Persieds & Pythia
It was too cloudy to see any Persieds early this morning ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids ), so we’ll try again pre dawn tomorrow.
Last night, we watched the The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to stay up late. Tom Waits is impressive. Terry Gilliam says in one of the ‘extra’ sections on the DVD that “Waits writes songs for the Angels and sings them with the voice of Beelzebub”. Gilliam is pretty badass himself. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Gilliam ) . He has tried to make plans to do A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. One fascinating thing I noticed is that he shot the film with extremely wide angle lenses. I read that he used an 8mm lens for almost the entire film. Lily Cole (the daughter of Dr. Parnassus) has been cast as Alice in Marylin Manson’s upcoming Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, which I’m hoping is better than the recent Alice in Wonderland redo.
Aside from the reference in the title, the etymology of Parnassus is pretty cool. Mount Parnassus was home to the Oracle of Dephi ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi ) and the muses, where unfortunately three tectonic plates intersect atop two faults and cracks in the earth allowed ethylene gas into the priestess chambers. Gould, Mozart, Bach and Beethoven all studied from Gradus Ad Parnassum “A Step to Parnassus” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradus )