This was Klara Sax's summer at the roofline. She found a hidden city above the grid of fever streets. Walk and Dont Walk. Ten million bobbing heads that ride above the tideline of taxi stripes, all brain-waved differently, and yes the street abounds in idiosyncrasy, in the human veer, but you have to go to roof level to see the thing distinct, preserved in masonry and brass. She looked across the crowded sky of ventilators and antennas and suddenly there's a quirk, some unaccountable gesture that isolates itself. Angels with butterfly wings tucked under a cornice on Bleecker Street. Or the mystery of a white clapboard cottage on the roof of an office building. Or the odd deco heads, sort of Easter Islandish, attached to the corners of a midtown tower. She found these things encouraging, dozens such that hung unauthored, with bridge cables in the distance and occasional booming skies, the false storms of summer.

Meredith Walker

I focused on the scene surrounding Miles' film society's showing of Sergei Eisenstein's "Unterwelt". Several things stuck out to me in this episode. The most obvious was the reference to Eisenstein and his film "Potempkin" which we have seen bits of throughout the semester. Second was the discussion on page 444 of what Eisenstein wanted the viewer to see in his film "Unterwelt". The nature and content of the film is "full of contradictions" which Eisenstein relates to human existence. The very act of being he believes is difficult because things/events are always in opposition to one another. Perhaps Delillo borrowed this way of thinking and emulated it with his text "Underworld". The text mirrors the film in that both communicate thoughts/experiences in an unclear manner purposely.

While on the topic of contradictions I might as well mention the production of "Unterwelt". The showing of the film is loaded with juxtapostions. How ironic a film which is considered taboo in subject matter and that the film society had to fight to get and now show is being presented at Radio City Music Hall with the Rockettes serving as an introduction. Radio City Music Hall is known for it's classic productions and the Rockettes are considered a traditional part of American society.

Lynette Erbe

Klara's reflection of typical 1950's films vs. those of Sergei Eisenstein. The vast majority of 1950's films were "creature features", aliens, blobs, swamp monsters,etc, all evolving from or displaced by the bomb. Eisenstein according to Klara breaks the mold in that his creatures are human and they come from within.

Taken together or separated the films of the 1950's illustrate the importance/significance of the bomb in American society and in individuals lives. Eisenstein's films however represent the growing paranoia among private and public life. Is the enemy really the U.S.S.R and other communist nations or is it within the American way of life (government). Individuals such as Matt Shay on page 465 begin to "wonder if the state had taken on the paranoia of the individual or was it the other way around."

Lynette Erbe

"Nick's younger brother Matt, who just assumes his father ran away, will grow up wonky--taught to play competitive chess by the cuckold Bronzini; abandoning that "hostile" game to become a graduate student of fission's trigger principles, an Army intelligence analyst translating dots on reconnaissance photos "into letters, numbers, coordinates, grids and entire systems of knowledge" for the next Vietnam bombing mission, and, in a secret desert installation, a weapons worker "of the soft-core type," figuring out "the lurid mathematics of a nuclear accident or limited exchange": "Go to the desert or tundra and wait for the visionary flash of light, the critical mass that will call down the Hindu heavens, Kali and Shiva and all the grimacing lesser gods."

Klara has abandoned Bronzini and the Bronx to become a famous conceptual artist. (Think of Georgia O'Keeffe, but also Louise Nevelson.) She escorts us to the best Manhattan art-world parties, gallery openings, poetry readings and camp-outs of film buffs for Eisenstein and Zapruder--even to Truman Capote's Masked Ball, at which J. Edgar shows up costumed as a butch biker "riding into town to take over leadership of the sadists and necrophiles." Through her eyes, we see the rooftop gardens and stricken streets of "the endless inspired catastrophe of New York" and the intimacy between art and death. And Klara, too, will end up in the atomic desert, sandblasting and re-decorating a scrapheap of abandoned B-52 bombers."

by JOHN LEONARD, The Nation

In Part IV, I found myself about equally focused on Matt Shay and Klara Sax--both seemed to be searching for something to fulfill them. Matt is looking for a reason to quit his job, feeling dissatisfied with his weapons work, wondering if he is putting his knowledge to the best use. Klara seems to be unhappy because she is not working on anything right now. She seems unsure of what to do next, so she appears a bit aimless. I think I can relate to their search for some meaning and fulfillment in their work, as I am searching for something to do after graduation. Thus, I have found myself focused on both of them and their struggles.

Elisa Stafford

I've decided that my favorite (or who I can find an interst in) character would have to be Klara Sax. I have recently written an email connecting the characers of Marilyn Monroe with the character of Jayne Mansfield. I came across a connection in the book, again, about the two, but this time, it was an analogous reltaionship between Klara and her friend Acey. Klara states, "you have copycat Jayne, the reproduced goddess, and she is all the more strong for being unoriginal.," (p.490). This quote is a statement from Klara refering to Acey's artwork, and how she tries to copy Klara. Klara was not happyt in her position of being a famous artist. She was out in the middle of a desert, nowhere land, to get away from all of the celebrity-dom, and here is Acey, comfortable with the fame, and dresssed up, milking her opening in a hot new uptown gallery for all it's worth,. Maybe Klara didn't want all of the fame, but when she noticed Acey getting it and enjoying it, she became a bit jealous. The grass is always greener on the other side.

