what is the sound of a scream

for the past few days i've been mostly off-line and hanging with anna and nicholas, reading and watching tv. i've not watched any movies. i have been re-reading david foster wallace and as the previous post quoted garrett caples. caples is an astonishing poet whose book complications i've been dipping into for months now. his style is rather dense and hypnotic and pitched just so. many pieces read like the hip-hop that he admires. i've not been a big fan of hip-hop, my own musical preferences run the range of indie and alternative acts with a big dollop of hardcore and i'm a big big fan of electronica too, but when a gifted writer references hip-hop in his work and also writes essays and articles about hip-hop then maybe i should just shut my trap and listen.

so then, on saturday i took nicholas to spirit halloween superstore. the store focuses on props and decor that are rather gory. instead of being freaked out by them nicholas was utterly entranced. there were two life-sized animatronic characters that shook and screamed in pain which sort of scared nicholas. and yet, every time i turned around he was right back - at a distance - to look at them. i couldn't get the boy outta the store, even. there was a witch's broom that stood straight up and rolled about the floor on its own with sound fx of cackling laughter. oh man, nicholas couldn't leave it alone. first he circled the broom, then he followed it, and finally he picked it up to figure out how it worked.

i had to literally carry the child outside to get him out to the car. he loved it. made me so proud i had to wipe a tear from my eye and tell him that no i wasn't crying it was simply a piece of dust that landed in my eye.

i think i've written about the trailer below before but i don't think i've actually posted it. i recall watching this trailer for alien either in late '78 or early '79 and was both haunted by it and thrilled. i couldn't wait for the movie to open because of the beauty of the prevue. whoever directed this piece knew exactly how much to show of the film while retaining the mystery of the story. it opens with the dry cracked landscape of an alien planet rolling at the bottom of the frame while cutting to images of that leathery egg all the while the word ALIEN is slowly being pieced together at the top of the frame. the soundtrack is more like sonar soundings than music and the images of the crew intensify in various states of terror. then a scream cuts back to a full-frame image of a giant planet and the freighter the nostromo in tiny relief while the film's catch-phrase in space no one can here you scream fills out the bottom of the screen. i've no idea why i just described the trailer itself and doing a poor job of it. it is one of my favorite trailers of all time. i remember an even shorter teaser trailer that showed only the egg and a crack of light with the catchphrase but i might be mis-remembering this trailer. here it is.