"Pat Cadigan - The Final Remake Of Little Latin Larry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cadigan Pat)

for full feature, no intermission, closed my eyes, and went to see the
triumphant return of Little Latin Larry.
It opened with split-screen -- very tricky to do behind the eyelids, I
wouldn't have thought it possible on the first edit, so right away, I knew
I had a double relative in there somewhere. Which is to say, either my
audience member was also related to the band, or one of the band was
related to the audience member. Or -- astounding to think of, but stranger
things have happened -- both. And with both sets of memory bits present in
each one. You don't usually find that sort of thing can remain coherent,
let alone linear in any way but, as I said, stranger things have happened.

Anyway, on the left hand side of the screen, you were going in the back
door with the band, to the dressing room, while on the right, you were
going in the front entrance of the bar. The perspectives on both were so
well-realized, I began to think that maybe I'd been duped somehow and I
had someone else's finished product sizzling around in my brain chemistry,
even though I knew that couldn't possibly be -- I had edited every moment
out of pure raw material, and if there had been any finished product in
there, it would have showed itself immediately as already refined. You can
distract a person, but you can't bribe a solution into disguising its
molecular structure.
I have to say that as soon as I got used to the split-screen, I loved it.
On one side, you could see the band getting ready, all the members
psyching themselves up and getting into character. The Loopy Louies were
like bikers, guys in denim and old sweatshirts who whaled the hell out of
their instruments. Three guitarists, one drummer, and they were all in a
little world of their own, of course. Bass guitarist is a husky guy with a
lot of thick black hair, a day's growth of beard and carrying around a
bottle of something amber-colored with a label that says "Jim Beam" on it.
He offers everybody a swig, including the Latinettes, who are teasing each
other's hair and putting on make-up on top of make-up on top of make-up.
And then up in the top left corner of the screen, you get his bio: Lionel
LeBlanc, graduate student in English, writing a thesis on Milton. Yes,
Uncle Miltie! The guy is a scholar of Berle's Divine Comedy and he's
wandering around with a bottle of Jim Beam and burping. You've got to love
it.
The Latinaires are such a precision dance team that they can take the
bottle from the Uncle Miltie scholar, swig, and pass it on to the next one
without missing a beat or a hand gesture. They're all mouthing something
about a great pretender, the purple satin shirts look like liquid metal,
the tight pants and the pointy shoes are positively low-rider classic.
But you just know that the Latinettes did their hair for them. The four
girls keep running over and putting more spray on their curls, even though
the Latinaires are protesting left and right that they don't need any
more. Then the girls tease each other's hair even higher -- they've got
great big bubbles on their heads, and in back it's something called a
French twist. They're all wearing halter-top dresses in a leopard print
and pointy-toed flats that they can do the Twist in.
And then there's Larry. Little Latin Larry. He really is little -- maybe
five feet, four inches, about as tall as the next tallest Latinette (the