Art Observed (Going Places)
This week: Always almost there. A blurry image tells more than you think. “Suggested Donation,” means never pay more than 1 cent to get into The Met. A broken toilet can still be used (just don’t flush). – TD
Back to a future
Scat-stacking shitty yesterdays together I go back in time, on my therapist’s chair, retrace particular events in my childhood, and open my eyes to the blurry wet room, depleted and calm. He’s been leaning in, elbow dents on his knees, eyes maybe a little wet too. I am trying to correct the past with my personal fucks capacitor. Lived a dumb tv movie life, or better yet when movies from the past wound up on tv; went to college at an English lit class lived a dumb book life, or better yet when those books wound up as movies; moved to a city for a dumb metrosexual life, or better yet someone tell me what that even means. Maybe, the past unforgiving, you moved from one city to another, kept exchanging cities, trading in your tokens at casino life for better cards, fairer dice, the unsightly decorative carpet under your feet, heads locked in vices in rooms you couldn’t see. And if gambling is our metaphor, I’ll be the old guy at the slot machine, the repetitive injury of his right arm pumping away at some statistical god, awaiting the golden shower of coins which will sound as a tambourine, hey play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to. In 1985, with that preceding Orwellian-slash-Van Halenian year neatly tucked behind us, one Marty McFly disappears from a suburban parking lot at night.
On Lost Films
I formerly suffered an unhealthy obsession (if I’m honest it’s still around, but it’s certainly depleted) with the conceptual implications of lost films. As a self-termed “archaeologist” of obscure media, discovering the possible existence of an artifact (mostly, for me, films/books/zines, photographs of art-events, etc), researching everything about it, and then possibly unearthing details to add to a collective knowledge base on said artifact is, well to be blunt, a really fucking awesome feeling.
A couple of days ago at Big Other, Amber Sparks posed the question “What lost film would you love to see?” The question found me immediately excited, because it was something that had managed to escape my head-space for a while. There’s any number of reasons why a film might be lost; if it was shot in the early days of cinema, the chemicals used to process the film itself could have deteriorated the celluloid, leaving nothing. It’s possible that the film was never completed, but screened to producers in an incomplete state, leaving a mark on an individual. The only copy of a film (smaller budget films) could have burnt in a fire, destroyed in some sort of natural disaster, or literally just misplaced.
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Reincarnate hard
In Funny People (dir. Apatow, 2009), Adam Sandler, since diagnosed with cancer, teases his oncologist about looking like Karl, the blond villain in Die Hard (1988) who rises from the dead at the end of the film for a final shot at John McClane (Bruce Willis), only to be shot dead by the black cop, played by the guy who ended up playing Urkel’s neighbor. (I’ll spare you my theory on the subconscious racism of how all “good cops” are black, as if such casting were some progressive affront to the more common implicit stereotype.) It is sadly wonderful how all of you know what I’m talking about, these names and faces closer than our own cousins — that there are semi-dense clusters of cells in our brains dedicated to remembering these things, that we are somewhat thwarted by them, yet continuously rewarded. In Hollywood’s game, people can be anything, and Apatow is aware of the pleasure we derive in getting the reference, the erratic yet embedded memory of Karl, as Bruce Willis and John McClane are equally distilled with meaning in this regard. (“Where you try to kill Bruce Willis” is Sandler’s punchline.) The question is did the script call for an actor who looked like Die Hard’s Karl, or was the script cleverly revised, ad libbed even, once they noticed the similarity? The answer is less important than its instigator. Karl since has risen from the dead twice, an unlikely Jesus, save the perfect Aryan hair.
Why I Will Love David Lynch Forever
"Coop, I may be wearing a dress, but I still pull my panties on one leg at a time if you know what I mean."
I have been re-watching Twin Peaks for, literally, the first time in a decade. I first saw the series when the Season 1 DVD was released, unfortunately long before Season 2 ever saw a DVD release, on December 18th, 2001. I got the box-set for Christmas. I had never seen the series before, but in the midst of my Lynch obsession at age 15, I was pumped.
