'Reality Bites' (1994)

Based on Helen Childress's initial ideas and multiple evolving scripts, Ben Stiller's Reality Bites (1994) takes place near the end of both the twentieth century and the analog era. Released twenty-four years ago, it now looks like an entirely different realm of the senses. Only Michael Grates, the goofy Ben Stiller character, lives as if in the twenty-first century: he's the only one with a mobile phone and a lucrative job - producing "In Your Face TV." 

The actors are fun. In addition to Stiller, there's Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawk, Janeane Garofalo and Steven Zahn, among others - Generation X, the all-Anglo version.  

Certain aspects of the film give it some gravitas: Vickie Miner (Garofalo) having to get an AIDS test; Sammy Gray (Steve Zahn) coming out; Lelaina Pierce (Ryder) having to look for a job; Troy Dyer (Hawke) having no social safety net, though he's reading Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit / Being and Time (and incidentally, I read the exact same book in 1991, while working a temp job for a non-profit called AIDSTECH).

Technology. Video recording, videotapes: Lelaina is making a documentary about her Generation X friends called Reality Bites. (Blockbuster, RIP). 

Telephony. Landlines, payphones are used by everyone except Michael and his preferred cellphones, one a clunky car phone and the other a smaller Star Trek style device. Lelaina runs up a long distance bill in no time. The scarcity of wireless and digital technology allow several suspenseful plot points that would be harder to pull off in the twenty-first century.  

Coffee and beer seem to be the preferred drinks. Set mostly in Houston, not much is drawn out of the place to distinguish it from any other large American city of the early 1990s, aside from a few cowboy hats. There's a formal yellow taxi -- no Uber, no Lyft. Lelaina's Dad's gas card covers the extra food expenses. Twenty-four years later, Reality Bites still. Only in the digital age, it's all gooder, man!

Today's Rune: Breakthrough. 

The Inferno of Dante (Pinsky Verse Translation): Response II

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky, Bilingual Edition, Illustrated by Michael Mazur with Notes by Nicole Pinsky and Foreword by John Freccero. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994, 1995 printing.

Let's run down a few more touchstones from Dante's Disco Inferno, shall we?

From Canto XIV (page 141): 

". . . All over the sand
Distended flakes of fire drifted from aloft
Slowly as mountain snow without a wind." 

Compare a snippet from the devilish 1969 Stooges song, "I Wanna Be Your Dog:"

"And now I'm ready to close my mind

And now I'm ready to feel your hand
And lose my heart on the burning sand

And now I want to be your dog . . ."

Dante Running from the Three Beasts by William Blake, 1820s

Tales of Brave Ulysses (Odysseus).

Canto XXVI (page 277):  

"You were not born to live as a mere brute does . . .

Turning our stern toward the morning light,
We made wings of our oars, in an insane
Flight . . ." 

Moonlight Mile. 

Canto XXIX (page 305):

"'. . . And already the moon
Is under our feet: the time we are allowed
Has now grown short, and more is to be seen

Than you see here. . .'"

Down in the Bottom / The Wishing Well.

Canto XXXII (page 341):

"It is not jokingly that one begins
To describe the bottom of the universe --
Not a task suited for a tongue that whines

Mamma and Dadda . . ."*

The Cooling Board.

Canto XXXII (page 347):

"'. . . down where the sinners are put
To cool . . .'"

The Stooges, "Real Cool Time" (1969):

"We will have a real cool time tonight,
Tonight . . ."

*"Mamma o babbo" in the original Italian (page 340). Bottom Line: the influence of Dante on fellow artists during the past 700 years is demonstrably effervescent and plentiful.  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

The Inferno of Dante (Pinsky Verse Translation): Response I

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky, Bilingual Edition, Illustrated by Michael Mazur with Notes by Nicole Pinsky and Foreword by John Freccero. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994, 1995 printing.

Dante's Inferno still packs heat 700 years into its publication. A salute to Dante Alighieri (circa 1265-1321) via this lively translation by Robert Pinsky (b. 1940).

A few snippets about Hell and Writing, beginning in Year 1300.

This is pertinent to many a tale, embracing nonfiction and fiction alike:

For my demanding theme so pulls my story,
To multiply the telling would be too little
For the multitude of fact that filled my journey.
(Canto IV, page 43).

Wow. So, Less must be More, More or Less, as so, too, would say the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). One can only provide so many telling details. James Joyce's Ulysses (1918-1922) takes readers on a crazy romp through a single day -- June 16, 1904 -- in a mere 700 pages of text. Even so, there are still gaps. Do these catch Dante's drift?

"Why do you squander?" and "Why do you hoard?" 
(Canto VII, page 67). 

Good question. We do people squander?  Why do people hoard? Human nature, very sinful. Simple as pie or a stye in the eye.

And he said more that I don't remember now --
(Canto IX, page 89).

This nifty statement covers a multitude of sins and omissions, no doubt. Handy at times in writing specifically and throughout life in general.

