Liked this from the soundtrack of french film, Anna M (disturbing tale of loopy, parisian stalker).
Indie folk trio, Au revoir Simone perform their song Stay golden as they wander through the a New York neighbourhood. Of course, some wiseacre can’t resist a witticism. The girls, more or less unpeturbed, continue – as wistful as ever.
Bravo!
#23.1 – AU REVOIR SIMONE -STAY GOLDEN by lablogotheque
Excerpt
The smuggest man in England? The Manchester Evening News chose their ‘half man, half lobster’ photograph of Mr Gill with care after taking exception to a very rude article about their city’s (risibly inadequate, according to AAG) restaurant scene.
AA Gill springs to mind, not because of an savagely amusing piece of journalism, but because he was on the Radio 4 travel show, Excess Baggage this morning. He mentioned that he had caused offence to the Welsh and in the course of a google search to find out how, I found this – a piece for Vanity Fair excoriating British expats in NYC.
Having been one myself, I can understand what he means – to a degree. That said, I don’t really think that his sweeping generalisation captures the existential truth for everyone that winds up there. I remember two fellows from Essex who were working in a Manhattan shoe store who loved everything american because it was so utterly different from their not loved place of origin.
Brits Behaving Badly (65.92 kB) A man at cross purposes (156.45 kB) AA Gill on dyslexia (194.96 kB)
Amy Sutherland
Interesting article on the ecology of nagging from feminist, Lindsay Beyerstein. She reviews Amy Sutherland’s NY Times article and book which outlines the effectiveness of using animal training techniques on her husband.
On the face of it, being trained like an animal isn’t appealing, but when one considers the alternative…
Finem respice.
Lights and Water from James Adamson on Vimeo.
Who would have thought that an out of focus lens could produce such an engaging video?
Hadn’t heard about this campaign video which casts Hillary and Bill as Tony and Carmela. Quite funny. Bill is actually more wooden than Hilary, strange to say. Johnny Sack [pictured] is cast as ‘the members only’ guy – which probably won’t mean much to you unless you’ve read one of the forensic analyses of the last scene….
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Cityscapes by Marc Yankus (New York, NY)
“In moments of transient repose, when its elements are briefly cloaked in softness, a kind of beauty envelops even the most mundane street scenes.â€
Not a great deal of insight in this report from The Star Ledger – a local paper in Camden, NJ. Former world champion Super Featherweight, Rocky Lockridge tells his story.
| Former boxing champ Rocky Lockridge is homeless in Camden |
Lockridge took a job working for William Jones & Son, Inc. in Camden, a drum and barrel company on Liberty Street, where he cleaned and painted barrels for $8 per hour starting in January 1994.
Shortly thereafter, he was arrested for burglary — the first time — but was sentenced to five years probation, according to court records. Three years later, he was arrested for burglary again, this time serving 27 months before being released in July of 1999.
He hasn’t worked since.
When he got out of jail, he found he had nowhere to go and ended up on the streets.
“I don’t know exactly what happened or how it happened or what happened at that particular time in my life,” he says.
One thing he does remember is going back to using drugs.
“I knew a lot of people who I partied with here in Camden after a victory,” he says.
Lockridge says that if you’re going to be homeless, Camden is the place to be. There are many different places that will give you a free meal, many shelters that will put you up for a night.
Lockridge lives on the $140 a month and food stamps he receives from the government — as well as pocket change he gets from panhandling. He says the stroke he suffered three years ago makes it difficult to walk, no less hold a job.
John O’Boyle/The Star-LedgerRocky Lockridge walks along a street in Camden.
He sleeps in shelters occasionally but admits he’s had issues committing to a shelter because the curfew is sometimes as early as 7 p.m. Lately, he has slept in a mosquito-infested abandoned row house around the block from his regular corner.
And he continues to have troubles with the law, though his last arrest — for criminal trespassing in May — resulted only in community service.
…
As he sits on his stoop, smoking a cigarette, he talks about why he is finally ready to turn his life around, find a place to live, give up drinking and drugs.
“I’m going to get it back together and say no to drugs,” he said. “I’ve got a family that I want to spend some time with ’til my time is up on Planet Earth. I’m on a mission now, perhaps even greater than my mission before. My kids need me in their lives, experience being the best teacher.”
John O’Boyle/The Star-LedgerRocky Lockridge (left) jokes with his friend Charles Braxton on a street corner in Camden.
