Planet
My friend and co-conspirator Matthew Everett has a short piece in the online journal Cafe Irreal. It’s only a three minute read and well worth it. It relates to the planet of The Little Prince and makes a whole world in just four paragraphs.
Matthew is a second year fiction student, which translates into “fascinating genius, more well-read than you.” Sorry ladies, he’s taken.
I know because the first time I heard him read, we all clapped and I said to my seat-neighbor, wow he’s really great. She turned to me and said, yeah and he has an amazing girlfriend. This struck me as rather pointed until the next reader finished, a cute girl, also fantastic, also in my literature class. This time I was informed, yeah she’s in a really great committed relationship.
Class, this is what we call “projection.”
Even if to some I come off as an overenthusiastic bisexual looking for a date, the truth is quite the opposite. We’re all good friends now, even the informer.
You can love Matthew from afar if you catch him reading this Friday at The Lucky Cat in the next installment of Earshot.
I don’t just like Matthew because he plays the accordion to relax (equates the inhale/exhale to yoga or meditation) and dresses like a priest, but because he explained to me that he and his girlfriend prefer movies with “wizards and robots in them.” Then he elaborated in a very intelligent, funny way that I’m no good at reiterating.
A couple Friday nights ago I made a nice home-cooked dinner and we watched the director’s cut of Blade Runner. Ridley Scott and his unicorns, his robots, finally got beyond the primitive part of my brain that had always loved and accepted them. I’ve watched the original a hundred times since it was released, but the director’s cut let you experience and understand what was going on. That’s not to say it was clear, but that you as a viewer were trusted as an intelligent being.
Maybe it was the warm belly and wine, maybe I’ve been reading too much Beckett, but Blade Runner felt less blurry. Everything was right there, clear as a nightmare with a horrifyingly, intentionally slow pace.
And then my whole entire life was filled with meaning. Or actually what happened was, I realized that the two most influential films of my early life were Ridley Scott films: Blade Runner and Legend, and if you branch off with the actors in those two films, you’ll hit my most favorite and/or influential movies, and leap forward to the tv series Battlestar Galactica.
Then I drew a diagram (lower):
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