More to come, or in Dante's words as spoken by Virgil, refashioned by Pinsky,

". . . it pleases me
To go now; for above us in the skies
The Fish are quivering at the horizon's edge,
And the whole Wagon lies over Caurus -- and this,
Farther ahead, is where we descend the ridge." 
(Canto XI, page 115).

In the next post, we'll go deeper. 

Today's Rune: Defense. 

Picasso and Dora: Take I

I love reading about the lives and work of artists. Here's another really good book of this type that I finished reading a few weeks ago: James Lord's Picasso and Dora: A Personal Memoir (New York: Fromm International, 1994; hardback published in 1993). 

Among the many real characters breathed back into life, there are three principals: James Lord (1922-2009), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Dora Maar (1907-1997). Not far behind is Françoise Gilot, who even now in 2015 is still very much alive and kicking at 93 (born November 26, 1921).

Dora Maar, one of Picasso's key -- and romantically doomed -- muses, has some of the best quips and observations in the book.

Of Picasso: "'He doesn't know how to stop making things,' she said. 'It must be terrible for him. Of course, it's terrible for us as well.'" (page 107).

Of Picasso: "'It's simple,' Dora said . . . 'He would submit to anything to be able to keep on painting, and he knows that what matters in the end is not whether people say good things or bad things about you. What matters is to be talked about.'" (page 118).

And: "'I felt so alone I got into a taxi and told the driver to take me out of Paris. The trees were like balloons ready to float up in the sunrise . . ." (page 149). 

Because it's based on Lord's notebooks and scribblings made at the time things were happening, Picasso and Dora has an exceptionally crisp and intimate feel.

(To be continued . . .) 

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express (Take II)

Wong Kar-Wai's 重慶森林  / Chungking Express (1994) has, I can see now, the same elements as many of his later films. There's a keen sense of space and time and opportunity, missed, found or brushing lightly. Everything depends on velocity, or state of mind. Two ships pass at night, sending signals. Or, one ship signals and the other doesn't either receive or understand the messaging until time passes. It's got the stuff of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927). It's got the subversive pizzaz of Jean-Luc Godard. It reminds of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which also came out in 1994, though without the more grotesque elements (i.e. no "bring out the gimp" here). Turns out that Tarantino helped showcase Chungking Express in a video/DVD release. Everything really is connected when it comes down to it.

A month passes; a year passes. How will people communicate down the road? What are tomorrow's possibilities, after yesterday's are finally understood?

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).
    

Wong Kar-Wai: Chungking Express (Take I)

Wong Kar-Wai's 重慶森林 / Chungking Express (1994) tells two obliquely related tales of contemporary Hong Kong. Its style is the quintessence of hip and genuine cool.

Chungking Express stars Brigitte Lynn, Valerie Chow, Takeshi Teneshiro, Faye Wong, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and the Chungking Mansions.    

Every scene in Chungking Express has colorful and memorable imagery.

Today's Rune: Journey. 
   

David France: How to Survive a Plague (Part I)

If, as Frederick Douglass put it in 1857, "power concedes nothing without a demand," David France's How to Survive a Plague (2012) shows an immediate demand -- faster, more effective response to the AIDS crisis, more resources for effective treatment --  via well-organized groups ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and its 1991 spinoff TAG (Treatment Action Group). Much of this compelling documentary covers the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s. In it, one will see not only the rank and file of ACT UP and TAG and their allies, but also buffoonish conservative enemies like North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, and let's not forget the mixed response of Pat Buchanan on Firing Line. Also: see George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Charlie Rose, among many others, drawn into the maelstrom. 

How to Survive a Plague is moving, fast-paced and exhilarating all at once. Fantastic!

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Flight

After the big election, now's the perfect time to see a slew of new movies on the big screen! 

First up: Flight (2012), directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Denzel Washington and filmed in Georgia, USA.  Washington is superb, the movie is sharp and the soundtrack includes songs by John Lee Hooker ("Never Get Out of These Blues Alive") and the Rolling Stones ("Gimme Shelter," "Sympathy for the Devil"). 

Unexpectedly, there are parts of Flight that immediately reminded me of Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) -- and that's a compliment.  

Overall, I liked Flight a lot more than Forrest Gump (1994).

Thanks to his strong but also nuanced performance, Denzel Washington deserves all the nominations for various awards that he'll undoubtedly garner. Let's not forget John Goodman, Don Cheadle and the rest of the film's crew -- all solid.

Official website: http://www.paramount.com/flight/

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

  

Jean-Luc Godard: Notre Musique

Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique (2004) is set in Bosnia-Herzegovina less than ten years after the Bosnian War (1991-1995), a savage conflict involving three main factions: Bosnians, Croatians (Croats) and Serbians (Serbs). Sounds and images of significant contemporary documentary value depict street scenes in Sarajevo and Mostar. Without getting into the film proper (yet), a primary image that leaps out from the film is the functioning electric tram. Here it is so soon after the bloodletting, yet trams are humming along.

