My past demands that I add 2-----------HOLY COW!!! I WANTED TO WRITE THE SIGN FOR CENTS, AND I REALIZED FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT MY KEYBOARD DOESN'T HAVE IT....PENNIES MEAN NOTHING ANYMORE!------2 cents. I was a very young graduate student (a *very* young one) at SUNY Buffalo when this film came out, and some colleagues of mine, to whom I had been introduced by a Professor I highly regarded, took me to their place for dinner and said they had something very special in mind for later in the evening. I don't remember what we ate, pasta probably. Then they whipped out some strange looking cigarettes. Then they showed me how to use one of these, and approved various stages of my developing behavior (see Becker, OUTSIDERS, chs. 3 and 4), and then, around 7:45 or so, we piled into a VW bug and drove into town---they lived in a farm outside in the country, it was quite beautiful--and there was a movie theater, and everything by then had begun to swim a little, and deliciously, without gravity as it were, and somebody bought tickets and led us inside, and this was, as it turned out, the first week of release of this thing, and it was in a very wide screen format--70mm probably--and these folks took us down the aisle, and they planted us right smack in the center of the first row, and the seats were exceedingly plush--they had theaters then with plush seats and with one great auditorium with only one screen and with cupidons on the ceiling--and the film just came on, bang, and there we were, at the top of our private mountains but together, watching the apes at the dawn of time. This is all true. I remember distinctly that when the film showed the docking sequence (with the Blue Danube) I was myself actually piloting that docking craft, and that every screen on the dashboard had a meaning for me, and that I understood everything. I understood everything about the entire film, it was totally clear, there was nothing missing and there were no obscurities. Later, of course, I had to try to talk about it. And so did everybody. And if people nowadays are flabbergasted at the number of varying commentaries, you ain't seen nothin! Everybody I met or heard talking for months had a commentary on this film. The person who thinks Kubrick is a tease is, of course, right in some respects. But long live teasers of that sort! He teased me out of downtown Buffalo and into the future in many ways, but I was too callow then to realize that it was not just an interesting narrative; it was an interesting piece of filmmaking. I suggest skeptics might begin by looking seriously at Godard, and *then* proceed to 2001. Or something like that. But it was all a long long time ago, and now I'm sitting here patiently writing this. Pomerance Toronto ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]