's score was composed, arranged, and conducted by English musician Paul Buckmaster. The main theme is based on Argentinian tango musician and composer Ástor Piazzolla's Suite Punta del Este.[12]
THEMES
Memory, time, and technology
2 Monkeys studies the subjective nature of memories and their effect upon perceptions of reality. Examples of false memories include:[6]
• Cole's recollection of the airport shooting which is altered each time he has a dream.
• A "mentally divergent" man at the asylum who has false memories.
• Railly telling Cole "I remember you like this" when a barely recognizable Cole and Railly are seen in disguise for the first time.
References to time, time travel, and monkeys are scattered throughout the film, including the Woody Woodpecker “Time Tunnel” cartoon playing on the TV in a hotel room, The Marx Brothers movie Monkey Business (1931) on TV in the asylum and the subplots of monkeys (drug testing, news stories and animal rights). The film is also a study of modern civilization's declining efforts to communicate with each other due to the interference of technology.[6]
Cinematic allusions
12 Monkeys is inspired by the French short film La jetée (1962), specifically, both protagonists being haunted by the image of their own death. The climaxes for both films also take place in an airport.[9]
Similar to La Jetée, 12 Monkeys also presents Hitchcockian elements and references to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Toward the end of the film, Cole and Railly hide in a theater showing a 24-hour Hitchcock marathon and watch a scene from Vertigo. Railly then transforms herself with a blonde wig, as Judy (Kim Novak) transformed herself into blonde Madeleine in Vertigo; James sees her emerge within a red light, as Scottie (James Stewart) saw Judy emerge within a green light.[9] Brief notes of Bernard Herrmann’s 1958 film score can also be heard. Railly also wears the same coat Novak wore in the first part of Vertigo. The scene at Muir Woods National Monument, where Judy (as Madeleine) looks at the growth rings of a felled redwood and traces back events in her past life, resonates with larger themes in 12 Monkeys’. Cole and Railly later have a similar conversation while the same music from Vertigo is repeated.[9] In fact, the Muir Woods scene in Vertigo is also re-enacted in La Jetée, making this another connection to that film.
Further on in the film, Cole wakes up in a hospital bed with scientists of the future talking to him in chorus. This is a direct homage to the “Dry Bones” scene in Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.[13]
RECEPTION
Release
12 Monkeys was given a limited release in the United States on December 29, 1995. When the 1,629 theater wide release came on January 5, 1996, the film earned $13.84 million in its opening weekend. 12 Monkeys eventually grossed $57.14 million in US totals and $111.7 million in other countries, coming to a worldwide total of $168.84 million.[14] The film was able to hold the #1 spot on box office charts for two weeks in January, before dropping from competition to From Dusk till Dawn, Mr. Holland’s Opus and Black Sheep.[15]
Universal Studios Home Entertainment’s special edition release of 12 Monkeys in May 2005 contains an audio commentary by director Terry Gilliam and producer Charles Roven, The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys (a making-of documentary) and production notes.[16]
Critical reception
The film received a positive response from critics. Based on 45 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, 87% of the critics enjoyed 12 Monkeys with an average rating of 7.6/10. The consensus reads: “The plot’s a bit of a jumble, but excellent performances and mind-blowing plot twists make 12 Monkeys a kooky, effective experience.”[17] The film was more balanced with Rotten Tomatoes’ 18 reviewers in the “Top Critics” poll, receiving an 83% approval rating and a 6.8/10 score.[18] By comparison, Metacritic calculated a 74/100 rating, based on 20 reviews.[19]
Roger Ebert observed 12 Monkeys’ depiction of the future, finding similarities with Blade Runner (1982; also scripted by David Peoples) and Brazil (1985; also directed by Terry Gilliam). “The film is a celebration of madness and doom, with a hero who tries to prevail against the chaos of his condition, and is inadequate,” Ebert wrote. "This vision is a cold, dark, damp one, and even the romance between Willis and Stowe feels desperate rather than joyous. All of this is done very well, and the more you know about movies (especially the technical side), the more you're likely to admire it. And as entertainment, it appeals more to the mind than to the senses."[20]
Desson Thomson of The Washington Post praised the art direction and set design. "Willis and Pitts's performances, Gilliam's atmospherics and an exhilarating momentum easily outweigh such trifling flaws in the script", Thomson reasoned.[21] Peter Travers from Rolling Stone magazine cited the film's success on Gilliam's direction and Willis' performance.[22] Internet reviewer James Berardinelli believed the filmmakers took an intelligent and creative motive for the time travel subplot. Rather than being sent to change the past, James Cole is instead observing it to make a better future.[23] Richard Corliss of Time magazine felt the film's time travel aspect and apocalyptic depiction of a bleaker future was overtly cliché. "In its frantic mix of chaos, carnage and zoo animals, 12 Monkeys is Jumanji for adults", Corliss wrote.[24]
