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Doug Liman's Swingers (1996), written by (and co-starring) Jon Favreau. Straightforward, low-key and small budget story about a depressed comedian (Mike, Favreau's character) and a couple of his male friends who try to help him rebound after a breakup.
Worth seeing mostly to behold Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston and Heather Graham kicking into gear. (Ron Livingstone currently plays the lead role in Audience's Loudermilk -- second season begins in October). Swingers is set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas with drinking, swing music and dancing as a more immediate backdrop. Matches, anyone?
Lingo from the movie includes: "babies;" "beautiful babies;" "get the digits" (make sure to get her phone number); "it's on" (the game of pitching woo is on); "you're money" (believe in yourself).
Today's Rune: Breakthrough.
I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), director Mary Harron's (b. 1953) first film, centers on Valerie Solanas and her fringe relationship with Warhol. Harron's prior experience as a punk rock journalist probably gave her an insider's perspective -- certainly she recreates the Factory milieu with precision of detail. She orginally envisioned a documentary on Solanas and her infamous works, The SCUM Manifesto, Up Your Ass , and her attempted assassination of French publisher Maurice Girodias (she tried to shoot him at the Hotel Chelsea, but he was out) and Andy Warhol, but after discovering that there wasn't enough archival Solanas footage and few who would speak for her, opted for a dramatic account.
Lili Taylor portrays Solanas as a damaged soul. She's been abused and neglected growing up, and is on her own in the world for the most part, street hustling. But she's smart, and very frustrated. A lesbian turning tricks with men, she is drawn into the Warhol crowd through meeting transvestite Candy Darling (played sympathetically by Stephen Dorff), and tries to interest Andy in her writing. His open door policy lets all sorts of weird people into an already weird Factory scene -- open until she later shoots him, which changes everything.
I Shot Andy Warhol is an interesting exploration of how commercially successful artists and aspiring artists interrelate. Solanas' feminism plays an important role, too -- her SCUM Manifesto cries foul at men and men's power. A la James Brown's 1966 song "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," Solanas believes it, and thinks the world needs a reverse shakeup. Ideally to her, all men should die.
Though demented in many ways, Solanas has a point. Why are there so few high profile women equivalents of Andy Warhol? Indeed, even by 2018, why have there been no women presidents in the USA? Why is such a crude and brutish man the current American president, beloved (and also hated) by millions?
Harron herself, as a woman filmmaker and writer, is rare -- only something like seven percent of directors are women.
The actors put in good performances. Taylor (HBO stalwart on Six Feet Under and The Notorious Betty Page ) is edgy, scary, mouthy and believable. Jared Harris (Mad Men, &c.) plays Warhol with appropriate cool and nervousness. Donovan Leitch (son of the singer) is fun as Gerard Malanga, and Michael Imperioli serves up Warhol's sidekick Ondine with bitchy camp -- and strong hints of his Sopranos' character, Christopher. Mark the scruffy Revolutionary is played by Justin Theroux in his first movie (Joe from Six Feet Under; Mulholland Drive ): it's his Beretta that Solanas uses to shoot Andy.
After I Shot Andy Warhol, Harron went on to write the screenplay for American Psycho (2000), which she also directed. She also worked on HBO's Six Feet Under ("The Rainbow of Her Reasons," 2005) and made The Notorious Betty Page (2005). She did The Anna Nicole Story (2013), too. There is continuity in all of her work so far -- exploration of gender issues, fame and notoriety. All interesting stuff. And unsettling. Some of it's funny, some of it's gravely serious, not unlike Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, with whom she clearly feels an affinity for women and mystery.
Today's Rune: Gateway.
Neil Jordan's Michael Collins gives a good basic overview of events swirling around Michael Collins from the Easter Rising of 1916 through the creation of the Irish Free State and Irish Civil War that ended in 1923. Liam Neeson has the lead role and is well-suited for it. A little less compelling are Julia Roberts as Kitty Kiernan and Aidan Quinn as Harry Boland, while Alan Rickman has to play (thanks to the otherwise serviceable script) Éamon de Valera as a devious weasel. Still, it works, and anyone watching Michael Collins will consider the Republic of Ireland in a fresh way.
This year is the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Here, street art in Cork commemorates "The Birth of Our Nation." The artist is on the right, in the front corner.
