Rushfield Babylon
Month
of my heroes, John Carpenter, on the making of Halloween as it turns 35. An excerpt:
You composed and played the music to this famed score all yourself. How did you coming up with such a spooky score?
JC: Well, the reason I became a composer was that I’m cheap and I’m fast. We didn’t have any money to hire a composer and an orchestra or anything like that. So, the main theme, the theme that everybody’s familiar with, was something my father taught me. He taught me five-four time on a bongo: ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. He taught me how to pound it out, and so I just adapted it to piano with octaves: Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding, and went up a half step. I had played around with that for years, just as – what could this be? On “Assault on Precinct 13,” I had one day to do the music. On “Halloween,” I had a total of three days. So, a lot of it was just different mood pieces. I didn’t score it from top to bottom. It was just a few pieces here and there of different moods and different feeling. So, I just banged it out, and it’s all improv. All this is just improvisation.
Grief, chance, guilt, marriage – and what drove Nelly Reifler, in 2003, to say goodbye to someone who was then very much alive.
On this anniversary, everyone should read my friend Nelly’s beautiful remembrance of her friend Elliot Smith.
I started on Instagram on a Throwback Thursday, figuring that it’d be harder to dislike photos of people as kids. As I marched down the feed, tapping the heart beside every photo, an elated, almost zippy feeling overcame me. All of these people would soon learn that I approved of them and would be forced to think about me. It felt powerful, like I was branding myself onto their minds. Then I came across hunnypot7’s picture. It was her usual softly-lit, pouty self-portrait. “Throwback to ‘09,” it said. It was a selfie masquerading as a Throwback Thursday. “That doesn’t count!” I said aloud. I didn’t want to like it. Moreover, I wanted to ask all 46 people who liked it how they could like it. But I liked it, and kept goose-stepping down the feed.
All social media is a platform for boasting, but the things they get up to over on Facebook would make even the most narcissistic sailor blush. I raised my virtual thumb to every humblebrag, political harangue, and comedy bit, feeling a giddy, albeit queasy rush, until I came across a status that gave me pause. A Facebook friend was using the opportunity of a recent tragedy to drop a celebrity’s name, and people were furiously liking it. I can’t like this sort of thing. I rationalized that I could like it purely for its ingenuity. There were so many likes, mine would just blend in, right? I liked it with my eyes closed and moved along, liking things that made no sense to like. Someone needed help moving, and I, along with thirteen other people, liked it. Someone else reposted something about a missing cat. I declined to like it. (There’s a clause in my liking contract for missing pet posts.) But seven other people did. Did they like that the cat was missing? Or do they just like cats?
”—Stacey Woods underwent what is probably the hardest voyage a member of Gen X can take - she spent a week liking things. .
Jack Shafer has an interesting column today discussing the conundrum that despite there being more political information available than ever before, Americans seem to know less about the world than they ever have. This corresponds exactly to the principle frequently set out here of The Backlash Era. I will call it Rushfield’s Paradox - that in this era despite more voices than ever being heard, there has never been more uniformity of critical opinion. Never have there been more people declaring as one that Breaking Bad is a masterpiece or The Newsroom a “disaster.” Never have dissenters from these views been less tolerated.
Careful readers will recall I have postulated that this effect is not despite the multiplicity of voices but because of it. At some point, when the din gets so heated (and the character limit so brief), considered give and take gives way to a dictatorship of the loudest, with the victorious side drowning in volume all dissenters.
The master of despair told me how it’s done