Kiver

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French Connection

blowncovers:

“The Gays” Contest: Runner-Up #1 

By Ella German

The overwhelming outpouring of love after Maurice Sendak’s death makes any remembrance of him poignant. Maurice Sendak wasn’t closeted but neither was he a Gay activist. We had to talk about whether it would be fair to use his characters to represent Gay marriage. But he was, after all, always an advocate for being true to yourself. 

Mazel tov

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Dairy Queen

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Unterwegs

Fifth ave at night on Flickr.

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Eater and Eaten

the-overlook-hotel:

Kubrick makes extensive use of number play in The Shining, employing a similar mirroring and doubling motif to that which he uses visually throughout the film. The film utilizes several repetitions of the numbers 12, 21, 24, and 42.

A few examples:

- In the final image of the film, Jack is shown in a photo from a New Year’s Eve ball in 1921

- That photo is one of 21 framed photos on the wall

- Danny’s shirt has a 42 on the sleeve

- Wendy watches the film “Summer of ‘42” on television

- Dick Hallorann’s rental car license plate has a prominent 42

- There are 42 vehicles in front of the Overlook at the beginning of Jack’s interview (not including the Sno-Cat)

- Regarding Room 237, the product of 2, 3 and 7 is 42, and the sum of 2, 3 and 7 is 12

- When Jack first sees Lloyd the bartender, the barstools are arranged in a configuration of 4 and 2

- The two inter-title times shown on screen are “8am” and “4pm”, which add up to 12

- Dick Hallorann’s litany of the freezer and pantry stock includes 12 turkeys, 24 pork roasts, 12-pound bags of sugar, and 12 jugs of black molasses

- The shortwave radio call sign for the Overlook Hotel is “KDK 12”

The sheer number of these instances is an argument against coincidence, but if one needs further proof of Kubrick’s fascination with number play, the title page of his copy of Stephen King’s novel of The Shining is filled with Kubrick’s own handwriting as he works out creative ways to use the number “217”. Room 217 was the number of the dead woman’s room in the novel, which Kubrick changed at the request of the Timberline Hotel management. His selection of “237” was not without forethought.

The question is: why? One possible explanation can be found in Freud. It is known that Kubrick studied Sigmund Freud’s writings on The Uncanny, where Freud discusses the unsettling effect that recurring numbers can have: ”We naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloak room ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together — if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number — addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains — invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny.”

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A Case of the Mondays

Yo

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Alfred Eisenstaedt

A man standing in the lumberyard of Seattle Cedar Lumber Manufacturing. 1939

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