Games of Reference

OfTroy's comment on yesterday's post directing us to the great The Dot and the Line cartoon (dir. Chuck Jones) reminded me of one other thing--besides vectors are everywhere--I learned about in that high school physics class. Surrealism. Yes, my introduction to surrealism came not from an art or literature class, but from the film Mr. V. showed us at the very beginning of the course: Frames of Reference.

Maybe you remember it: A tweedy scientist with a pipe starts talking and moments later a similarly professorial type shows up in the frame, except he appears to be upside down. All kinds of hijinks ensue with flipping coins, moving walls, swinging pendulums (pendula?), and so forth. Like so many films and filmstrips we were shown in school, it seemed dated (grainy B&W, made in 1960), and yet this one was mindblowing. (The YouTube video has the first three minutes but follow the link to the archives.org site for the whole thing.)

Tribeca, PA

Walter Benjamin writing about surrealism and the "little universe" of Paris: "That is to say in the larger one, the cosmos, things look no different. There, too, are crossroads where those ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day."

Or night. Coming back from Staten Island on an express bus last night, I dozed off somewhere on the Gowanus Expressway and woke a few minutes later at a plaza on Interstate 80 in the middle of Pennsylvania in the very early hours of the morning in the very early 80s. The dirty windows of the bus and the ghostly signals flashing from the sidewalk providing the frame and memory the reference.