Awards and nominations
Brad Pitt was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. Costume designer Julie Weiss (Hollywoodland, Frida) was also nominated for her work, but lost to James Acheson of Restoration.[25] However, Pitt was able to win a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture.[26] Terry Gilliam was honored for his directing duties at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival.[9] 12 Monkeys received positive notices from the science fiction community. The film was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation[27] and the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films awarded 12 Monkeys the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film. Pitt and Weiss also won awards at the 22nd Saturn Awards. Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Gilliam and writers David and Janet Peoples received nominations.[28]
Lebbeus Woods lawsuit
In the beginning of the film, James is brought into the interrogation room and told to sit in a chair which is attached to a vertical rail on the wall. A sphere supported by a metal armature is suspended directly in front of him, probing for weaknesses as the inquisitors interrogate him.[29] Architect Lebbeus Woods filed a lawsuit against Universal in February 1996, claiming that his work "Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber" was used without permission. Woods won his lawsuit, earning "a high six-figure cash settlement" from Universal.[29]
Then:
Vertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart, Kim Novak, and Barbara Bel Geddes. The film was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor, based on a novel by Boileau-Narcejac. A retired police detective, who has acrophobia, is hired as a private investigator to follow the wife of an acquaintance to uncover the mystery of her peculiar behavior. The film received mixed reviews upon initial release, but has garnered much acclaim since then and is now frequently ranked among the greatest films ever made, and often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career.[1]
Plot
During a police chase across the rooftops of San Francisco, Detective John "Scottie" Ferguson (James Stewart) discovers his latent acrophobia (fear of heights) when he stumbles and hangs from a rain gutter. When his partner (Fred Graham) tries to save Scottie, he slips and falls to his own death before Scottie’s eyes. After the incident, Scottie decides to retire from police work, but a college acquaintance named Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) hires Scottie as a private investigator to decipher the peculiar behavior of his wife, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak).
Scottie follows Madeleine as she visits the grave, the former home and the museum portrait of a dead woman named Carlotta Valdes. Scottie learns that Carlotta Valdes had a tragic life that ended in suicide and that she was Madeleine's great-grandmother. After following Madeleine to Fort Point, Scottie sees Madeleine jump into San Francisco Bay next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Scottie rescues her and takes her to his home to recover. Madeleine eventually confesses that she feels like she may be going insane and has to repress suicidal impulses. Scottie comforts and reassures her and the intimacy between them grows.
When Madeleine recounts the details of a bad dream, Scottie identifies the setting as Mission San Juan Bautista and takes her there in an effort to ease her anxiety. At the mission, Madeleine panics and suddenly runs into the church and up the staircase of the bell tower. Scottie chases after her, but his acrophobia prevents him from making it to the top of the staircase. Halted on the steps by vertigo and paralyzing fear, Scottie hears a scream and, through a window, sees Madeleine fall from the tower. The manner of her death was officially declared to be suicide and Gavin blamed it on possession by Carlotta Valdes.
Scottie had fallen in love with Madeleine and is depressed after her death. As his emotional state improves, he begins to haunt the places that Madeleine had visited. On the street, he spots a young woman who, in spite of her very different looks, somehow reminds him of Madeleine. Scottie follows her to her hotel room and tries to persuade her to talk to him. She tells him that her name is Judy Barton, and that she is just a simple girl from Kansas. Though initially hostile and defensive, she eventually agrees to join Scottie for dinner - but once Scottie has left, we learn of her true identity. She was, in fact, the woman whom he knew as "Madeleine," but she was not actually Gavin's wife. Gavin had hired her to pose as his wife and pretend to be possessed by Carlotta Valdes. Gavin faked the suicide by hiding at the top of the bell tower and tossing over the body of his already-murdered wife. Gavin used Scottie as a witness to her apparent suicide by correctly predicting that his acrophobia would prevent him from following "Madeleine" to the top of the tower. But Judy had fallen in love with Scottie, so she chooses to hide the truth and attempts to establish a genuine relationship with him.