Since I’ve been re-watching it, I’ve been thinking a lot more about David Lynch than I have for years– at least since Inland Empire was released. While I know that Twin Peaks is specifically not exclusively the work of Lynch, in any sort of auteur sense, it certainly maintains a lot of elements that are specific to his aesthetics, and the episodes he himself directed are certainly the best of the series. The point is, I’ve been thinking about how awesome David Lynch is, and how really he is sort of the only ‘dark cult figure’ that I can still deal with after decades of obsession & attempting to navigate ‘fanboy’ culture (which, for the record, any sort of genre-based fanboy culture–actually just make that any sort of fanboy culture in general–is pretty much the most annoying thing in the world; I can no longer deal with the cult of Werner Herzog due to his incessant pandering & the caricature of himself that he’s fallen into (and the fact that Klaus Kinski is 100x more awesome than Herzog while Herzog gets all the credit majorly pisses me off)). Anyway, the point is I’ve made a list of why I will love David Lynch forever.
1. David Lynch understands the idea that films are more than just a representational narrative, rather, they are experiences in their own right.
2. David Lynch is not afraid of unwavering intensity. In fact, he loves it, and uses it to a very strong degree. Within the first season of Twin Peaks, made for prime-time network television, after establish a jovial tone filled with the lower-middle class & hat-tips to coffee and pie (“americana”), there are strobe lights, sexual perversions, and intense screaming & crying. This is not Lynch pandering towards “revealing the dark underbelly of suburbia”– maybe that is what Blue Velvet did, but I’d argue it’s more likely that Lynch is just prone to exploring this intensity in various environments (which if you ask me, the rest of his filmography seems to prove).
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Brazil is on @Max right now
Do you guys like that movie?
Do you guys have a premium movie channel package?
Do you guys watch Max After Dark, i.e., Skinemax?
I mean, how was your day?
Say something, say something, anything
II. Say Anything
I’ve never seen Say Anything, released in 1989 when I was 13, fell into the gap of people who were too young to see it in real time, and not interested enough to see it as the cultural imperative it kind of became for the coming of age romantic allegory. Sometimes I feel like I should just see the movie and get it over with, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t love it as much as I do now, like the idea of what you think is inside something is better, more inviolate, than the actual thing. You know how actors ruin the characters in a book made into a movie? Or how the movie ruins the book? Or how the book’s execution ruins its conception? Art, really, is a bag of failure.
So I have not seen the scene where John Cusack holds the boom box for the girl, perhaps to play a song? I know it’s about a guy who likes a girl, and he plays a song for her because maybe he can’t play guitar and sing, or maybe the song was playing during an intimate moment. Yah that’s probably it. I know these things because I have lived in this world the same way you have, and together we understand these things — the kissing, the songs, the I love and hate yous, which brings us to dawn, after the 2:00 am text, having been up all night, somewhere in the middle of this world, a broken google map URL, a night gripped by tendrils of want, which felt, this middle, like the edge.
Expat Fever
I went to see Midnight in Paris last night. It was silly and predictable and obvious. And I loved it. Owen Wilson played a great Woody Allen. Rachel McAdams, a truly hateful soon-to-be wife. But their story is really just a vehicle to get the actual narrative rolling. When Wilson’s character, Gil, a hack screenwriter trying to be a novelist, starts going back in time on some freak Cinderella-story midnight stroll and meets up with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Picasso, Stein, Dali, Man Ray, Cole Porter, TS Eliot–there are many more–I couldn’t help but be giddy. I’ve always wanted to see these people in action–and there they were. Hemingway talking in Hemingway sentences, Zelda Fitzgerald’s buzzing mania, Dali rambling incoherently about rhinos, Picasso a little bald, Stein the gentle aunty. Sure, Allen’s depiction was as Disney as it gets. Sure, Allen was indulging in pure fantasy, and I fell hard. I left the movie theater…dancing. This is not a movie review. I’m not generally a Woody Allen fan, even. This is a note about surprise. I went to see Midnight in Paris because there was nothing else worth watching, and I wanted to sit in the local art house theater with a very full glass of Pinot Noir, some Dots, and a handsome date. I’m surprised that make- believe can still give me joy. I’m happy that I haven’t totally given up on the fairytale. And it’s cute to see Wilson playing Cinderella.