On Old and New Technology (a way of repeating the cliche that we'd rather
have what's familiar than what's new):
In the wider sense--phone lines follow the same path and paradigm as
telegraph lines.
As the determinate ground for normalcy: In _Blade Runner_ the Harrison Ford
character trusts the old technology (memories (even if implanted),
photographs) more than the new (his relationship with the Rutger Hauer
character).
Note how _The Matrix_ inverts this logic: Neo, himself new, forgoes normalcy
(mostly) and finds his freedom unbounded (sort of, at least ungrounded--Neo
can leap like nobody's business). By fiat, the raining bit code of Oriental
characters (a spirit realm Assembly language mantracized or now for
something completely different: a belief in something NEW) thereby becomes
the determinate grounds for normalcy.
Does _The Matrix_ repeat the "Eolian Harp" thesis (see below)?
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On Texture (repetition in another form . . . (syn(sense)esthetic
onomatopoeia) . . . style):
David Lynch's _Blue Velvet_ and Superrealism (Hanson . . .), aka a
Hardy-Boys adventure turned misadventure or photographic realism devours its
children by way of hypertroping (incest, decontextualization, excess (see
Bataille), . . . ).
Notice how Superrealism establishes the grounds for normalcy in _Blue
Velvet_--its sense lies outside the usual concerns of film but within the
concerns of sculpture, photography, and painting.
In _Blue Velvet_ the corpse of the Man in the Yellow Jacket resembles a
Hanson sculpture as does the man in the hospital bed . . . . Name your
favorite Superrealist.
Mechanical Bird and Tribal Mask:
The texture of Blue Velvet is--a close-up shot of ants crawling on a severed
ear, Heineken in a 50's bar, a photograph of a mother and child, the
incredible noise of a flushing toilet that drowns out the escape signal (a
car horn honking), detail shots of cars, ambulances, buildings, the
Lumberton billboard--a series of superrealist motifs.
A little poetry (the see below mentioned above):
Coleridge's "Eolian Harp", the harp itself, the wind, and . . . .
Take these lines: "And now, its strings/ Boldier swept, the long sequacious
notes/Over delicious surges sink and rise,/Such a soft floating witchery of
sound as twilight Elfins make," . . . .
Take the thesis: "And what if all of animated nature/Be but organic Harps
diversely framed,/That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps/Plastic and
vast, one intellectual breeze,/At once the Soul of each, and God of all?"
Here the determinate ground for normalcy is the One, which sustains both
variance and repetition.
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Putting lipstick on the pig or Faust and Devil Magic:
The standard take on the determinate ground for normalcy is the Gulliver
story: our limitations are what make us human, or we're nothing but a bunch
of Yahoos. Or, even with a technological twist: a little magic never changes
human character (greed, lust, envy, pride . . . )--no matter how good the
special effects.
Take this story: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,38454,00.html
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JMC
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