Monthly Archives: May 2005
The Passions Of Patty Hearst (or "I'm Over Hear In The Hydrangea Bushes!")
The music is a smashee of two scenes from Apocalypso Now…it is interesting that Francis and his dad ended up doing the score on their own… collaborating using the son’s grasp of gizmo’s and the father’s knowledge of music (Morricone was unavailable to do the syth score).
Saw the most facinating documentary last night on PBS about Patty Hearst. I grew up with that scandal and it always seemed unfathomable to me… it’s even more bizarre now… something out of the movie Network, but not real… pay back from the artistic ghost of Orson Welles’ career… something about the SLA snake head reaminds me of the mirror shot in Kane… as it reminds me of a flower… the perverse opposite other of Flower Power.
Three Brothers (or The Cherry Orchard)
The Pillowman (or Have You Prayed Tonight Lenny?)
At Some level I am amazed at how closely the facade of a cathedral resembles a stage… something about goings on under arches maybe…
The rain and sun were out again and we were marching through Times Square to collect on a brithday debt: the tickets for The Pillowman with Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum.
There is something that still rings dynamic to me about the theater district architecuture of New York… this choc-a-bloc ultra modern meets the neo-whatever the fuck of some turn of the century showman. It is a bizarre and exuberant mix, even if we all miss the hookers (those in the know insert O’malley joke as need be… but we had a nice lunch at Morelle before the show). We were looking for the Booth theater… I thought it odd that they’d named something after John Willkes… still if Sondheim can make a play about Assassins…anything goes on Broadway!
You get certain views which give you pangs of nostalgia for old New York, where artists could actually live and practice their trade… and hustlers and clowns and cowboys walking through alleys with gimps at midnight with chimes and the folks at Sardi’s… It must be these ancient theater signs after all that video craziness of Times Square.
Dave Conrad had been raving about the play the night before. He said, “If you get the chance to see it, you must.”
I said, “We’re seeing it at tomorrow’s matinee…”
He said, “Good.”
You have to understand that he and Billy have a similar look and have competed on several parts, so I thought it was pretty big of him to be so enthusiastic… but it really is a great and thoughtful play about narrative and how fact and fiction effect and affect each other. I sort of saw the ghost of Mice and Men, Garp, certain Mamet and Pinter, and some kind of Hawthorne/Poe dialogue… but it was funny as hell and very theatrical… and the best thing Jeff Goldblums done since he said, “What’s my Mantra?” in Annie Hall, or rode that chopper in Nashvile. I guess he’s learned something by teaching… but then I did love The Fly…. I digress. Just see the play.
I mostly loved the supporting actors:
They walked away from the stage door with no fans… and I thought the whole Hollywood dominance of the craft has become something of a real sham… but they left so fast I couldn’t even snap a photo…and then I saw the old building I used to do phone banking in for the SEIU union… I called it acting on Broadway, thank you very much… I had no procenium arch, but I had a phone and a song in my heart… blah blah blah…
Service Employees Internationl Union headquarters: come and hear those sweeping feet, on the avenue I’m taking you to, 42nd Street!
Sunshower (or Broken Hand Henry)
Well we were off on a Saturday night to Williamsburg to meet up with David Conrad and some friends of his from Pittsburgh with whom we’d last gone out about a decade ago, when the sky opened up with torrents of rain and torrents of sunset. It turned into a strange night of light effects and dark affects… strange New Guinea spirits hung over us.
Here’s an omEGG sample (very compressed) where the painter James Rosenquist fills in for Pat’s father/M. Tristan.
The spirits threw down a rainbow and I show it here in it’s unaltered color… the yellow/orange is the sunset coming through rain clouds… I swear to god the rainbow ended right at the word OPERA… I felt like Kinsky’s Fitzcaraldo.
Conrad was celebrating the end of his Shakespeare Henry play in Pittsburgh and the beginning of his new CBS show (he had to attend the upfront party where they made him stand infront of a cardboard cut out of himself… very meta). Seems he broke his hand on closing night. The romantic in me had hoped it was during a fight scene, like the time Orson cut a man on stage (he said the real knife looked better under the lights… but then got carried away). Turns out it was just a trip and fall and he went into the scene and then realised that his fingers were flopping down like the dying petals of a flacid flower.
With my shiner and his busted hand, it looked like we’d been in a bar brawl… you should have seen the other guys… but really it was a quiet night with just a few nice glasses of interesting wine. The place is called Zebulon…live music, poetry, sadwiches and chacuterie, good wine, etc…
We were also there to mourn the loss of a poet named Lars Weissberg, who drank himself to death in L.A. I’m unfamiliar with his work, but apparently he liked Jack Daniels… he should have stuck to Campari like Steve Zisou.
