This place is a lot like Hotel California.

....

So are you dancing to remember, ... or dancing to forget?

I'M NOT DANCING AT ALL I'M NOT DANCING AT ALL I'M NOT DANCING AT ALL.

Hahaha it certainly is :P

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said ’we are all just prisoners here, of our own device’
And in the master’s chambers,
They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can’t kill the beast

-Don Henley at the time didn't admit to being involved with Satanism, and hasn't explained that metaphorical references to Satan may have been peppered throughout Hotel California songs, but most latch onto mention of "The Beast" as being a Satanic reference. He did in private reveal the entire album was inspired by the experience of going into the LA music business and how it is tantamount to selling your soul, especially how desperate artists were to sign with labels in the late 1960s, and how little they were paid, how much control the producers had over what they did, and so on. The whole album tells a fairly coherent story of the business, with Hotel California being Los Angeles itself.

I guess that means that the recording industry / labels (RIAA perhaps?) is this beast you rail against and try to make stabs at attempting to become free again… and never do.

MOST listeners however tag the specific lyrics of Hotel California with being metaphors for drug use and addiction. Where you are not dancing, you're using. Some do it to remember, some to forget. Addiction creates prisoners of its own device - be it the roach clip, bhong, pipe, or syringe. And you can check out (of reality), but never leave (the addiction).

But the Hotel not having had wine since 1969 is a reference to when The Eagles signed with their current label in LA. Wine is also a metaphor for blood, so it can mean they've been bled dry by how little they got paid compared to how much profit their label, agent, booking agent, et al., made instead…

It goes to show how Ballads (one of my favorite forms of music) really are awesome, for they tell stories and often are rich in metaphor as well as melody and mood. Rap and contemporary rock just lack a lot of it, thinking beat, loops, rhythm, and plain rhyme substitutes for a fully instrumentalized ballad like this song from The Eagles.

That makes a lot of sense, about checking out but can't leave.

Seems obvious now but then again I've always been pretty oblivious.

Piers Anthony (famous for his "Xanth" fantasy novels, which have punny titles like Isle of View, pun on I love you) had in one of his novels a magic that reacted to absolute truth. When spoken, especially thrice, it would cause the fabric of the universe to acknowledge it with tremor. The more profound the truth, the more serious the tremor. It was widely believed that enough truths revealed about the world and spoken out loud in this way would unravel creation itself. That deception, lies, hidden truth, undiscovered facts, secrets, and mystery was basically all that maintained the status quo.

Why this preposterous fantasy is sort of relevant is when a song like Hotel California has a metaphor that chimes on a truth we recognize, even though we don't understand its real meaning, it plucks a chord of resonance with us. Something strikes - sometimes even raising the hairs on our arms or back of the neck. Then, sometime later, a connection finally falls into place - the final intonation needed - the third speaking of the truth - and then the whole universe seems to move a bit under our feet, shift around us. We learn something that depending on its depth, can flip the world upside-down.

I'd not especially recommend Piers Anthony as a deep thinker. Xanth novels are really a pun-fest of elaborately set up ways for monsters and situations to use and re-create new ways to pun-ish the reader. For example, he has a medusa character that will stare at a bowl of whole milk through a veil for an hour or so, somewhat tainting and firming the substance, but not quite to stone. Rather it creates cheese. Naturally, it is called Gorgon-zola.

On the subject of Science Fiction writers who've been especially prophetic about the future, I think I will have to agree with a recent Science Channel series about this very subject, and recommend Philip K Dick, whose novels and short stories have been already adapted to give us films like Blade Runner, Minority Report, Through a Scanner Darkly, (your favorite) Total Recall, The Adjustment Bureau, and I think still others yet…

ah yes, I've been wanting to see that series on the sci channel.

still waiting for my own tremor-inducing epiphany of truth though. Nothing much surprises or moves me.

Just finally saw blade runner a few months ago. Finished it and thought: "Wow, that's one of the few (up there with star wars and casablanca) fantastic movies that could never have a re-make done of them." of course, I wake up the next day and what's in the news? They're filming a remake of it.

There are 2 films I tend to boil down as the best I've ever seen when someone tries to nail me down to just one or two best of all time.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Blade Runner

I will get more wishy-washy the further down the list I go. But I have a love of Science Fiction - not sci-fi, but taking what we believe is scientifically possible in the future knowing what physics believes can be achieved with enough research grants and labor and materials and time. And show verisimilitude - reasonable guesses, visions of the future that are intelligent, far-seeing visions for their time that extrapolate on science and technology and wonder how they will shape the human experience. How social interaction and life will change.

Arthur C Clarke was pretty good at getting things well thought out in 2001: A Space Odyssey, using velcro so you could walk on the deck of a ship in zero-G. Having complex instructions for using the suction systems of a zero-G toilet. Having the need to liquify space food. Needing to reconstitute through a means like our conventional microwaves (before the fact) on zero-G craft; needing artificial intelligence in extremely complex systemic spacecraft, and to interact with crew on long voyages.

