Ian Lynch's All You Need is Death Soundtrack/Score hasn't left the side of my office turntable since it arrived. This one haunts me on a regular basis. Yesterday, the first song on the second side especially hit me, possibly because it's been a few months since I last watched Paul Duane's fantastic film and the cinematic associations have weakened compared to the mental ones I've made with the music. This gets me thinking about THIS post over on Heaven Is An Incubator. Man, talk about hitting it right on the head.
Watch:
The older you get, the tougher it is to just be a person. I don't mean existing gets more difficult - though our bodies and our society definitely make that the case - I mean just operating inside the framework you've spent your life building out as "you." I've had a tough couple of weeks mentally as my job is absorbed and transmogrified inside a hollow corporate entity, and one of the things that brought me back from an emotional brink is Mke Clattenburg's Trailer Park Boys.
I know, I didn't expect any of this, either.
A lot of the 'healing' I find in this show comes right up front with the opening credits. If a more soothing, peaceful intro than Blain Morris's for TPB exists, I haven't heard it. Twin Peaks would be close, but that also carries with it a sense of foreboding. Morris's is pure grace, and it always brings my heart rate down a couple notches. Maybe this is because it reminds me of the time that I discovered the show, shortly after moving to L.A. in 2006, an era I now look back at forlornly as just before the post-apocalyptic era we live in today began.*
And of course, this theme song is the perfect precursor to whatever idiocy lies in wait on the other side of its final note. These characters are, in my opinion, one of the funniest comedies in existence. There's a lot that's over-the-top, but there's even more nuance that it's taken multiple viewings to catch. Julian's perpetual drink is, to me, Shakespearean in its design and continued execution, as is Ricky's inability to 'use his words' properly.
Don't even get me started on Conky or Sebastian Bach.
*Of course, I recognize that, as a middle-class, white male, the world has been shit for so many other people for so long and that I'm just morning my own personal apocalypse. Doesn't make it hurt any less, though.
Read:
Two chapters into Prof. John Trafton's Movie-Made Los Angeles and I am fascinated. This is easily the most academic long-form piece I've read in a very long time, and while it took my brain a few sittings to adjust, once it clicked, I found myself fascinated by all the behind-the-scenes history of Southern California that those of us boring in the late Twentieth Century take for granted as just always having "been that way." In particular, John's use of the palimpsest metaphor of Southern California in general, and Los Angeles in particular, is so graceful and spot-on that it makes me wonder what other cultural histories we've erased or submerged with modernity.
Movie-Made Los Angeles is published by Wayne State Press. I picked mine up at the wonderful Sky Light Books in L.A.'s Los Feliz neighborhood, but you can order this anywhere you order books. Also, and I've said this before and will no doubt repeat ad infinitum, check out some of John's essays over on his website HERE.
Playlist:
Valkyrie - Fear
The Replacements - Pleased to Meet Me
Barry Adamson - Cut To Black
Ian Lynch - All You Need Is Death OST
The Used - The Ocean of the Sky
OLOMUHD - The Absurd Silence of a Mute World
Deafheaven - Ten Years Gone
Man or Astroman? - Deafcon 5...4...3....2...1
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity
Deafheaven - Sunbather
The Mars Volta - Deloused in the Comatorium
Deafheaven - New Bermuda
Card:
One Card from my original Thoth Deck for today.
Avoiding activity - is this a reference to the fact that it's nearly 100 degrees outside and I feel like doing nothing but reading all day, or is this a reference to me being too lackadaisical about the situation at work?