Lockridge says he recently was tracked down by his son, Ricky, now 24, who lives in the Washington, D.C., area near Lamar. The twins were surprised to find out a few months ago that they have a half-brother, Ramond Dixon, 22, born in Camden but who now also lives in the D.C. area. The three have become close — but they remain distant from their father.
“I remember spending time with him when I was 3 or 4, but he was never there at a steady pace,” Ramond, known as “Ron-Ron,” says. “Even though my dad wasn’t there for me growing up, I never really had harsh feelings. I never was really upset. As a man now I can see that people make mistakes.”
Ricky Lockridge has mixed feelings.
“It’s sad. It hurts,” he says about his dad’s predicament. “But I never lost confidence in my dad, he’s a strong person.”
Lockridge says reuniting with his boys is his inspiration for cleaning up his life.
“Now I’m ready for this, mentally and physically, to get me back on track,” Lockridge says. “I am in dire need of that kind of support and I want it. I’ve been knocked down. Now I’m finally ready to get back up.”
…
“It hurts. It hurts. In more ways than one, it hurts. How can you be a great man, father and husband … how can you be a great champion and not be a great father, husband? Dad? It hurts. But I’m still alive. I can’t make up for the lost time, but I can just get there, be there, spend the rest of the time with my wife and children and give them the time that I have left.”
From David Edelstein in New York Magazine:
There’s something appealingly anti-psychological about Charlie Kaufman. As a Jew who explores the inner lives of anxious neurotic depressive solipsists, he could be expected to build his works around repressed traumas and cathartic revelations: very Freudian, very twentieth century. But Kaufman goes in the opposite direction. The whirlpool doesn’t circle in on painful personal truths—it moves outward, in ever-widening spirals, until identity is swallowed up by larger forces.
… Kaufman contrives to display even more permutations of the self, on the way to the self’s dissolution. This epic dream play with its leaps through time and space, its characters and shadow characters, poses a momentous question: Uh … well … I’m not sure what question the movie is posing. The answer, though, is definitely “Death.â€
From Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:
To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York†is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now. That at least would be an appropriate response to a film about failure, about the struggle to make your mark in a world filled with people who are more gifted, beautiful, glamorous and desirable than the rest of us — we who are crippled by narcissistic inadequacy, yes, of course, but also by real horror, by zits, flab and the cancer that we know (we know!) is eating away at us and leaving us no choice but to lie down and die.
Despite its slippery way with time and space and narrative and Mr. Kaufman’s controlled grasp of the medium, “Synecdoche, New York†is as much a cry from the heart as it is an assertion of creative consciousness. It’s extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing, embracing bodies pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea, yet it’s also the only idea worth the fuss, the anxiety of influence and all the messy rest, a lesson hard won for Caden. Life is a dream, but only for sleepers.
From Carina Chocano in The LA Times:
…recalls the Jorge Luis Borges story in which the imperial cartographers make a map of the empire so detailed and true-to-life that it takes on the exact dimensions of the territory and ends up covering it entirely. Jean Baudrillard famously inverted the story to illustrate his idea about the “precession of simulacra,” a postmodern condition in which the representation of something comes before the thing it represents, breaking down the distinction between representation and reality completely.
No doubt Kaufman, the brilliant, melancholy and unrepentantly solipsistic mind behind “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Adaptation,” had both in mind when he outlined the contours of his sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad movie, which might have just as well have been called “Being Charlie Kaufman” or, better yet, “Being Anybody.”
What is going on with Caden? Is he sick? Crazy? Dying? Already dead? Pretty much all of the above, though not in the usual sense. Kaufman is trying to do what Caden is trying to do; he’s trying to make sense of loss, longing and death. He’s mining all the sadness in the world. As for happiness, he’s suspicious. It’s a sham product sold by a huckster (Hope Davis, as his therapist and bestselling self-help author). He’s marveling at the struggle and the longing, multiplied by the billions, in the face of futility. He’s having an existential freakout on an epic scale.
Hoffman commits himself completely to Caden’s mournfulness, to the sadness that comes with realizing, as he does in the end, as what was once “an exciting, mysterious future” recedes into the past, “that this is everyone’s experience, every single one; that you are not special; that there is no one watching you and there never was.” This sounds hopeless — too hopeless, even, for some of the characters in the film, who chafe at Caden’s vision. There’s beauty everywhere — in the transporting score by Jon Brion, in Hoffman and Morton’s performances, in Adele’s paintings (actually the miniaturized paintings of an artist named Alex Kanevsky), in the fact that we struggle in the face of futility, that as Caden tells his actors, we simultaneously fear and don’t believe in death. That the house is on fire from the day you buy it. That the house is never not on fire.