Scottie grows fond of Judy, but their relationship is hindered by his memory of "Madeleine." He gradually transforms Judy so that she bears an uncanny resemblance to "Madeleine," and Judy goes along with this change so that they may be happy together. Scottie's suspicion is aroused when Judy wears a necklace that he remembered seeing in the portrait of Carlotta Valdes. Scottie takes Judy to Mission San Juan Bautista, revealing to her upon arrival that he wants to reenact the event in which he failed to save Madeleine, admitting that he has realized she is the same person. Scottie forces Judy up the bell tower while he recounts the incident and presses her for the truth. Scottie realizes that he has conquered his acrophobia and his ascent, therefore, is not impeded by vertigo. On top of the bell tower, Judy admits to the deception, but pleads to Scottie that she loves him. The two embrace, but Judy, startled by an approaching shadow (a nun), steps backward and falls from the tower to her death. The film ends with Scottie perched on a narrow ledge in utter despair while the nun rings the church bell.
Cast
- James Stewart as John “Scottie” Ferguson, a police detective who develops acrophobia after watching a fellow police officer fall to his death.
- Kim Novak as Judy Barton, a girl hired by Gavin Elster to pretend to be Madeleine Elster.
- Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge Wood, Scottie’s confidant and friend.
- Tom Helmore as Gavin Elster, an old college friend of Scottie’s.
Adaptation
The screenplay is an adaptation of the French novel The Living and the Dead (D’entre les morts) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock had previously tried to buy the rights to the same authors’ previous novel, Celle qui n’était plus, but he failed, and it was made instead by Henri-Georges Clouzot as Les Diaboliques.[2] Although François Truffaut once suggested that D'Entre les morts was specifically written for Hitchcock by Boileau and Narcejac,[3] Narcejac subsequently denied that this was their intention.[4] However, Hitchcock's interest in their work meant that Paramount Pictures commissioned a synopsis of D’Entre les morts in 1954, before it had even been translated into English.[5]
Hitchcock originally hired playwright Maxwell Anderson to write a screenplay, but rejected his work, which was entitled Darkling I Listen. The final script was written by Samuel A. Taylor—who was recommended to Hitchcock due to his knowledge of San Francisco[5]—from notes by Hitchcock. Among Taylor's creations was the character of Midge.[6] Taylor attempted to take sole credit for the screenplay, but Alec Coppel—the other screenplay writer hired by Hitchcock—protested to the Screen Writers Guild, which determined that both writers were entitled to a credit.[7]
[I’ll finishing this purloining later, I’m tired, other important things spring to mind, such as the film Memento, electroconvulsive therapy...]
From Wikipedia, and I thought I had the concept of “Instruction Manual” (a tiny Korean book with baby writing in it):
The Alliance of Twelve, with SD-6 being one of its subsidiary cells, is a fictional international organized crime group in the television series Alias. It is involved in the trade of intelligence and weapons as well as in blackmailing.
The organization was founded by Alain Christophe, once a CIA counterintelligence officer, as well as other former agents of various other intelligence agencies and wealthy individuals investing in the spy trade after the Cold War.
The Alliance of Twelve is an enemy of the United States and a rival to the CIA.
Organizational structure
The Alliance is led by a board of directors.One of them being Agent Irvin. Some members are from the private sector, but most are former intelligence officers. All of them are wealthy. The organization is divided into 12 sections, named SD-1 through SD-12. "SD" stands for Section Disparue — literally, the section which has disappeared in French (Sydney translates it as "the section that doesn't exist" in the episode Q&A). These organizational cells are spread over 12 major cities of the world. The Alliance takes in CIA agents and trains them to believe they are working for the CIA when in reality they are not.
Objectives
The purview of the Alliance is the black market trading of weapons, military secrets, industrial intelligence, medical technology, computer advances, and political agendas. Its clients include governments, corporations, wealthy citizens, families.
The Alliance aims to eventually reach world domination through its control over organized crime and the trade of intelligence. According to Jack Bristow and Arvin Sloane, the Alliance wished to change the world once it had achieved this, and rid the world of corruption, but had become bloated and corrupt over the years, diverging from their original vision and focusing instead on profit.
Actions
According to Sydney Bristow in the episode Q and A, the Alliance of Twelve was responsible for the carbon proxy disaster in 1992, in which an accidental methyl isocyanate leak at the manufacturer plant in Bangalore, India killed three thousand people and injured another thousand, leaving them disabled. In 1996, near Kyoto, Japan, a bullet train accidentally switched tracks and derailed, killing a hundred and fifty people. The Alliance was also responsible for that disaster. In 2001, the Alliance caused a transport plane in Germany to suffer mechanical failures outside Munich, killing twelve people. The disasters were falsely believed to have been accidents. In truth, some were acts of revenge, others were personal favors to those who helped fund the Alliance. Some were distractions so that local resources were occupied so that SD-4 or SD-7 could infiltrate a building somewhere and retrieve sensitive data.
