We watched two documentaries this weekend. In the Womb and The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antartic Expedition. While In the Womb offers a wealth of information (why kids' heads are so big, being one), there is a serious amount of filler--mostly of midriffs and women floating in water--and a strangely uneasy amount of speculation, resting on, as always, the calm artificial waves of the medical model. The Endurance is simply fantastic, an amazing story and an elegant documentary.

Today marks nine years sober. My prior drinking life is almost entirely out of my view now, seeming much like a distant door. I have very little good to say about any of that time, except that I'm glad it's over.

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Finished watching The Mosquito Coast, a mid 80s film directed by Peter Weir, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. The writing is pretty engaging, the moralizing is kept to a minimum, and the scenes in Belize are quite beautiful, but the character Ford plays is the real ace. It may be his finest effort, which isn't saying much, I realize, since he tends to display one emotion and one emotion only in his movies, but this character is multi-hued and distinct. It's not a great film by any means, but there is enough intensity to recommend it.

It's been a few years since I read a book by John Ashbery. I'm now reading his Three Poems, nearly finished with the first one, "The New Spirit." Struck by the more serious tone throughout, how less inclined it is in moving toward slapstick. Some awkward, overforlorn passages, some typical Ashberyian labyrinths of unknowingness, and some casual philosophical openings:

"I can only say that the wind of change as it has happened has numbed me, to the point where the false way and the true way are confounded, where there is no way or rather where everything is a way, none more suitable nor more accurate than the last, oblivion rapidly obsorbing their outline like snow filling footprints."

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Am working on a longer piece right now. May read a section of it at Pegasus Books.

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My parents were involved in a fatal (not to them) car accident on Saturday. The other car failed to stop at a stop sign. There were three teenaged girls in the other car. One of them died at the scene, another is in critical condition, and a third suffered broken ribs, but is now in fair condition. My parents are on painkillers, but are doing okay, all things considered.

Robert Altman's swansong, A Prairie Home Companion, is an entertaining movie, even if Altman's a bit caged in by Garrison Keillor's sentimental screenplay. Altman has always been interested in the muttered comment, the talking over of one another, the seemingly stray detail, and telling intimate stories with large casts. Actors seem to thrive in an Altman movie, because of his well-known interest in getting out of their ways, in believing they know what's right. This freedom comes across as relaxation and lightness in the performances--everyone seems to be having a lot of fun. Streep's performance may seem like Fargo 101 to some non-Midwesterners, but she actually gets the regional dialect down much better than the characters in the Coen's movie. Self-restraint, mixed with a desire to out-humble the next person, and just generally "being nice." Lily Tomlin is from Detroit, and she seems a good solid choice here, though I thought she was straining a bit too much. Lindsey Lohan seems like a producer's add-in, to bring in young movie-goers, but her character does seem realistically annoyed to have to be around older adults. Overall, it's a competent, fun movie, if a bit sentimentally strained.

Watched The Niklashausen Journey. If you haven't read Marx, this film will serve as a pretty quick primer. Otherwise, it's a strangely heavy-handed and cliched representation of youthful idealism brought to its knees by the power of the State. All the set pieces are involved--religion's complicity with capitalism, the overstuffed, bored wealthy, the hired guards of the wealthy and propertied, the Police, etc. Fassbinder's satirical cynicism of leftist idealogues is clearly on display, or their naivete is, but it's fairly obvious where his heart ultimately is: with the rebels. The film ends with a glancing recognition of Castro's and Guevara's struggles in getting the Cuban revolution started, trying again (the point of the film), until they took to the Sierra Maestra mountains and held their ground against the U.S.-stooge, Batista. Fassbinder (that's him in the middle of the picture, above) plays quite a large role in the film, a bit unusual for him.




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By the way, the Bilderberg Group will be meeting in Istanbul, Turkey this year.

With all of the movie-watching, I am somewhat concerned that I may be coming across as a malingering layabout.

Puritans! I do work!

I wanted to explain--why?--that when I was a runofthemill drunken college student there came a point at which I had to discard Journalism as a career path. At that moment, my three alternative interests came to the front. Art, English, and Film. After some thought, I went into English, but Film and Art have always been main interests. (Autobio note: my brother did take his degree in Film.)

Midwestern ethos: Explain yourself, young man!

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The newish Guy Maddin film, Brand Upon The Brain!, is now showing in New York. With various "celebrity" narrators--live--like Isabella Rossellini, John Ashbery, Lou Reed, etc. Here's a NY Times review of it. It'll be at the Village East Cinemas for another week or so.

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Re: Foley artists:

How effects are sometimes made

Effect How Made

Galloping horses Banging empty coconut shells together
Kissing Kissing back of hand
Punching someone Thumping watermelons
High heels Artist walks in high heels on wooden platform
Bone-breaking blow Breaking celery or bamboo or twisting a head of lettuce
Footsteps in snow Squeezing a box of corn starch
Star Trek sliding doors Pulling a piece of paper from envelope
Star Wars sliding doors Flare gun plus sneakers squeak
Bird flapping its wings Flapping a pair of gloves
Grass or leaves crunching Balling up audio tape

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Tschüss

Watched Keane and An American Soldier.

Keane is basically a character study of a man with some obsessional thoughts, mainly about the loss/abduction of his daughter. The actor portrays the character in a nicely, unreliable way. One moment he's pacing, muttering to himself, paranoid, and the next minute he's fairly "civilized," eating Cuban food with a traveling mother and daughter. It's a moody, unresolved movie, but one that is still satisfying. There's enough uncheap emotional upheaval, and enough tight little turns, to keep it interesting. Directed by Lodge Kerrigan. I enjoyed his previous two films as well--Claire Dolan and Clean, Shaven.

The American Soldier is one of seven films Fassbinder put out in 1970 alone. There are some interesting plot developments in it which talk back to other Fassbinder films, obliquely foreshadow, from this same time. The film itself is an attempt to personalize the grand, complex, impersonal war in Vietnam, with a state-hired killer doing his business in Germany. Like a soldier is a kind of contract killer for the State. It never exactly draws too many parallels with Vietnam, though it lingers in the background. The film is also an homage to American gangster films. Fassbinder has done much better work elsewhere. Thin plot, with cartoon characters.

Next up:

Another Fassbinder film from 1970, The Niklashausen Journey.

Also, Robert Altman's last film, A Prarie Home Companion.

We watched Polyester last night. It was on IFC. One of the few Waters' films I hadn't seen, it contains many wonderful moments of suburban familial decay, and renewal!

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There's actually an online vertigo support community. In the forums, people list their first encounter with dizziness, like marking an unholy day.

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There is word out of Kansas of an impending Gary Lutz chapbook.

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A magazine from Pittsburgh, Caketrain, has accepted several pieces from the post-Trilce manuscript, Claims of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The issue is to be out later this year.

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I will be reading with Suzanne Stein on June 2, 8 p.m., at Pegasus Books, in Berkeley, CA.

The BPPV (vertigo) is still around, which is longer than I've ever had it, so this is why my posts have fallen off. Have actually considered getting a cane. Not a joke, though I wish it was.