Word: monoliths
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GYORGY LIGETH LUX AETERNA (Deutsche Grammophon). Moviegoers may be familiar with Ligeti's score from its use in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it accompanies the discovery of the monolith on the moon. The music is not conceived stereophonically but, like a clever piece of audible op art, achieves that effect from its dense-textured 16-part counterpoint, which seems to shimmer around its source in concentric waves. As an exercise in the deceptive qualities of pure sound, it is an awesome tour de force...
...Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick's version of human and technological evolution as controlled by a mysterious black monolith that appears when the sun, a planet, and its moons, are in orbital conjunction. Cinerama, as such, has never been used better, and the special effects are revolutionary. I don't honestly think anything more need be said about 2001 at this point. Should anybody want to read the official CRIMSON interpretation, the long review by Peter Jaszi, Steve Kaplan, and myself, has been reprinted in the current issue of Film Heritage...
...bombing of North Viet Nam in March. De Gaulle hailed that as "an act of reason and political courage." The general was no less pleased with the choice of Paris as the site for the Washington-Hanoi negotiations. Then came France's May riots, which shook the Gaullist monolith and weakened the franc; the Shrivers deplaned as students were battling police by night in the Latin Quarter. As the pro-De Gaulle newspaper Paris-Presse observed, "M. Shriver started from scratch at a time when France was making a clean sweep of the past." The assassination of Robert Kennedy...
...Britain's output of railway locomotives and up to half of the country's turbo generators, switchgear and transformers. The potential of the new combine's market domination prompted executives of Plessey Co. Ltd., a smaller electrical firm, to denounce the merger as a competition-stifling monolith...
...film's ending, however, is almost pure Kubrick. A surviving spaceman is plunked into a Louis XVI bedroom after a psychedelic zoom through time and space that is mystifying to most moviegoers. But Clarke's novel version of 2001 explains all. As the survivor approached a huge monolith on lapetus, one of Saturn's ten moons, the astronaut entered a "stargate" into a different dimension, dominated by a godlike superintelligence. He is first returned to childhood, then transmuted into pure intellect and transported back to earth, carrying with him all the wisdom of the universe...