And "West Side Story" is his most famous and successful attempt, successful attempt, to use his music fugue form, the way Johann Sebastian Bach did it all the way back in the 1600s and 1700s.
It painted only one image of Latin America, and it was how they were all expected to write. Fuguet ran into this conflict head-on. As the story goes, he received a pretty brutal rejection from a US editor who dismissed his work because it didn’t engage with magical realism,
shunned Márquez, and challenged the idea that, in Latin American literature, “everyone wears sombreros and lives in trees.” Fuguet’s words, not mine. Pretty infuriating, right? It’s enough to make you want to start a whole new literary movement as petty revenge.
Even the name, McOndo, is a pun on García Márquez’s legendary Macondo, the setting of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Fuguet writes, “In McOndo there’s McDonald’s, Mac computers, and condos.” In other words, nothing magical, but the stuff of everyday culture. And as the poet Beyoncé says, the best revenge is your paper.
as he looks back on his life through the lens of movies. Fuguet divides the middle section of the novel into fifty chapters, each dedicated to a specific film and moment in Beltrán’s youth. “Dumbo” is the backdrop for his fears of maternal abandonment.
The McOndo movement led to some incredible work. Like Fuguet’s 2002 novel “Las Películas de Mi Vida,” “The Movies of My Life.” It’s written from the point of view of a seismologist, Beltrán Soler, as he looks back on his life through the lens of movies.
And we're in dance mode. And to play a fugue in this case-- and this is that amalgam of technology and emotion.
And we're in dance mode. But listening to this fugue in a way is really different than listening to polyphonic music, music with tune and accompaniment.
And they brought Thomas to the hospital. And in her fugue , they asked her if she could identify Thomas as the guy who had beat her in this alleyway. And she said she couldn't be sure, but show me his hat.
But at this point, all that stuff sounds to me like an incredibly genius five-year-old or something. and program the rules of fugue , and you can spit out a fugue .
And "West Side Story" is his most famous and successful attempt, successful attempt, to use his music So you're mixing a Bach fugue with bebop jazz and all these blues elements.
And we're in dance mode. The first subject of this fugue is the thing you hear right off the bat.
And we're in dance mode. Why are we playing a fugue in this movement?
Do it. So hold on. -He went into like a fugue state.
Somehow it got to them that this horrible thing had happened to this woman, and that it was a black man that had done it. And like most mobs in a drunken fugue , they went to the jail. And the sheriff was able to deter them.
So we would do things like I'd bring a rubber ball to school. Some are having moments of fugue .
And we're in dance mode. Three of them end with fugues .
So there are these very strange incidents of people who not only lose their memory, but along with that, lose their identity. It's this very rare case of dissociative fugue . The first noted case, his name was Ansel Bourne.
Pretty infuriating, right? It’s enough to make you want to start a whole new literary movement as petty revenge. It all kicked off with a short story anthology that Fuguet and Gómez published in 1996, named “McOndo”… which featured not a drop of magical realism. McOndo — which became the name of the literary movement — was a reaction to the assumption that Latin American literature could be boiled down
And we're in dance mode. And in a final movement-- get ready for it-- he writes a full four-part fugue .
And we're in dance mode. So again, some of you know what a fugue is and how it's put together.
But Puig was far from the only Latin American author to take meaning and inspiration from movies. In fact, Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez started a whole pop culture-inspired literary movement in the ‘90s. The story behind it? It’s brilliant!
But at this point, all that stuff sounds to me like an incredibly genius five-year-old or something. Even in his most deterministic pieces, something like a fugue form, which is very strict-- as I mentioned, there are just so many degrees of freedom.
But at this point, all that stuff sounds to me like an incredibly genius five-year-old or something. One was, it sounds like it was a more modern composer doing a fugue , somebody like Hindemith or something like that, or maybe even a Stravinsky.
the capability of actually enhancing putting focus on a natural environment. it's harder to kind of make a stylistic differentiation between one's work and another's work because it's maybe like fugue writing or something like that.
And we're in dance mode. It's somewhat unprecedented, because not only does he write a four-part fugue .
Which Astair remembers perfectly, she thinks. Even if her hand collapses into some private, inkless fugue of heaviness. Her lids also engage in the same heaviness, even as some kind of internal lid begins to open.
- I did a thing where I played what I call high information music. High information music would be Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, fugues , yeah, any- anything Bach. And I would play the Well-Tempered Clavier, and I would play... I have a, a friend who... Turkish pianist who's one of the greatest improvisers I've
I've actually written some programs that make music using the rules of counterpoint. He also imposes other algorithms on himself, such as the rules of canon or the rules of fugue . But he's smart enough to never let these logical systems overdetermine the music.
But at this point, all that stuff sounds to me like an incredibly genius five-year-old or something. I mean, I think towards the end of his life, he was challenged to improvise a fugue on a given theme.
Team's crashed chopper and is attacked by Baskervillian hounds. But all you are privy to is the puppetry of snarling muzzles shot in artless close-up. To the canine puppeteer's credit, the hounds are more convincing than the living actors whose performances are miraculously unsuccessful. The cinematography, meanwhile, is a shaky cam evil, deadish fugue minus any insinuation of talent, style or coherence.