SD-6
SD-6, headed by Arvin Sloane and based in Los Angeles, is the focus of the first two seasons of Alias. SD-6 pretends to be part of the CIA and states its objective as "retrieval and study of intelligence both military and industrial throughout the world that is critical to the superiority and survival of the United States of America." Even its own members, initially including agent Sydney Bristow, believe it is a black ops division of the CIA and only a handful of senior staff know the truth and are complicit in the deception.
In the first episode of Alias, Sydney learns from her father, Jack about the organization's true character as a part of The Alliance of Twelve.
During the course of the first season, other heads of the SD cells are eventually shown meeting. Among them was Edward Poole, head of SD-9 (played by Roger Moore), who manages to convince Sloane to kill fellow SD head Jean Briault to influence an upcoming vote on whether to declare war on Alexander Khasinau, who has eliminated rival groups FTL and K-Directorate. Another SD leader is identified by the first name "Ramon," but his last name and his SD cell number are unrevealed.
PARANOIA AND RUTHLESSNESS
Of SD-6
SD-6 branch was headquartered in the Credit Dauphine building in Los Angeles, with entry through a special elevator to the sixth sub-level of the building. Every person who entered would be biometrically scanned and visually confirmed. As a security measure, all three areas of the foundations of the building itself were rigged with C-4 explosives that would go off if the inner vault had been breached during a security lockdown or for other contingencies. Fail-safe or lockdown procedures could be carried out only by Arvin Sloane, using his right index fingerprint; presumably, other SD cells had similar contingency plans (such as for deterring a CIA raid, which happens in Season 2) that would make it difficult to shut down.
In addition, SD-6 employed an internal security group responsible for investigating and terminating individuals who even know of SD-6's existence, those believed to know about the true nature of SD-6, or those suspected to be Double agents or traitors to SD-6. Sydney's fiancée, Danny, was murdered by SD-6's internal security division in Season 1 after Sydney revealed to him that she works for SD-6, believing it to be a part of the CIA.
Of The Alliance
In addition to the cell-like nature of Section Disparu, which presumably allows the termination of entire SD cells in the event that it is wholly compromised, the Alliance of Twelve is an utterly ruthless organization that constantly suspects and conduct surveillance of even its head members.
When Arvin Sloane's wife, Emily, admits to knowing of the existence of SD-6, Arvin is told to have his wife killed as a test of loyalty. Arvin was able to win a temporary reprieve because of his wife's cancer which would kill her soon; when her cancer is found to be in remission, he is again told that in order to become a "full partner" in The Alliance, he would have to kill his wife. He then faked his wife's death by drugging her wine and putting her in suspended animation.
Having proven his loyalty to the members of The Alliance, he is welcomed as a full partner and injected in the neck with a tracking device and mini-microphone to have his movements and conversations recorded 24/7. Although Sloane was clearly privy to matters that only a handful of men and women knew about, he was clearly not yet part of an 'inner circle' within The Alliance board, suggesting that there is some sense of competition and suspicion among even the SD cells and their leaders.
The end of The Alliance
The Alliance came to an end in the middle of Season 2 (Episode 13, "Phase One") of Alias when Sydney stumbles upon information, with Sark's aid, that leads her and Vaughn to believe there is one master server, server 47 (in keeping with the Rambaldi sub-plot of the show, where 47 is a key number in Rambaldi's works), which could potentially have all the information the CIA would need to shut down all of the SD cells simultaneously, thus acting as a sort of 'silver bullet' to the cell-like nature of the Alliance.
Although the server was located on a Boeing 747 plane that was constantly airborne as a security measure, Sydney was able to pose as an escort for the computer technicians onboard during one of its landings and copy all the information from the server. When Jack attempted to go back to SD-6 headquarters to get confirmation that the information was genuine (as the CIA would only have one chance), he was apprehended by the acting head Geiger (Sloane had taken off and was declared MIA by the Alliance) who accused him of being a CIA spy.
