'Writing down the logic of my solitude
As far as I'm concerned
I'd like to leave it random'
- Phoenix, 'If it's not with you'
Sunday night, cinema: Memories of Underdevelopment, a film from post-revolutionary Cuba narrated by a middle-aged womanizer who compares his calamitous affairs with 'underdeveloped' and unstable young girls to the tribulations of the underdeveloped and unstable socialist state. There's a rather unpleasant recurring image of rotten fruit, the narrator suggesting that, here in 'the tropics', things (read: women, revolutions) ripen and flower very quickly but tend not to last long, rotting away just as fast as they bloomed...
Monday night: the hardcore, cut-up sounds of Kid606, Knifehandchop and DJ Rupture. The venue is a railway arch in back of a pub, the music flies out of the speakers like sheets of white-hot sparks and, by the end of the night, half the audience is on the stage, MCing and improvising beatbox, while the Kid has an innocent-looking 20 year old blonde scream into the microphone, 'I need more fuckin' hardcore!' Some gig...
Tuesday night, cinema: Wonderland is full of strange camera angles, jump cuts, close-up whip-pans, saturated colours, split screens and time-lapse photography, all of which serves no discernible purpose besides making the narrative more of a mess than it already is (the filmmakers would doubtless protest that they are preserving the ambiguity that pertains to the facts of the case, but no, it's just a mess).
Simone Weil once remarked that whereas, in real life, evil is monotonous and sad, it usually tends to be represented as diverse and exciting; conversely, goodness, which in real life is always new and infinitely rewarding, is represented as dull. Wonderland has enough honesty in its latter scenes to know that the worlds of pornography, drug addiction and violent crime are sad, ugly and evil but, for most of its first half, it works rather too hard at trying to conceal this truth.
(I'm a little concerned that I'm beginning to come across in this journal as a prude and a moralist. Fuck it: I've only got our best interests at heart, children.)
'The things I do possess
Sometimes they own me too'
- Phoenix, 'Everything is Everything'
As far as I'm concerned
I'd like to leave it random'
- Phoenix, 'If it's not with you'
Sunday night, cinema: Memories of Underdevelopment, a film from post-revolutionary Cuba narrated by a middle-aged womanizer who compares his calamitous affairs with 'underdeveloped' and unstable young girls to the tribulations of the underdeveloped and unstable socialist state. There's a rather unpleasant recurring image of rotten fruit, the narrator suggesting that, here in 'the tropics', things (read: women, revolutions) ripen and flower very quickly but tend not to last long, rotting away just as fast as they bloomed...
Monday night: the hardcore, cut-up sounds of Kid606, Knifehandchop and DJ Rupture. The venue is a railway arch in back of a pub, the music flies out of the speakers like sheets of white-hot sparks and, by the end of the night, half the audience is on the stage, MCing and improvising beatbox, while the Kid has an innocent-looking 20 year old blonde scream into the microphone, 'I need more fuckin' hardcore!' Some gig...
Tuesday night, cinema: Wonderland is full of strange camera angles, jump cuts, close-up whip-pans, saturated colours, split screens and time-lapse photography, all of which serves no discernible purpose besides making the narrative more of a mess than it already is (the filmmakers would doubtless protest that they are preserving the ambiguity that pertains to the facts of the case, but no, it's just a mess).
Simone Weil once remarked that whereas, in real life, evil is monotonous and sad, it usually tends to be represented as diverse and exciting; conversely, goodness, which in real life is always new and infinitely rewarding, is represented as dull. Wonderland has enough honesty in its latter scenes to know that the worlds of pornography, drug addiction and violent crime are sad, ugly and evil but, for most of its first half, it works rather too hard at trying to conceal this truth.
(I'm a little concerned that I'm beginning to come across in this journal as a prude and a moralist. Fuck it: I've only got our best interests at heart, children.)
'The things I do possess
Sometimes they own me too'
- Phoenix, 'Everything is Everything'
VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
I think you're great, keep the comments coming, and the arrangements are simple, we called the county clerk's office where we will be vacationing and we're all set. This is how cool my girl is, I asked her what should we wear? And she replied, "See that's why I didn't want to get married (we've been together for 14 years) I don't want to have to think about all that. I hope you don't want me to wear a dress, because I'm wearing slacks." Then this morning she said, "Well, it might be hot, so maybe a light summer dress." She's so cute.
Porcelain death machine= tv, true isn't really made out of porcelain, but it does roll off the tongue nicely...
Messy film making will always have a place in my heart. Mostly to have something in there to compare against when good films wander in.
Sounds like the music scene out there is quite intense. Round here, the best I can hope for is sitting in on a friends band while they rehearse, until they play live that is.
Pray tell what holds your fancy in the last great Wilderness? I myself have spent some time up there, and intend to again soon.