Saturday 4/20/24
Writers: Start fast, end epically.
There are all kinds of ways to start fast and end epically. Creating total immersion within just a few words is a way to start fast, for example. Making it so that a person cannot physically stand up is a way to end epically.
For a long time, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy were in a similar position in that they were thought to trail others rated more highly than they were. Chaplin especially in Keaton's case, and the likes of the Marx Brothers with Laurel and Hardy.
The truth is, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy at the best, and those others are not close to them. One reason is that the work of Keaton and Laurel and Hardy does not date. It will never date so long as humans aren't replaced by machines. Consider: When Hardy says, "Tell me that again," in Towed in a Hole.
I wrote a piece recently about a scrap from F. Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks. Similarly obscure is his poem, "Thousand-and-First Ship." It's a sad, sing-song affair, almost a ditty, but a ditty of depth. It reaches this kind of crescendo, though it's a false crescendo; a crescendo based upon what the narrator thought was going to make him happy and fulfilled in this relationship, which, as he knows now, is not what actually does so. I love the lines:
There'd be an orchestra
Bingo! Bango!
Playing for us
To dance the tango
And people would clap
When we arose
At her sweet face
And my new clothes.
And then down the hill it goes, because this is not how things work.
1958's Dracula (known as Horror of Dracula in the United States) was greeted with much excitement by those hungry for horror fare. Among the most ardent of horror fans were Boomers, and save for revivals of older films, this would have been akin to a prodigious opening act for them, insofar as a new release--and a new era--went. Yes, there had already been Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein, but that wasn't quite the same as the coloristic--and what was thought by those of a certain age in a certain time to be lurid--tour-de-force that was Terence Fisher's Dracula. Changed things. Along the same lines was Cream's 1966 debut, Fresh Cream. I don't believe anyone has ever articulated just how important that record was, what it both did and heralded. The kind of buzz it generated. It was a very different buzz from, say, that same year's Revolver from the Beatles. That was more Beatles. Fresh Cream was new. You heard it and knew a change was happening. A change was happening with Revolver, but it was less obvious to most in the context of those times. If people older than school children had a playground on which they talked about things, they'd have talked about Fresh Cream as kids not much older than playground age went on and on about Dracula.
