So…while awaiting the repair of my plasma display, I had to rig up something on which to, you know, at least watch some stuff, so My Lovely Wife and I took a partially-functional Toshiba 13-inch out of mothballs (yes, I know it contains a built-in DVD player…don’t ask, please) and hooked the receiver outputs to it…the result reminds me of an anecdote told by Guillame Apollinaire of a visit the distinguished playwright made on the great proto-Dadaist and pataphysician Alfred Jarry, on the third-and-one-half floor of a small apartment building: “It turned out that Jarry’s place was filled with reductions. This half-floor room was the reduction of an apartment in which its occupant was quite comfortable standing up. But being taller than he, I had to stay in a stoop. The bed was the reduction of a bed; that is to say, a mere pallet. Jarry said that low beds were coming back into fashion. The writing table was the reduction of a table, for Jarry wrote flat on his stomach on the floor. The furniture was the reduction of furniture–there was only the bed. On the wall hung the reduction of a picture.”
Said anecdote also, of course, points to a source of inspiration for a particular feature in Charlie Kaufman’s script for Being John Malkovich.
A little while before I started writing for MUBI / The Auteurs, I lived in a place I thought of as my “Alfred Jarry apartment;“ it was an attic that had been converted into rentable property, and I’d moved in because it was extremely cheap and my friend had lived there for a long time and liked it. Problem was that said friend is fairly short, and I’ve very tall, and this attic had 7 foot ceilings – which shouldn’t be a problem, except that the landlord had been unable to run wiring or piping in the floor and therefore had to build everything up. The distance from the bottom of shower to the bathroom ceiling was maybe 5’10”, and needless to say, I couldn’t wear a hat indoors. I thought I’d get used to it, but over time it started to drive me insane, and I tried to spend as little time in that apartment (which, though low-ceiling’d, was kinda spacious) as I could…
Hey, we have the same PVR.
Maybe you could turn the little TV around and watch the image reflected in the big TV? Of course, the image would be reversed, but if you stick to early Greenaway that shouldn’t matter too much…