One and a half years ago I sat in a movie theatre in the South Suburbs of Chicago and took a killing blow to my nostalgia-based love of Star Wars. Today, watching the trailer Lucasfilm released for The Mandalorian, I feel that love intensley rekindled. Not rekindled in a capacity that will see me paying ~$20 for the next installment of the film franchise, but in a way that does what this new series was quite transparently made to do: reach back into my nostalgia bunker and pull out a big ol' pile of my childhood guts. I count quite a few checks in boxes I'd forgotten I have:
Boba Fett (in visage if not character, which in my opinion, is a fucking brilliant way to fan service us without a retcon that resurrects the ill-fated bounty hunter).
IG-88. Kicking ass and taking names, no less.
That squid-faced guy from Jedi.
Cantinas filled with wretch scum and unabashed villainy.
Oh yeah, and then there's the fact that Werner Herzog plays a heavy. Herzog and Star Wars? Talk about two things I never knew I wanted before seeing them with my own two eyes.
So yes, I will definitely be on board with the Disney steaming app for this one. No doubt. And I can appreciate my rabid fervor as nothing short of nostalgia - I'm fine with that.
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Today is day number 2 of Dead Milkmen Appreciation Week here on my page. For today's entry, I went with something newer - Fauxhemia, the second track from 2011's The King in Yellow. Once again, the Milkmen totally nail relatable lyrics. The entire album is quite adroit at that - surely one of the Milkmen's greatest strengths. What's more, this album really excels at striking a track-by-track synthesis of the two main song archetypes the band's songwriting typically manifests, which I'll trace all the way back to their 1985 debut Big Lizard in My Backyard (long my favorite by the band) to define: there's the biting, often hysterical social commentary in tracks such as Violent School and Right Wing Pigeons, and the more straight-forward, emotionally melodic numbers like Tugena. And the synthesis really works, perhaps on no song better than this one. In my head, when the "Your 300 lb Psychic Baby..." line comes up in the chorus, I immediately picture the cover of Big Lizard, except with the giant lizard replaced by a giant, fat baby, and it always makes me laugh.
**
Playlist from 8/23:
The Dead Milkmen - The King in Yellow
Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
Mötley Crüe - Shout at the Devil
The National - High Violet
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - The Night Creeper
Alabama Shakes - Sound and Color
The Dead Milkmen - Big Lizard in My Backyard
Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
Jenny Lewis - The Voyager
INXS - Kick
**
Today's spread:
Something I'm working on isn't working, I'm trying to force the issue, and that's not going to work. So the question then, is what do I need to re-think? I think there's an underlying current here of anxiety concerning Ciazarn, because Grimm and I are attempting to get this up on its feet by September. That feels like I'm trying to force that deadline, and I think this spread is telling me what I already know: push it back.
Spending my morning with Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, aka Fitzcarraldo. This is one of the most impressive motion pictures ever made. Period. I'm planning on following up the film with a viewing of Les Blank/Michael Goodwin's The Burden of Dreams, the documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo. If you've never seen these films, what's so amazing is this: in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, the titular character, as played by the always brilliant Klaus Kinski, is a would-be entrepreneur in the early 20th Century Amazon with one great dream in life: to build an Opera house in Iquitos, a small city in the jungle. To fund this, Fitz's plan is to become a Rubber Baron by exploiting the one region of rubber trees still unclaimed in the area - unclaimed because the rapids in the Ucayali River that leads from the Amazon directly to the region are unnavigable. But Fitz has a plan.
The Plan: To sail upstream on the neighboring Pachitea River, then pull the boat over the narrow strip of land that separates it from the Ucayali. From there, Fitz reasons they can sail down the Ucayali into the region of rubber trees, gather his workers' yield, and haul it back up to the crossover point, it's just a matter of short trips for his steamer up the Ucayali, and the work of transporting his crop back across to the Pachitea.
But, you know, first they have to actually pull a streamliner over a mountain.
So how do you film that? Well, you have to actually do all of it. As in, Herzog had to actually pull the steamer over the land, which required blasting. The Burden of Dreams chronicles the reality of a filmmaker willing to do the same fantastic feat he requires of his fictional character. It is massive, awe-inspiring, and the very best kind of creative insanity, to say the very least.
Playlist from 2/14:
Pink Floyd - Animals
Corrosion of Conformity - No Cross No Crown
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
The Pack A.D. - Unpersons
Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland
Mike Patton - Mondo Cane
Card of the day:
Seems to line up with my viewing this afternoon. Something this inspirational will usually help charge the batteries right before a new endeavor.
Well, it's been a few days. In fact, the interim between today's post and my previous one on Sunday is the longest I've gone without posting since I began the new format of this page shortly into 2018. This plague I have is no joke, and to top it off we're short at work, so I've had to go in the last few mornings. It's been half-sick days all week, which isn't bad, but half measures apparently are not going to give me the rest I need to beat this, so today I am just off, period.
