Favorite James O. Incandenza film?

[RandomKoolzip]

My favorite is Every Inch of Disney Leith, as it makes the most use of endoscopic cinematography AND the controversy surrounding uniform metricization.

[asthmaticeog]

1. Other: "Cage III — Free Show"

"The figure of Death presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs."

[RandomKoolzip]

2. That was a good one....

Or how about As of Yore?

"A middle-aged tennis instructor, preparing to instruct his son in tennis, becomes intoxicated in the family's garage and subjects his son to a rambling monologue while the son weeps and perspires."

InterLace could get uber-goofy back in the day.

[asthmaticeog]

3. "Homo Duplex" was fun.

"Parody of Woititz and Shulgin's 'poststructual antidocumentaries,' interviews with fourteen Americans who are named John Wayne but are not the legendary 20th-century film actor John Wayne."

Ah, the good old days before subsidisation.

[RandomKoolzip]

4. That's when Digital Parallelism was at its height.

In light of the Supreme Court's recent decision regarding Immanent Domain, I think it's time to load up this particular cartridge again:

"Immanent Domain" - B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Judith Fukuoka-Hearn, Pam Heath, Pamel-Sue Vorrheis, Herbert G. Birch; 35 mm; 88 minutes; black and white w/ microphotography; sound. Three memory-neurons (Fukuoka-Hearn, Heath, Voorheis...w/ polyurethane costumes) in the Inferior frontal gyrus of a man's (Watt's) brain fight heroically to prevent their displacement by new memory-neurons as the man undergoes intense psychoanalysis. CELLULOID; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RE-RELEASE #340-03-70 (Y.P.W.)

[asthmaticeog]

5. I always felt that was a sort of companion piece to

"It Was A Great Marvel That He Was In The Father Without Knowing Him"

"A father, suffering from the delusion that his etymologically precocious son is pretending to be mute, poses as a 'professional conversationalist' in order to draw the boy out."

[RandomKoolzip]

6. As an example of the Cinema of Chaotic Stasis, I find "Marvel..." wanting.

I'd much rather watch:

"The Medusa v. The Odalisque" - B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Uncredited cast; zone-plating laser holography by James O. Incadenza and Urquhart Ogilvie, Jr.; holographic fight choreography by Kenjiru Hirota courtesy of Sony Entertainment-Asia; 78 mm; 29 minutes; balck and white; silent w/ audience-noises appropriated from network broadcast television. Mobile holograms of two visually lethal mythologic females duel with reflective surfaces onstage while a live crowd of spectators turn to stone. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; PRIVATELY RE-RELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PRODUCTIONS

Possibly the finest entertainment cartridge that O.N.A.N. has ever produced. I always wondered what Medusa's map would look like...

[asthmaticeog]

7. "Untitled" - Unfinished, unreleased

[RandomKoolzip]

8. Fuck it. You win.

I can't top that one for obscurity.

As a side note, when Himself was filming "It Was a Great Marvel That He Was In The Father...", I had NO idea what was going on. I almost gave up because that one scene was so confusing. It wasn't until I re-read the book that I realized that Himself was filming that episode.

Anyway, I just started re-reading "IJ" for the third time. Wish me luck....

[Tyrone Slothrop]

12. Have you ever finished it?

I'm a fan of DFW, read Ulysses a couple times, read Gravity's Rainbow three times, but I have yet to make it more than about 200 pages in I.J.

Maybe cause it's just too damn big to carry on the subway with me?

[RandomKoolzip]

14. I found Gravity's Rainbow to be far less rewarding, actually.

I liked it, but it seemed like a truly tough slog; I finished GR over a leisurely period of about a month and a half while in college, and still ahd to skip over most of the science/chemistry stuff in there. The thing about Pynchon is that he can be so remote emotionally that I tended to drift off while reading chunks of GR, unable to connect with any of the characters.

"Infinite Jest," however, took me seven days. I actually read it while moving from one apartment to another; whenever there was downtime, I found myself drawn to it again and again, it was so addictive. And while there is a veneer of cold intellectualism (there's more science and math than I'd hoped; the Eschaton episode seemed to drag on for decades, etc) in IJ, there's also a lot of warm humor and sadness which kept me rapt.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

15. I'll have to give it another shot this summer

I studied engineering/chemistry/physics in college for several years before I switched majors so most of the science and physics in GR actually really spoke to me on a deeper level than I think it does on most who read it.

I recently reread it in the wake of the London bombings and found it to be much better (and more easily comprehensible) than the first time around.

I'll have to give IJ another run this spring. (Although I have 1491, In Cold Blood and Mason & Dixon all on deck -- so it might have to be this summer.)

[RandomKoolzip]

16. Mason & Dixon is great.

All the repressed emotion that I could barely even perceive in Gravity's Rainbow (and most everything else by Pynchon) comes to the surface, gloriously. The stylistic japes get a little tedious, but patience is rewarded.

[asthmaticeog]

17. I've started it thrice, finished twice.

It's SO rewarding. I suspect I'll re-read it a few more times. What the hell, right, I'm still young.

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. I need to re-read IJ.

That book, along with Gravity's Rainbow, represent, IMO, the pinnacle of the literary movement known as 'post-modernism'; and with their themes of our strangely eroticised and insanely dysfunctional relationship with passive entertainment and the technology of death, taken together they give as good a picture of the bedrock existential malaise underpinning much of modern life as anything could.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. 'The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss' "Persecution and Assassination...

of Marat as Performed by the inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade'.

One of his most absurdist works.

[RandomKoolzip]

10. I think Incandenza took that one up as an excuse to

beat up Marlon Brando's corpse one more time.

....And to puke all over the front row.

[Spider Jerusalem]

11. Nothing quite as touching...

as a father-son relationship that creates strong and lasting bonds, eh? Like a shared loathing for Marlon Brando and a love of fine Kentucky whiskey...

[HughBeaumont]

18. I still have yet to read this fucking novel

and I've had it for going on seven years now.

I promised myself I'd read The Tunnel first, though. Still ain't finished that one neither.

[RandomKoolzip]

19. It's one of the only cultural totems of the last thirty years

that not only lives up to, but transcends its hype. It's as important (and enjoyable, and hilarious and sad) as it's cracked up to be. I'd suggest devoting some vacation time (if ya have any) to digesting it.

[HughBeaumont]

21. And I'm going to need some serious vacation time to read that monster.

Reading GR, House of Leaves and The Tunnel was hard enough.

[RandomKoolzip]

20. pathetic self-kick

[redqueen]

22. Other - The Medusa vs. the Odalisque

I was actually looking for a thread about common myths about hydrogen cars.

How fortunate that I found this one instead. :)