Dans la forêt du charme et de l'enchantement

Last night I went to see it in Yorkgate, a mall in North Belfast, with a bingo place and a Poundstretcher on the ground floor. The cinema is on the top floor opposite an amusement arcade. There were about half a dozen people in Screen 13 and sitting in the third row I had got myself in exactly the right frame of mind: I would ignore all characters and spend two hours ogling spaceships.

What can I remember of it? A CGI Christopher Lee flies across the dunes on a jet-bike, cloak flapping. A hugely heavy balloon-shaped starship is shot down by a helmeted clone; he turns to his colleague and nods. A couple of asteroids get blown up by Boba Fett’s dad… bapp! … bapp! … There is a love scene in front of a huge waterfall, that looks like a lit-up picture from a Chinese restaurant, and then a cartoon man is riding a sort of inflatable cow. There is a phantasmagoria inside a robot factory.

It goes on for hours. More icing than ever before and even less cake. No film could be more misguided or amazing.

It was after midnight when, leaving the cinema, I accidentally went out the wrong fire exit and into the cleaning supplies area. Then I went down two escalators past a closed Burger King and out into the car park.

From this paper on Joseph Schumpeter:

Besides innovating in production, entrepreneurs often had to change
habits of consumption. Confronted with growing inventories, industrialists had to convince reluctant customers that they actually needed the new goods. Here Schumpeter, unlike most economists, places heavy emphasis on the role of marketing in mass consumption, and in economic growth itself. “It was not enough to produce satisfactory soap,” he writes; “it was also necessary to induce people to wash—a social function of advertisement that is often inadequately appreciated.”

From the perspective of producers and investors, it did not matter
whether new wants were real necessities. “Needs,” Schumpeter observes, “whatever they may be, are never more than conditioning factors, and in many cases mere products of entrepreneurial action.” Undeniable needs such as food, clothing, and shelter do not, by themselves, “set the capitalist engine into motion.” This is why “economic development (capitalist consumption included) has never been conspicuous in the countries which to the observer seem to be most lavishly supplied with needs.”

Columning is a deadly occupation, leading frequently and successively to overzealousness, super-seriousmindedness, monomania, hysteria, and sometimes madness.

Harold Ross

Keith Tantlinger, Builder of Cargo Container, Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com.

Maximum extent of the TEE Network.

On Sunday night, I put on the Hornsignal Symphony by Haydn. The next day I visited the closing sale of a bookshop and saw a generic yellow paperback in German which contained the word Hornsignal in its title.

Later, I went through a series of web searches.

The publisher of yellow German literature paperbacks is called Reclam. The book was “Cavalry horses at the horn: The crisis of politics as reflected in language” by Erhard Eppler.

The title of the book refers to an Orwell quote about ready-made phrases: “words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern”.

This occurs in Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which is also the source of “the fascist octopus has sung its swan song”, the current title of this blog.

Sensenmann – Wikipedia.