Francine Jaffe

Radio City Music Hall

The dancers spread across the stage and in a single dexterous swipe, like upholstering a gun, they pulled off their tearaway trousers and went into a final rousing kick, guns flashing, and drew several waves of applause....And how strange it was to see a thing like this, a red star of such political and military moment, plunked down here, the grim signet of the Soviet Union, in the Music Hall of all places--think of all the Easter shows and Lassie movies....

Of course the film was strange at first, elusive in its references and filled with baroque apparitions and hard to adapt to--you wouldn't want it any other way.

Overcomposed close-ups, momentous gesturing, actors trailing their immense bended shadows and there was something to study in every frame, the camera placement, the shapes and planes and then the juxtaposed shots, the sense of rhythmic contradiction, it was all spaces and volumes, it was tempo, mass and stress.

In Eisenstein you note that the camera angle is a kind of dialectic. Arguments are raised and made, theories drift across the screen and instantly shatter--there's a lot of opposition and conflict.

Myron Lounsbury

Southern New Mexico

Matt Shay sat in his cubbyhole in a concrete space about the size of a basketball court, somewhere under the gypsum hills of southern New Mexico.

The operation was called the Pocket.

There were people here who weren't sure whether they were doing weapons work. They were involved in exploratory research and didn't know exactly what happened to their findings, their simulations, the results they discovered or predicted. This is one of the underlying themes of the systems business, where all the work connects at levels and geographic points far removed from the desk toil and lab projects of the researchers.

Myron Lounsbury

Studio of a Video Artist, NYC

The footage ran at normal speed on some sets, slow motion on others, and the car moved down Elm Street and past the freeway sign and the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and the shot was unexpected.

Different phases of the sequence showed on different screens and the spectator's eye could jump from Zapruder 239 back to 185, and down to the headshot, and over to the opening frames, and on the TV wall was a kind of game board of diagonals and verticals and so on, interlocking tarots of elemental fate, or synchronous footage running in an X pattern, and whatever the mathematics of the wall there were a hundred images running at once, here comes the car, here comes the shot, and even though it wasn't part of the footage, Klara was sure there was a Hertz sign on top of the Book Depository--she'd seen it in photographs, forgotten about it until now and thought it was another passing strangeness, however minor, a rent-a-car sign brooding over the motorcade

Myron Lounsbury

Southwest New Mexico

[Matt] told Janet the story, how Nick believed their father was taken out to the marshes and shot, and how this became the one plot, the only conspiracy that big brother could believe in. Nick could not afford to succumb to a general distrust. He had to protect his conviction about what happened to Jimmy. Jimmy's murder was isolated and pure, uncorrupted by other secret alliances and criminal acts, other suspicions. Let the culture indulge in cheap conspiracy theories. Nick had the enduring stuff of narrative, the thing that doesn't have to be filled in with speculation and hearsay.

Myron Lounsbury

Martin Scorsese: Filming "TAXI DRIVER" (Mary Pat Kelly)

Martin Scorsese returned to New York to start making "Taxi Driver" in 1974. On a hazy night in June, Scorsese took to the streets. It was--even by New York standards--unbearably hot, humid, and fetid. As the scene begins, a yellow check cab emerges from the mysterious steam that continually escapes from the innards of New York City. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is driving the taxi cab. Screenwriter Paul Schrader, qouting Thomas Wolfe, described him as "God's lonely man." "Taxi Driver" is his story.

Myron Lounsbury

Martin Scorsese (on filming "TAXI DRIVER"):

"It was actually the first time in New York I actually shot a film the right way. But once you put a camera in the street it's not real anymore. I don't care what you say: you pick up things, certain things happen, it's never quite reality."

"I was accused, in "Mean Streets," of just showing the garbage on the streets. When I was shooting 'Taxi Driver,' it was filthy because of a garbage strike and everywhere I aimed the camera, there were mounds of garbage. I said, 'They are going to kill me! Guys, take away some of the garbage.' Here I was trying to control reality, but that was reality. In L.A., wuth "Mean Streets," we had to put garbage in the street to make it look like New York."

Myron Lounsbury

Martin Scorsese: Filming "MEAN STREETS", early 1970s (Mary Pat Kelly)

Martin Scorsese returned to New York to start making "Taxi Driver" in [Scorsese] returned to the old neighborhood during the Feast of San Gennaro with a six-day shooting schedule for New York exteriors, as well as interiors he felt could only be found in the city. Tourists crowded Mulberry Street, waiting online at food and game booths. In the decade since Murray and Joe, J.R. and his friends had hung out here, the old neighborhood had changed. "Little Italy" had become a contrived medley of restaurants and cafes that catered to tourists. Real neighborhood life retreated into social clubs and secret places, like the walled compound of Old St. Patrick's or the graveyard of St. Michael's Russian Catholic Church.

Jonas Mekas: New York Art Scene, early 1970s (Scot Nygren)

[In "He Stands in a Desert,"], intimate portraits represent the New York art scene as a community in which personal contacts defy the impersonal machinery of late-industrial bureaucracy. Early in the film at a dumpling party, George Maciunas argues a theory of the avant-garde as a theory of subversion and doing new things, both artistic and political. Images of Allen Ginsberg at the New School in 1972, the Fluxus group on a Hudson River cruise in 1971...and many other sequences of artists imagine a Romantic ideology of presence and improvisation against industrial depersonalization....

Weddings and anniversaries, birthdays and celebrations of all kinds punctuate "He Stands in a Desert".... The intertitle "Unity? Yes, my film has a unity--it's all spliced together" is followed byan image of breast-feeding,a juxtaposition that suggests that the biological continuity of generations is conceived as the structure of the film.

Myron Lounsbury