I snapped the drive home in a blurry symphony of streaks and dashes… have a look:
When we got home the moon filled the sky all puple and we found a parking spot like that. I made some sketches of the night and I’ll scan them in after breakfast, before we go see Plowman.
She Touched Your Perfect Body WIth Her Mind (or Wavelength)
Liberty is all bound up and we should handle with care, but do our monkey heads remember what drove all the shit against the blades of the fan? Here in BK I still pass little Catholic type shrines to the 9/11 victims… just tacked to trees like a car accident, or a random shooting had happened there… candles lit and pictures and it makes my monkey mind reel…
The thing I hate most is how aiplanes look and sound to me now… they were always the site of romance and hope for me… I lived for airports and the hope of Exodus from Connecticut… I’d look up and it was like prayer when the jets flew by… it was hope… not so easy now. You feel like Dylan Thomas on your own Fern Hill at sunset
Days Of Heaven Can Wait (or Steeple Are Strange)
And everything was under a great column of light and these flowers, while they don’t look like much, wafted the smell of near naked women all down our block and caught the sunset like a giggle on the breeze.
I ain’t tryin’ to put a black eye on the game, but I got nailed in the face by an old cutting board painting… it fell on me from a precarious perch in a sort of Un Chien Andlou affair. It seems like a good detail for Clark in Willoughby, so I’ve been doing improvs based on Rocky and Barfly, or something. Who needs makeup? Just slam yourself in the face with art… then I nearly cut my head open on our new dvd rack… it’s not going well… talk about beating yourself up… art and movies all after me… hell I feel like the narrator of Willoughby! It’s a conspiracy of the cultural elite! Or I’m a clumsy oaf/bull in a china shop of my own making. Deadalous Redux: or Symphony for the Devil – if your computer has lots of juice, it is fun to run all these little movies that follow together with my quote from Iggy and The Stooges – it sounds like punk meets sample rock. I love all accidents… untill someone puts an eye out.
God Only Knows (or A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rosebud)
Here are some motion studies from Asi Nisi Masa. THe logos intrigued me in as far as they all seemed to relate to eachother… globes/spheres/triangles/planets… What does it mean? Coming Around.
Day For Night (or True Faux)
Sky is crying, see the streets all filled with tears… rain come down and give this dirty town a drink of water… a drink of wine… did they say why?
As if to welcome video to IT IN place Con Ed is (perversely) On It and they’re filming on fifth. There is something so satisfying about a nice kleig light.
So what is little Debbie’s future like in this fair land? I’m spending way too much time remembering that early sixties t.v. add where the little girl plucks daisy petals in a count down till a man’s voice takes over and then KA POW the atom bomb goes off. Fibbonacci sequence, in deed.
Look Out Honey Cause I'm Using Technology (or The World's Forgotten Boy)
The blues exist as a way of seeing beyond blue, which means seeing beyond the sky and further towards hope… or whatever.
Orson Welles genius sits on this blog… like a … like a… like an Orson Welles I guess.. I mean heavy. I was watching the TCM May madness all last night and nodding off in a sort of Wellesian dream and why is it that everything he shot looks about the way I’d want to shoot a movie. The Auteur theory is proved by Orson… I’ve had arguments with Connie on this point, but when he started working with Mark Schwartzbard (a mensch and supremely talented DP), we both realized that it is about telling the camera what to shoot and from what angle…the rest is up to the talent and technique of the camera man… speaking of whitch there is a new film about Haskel Wexler (for whom Mark came out of camera loading retirement to work on Woody’s film and then…like many aparently… Woody fired Haskel… Yellow Dress in deed) by his son that should be facinating. So… I’m indulging my still side, knowing that moving and audio will be in there soon… I feel like D.W. or Buster at the change over… all that is gained will leave something lost… but there it is…
It simply amazes me to see an Hasedic Jew drive up to Chai Tots and drop off a kid with yamuka and talis from a Mercedes SUV. I want to puke… but it proves the lie that opression does not lead to enlightenment, it leads to mental illness. Concetration camp slave labor not enought to turn you away from naked status seeking? Well what is? I’m sorry that syllogism, or logical leap, or whatever it is, accounts for Israel… and also THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. It would be funny to watch us all build our own hell of mirrors, if I weren’t living in it too.
Be power… be energy… be america… be michigan… be crazy… be electric.. be standing on the corner waiting for the velvets…be more a space cadet than ziggy and then… and then.. and most imprtantly then than… go on being.
Never become Briton, or Rome, should be the gathering concept of our democracy, but certain elements of past power can not get their egomanical brains around the idea of one for all and all for one. They wish for their old dethroned aristocracy; and so they go to Yale. Harvard would ignore them. Brown would beat them within an inch of their life and then ask for money. I’m sorry… where are the lower classes (so called). There ought to be cities burning… and I fear there will be within the decade. I have Jones Mojo on it being about 1962… But where is Martin Luther (black or white?)?