He only put in his own short story of a guardian that looked over developing species and gave them sort of a "push" at critical points in their evolution. Most of the rest of what's shown is SF, or speculative fiction based on an extrapolation of what science likely will do with technology, like embedding a lot of flat-panel displays in consoles instead of the primitive dial gauges and mechanical number counters. I think he even got the concept of voice and touch screen interface predicted in that film.

So even though 2001 was actually filmed prior to the moon landing, it's still very advanced in its vision today. It's not clunky TV screens and antennas and phone cords hanging off things and stylii and backwards metaphors for old technology still being in use in 2001. No, somebody designed everything with the future in mind, down to the last detail. That's Science Fiction.

Blade Runner is exactly as detailed. It works even better because this is a world of Replicants - you can't tell if it's an artificial snake or a real, hatched, biological one for the most part. You'd have to kill it, or look at one of its scales under a microscope. Same with the people, too. The "uncanny valley" has been crossed - so far that you need a Voight-Compf test to certify someone is human. But what if your memory of passing the Voight-Compf test was just an implanted memory, along with all the other false memories you have? How could YOU tell if you were a replicant, really? This is a common Phil K Dick theme, questioning reality itself, what makes for validating what's real and what's make-believe.

What if you REALLY just got off the assembly line this morning and everything you think you remember is just artificially implanted? How could you prove otherwise? How much would a person need to remove from your home, your wallet, your bank, your computer, your online accounts, until you started to doubt yourself? Just how much stuff on this planet proves you're who you say you are?

This is the beauty of Blade Runner, which Phil K Dick published as a short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" The androids start coming to terms with emotions, feelings, and mortality. And like us, they rail against death. The story was written in the 60s, so Television became the overriding opiate of the masses with thousands of channels, so like with the Internet, most any fetish or taste in entertainment was catered to. Apparently content was somehow provided to please these audiences be they only 40 or 10,000,000,000 strong.

Dick's story was rather political/religious, so it varies a WHOLE LOT from Blade Runner. It has some character names in common, maybe its vision of a dystopian LA is correct, and its cultural blender… I remember Dick was initially not enthused with the production, but when he saw the sets, his opinion changed. Still, he died of a stroke before they finished production, in his early 50s.

It's indeed a pity he didn't get to see this still probably best rendering of his works (Minority Report is decent, as is The Adjustment Bureau). And a huge shame he missed on millions of fans like you and I who could've +like'd him or followed him on Twitter, social networks being another thing he definitely was forecasting the future to have… with ominous "big brother" overtones (which twitter has, being logged by the Library of Congress… which I'm sure means the FBI/CIA are continually parsing tweets as well).

Dick would have been sadly validated by what we have in 2011, and a bit morosely amused as well, having written that the public WOULD willingly stick their heads into the government's noose.

Totally agree with 2001. The tech is a wonder to look at with the degree of accuracy. The storyline, well, I think you have to be under the influence to understand. I get the gist of it and nothing more after reading several articles on it.

Blade Runner is so uniquely paced. Everyone talks about it being scifi noir. And yeah, sure, it's that. But what interests me is how it creeps along, then has sudden bursts and fast cuts, then slow quiet conversation, then the replicant is bashing it's head through a wall and leaping across buildings.

I did like the adjustment bureau. It wasn't how I thought it was going to be. (Thought it would be awful.)

Blade Runner was a better film than Dick's book in a lot of ways, but still had Dick's existential quandary at its core, which I thought honored Dick's paranoia and sense of unease with reality he suffered from most of his life, being somewhat of a paranoid schizophrenic, whose mind was not served well by drug and alcohol use he participated in during his more productive years.

2001 you can't particularly explain to someone, but you probably can agree that it is an experience. Many Kubrick films are exactly that. Experiences. It's almost as if vision is the singular most important sense to Kubrick; dialogue and music are somewhat secondary. Plot and character tends to fall by the wayside.

Having seen many more of Kubrick's films, I don't especially revise that statement. In The Shining, there's this unnatural tendency of the camera to linger at a particular angle, at a peculiar height above floor level, staring as if from a rat's eyes into a room. And keeps lingering. Long enough that you figdet in your seat. Right as you fidget, then comes the edit. It happens over and over again in 2001, in The Shining, and even in Barry Lyndon. It's a talent to force you to stare… until you fidget, then ah, you're still awake. Good, let's proceed.

I call it the Kubrickian Camera Angle, because no other director has shots or edits like that in their films. And it's especially creepy. Kubrick used to photograph for Time/Life (Life, I think actually), and so his talent for finding just the right way to look at a static scene was gifted… and somehow, he also knew how and when staring at a particular image became uncomfortable, or boring, because the tension of anticipating something shocking was stretched too thin and you find yourself needing to fidget. There can't be something about to happen after THIS long…!