I couldn't help but think how Detroit used to have a major streetcar/trolley system and may again; how in Fort Worth, Texas, there is currently a discussion over reinstalling trolleys along 7th Street and other thoroughfares. In 1907, there were sixteen streetcar lines in Fort Worth. Today, Dallas runs trolleycars and other light rail, as do other North American cities such as Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, Mexico City and Toronto.

What does the electric tram represent in Notre Musique? I'm not sure, but it's worth remembering that Orpheus is a tram conductor and the god Hermes runs a tram station in Marcel Camus' Orfeu Negro/Black Orpheus (1959). Perhaps the electric tram represents a hope for the reconstruction of a well-woven social fabric after periods of mass violence and destruction, the kind that makes one think of Syria today, or the Gordian Knot of Israeli-Palestinian relations, which is another key topic in Notre Musique. Or perhaps it's simply making some of notre musique -- "our music."  

Today's Rune: Possessions.         

The Velvet Underground Revolution: Václav Havel, RIP

As of this post, news is rolling in of the death of Kim Jong-il, North Korea's "Supreme Leader" -- a time of peril and, we can hope, opportunity. Time will tell soon enough. Earlier came word of the death of writer Václav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic.

When I was in graduate school at Temple University in Philadelphia, Havel, upon receiving the Liberty Medal, gave an acceptance speech at Independence Hall, where the original American Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. It was a warm day and I had to drag myself over from West Philadelphia in time to hear him speak. He was eloquent and "heavy." Here's a snippet from "The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World," which he delivered in English on July 4, 1994:

It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies -- it must be rooted in self-transcendence:

Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.

Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.

Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction. . .


This speech was given less than five years after Havel became President in the wake of the Velvet Revoluton of 1989. Havel, being an artist as well as politican, was a huge fan of Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and others. From Velvet Underground to Velvet Revolution to Philadelphia Freedom.

We must hope that something as good as Havel's way develops on the Korean penninsula, now or soon.

Today's Rune: The Self.    

Andrei Codrescu: The Disappearance of the Outside

Andrei Codrescu's The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (Ruminator Press, 2001, with new preface; original edition, Addison-Wesley, 1990) does a lot of things at dizzying speed. For one thing, it discusses a lot of literature, particularly Romanian, but also Eastern European in general, and Latin American, with some on North American, too, including from the perspectives of Walt Whitman and William S. Burroughs. There is a lot about Dada, Surrealism and the Beats, about authoritarian society, communist dictatorship and also advertising, technology, propaganda and globalism.

Hopefully, more on this in the future. But in the meantime, one of my favorite lines in this dazzling text is also one of Codrescu's simplest: "Here were books."

This copy signed on March 13, 2002, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That was a real cool time. Anne Waldman was there, too.

I've been co-reading Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space / La poétique de l'espace, translated by Maria Jolas (1994 edition; orginally published in 1958). Right now, it's as if The Poetics of Space is having a conversation with The Disappearance of the Outside -- right down to "the dialectics of inside and outside" (Bachelard, page 84). A nest, a space, a house, a place -- go, dream cats, go!

Today's Rune: Signals.     

Red Rock West

John Dahl's Red Rock West (1992) is a small-scale neo-noir treat featuring two now deceased character actors (J.T. Walsh and Dennis Hopper), plus Nicolas Cage and Lara Flynn Boyle, with small but notable roles by Dwight Yoakam and Timothy Carhart. Stylish and peppered with subtle humor, the film has an almost ancient primal-mythic arc but is set in the centemporary American West. Cage's character Michael, a Marine veteran and survivor of the 1983 Beirut embassy bombing, has a bum leg and a lot of choices to make; Hopper's character, Lyle from Dallas, is also a Marine veteran, but of the Vietnam War era; he has been hired to do something nasty in the town of Red Rock West. Boyle's Suzanne (pictured above) is married to Walsh's Wayne. Besides some mordant quips about marriage, Red Rock West rolls out stylish scenes, twists and turns, the kinds of things Oliver Stone later built upon in making U Turn (1997).  

Dahl's subsequent movie, The Last Seduction (1994), features Linda Fiorentino as one of the most entertainingly conniving femmes fatales I've yet seen on a screen.  More recently, Dahl directed several episodes of True Blood and Dexter.

Today's Rune: Fertility.   

The New Age: A Film by Michael Tolkin

Having already turned out The Rapture (1991), Michael Tolkin's next psycho-social exploration brings us into the realms of inner-outer psychic space via The New Age (1994). Judy Davis and Peter Weller are deftly cast as conspicuous consumers put through their paces when the money runs out in California. Evil indie film -- perceptive, sharp and dark, but also entertaining. Follow your bliss, choose your drum circle, pay for a personal mantra, enter the sweat lodge and remember: "Money isn't money. Money is an expression of something else!"



Today's Rune: Journey.