In the USA, the word more likely to be used for "centenary" is "centennial." Why the difference? I have no idea, but definitely I like the term "Roadworks" employed in Ireland better than "construction" in the USA, because its meaning is more specific, maybe even more upbeat.
Books on the 1916-2016 centenary are ubiquitous in Ireland this year. Note image of Michael Collins in the upper right corner of this picture, taken in June.
Documents and an image (to the right) of what looks like the 1916 Dublin GPO (General Post Office) in flames, on display in Cork, June 2016.
We were there during the Brexit vote, of which the Republic of Ireland had no part. Indeed, Ireland proper is pro-European Union. Brexit may cause new headaches for Northern Ireland, though. We shall see.
Today's Rune: Defense.
This collection of Asha Bhosle movie tunes is a trip. I can hear South and East Asian elements here and some of Asha Bhosle's vocal style in Vietnamese rock and pop music from the 1960s and 1970s. There are also European, American and Middle Eastern tinges. It's in Hindi but it's global. It's cool.
May take a while for some ears to take in Asha Bohsle's often high-piercing vocals, but above all, she lays down some serious trance music.
Using Google Translate, one can covert Hindi song titles into other languages. Track Number 9 on CD 1, from Hindi into English: "Jaiye aap kahan jayenge" = "Where Will You Go?"
The thirty-one tracks in Asha Bhosle: The Golden Collection (1996) were "arranged by Sanjeev Kohli," according to a note on the back cover of the CD. He was a major music producer and executive at HMV (EMI India) at the time, and a strong promoter of international music. For the record, the back cover also lists RPG, and The Gramophone Company of India. The tracks here range in recording years from 1957 to 1986.
Asha Bhosle (born in 1933) and her big sister Lata Mangeshkar (born in 1929) have both recorded thousands of songs. They are widely known as "playback singers," -- that is to say, actors lip-sync their recorded vocals in movie scenes.
Thank you Asha Bhosle, Sanjeev Kohli, Lata Mangeshkar and India for these tracks. I now pass this anthology forward.
Today's Track: Breakthrough.
Catherine Wheel's Like Cats and Dogs (1996): 77 minutes of trippy Pink Floydesque music parsed into thirteen tracks of various dimensions: ambient, eerie, haunting -- reflected in the front cover of the CD.
Not only does some of Catherine Wheel's music sound like Pink Floyd, but check out track number 2: their own version of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here." Track 13 is "hidden."
Now that I've given this anthology another listen and am posting about it, time to say thanks and let go: "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. . ."
Today's Rune: Possessions.
In 1996, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne delivered La Promesse / The Promise. This film, set in their familiar, deflated industrial city of Seraing, Belgium -- smaller than Flint, Michigan, for comparison -- focuses on a father (Olivier Gourmet) and son (Jérémie Renier), their dodgy migrant worker housing-and-work schemes, and some of the international refugees situated among them. Specifically, though with minimalist style, we get to know more about how things are, and more about three people from Burkino Faso: Assita (Assita Ouedraogo), Amidou (Rasmane Ouedraogo) and their baby.
In La Promesse, father Roger and son Igor have a fraught relationship that goes with the territory. Something's got to give . . .
Assita, Amidou (an unlucky gambler) and their small child.
In La Promesse as elsewhere, the Dardenne Brothers are masters at showing microcosms, situations teetering on the edge of disaster and coursing with moral quandaries. This is strong, laconic independent filmmaking.
A similarly themed but more depressing film (set in Spain and starring Javier Bardem) is Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful (2010), which I also like.
Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).
"What you resist, persists." ~ Attributed to Carl Jung. As noted in the previous post, I've been seeking the origin of this phrase, thought and idea, and have found it in many places, but without further documentation.
Synchronicity -- an idea Jung definitely espoused -- has converged, thanks to: recent conversations; an article I'm writing about Edward William Johnston (1799-1867); and Barry Miles' epic tome, Call Me Burroughs: A Life (New York: Twelve, 2014), which I finished reading a couple of weeks ago.
Johnston, because of his pertinent essay "Genealogy of Ideas” Southern Literary Messenger: Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts. Volume VIII, No. 9 (September 1842): pages 548-555. Richmond, Virginia: T.W. White. Link here. Ideas have a traceable "genealogy," Johnston posits. They rarely appear out of the blue, except for in their first incarnation.
