The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

December 13, 2001


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Take of the Continuity Girl


The continuity girl wears a big baggy sweater and carries a clipboard and
Polaroid camera. She walks among the naked actors and actress and takes
notes, whose hand is where, which face is turned towards - and which away
from - the camera. this is amazing. whose finger has a torn nail - whose
breasts already damp - the degree of nipple erection (easy here) - all of
this is carefully noted by the continuity girl. There is sweat running
from a shoulder. The terrorist has his knife to a neck from the left - no,
from the right - side; "R" appears almost by command on the continuity
chart. Is this the numbered scene, the only scene - the continuity girl
knows, takes everything into account. She writes "Alan is gagged tightly,
he is having trouble breathing. If he suffocates, this will be the only
take." She writes "n/g" as the gag is loosened. Azure has been shaved,
head to toe; Azure is constantly shuddering. The continuity girl writes
"Azure moves - lock structure in edit - there is no room for error - there
is nothing but error." The continuity girl notes the bruises and bites on
four, on five, breasts. She notes, "Day 3." She notes, "This is the second
day." It is the goal of the continuity girl to make sure the world is
whole, to make sure it remains contained, coherent, logical beneath the
chaos the rest of us take for granted.


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The Continuity Girl


The continuity girl asserts the fundamental forces of the world. She
writes 5; then 5/under erasure; she writes 4; she exhausts the series. She
adds the cosmological constant, planck's constant; she erases them; she
includes them; she erases them. The slate is a mess. The slate is
unreadable. The slate mimics the world. The slate becomes the world. She
continues to write. She is wearing a baggy sweater and carrying a Polaroid
camera. She carries a great number of accessories: tripod, telephoto,
wide-angle, scanning-transmission electron microscope, interferometer,
neutron telescope. There are a continuous number of scenes; she numbers
them according to the continuum. It is not so difficult to describe the
actors; they are also continuous, and the transformation of props and
objects occurs according to aristotelian logic and fluid morphology. Only
certain quantum leaps give her trouble, but these radical discontinuities
also permit discontinuities within or across scenes, and need not be
annotated. For the rest, everything appears relatively differentiable.
The slate is a mess. The slate is a continuous mess.


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(this reminds me of recent posts; I've used it for various pieces, just a
simple awk filter - Alan)
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/[0]+/ { print "0" }
/[a]+/ { print "hidden" }
/[b]+/ { print "girls" }
/[c]+/ { print "clotting" }
/[d]+/ { print "everything" }
/[e]+/ { print "e" }
/[f]+/ { print "f" }
/[g]+/ { print "g" }
/[h]+/ { print "h" }
/[i]+/ { print "i" }
/[j]+/ { print "j" }
/[k]+/ { print "k" }
/[l]+/ { print "l" }
/[m]+/ { print "m" }
/[n]+/ { print "n" }
/[o]+/ { print "o" }
/[p]+/ { print "p" }
/[q]+/ { print "q" }
/[r]+/ { print "r" }
/[s]+/ { print "s" }
/[t]+/ { print "t" }
/[u]+/ { print "u" }
/[v]+/ { print "v" }
/[w]+/ { print "w" }
/[x]+/ { print "x" }
/[y]+/ { print "y" }
/[z]+/ { print "z" }
/^$/ { print "void" }

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