Word: staticity
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Before the game starts, they give an award to Carl Yastrzemski--a big trophy. Carl had his 3000th hit this year. Last November, Carl's boy, Ed "A Man Called Flintstone" King, made Governor. Carl's a winner. He mumbles a few words through incredible static. The crowd cheers. I've heard Carl has to tape up his Achilles tendons so tight that he has no feeling in his feet. I've also heard that Carl voted with his feet. Carl's a winner...
Back at the ballgame, they've turned up the static again, and the crowd is getting ugly. The Red Sox are down 1-0 following a big Toronto third inning, which is to say as big as Toronto third innings ever get. The static continues, louder--it's like that night Elvis Costello cleared out an unsimpatico crowd by telling his roadies to turn up the white noise...
...runs through almost all of his work. As Starbuck puts it, "We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one." Yet Vonnegut does not believe that people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve the lot of man kind. "Who was the wisest...
...thanks to two circumstances that hold true in no modern capitalist state. Print was thinly spread among the masses, radio almost unheard of and there was no television. Moreover, most of the proletariat was not only illiterate, but steeped in the tradition of the icon. So ideological control of static visual images was necessary to the party. One might even say that the Russian avant-garde was the last group of artists to work in a society where painting and, to a lesser degree, sculpture were still dominant mediums of discourse...
...with Keaton and Murphy in their apartment, with several medium shots executed by a panning camera. Again there is a long tracking take with Allen and Hemingway walking through the streets, and turning corners, on a sunny day. An abrupt cut of the dark apartment with spiral stairs-a static shot with only two bright spots, a typical mise-en-frame. Next comes a "bright" sequence composed of shot-reverse-shot exchange between four characters in the gallery. An abrupt cut shows the same group of people walking down the avenue...