Burroughs, because of his idea of the "word virus:" that words and ideas spread through time and space as a virus.
Which reminds me that Ebola has been around since 1976 -- and was widely covered in the news at the time.
In turn, AIDS is now traced back to the Belgian Congo in the 1920s. (See James Gallaher's "Aids: Origin of pandemic 'was 1920s Kinshasa,'" BBC News (2 October 2014). Link here.
So how about the "resist, persists" quip (and its variations) attributed to Carl Jung? Where can it be traced back to?
In the previous post, I left off with this, from Robert J. and Alex W. Fraser's As Others See Us: Scots of the Seaway Valley (Ontario: Beamsville Express, 1959):
What you resist, Persists
All though [thought] is energy
All things are in Motion
. . . . .
And I earlier noted the widespread use -- either with no attribution or with uncited attribution pointing to Jung -- of this "word virus," especially in the last ten to twenty years.
Here's a latter-day repetition of both elements that occurs after the 1959 book, As Others See Us:
"What you resist, persists." ~ Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1 (Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 1996), page 100.
"1. All thought is energy.
2. All things are in motion.
3. All time is now."
Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 3 (Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 1998), page 114.
Walsch gives no citations.
Which leads me to believe, for now, that all three of these texts are drawing from older sources, perhaps via back channels, such as ideas from earlier "New Thought" and "Power of Positive Thinking" texts. In other words, these same words are used in the same order, but neither As Others See Us (1959) nor Conversations with God (1996, 1998) are their originators, rather they are transmitters, "infected" by earlier "carriers" of statements they spell out verbatim.
The true origins of these statements will either eventually come to light, or they will remain hidden in mystery. Digitization of older texts will continue to be useful in figuring out these kinds of genealogies of ideas and word viruses -- helping us "get to the bottom of things."
Today's Rune: Flow. Illustration at top from Thought-forms by Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1905).
Even a few minutes of Jean-Luc Godard's For Ever Mozart (1996) would probably scare most people off. Maybe even more so than "actual" archival footage of the Bosnian War (1992-1995) or the current Syrian Civil War, or fighting in Sudan and South Sudan, or in Kenya, or Iraq.
Art collides with killing. We know what killing is, but what exactly is art? What does it do? What makes it different? What difference does it make? Is it entertainment, or remembrance, or bearing witness, or something both grounded and transcendent to either, or both, the creator and the beholder? You tell me. Godard asks the questions. Sort of. Maybe. (Does he? What about his answers? Are they provisional?) Does "the average person" care about Bosnia, or Syria, or art? And if not, why not? And if so, why?
Then there's linear time. And looping time. I was intrigued on first look during For Ever Mozart -- which for the most part felt maddening, like a special remix of Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963) and Week-end (1967) in part with dashes of the future-made Notre Musique (2004) -- about an explicit statement illuminating the Bosnian War (and other related post-Yugoslavian slaughter of fellow Europeans) as being the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, a prequel to what followed (World War II).
As if time is in a reverse loop, with Bosnia first, then Spain, and then WW2. Strange. But true enough, I suppose.
Maybe we are all The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) -- even though I haven't seen that particular movie version of time yet (nor earlier nor later nor evermore). I have seen Michel Gondry's (and Charlie Kaufman's) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which may bring up similar musings on time and memory and desire. Can you dig? Could you then or now or in the future? If not, forget all that is here. Maybe the next post will be more spot on, or spotless, or equally spotty. Who can tell until it's done?
Today's Rune: Signals.
Digging the descriptive texture of Jay Bremyer's The Dance of Created Lights: A Sufi Tale (1996). The weird thing is: where did I pick this up? When? Why? Furthermore: did I? Must have been serendipity. Synchronicity. Kismet. A dream made real.
Set in Córdoba, the novel gives a tantalizing glimpse into another world, a shimmering one so intimate and present yet also distant.
As Bremyer notes in his preface: "Here the kingdom of al-Andalus had become, by the tenth century [A.D. or C.E.], one of the greatest kingdoms in the world, strong enough to host and protect scholars, musicians, poets, physicians, scientists, theologians, philosophers, and heretics of all persuasions. . ." (page 9). Amen to that.
Today's Rune: Partnership.