And a less indulgent view from Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:
Well, there are three commonplaces on which it repeatedly riffs. One is what you might call the romantic-pathetic theory of imagination: any alternative reality that we design and furnish, when we conceive a work of art, is always to some extent a stand-in for the puny or pitiful one that we have been personally landed with. The second and most imperishable truth is: we grow old, and perish. And the third says: all you need is love. These are noble principles to pursue; unless the pursuit is waged with gusto, however, it threatens to slump into the sententious, and that is what happens here. With so much screen time being allotted to Caden’s bad marriage and pustular health problems, his majestic production doesn’t get going properly until the second half of the film, and by then we don’t care enough (worse still, we don’t know enough, such is the vagueness of its guiding rubric) to mind whether it triumphs or flops. Compare Dennis Potter’s great mini-series of the nineteen-eighties, “The Singing Detective,†and you will see much the same setup—a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch—rendered with unstinting vigor. And, should you still have a taste for the fancies of a fading man, try Orson Welles’s “The Immortal Story,†or a little picture of his called “Citizen Kane,†all of which, I sometimes think, could be floating within Kane’s cranium, like snow inside a globe. In each case, there is joy—not just a mournful snickering, as carried in Charlie Kaufman’s bag of tricks, but the breath of divine pleasure—in the conjuring of dreams. If you want to show a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, go right ahead, but give that hour all the life you can.
by Timothy Collins
FROM the collection by Edgar Lee Masters – all poems from Bartleby.com
Dissolute son, REUBEN PANTIER:
WELL, Emily Sparks, your prayers were not wasted,
Your love was not all in vain.
I owe whatever I was in life
To your hope that would not give me up,
To your love that saw me still as good.
Dear Emily Sparks, let me tell you the story.
I pass the effect of my father and mother;
The milliner’s daughter made me trouble
And out I went in the world,
Where I passed through every peril known
Of wine and women and joy of life.
One night, in a room in the Rue de Rivoli,
I was drinking wine with a black-eyed cocotte,
And the tears swam into my eyes.
She thought they were amorous tears and smiled
For thought of her conquest over me.
But my soul was three thousand miles away,
In the days when you taught me in Spoon River.
And just because you no more could love me,
Nor pray for me, nor write me letters,
The eternal silence of you spoke instead.
And the black-eyed cocotte took the tears for hers,
As well as the deceiving kisses I gave her.
Somehow, from that hour, I had a new vision—
Dear Emily Sparks!
Richard Buckner‘s song from the poem is very good:
[audio:http://www.fieldus.com/wp-content/audio/richard buckner - reuben pantier.mp3].
Lots more Richard Buckner @ the Merge Records store.
…
Fully retired father, BENJAMIN PANTIER:
TOGETHER in this grave lie Benjamin Pantier, attorney at law,
And Nig, his dog, constant companion, solace and friend.
Down the gray road, friends, children, men and women,
Passing one by one out of life, left me till I was alone
With Nig for partner, bed-fellow, comrade in drink.
In the morning of life I knew aspiration and saw glory.
Then she, who survives me, snared my soul
With a snare which bled me to death,
Till I, once strong of will, lay broken, indifferent,
Living with Nig in a room back of a dingy office.
Under my jaw-bone is snuggled the bony nose of Nig—
Our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world!
Some discussion of Benjamin Pantier @ spoonriveranthology.net
…
And finally, the ill matched wife, MRS BENJAMIN PANTIER:
I KNOW that he told that I snared his soul
With a snare which bled him to death.
And all the men loved him,
And most of the women pitied him.
But suppose you are really a lady, and have delicate tastes,
And loathe the smell of whiskey and onions.
And the rhythm of Wordsworth’s “Ode†runs in your ears,
While he goes about from morning till night
Repeating bits of that common thing;
“Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?â€
And then, suppose:
You are a woman well endowed,
And the only man with whom the law and morality
Permit you to have the marital relation
Is the very man that fills you with disgust
Every time you think of it—while you think of it
Every time you see him?
That’s why I drove him away from home
To live with his dog in a dingy room
Back of his office.
…
See the epitaph of Emily Sparks (Reuben’s beloved) @ outofthewoodsnow.
…
Looking at Wikipedia it seems clear that Masters had himself felt the need to leave his small town behind, even if it was where he located much of his work.
There’s a quotation on Wikiepedia that gives a clue to his likely attitude towards Reuben:
“To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire–
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”