Knowing she couldn't go back herself, Sydney called her SD-6 partner Marcus Dixon to get the confirmation and tells Dixon the true nature of SD-6. With this information, the CIA was able to successfully raid all the offices of various SD cells around the world; Sydney was a part of the CIA team that infiltrated SD-6 headquarters in Los Angeles and rescued her father moments before he would be electrocuted by Geiger. It is then revealed that Sloane had planned the destruction of the Alliance, having a technician bypass the surveillance devices in his neck, and he and Sark had supplied Sydney with the information the CIA needed to remove The Alliance—after he had cleared out (apparently) all Rambaldi artifacts to his own location outside of SD-6.
However, one artifact escaped Sloane's attention. This artifact, the Horizon, had been sought by Prophet Five for thirty years, and was eventually retrieved (after coercing Sydney) by Irina Derevko, who then betrayed Prophet Five, almost four years after the fall of the Alliance.
so SD is SD is SD. What caught my eye here other than dangling fishhooks at the door
The other eyecatcher was the 47. The 4117 from the other day. The server 47 on a 747—a ratings-savings episode, IIRC—I think of 77, as in 77 Mass Ave for MIT. The number 77 cropped up a few times in the last week, I just hope 380 or whatever has no connection with MIT. Where the 77, aside from on 7.7.77 at 7.07 for 7s I drew a 7 and still have it! I am the 5-person too, as I was born at 5:55a on 5/5 so in 2005, 05/05/05 at 05:55a it was my... 37th birthday, which is 5x5 (hex, a crazy math). AND it is part of Theosophy, AND there is an article by Robert Gauldin (of Eastman School of Music? He wrote a counterpoint/harmony text) on Stravinsky’s “In Memoriam Dylan Thomas” to which a colleague Elliott Gyger wrote a paper either apply 5 to anything or anything to the Dylan Thomas piece. Jim Morrison, One in Five... I wonder. Oh, 20 percent, which has been some ?libertarian aim on the right for a long time, I think. Or... that is how much of the world should survive with clever osmotic genetic drift in the manner of oceanic extremophiles (think Ron Howard’s Cocoon) well, off the deep end again. Why would someone say their father was a “Tycoon”?—A very odd choice of word that gave me electric shocks to the legs, but I now recall Rachel and at least one other could play tricks with my nerves, directly. The latter used pheromones to seduce me, with a fairly basic epistemology.
But the 77s and 38s. Oh, building 38 must be RLE? Yes, I think I even had a dream of standing atop it once. Not saying. Here is some RLE copyright material, sorry:
In 1973, the growing Laboratory expanded further into all of the new building 36 within the Sherman Fairchild Electrical Engineering and Electronics Complex. Located at 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Fairchild complex includes an eight-storey structure which houses core space of the Research Laboratory of Electronics( MIT building 36), an adjoining six-storey structure (MIT building 38) housing RLE laboratories, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.
The six-storey Education Center (MIT building 34) was constructed in 1983, which provides a physical link between the two buildings and additional conference and lecture rooms.
At the time of its completion in 1973, the Fairchild Complex was the single largest building project at MIT since the Cambridge campus was constructed in 1916.
The complex is named in memory of Sherman M. Fairchild, the late founder and chairman of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fairchild Industries, and the Fairchild Foundation.
The Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill designed the two concrete and glass buildings which contain classrooms, laboratories, offices, instrument rooms, and mechanical and electronic shops.
Since 1997, over $12M has been re-invested back into the core RLE facilities in MIT buildings 26, 36, and 38 in the form of extensive laboratory and office renovations. Additional significant renovations are underway today.
I’m getting a lot of Fs (fails), the notion of a fair child, I know there is research there into non-invasion brain ?pulse-magnetic neural network alteration as I think DT worked on that despite being the vacuum tube (valve) guru, sucking’em dry those crania. And an SOM, which is funny because Somerville starts that way, but I was chatting about the important of CMOS circuits today. Unless I am a bozoid, which is possible, S.O.M.—they are possibly the most famous BIG, modern, slightly boring I think, architectural firm in the world, nothing like Zahir Hadid or OMA or Gehry or or or—did the building for Entrapmentwith Catherine Zeta Jones and Sean Connery, the twin towers of the national petroleum company in the capital of Malaysia. If I lived at Harvard’s only twin towers—Leverett (means “baby hare”! and incoming sophomores are called rising rabbits) when the WTC twin towers were done in and down (by whom? “The Cell” is it or is it pronounced “The Network”—I recall thinking of Jennifer Lopez!), I had a series of nightmares—which I think a induced sometimes—by tiredness no less—in which the Petronas Towers were crashed into by a double decker plane in an act of what I called CVS (Cerebral V__ Supremacy but I forget the V, or is it 2010S but nothing to do with Consumer Value Stores from Woonsocket RI despite the pliability claim of their name...) MIT RLE.