And I lied. Steven Spielberg used a Kubrickian Camera Angle, in the movie A.I. I feel this was as a homage to Stanley, whom Steven had corresponded about this film, but never collaborated until too late on producing it. So some of the angles, filming, framing, touches here and there are Kubrickian. Spielberg isn't another Stanley - far from it. But he learned at least once or twice how to get that creepy overly long pause going.

Blade Runner is Science Fiction the way many people do believe the Earth is still headed - overpopulated, over-polluted; resources generally depleted; the environment gone crazy from climate change, with chronic rain from all the polar ice caps having melted, the oceans having drowned much of the coastlines of all continents; law and order only exist in patches, your chief solace being to wall yourself up in an apartment/city and never really leave the gigantic, pyramidal structure; socio/economic strata is easy to tell - just what floor is it you live on; slave labor still drives economies - just cobble together parts that make something that believes it's a human with a human's lifetime full of memories that dies within 4 years. Who cares what it thinks of this design? It's a thing, not a person!

And because I have my ways around their ways, me not being too big a fan of my dad's old business and all, I can tell you truthfully the name of my dad's old business was "Commonwealth Adjustment Bureau." So your life, your money, everybody's life and the economic situation we all have today. Yeah, a white book on a shelf. Looks a lot like a flowchart.

You wonder why churches need donations? You really think God doesn't need money? Uh-huh.

See, that must be my problem with 2001. I put audio at 60% and visuals 40%. Perhaps less. Drove me crazy that I couldn't get surround sound until recently. Which is odd, since I'm pretty much tonedeaf.

I'd say the lingering camera is more about developing discomfort rather than an editing mistake. There have been several times I've been editing a short and changed where a cut is by just a few frames and it changed the feel entirely. The creating suspense by doing nothing is difficult though. You have to both KNOW that's what's going on, while at the same time not consciously acknowledging it.

It's interesting because that sort of thing is showing up in TV shows now. The ones that aren't made for the mass market. Like Breaking Bad will have long stretches of silent, empty frame. It's not for tension, but for realism. At first you feel like something's wrong. Eventually you feel like you're sitting there, waiting, observing, just as you would in real life. It's interesting if you have the understanding.

Ah, so you like the Blue Danube and the other exotic classic music in 2001. Nothing was composed for the film. Even that EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE type sound is some sort of tone-poem or other classical music. So yes, you put this complex, grand orchestral music on a surround sound system and start with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that low hum from the sub-woofer vibrating your innards practically before you hear anything, then coming to a creschendo just as sunlight crests the celestial spheres, the view cosmic and the crash of symbols work together with the shining brilliance to give you the shivers, exactly as if your body is atingle with the very sound itself… a full immersion into sight and sound, where you lose sense of body and spirit, you're some observer without a mind or soul, perhaps an entity exactly like what might well have created (or be inside) the Monolith itself.

And the claustrophobia of the sound of that breathing - it puts you IN that space suit, makes you breathe in sympathy with the astronaut, almost feeling your sweat start to stick to the phantom space suit around you… and as things blink, buzz, chirp, trill, and flash, flickering across his face, you too get the experience - the same brilliance and annoyance. Why does everything have to make this ridiculous noise!? But it's logical somehow. You have to hear that this system and that is still working without having to look at it constantly. If it stopped chirping, THEN you'd be REALLY annoyed…

Then the silence of space itself. The bleak emptiness of it. You hear your breath and nothing else, space walking. Cold, unfeeling, vacuum. Complete, utter silence. THEY GOT IT RIGHT.

What else could be more appropriate for docking maneuvers in space with a station that rotates to produce artificial gravity? A dance. Waltz, graceful, gradual, careful, gentle, picking up the pace, getting into position, speeding in, gliding, maneuvering, thrust a bit more, dancing perfectly together, spinning, waltzing, meeting… and done. All with another graceful swing out to the waiting arms of Luna.

George Lucas considered 2001 carefully before writing Star Wars, down to pondering using another classical music sound track for his film. He pondered using The Planets by Gustav Holst. In particular, the opening scene might've been the Star Destroyer coming over the screen to the ominous melody of "Mars." It might have worked, but of course the film didn't fit the music too well and needed incidental, new music. All new music, but with a 30's serial classic feel, so orchestral music should be used, and therefore it was fairly quick that John Williams became involved, and the rest is history.

Thanks for the additional information about careful editing, even down to the frame unit. And about the realism of giving the viewer some verisimilitude, like just staring off into space as it were, where nothing will happen, but tension can creep in. Artists can obviously find the right time and place to shoot these sorts of shots and cut them and edit them in appropriately, even finding how to adjust them during post to make for the best effect, be it tension, unwinding tension, or simple pause for pacing. That part of film construction is definitely way beyond my ken.