Happy 50th !! plus other jetsam and flotsam

 

 

 

First of all,  humble but most significant congrats are extended here Carolyn, as your last post was the 50th in our conversation blog.

 Your time with the mastadons, mammoths et al. sounds  truly awesome to me  ( and I'm using word in its pre-slacker-catch-phrase context )  Back when Ike was your President I was first astonished by them and similar giant prehistoric creatures. To think that so much mobile real estate could actually be living flesh. I was totally one of those wide-eyed boys who were ga-ga for all things old and monstrous. I still am at times.  The Godzilla remake ( the 1998 one with Ferris Bueller ) still makes my top 20 kick back and just watch list.
 

 

Somehow, I doubt that Matthew Broderick puts it front and centre on his resume though.

 



Now then, where was I , oh yeah,  Kubrick....



Stephen King, William Thackeray, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur C. Clarke and Anthony Burgess share something. They are all accomplished authors. Starch collar literary types may chafe at having King, and maybe even Clarke labelled as such, though. What they share for our purposes here  is having had literary offerings turned into cinematic offerings by Stanley. Kubrick . Some were overshadowed in the process. Burgess may have felt this effect most of all. Few remember that A Clockwork Orange was originally a novella by Anthony Burgess? Overwhelmingly we think of Kubrick’s riveting and mega-unsettling movie when we hear that title. To his credit, Arthur. C. Clarke ( who rubs shoulders with The Beatles in my personal pantheon ) wrote a novel titled 2001 at the same time that the movie was being created ( facilitated, in part, by his collaborating with Kubrick on the screenplay, as the movie had been inspired by an earlier short story of his “ The Sentinel”.)

Nabokov probably enjoyed a resurgence when Kubrick’s Lolita was released in 1962. It didn’t , and couldn’t, treat the  taboo subject matter the way the novel did simply because of the button down state of cinema censorship at that time.  "What was all the fuss about ??"   is probably the standard reaction from one viewing it in 2013. The 1997 remake was truer to the novel and, with 35 years of ripening public mores and morals working in it’s favor, more provocative as a result.  It would only be only two years later that the director of the original Lolita would pass away, in 1999.




Thackeray probably reaped the same benefit, maybe even to a greater extent. Nabokov’s subject matter came with a built-in shock value quotient. Thackeray’s “ Barry Lyndon” was more soporific than salacious, it seemed. Either way, they were ambitious undertakings. Martin Scorsese, apparently, feels Barry Lyndon was Kubrick at his best. I confess, I tried on the original novel and simply couldn’t get it to fit comfortably, and ditto for the flick. My loss, no doubt.

King’s novel would, no doubt, have done just fine on it’s own but Kubrick and Jack Nicholson will forever be indelibly associated with  The Shining, even for those who first met it in paperback or hardcover.  Apparently King wasn’t happy at all with the direction that Kubrick took his story and, like George C. Scott ( who felt burned from his experience in Dr. Strangelove) vowed to never work with him again) - oh well, their loss perhaps. 

  I'm thinking there might be one more kick at the Kubrick can, but I will move on to other things here and now, or else I’ll drone on for hours. I'm on the perilous precipice of pedantry even now!

And that, of course, means riddles. Pretzels they were indeed, Carolyn. What gave it away, the sodium chloride or the pretzel logic? I'm gonna go back once more right now and look at your latest, but once again I am flummoxed I believe.( insert passage of time music here - but not the cheesy one from Jeopardy!  )

  Nope, I simply do not have a clue not even a wild guess right now. 

 Here's mine for blog entry #51:

 

 

A quick shot of liquid courage

Energy conduit under the hood

Contracts when times are tough 

 

Enjoy  that egg hunt or egg coloring or  whatever rituals may accompany your observance of Eastertime. Does anyone still have an Easter Parade, I wonder?

Don

 

 

Note: All Photos/visuals sourced from Google images