(no subject)

Well, now I've seen A Clockwork Orange on the big screen. (My only previous viewing was on VHS in high school, long enough ago that this was effectively my first time again.) It was better than I remembered/expected, although parts of it now plays mostly as camp--a fact of which I was repeatedly reminded by Beavis and Butthead in the row behind me.

During the pivotal torture scene--where Alex is inadvertently forced to associate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with physical discomfort--I thought about the way the scene is mirrored to the audience. While Alex is simultaneously seeing images of violence, hearing Beethoven, and experiencing pain, we in the theater are simultaneously seeing repulsive images of violence (including that perpetrated against Alex) and hearing Beethoven ourselves. Kubrick must have known that some viewers would forever associate the Ode to Joy with torture.

I wonder if he understood that the horrible synthesizer-vocoder rendition of the symphony he used was punishment enough.

Before the movie started, they showed the trailers for Sexy Beast, which I quite liked, and The Minus Man, which I liked more (plus it had a great trailer). Neither one of them is showing as part of this midnight movie series, or any other time soon. Why would they do that to us?

open mike report

Sweetwater, 2003-07-05

I've been playing around the south bay for a few years but have never made it up to the north bay for Sweetwater's well-regarded open mike. Today I learned why. It only took me half an hour to get to San Francisco, and then it took AN HOUR to drive a few miles from the freeway to the Golden Gate Bridge. A local assured me that it usually isn't that bad. We'll see.

Anyway, it was a light crowd--Saturday afternoons are sort of a new thing there, plus it's a holiday weekend, so people are out of town, plus it was a gorgeous day and who would want to be sitting in a bar? Still, there was some walk-in traffic, and the other musicians were very friendly. One of them gave me cherry-peach pie! (It was her birthday yesterday.) I'm hoping to get up there again for a Monday night open mike soon. Surely it'll be a faster trip during rush hour!

Afterwards I walked around looking for a place to eat, and learned that Mill Valley drivers are maddeningly polite about crosswalks. One guy stopped his car at a crosswalk when I was just standing on the sidewalk deciding where to go, and I had to cross the street just to be polite. That took me to a place called Avatar's Punjabi Burritos, where I had a Punjabi burrito, something I had never encountered before even as a phrase. It was good, though.