very basic: Every actor or director flogging a movie, when asked what it was like to work with so-and-so, inevitably insists everyone was just fabulous, totally professional, a joy to work with, and never was such fun had on a movie/TV set. You have to wait until they’re 80 and write a scandalous autobiography to get the real story!
I’m sort of on an ongoing dystopian fiction kick, so the dystopia vs. apocalypse issue comes up pretty often.
Of course these are abstract songs, but who could deny that the main theme of the album was a crumbling relationship? And who went through a crumbling relationship when “Blood on the Tracks” was recorded?
You must at least grant that the album must have been heavily inspired by Dylan’s personal life. Of course, “Desire” picks up some threads from “Blood” (because this was the time when their marriage finally came to an end), but presents them in another fashion. That’s Dylan. And he has always been reluctant to explain his songs, so I understand his denial, and I don’t chide him for that. An artist isn’t obliged to explain his work. But I still don’t buy it.
P.S.: I have a vague memory that I even sometimes read that Dylan claimed that “Sara” also wasn’t about his wife. I possibly misremember, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true.
I suppose it depends on if you consider Alternate History a genre of Science Fiction. Some people prefer a more generic label of Speculative Fiction to cover ideas like Alternate History, Distopia, etc, that are not premised upon scientific/technology developments but offer alternative versions of the past or projections into the future.
So? They’re Navy personnel, subject to potential battle conditions. They’re every bit as essential to a Navy as the bosun, the navigator, or the gunnery sargeant (or whatever).
Right, but the key thing is that first and foremost these jobs are military jobs held by active military officers. And while it’s not explicitly clear for other branches of the military, for the MI it is. The teachers at both Johnny’s training schools are not only active officers, but have seen active duty, and are often on rotation as a teacher because they are so good at combat. Plus, at OCS a lot of the trainer positions are filled by injured officers that cannot do active combat and qualify for disability retirement with full benefits, but remain active duty so that they can teach and let more able-bodied soldiers stay in the field.
It’s true, being a cook at an Army base on some government outpost might usually be fairly unrisky at a state of peace. The requirement is not that they must put themselves in a 50:50 situation or have some other definite risk of death in order to qualify for citizenship. But they have to join the military, go through military training, and serve time in a position that at least nominally has the risk of combat activities associated with it. Because war could pop up at any time. And if they’re not fit for combat, they are given some equally tedious, difficult, and tiring if not dangerous job.
He explains at one point that many of the veterans spent their time in conditions of peace and were not subject to the dangers of war. So the military had to dream up all sorts of creative ways to harry and stress and wear out and otherwise make nearly unbearable their conditions.
Delivering mail in contemporary Iowa (or whereever) wouldn’t cut it, whatever Heinlein said at a later date. Hell, the merchant marine didn’t qualify (it’s mentioned in the book as a sore point).
However, according to Offred, Gilead came about as a response to declining birth rates brought on by environmental collapse, with large sections of the N. American continent being referred to as, IIRC, “wastelands”. It did not come about merely by people being “rat bastards”.
That’s like saying every novel is science fiction, because they all have technology in them. Which pretty clearly wasn’t my point. Science fiction is when you take a concept or trend in a field of science, and extrapolate it into the future. The field in question could be electronics, or physics. Or it could be sociology. Hell, the science doesn’t even necessarily have to advance - a novel about how, in future, we’ll be living like cavemen would also be science fiction. A Handmaid’s Tale works as science fiction because it’s taking several different sociological and environmental trends and extrapolating them forward to an imagined end result, specifically, increasing pollution, the effects of chemical additives on human reproduction, and the rising tide of far-right religiosity.
I’m sure most of you know this, HAL 9000’s initials are “IBM” plus one. Arthur C. Clarke has maintained that this is a cooincidence.
Riiiight
Looking through Wikipedia at Sir Paul’s songs, this bit I don’t believe is that the writing credits are shared by Paul and Linda. Yeah, sure Paul, you and Linda both worked on all those songs together. At least with Lennon/McCartney, even though most of their songs were not collaborations, they both contributed significantly to their collective output. I find it hard to believe that the same can be said for McCartney/McCartney.
Why don’t you believe that this is a coincidence?
This may have been done for very practical reasons. Linda didn’t have the contractual entanglements siphoning off her share of the royalties that Paul had. By splitting the credit, they were able to assign Linda’s half of the publishing rights to their own MPL Communications publishing company.
Yeah, as he has aged Bradbury has developed some sort of reaction against TV. In the postscript to the recent edition of Something Wicked This Way Comes he writes about how he developed the mood for the novel when walking around outside one evening for hours without seeing anyone. Everyone was inside wasting their lives watching TV instead of being out living life, he claimed. It is just a really weird comment for a story that has nothing whatsoever to do with TV, coming from an author who himself wrote and hosted a TV show. Earlier this year I also showed a documentary in my class called “Ray Bradbury, an Author and his Life” (or something like that), and he went into an anti-TV rant for bit in that film too. Maybe he’s pissed that the old sci-fi serials that were his bread and butter for 20 years have disappeared forever.
(Another weird thing from the documentary that struck me were the Coors Banquet Beer cans, the yellow tall boys, that were all over Bradbury’s house. It just seemed funny somehow.)
Malcolm McDowell, for awhile at least, insisted that he thought Caligula was going to be high art until the director and producer mangled it in post-production. Y’all, there is a scene in this movie where McDowell fists another dude. There is no way he didn’t know it was porn the moment he showed up on set.
Wasn’t that done via cuts and a “hand double”, though? At least, that’s what I’ve heard.
And that’s the kind of claim that makes Bradbury seem unbelievable. There were only eight million televisions in the country in 1950. Television was growing (there had only been one million televisions in 1948) but there were 150,697,361 Americans counted in the 1950 census - television was still a relatively small fad.
Good point. Hadn’t thought of that.
Actually I am just bummed that I didn’t figure it out before everyone else. But you’re right, it probably is a coincidence.
The Cloverfield monster was not a confused baby looking for his mommy.
Nor was he killed by the bombs at the end of the movie.
He’s NEVER given a consistent answer of # of movies he wanted in the *Star Wars *saga. As low as 3, as high as 9 have been his answers.
Good point. It could be about both being cool and another, errr, fundamental topic. I think it’s instructive to check out the back of his T-shirt (which rocks!) in the video. 
I’m not an expert on Warhol but in every interview with him I’ve seen, he’s denied emotional sincerity.
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