I'm starting the day re-watching the above Emma Ruth Rundle documentary that Sargent Housedropped last week; makes me want to move back to the Midwest, if I'm being truthful. Although, if I'm being honest, many fleeting glances into other people's lives inspire that reaction in me; from visits home, to contemplation of friends who have beautiful homes and pay less in monthly mortgage payments by half than I pay to rent a small two-bedroom, to the idea of thunderstorms owning an entire season. The early scenes in this doc, those with everyone in the bar, even just the shot of the street outside the bar for that matter because there aren't bars in LA like that, these scenes make me homesick. Then again, I remind myself, it's only one aspect of myself that pines for these things, and as green as the faraway grass of Chicago, or Dayton, or Louisville looks from here in Los Angeles, I'm well aware I have a pretty awesome life set up here. Cost of living is a big check in the CON column, but there's a lot of PROs as well. This is the mental and emotional cost of daily life: the balancing act between all the wants and needs inside us. And I do a pretty good job, for the most part.
This doc also made me remember how much I like Young Widows. Been a while; you'll notice they begin to populate my daily listening again below.
**
Here's a shocker I just found out yesterday because I don't pay any attention to music award shows: High on Fire won a Grammy on Sunday. Holy shit; hell hath frozen over. And as much as I hate to solicit for a paradigm I detest, here's their acceptance footage, because even after watching it twice, I still can't believe it. That said, I feel like this is an Oscars-like, making-up-for-lost-time awarding, because although I dig Electric Messiah, I feel as though the band's truly groundbreaking and undeniable work is well behind them. Still, who'd have thought, eh? Better late than never...
Having now crested the half-way point in Ramsey Campbell's Alone with the Horrors, I've returned it to the shelf and decided to re-read a few of the stories in Thomas Ligotti's debut collections Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe. There's a definite pedigree here; Ligotti is clearly influenced by Campbell, although not in an overly direct way. But there are some aesthetic through-lines I am interested in exploring here, and I'm enjoying this strange little path I've discovered for myself through some of the foundations of short-form modern Weird/Horror. It's definitely helping me understand tone and craft better.
I've watched quite a bit during my sick time. First up, Anthony from The Horror Vision recently gifted me a copy of Scream Factory's Scream Queens Double Feature: John Carpenter's The Fog, and Joe Dante's The Howling. It'd been a couple years since I'd seen The Howling, and I was curious to see the difference the transfer would make, so before watching it I did a quick A/B with my old DVD copy.
Wow. Folks, this is dangerous. Having only recently been converted to the merit of upgrading to Blu Ray - because I refuse to rebuy my collection on another format - I have to say, the difference is huge. So I watched The Howling and was enraptured by the clarity. I also did some reading about transfer technology and what not (Blu-Ray.com is a near limitless source for that), and I have to say, I won't be replacing everything, but some films for sure. Army of Darkness for instance, or at least the DVD copy I have of the Director's Cut, is a laughable transfer; seriously, this was one of the first films I noticed issues on, two years ago when I excitedly sat down to show K the original Evil Dead trilogy. We made it to the third installment and I realized the picture was so bad it looked like we were watching the film on a crappy old tv in 1978 during an electrical storm. I mean, it's garbage.
Army of Darkness isn't a film I can't live without; it's easily my least favorite of all Ash Williams vehicles, but it's an iconic gem and one I want in my collection. But not this terrible transfer. Because, the idea isn't about constantly upgrading and rebuying, it's about Film Preservation. And while I'm not sure if I have to nitpick over the differences between the $10 AOD Blu Ray that Scream Factory released and the $30 one, having all three versions of the film is important to me, so it's going to have to be the $30. But that purchase is down the road, perhaps when one of SF's sales comes up. I'm still trying like hell to save money, and doing a fairly good job doing it, which is precisely why all the information available about transfers and clarity is, as I said at the outset, dangerous.
After The Howling, I changed pace and watched Jim Jarmusch's Paterson. Wow. One of the best films I've seen in a while, and one of my favorite of Jarmusch's to date; he has such a sense of forgiveness, community, and humanity that comes through in his work, that I feel like this film actually helped heal some black, sticky stuff that was left inside me after a falling out I had back in August last year. So good. I'm not posting a trailer, because there's no way a trailer could tell you anything about this film. Just watch it; Paterson is an Amazon-funded film, and thus available on Prime for free.
Next, I finally got around to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: The Vampyre. I don't always understand or gel with Herzog's style, but he has such a knack for balancing pragmatism with artistic flourish that I always enjoy his films, even if only after they've ended and I'm re-thinking them. That might be the case here. Let's stick with the poster thing, I'm starting to hate trailers:
Finally, with all these long stretches of time on my hands, I thought I'd get around to one of the longer flicks that has been on my list forever, namely, Derek Cianfrance's 2012 MASTERPIECE, The Place Beyond the Pines. This film was enormous to me; a familial crime epic that blew me away and capped my cinema for the day yesterday because, how the hell do you follow something that BIG? And hell, Mike Patton does the score, and I can say this not just as a fan of his but as a fan of cinema scores: fantastically done, Mr. Patton.
Playlists have been tiny, so instead of doing a day-by-day, I'm summate thusly:
Playlist from Sunday, 2/10-Tuesday, 2/12:
SQÜRL - Paterson OST
David Zinman, Dawn Upshaw & London Sinfonietta - Gorecki: Symphony #3, Op 36 "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs": I. Lento - Sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile
Young Widows - Settle Down City
Young Widows - Old Wounds
Talking Heads - Remain in Light
Windhand - Eternal Return
Morphine - The Night
Secret Chiefs 3 Traditionalists - Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini
Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch - An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil
John Carpenter - Lost Themes
Card of the day:
I'm hoping this is a reminder of the past few days, and not a harbinger of more oppressive illness to come.
