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Making stuff to distract myself from existential dread

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bcj
@bcj

One of my absolute favourite albums is Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) by Brian Eno. I think it is start-to-finish an amazing album, but also I've slowly become obsessed with how you can make a conspiracy board web of connections between it and a handful of other works.


There are two different sets of cards that had a major influence on the album. One set of cards are the Oblique Strategies cards that Eno and Peter Schmidt developed and then used in producing the album (Sorry @nicky, I haven't tried your GameBoy Port yet).

The other set of cards were postcards of the opera Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. The album has not obviously taken much from the postcards beyond the title but it is an incredible and evocative title.

The 1970 film is based on the same Beijing opera production as the postcards. You can watch it online. Even knowing the plot, I only made it about half an hour in because there aren't English subtitles.

The opera itself is an adaption of Tracks in the Snowy Forest, which was itself a popular fictionalized account of an event during the Chinese civil war. I thought it was a fun read but unless you've got access to a university library, good luck trying to read it without spending a bunch on a used book site.

Tsui Hark made an ok remake that I'd say is most-directly written off the opera or the 1970s movie if I had to guess. It's most remarkable in being able to find a way to fit product placement for phones in a movie set during the civil war and for ending the movie with a second version of the climax with cooler stunts. I'd probably rewatch it before I rewatched Battle at Lake Changjin but I just don't love the look of Hark's CG-heavy stuff.

The thread that ties the album to a number of significantly different works is tenuous, but like a good conspiracy I believe it either in spite or because of this.

I have to believe that Tom Huckabee/Kent Smith's Taking Tiger Mountain takes its title either from the album (or less likely, the play). The story the title comes from within the movie doesn't appear in either work it was adapted from and also, come on it's obviously a reference to the album.

What were the works the movie was based on? It was shot without sound and dubbed after the fact. At the time of shooting, it was based on a poem one of the directors had written that was loosely based on Camus's The Stranger.

When it was edited together and dubbed, that plan was abandoned and it instead became a fairly loose adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Blade Runner (a movie). Obviously, they couldn't call the movie Blade Runner because Ridley Scott had just bought the name Blade Runner for his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, so why not take the name of an album that took its name from a play?

How is Taking Tiger Mountain? Experimental. Not to my taste. I'd also say bad. Watch Blade Runner instead.

It probably doesn't help that I found reading Blade Runner (a movie) to be a miserable experience. I haven't read any other Burroughs so I don't have a good feeling for whether I just don't like his style or if this in particular isn't great.

You might be wondering, why Blade Runner (a movie) calls itself a movie if it's a novella. Well, it was originally going to be the screenplay for the adaptation of Alan E. Nourse's The Bladerunner before the project fell through. I guess something with that rights agreement is how Burroughs can sell the title to Scott or the screenplay to Huckabee and Smith (although in that case a small art film may just be enough under the radar).

I've never read The Bladerunner, but I started to read it last night so I could be able to have some basic level of experience with everything1 mentioned here. I don't think I'm going to especially like it but it is at least pretty readable so far. Also, unlike in Blade Runner, the term 'bladerunner' actually makes sense. The book is about people who run medical supplies like scalpels for underground doctors/surgeons.

Something else did directly take from Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) and that's a lot easier to prove because it's called Brian Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy). It's a cover of the original album by Doug Hilsinger and Caroleen Beatty. I've been relistening to it while writing this up. It's fine, and that's fine. It isn't a re-imagining of the album, it's a recreation. Unsurprisingly, I can appreciated the idea of being obsessed enough with the original album that you'd decide that the best way to appreciated it would be to replicate it in its entirety


  1. I haven't seen the opera either. It feels like the 70s movie is a close enough adaptation to make broad statements but who knows


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