Rules. For Peter. Switch imagination off. Get bureaucratic stuff done. Post on as many blogs as possible... haha. I mean, get the recording, oh it’s up, many of them are, with the clear sonic modification—not just phase-canceling fractal filters to form the images, arrow writing, tumbling (funny how we watched gymnastic tumbling and synchronized swimming for the 2008 Olympics!), and the rest, but actual layers of sound—added voices, and in the same way as the visuals, and words, and lives, and general parasitic nature I call it—like the clever parasites David Attenborough has, when not doing the Bird of Paradise or Lyre bird in all its mimicry, that has spores entering the brain of some creature, changing its brain, then sprouting fungal agony branches—how the word “dendritic” is one of those relationship resonators, I hope we have some semantic closure here... like limit the dendritic structure of dendritic structure to 10 levels, former love of mein. It is a scary image.
s th rls r n mgntn fr th rst f tdy. no proof reading yet. Hey, especially easy one: answers are buried in questions for the knowing, right? D’uh, the word “yes” is right there, kind of elides with ESP, which is MIT’s special teaching program that a few friends/exes have given seminars at with well-innuendoed descriptions... how not to have volcanoes erupting, and earthquakes shattering... or was that a dysentery reference? Verbally, yes, I suppose.
Speaking indelicately of that, I had the misfortune of having campylobacter enteritis in NZ. Get it, like more coded jargon, compiler entry? Or pyles~cells or batteries, or lobe, or act, or amp__ that one goes anyone though I think amphibole went into the ear of an ex-gf geologist sitting an exam when I first knew her; she maintained she didn’t know the answer but heard my voice sasying amphibole. Ebola, (sounds like) fib, amphibious, Bola (the anti-cyclone that wiped out my coast of the NI of NZ), eloquence upended I’d say. And so the addict(ionarie)s life goes, butter in the churn, letters in the square box, read them R->Le like Hebrew (reminds me: time for a brew of tea and to check up on my nephew, but churn—which might be short for butter churn— makes me think of earning money or be cremated. In any case after the pre-cam. ent. hospitalization where there nurses had that maximally shit job in the world, there was the month-later day surgery, for an anal probe and it felt as if they had left a scalpel in there (which is still how I feel about my London hernia, done at the Middlesex hospital, where a nurse stole half my demerol and IIRC kind of had some fun with me, he did, in the old man’s just-lost-their-bladders ward, after the operation appeared to partially fail, given the gushes of blood from the barely stitched exterior wound—ALW, my girlfriend, took good control of the scene. Anyway, Mr Knight (surgeons are called Mr, not Dr, in New Zealand) did a fine job I am sure with my sigmoidoscrapy, but it did feel like something surgical was left to tickle in that non-tickly way. I barfed for hours upon rousing, and a giant tampon of fully blooded cotton swabs made its way out. I then passed out. Again. Very unlike me.
I never mentioned the swollen ankle swellings, and more importantly how I passed out twice in the basement of Paine Hall, Harvard Music Department, TWICE in EXACTLY the same spot, the only two times I have been in that spot, kind of a dead end opposite my office which was B4 down a go-nowhere corridor. How once in London, in the late 1990s I think, I won’t say where, I had my period very seriously yet again. I told Mum. She seemed sympathetic. David agreed with my theory it was the raspberry pie from MacDonald’s, readily. NO, and it wasn’t hr.s either as I have never had those. The clot gets thicker.
Oh, it is spring verging on summer today, and with some delicate rain today, passing some leaf-ferns today reminded me very much of home, in our “shade house” Dad would build wherever we lived, for the unfurling of fronds and other fernlike things, just the right thing for a Kiwi, where the silver fern is our national plant, our netball team, the koru is the stylized version on Air New Zealand planes, and it looks like a curled up coch-lea or something that would go in one or near one, such as the “coily croimaster”—the curled up end of the teste that lee40 would call cremasters (or croimasters) (which are smallish, apparently, I guess as a counterweight, like the muscle—we saw Cremaster II when we were first together, on Cammy’s suggestion—about Gary Gilmore, with quite some uterine scenes among other claustrophobic Moments). And plot analogies.
Time to unorbifold my lobes (actually, they bulge). Mites in the heart, mitochondria—actually, chondria is the gut in general I think, and some Generals have gut. You had to have guts to sit my generals (comprehensives) in Harvard Music Theory—as in hypochondria, under the chondria.
