Why don't you kill him? Why. He's my friend.

Best of the Decade (dir. Ridley Scott, '13)

I watched this in February, 2014 on a late Sunday night trip while visiting my Dad. We had Chinese food.
Then I went continued onto Savannah.

 It's the director's cut.

Best of the Decade (dir. Greta Gerwig, '17)

this scene should be "crash into me" but it's been taken offline. fine. i teared up during this scene, too.

David Milch's Third Act

At one point, I asked him whether, despite what Alzheimer’s was stealing from him, it had given anything in return. The answer: a continuous sense of urgency.
“There’s an acute sense of time’s passage,” he said. “Things are important. You don’t want to be inconsequential in your perspective on things. I feel that with an increasing acuteness—that everything counts.”
“Do you wake up to that feeling every day?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Milch believes that time is ultimately the subject of every story.

Singer: When you wake up in the morning, is there a process that you’re aware of—an inventorying—that you weren’t experiencing five years ago?
Milch: Absolutely. As I say, it’s a series of takings away. And there’s a subsidiary category of shame, at not being able to do things.
Singer: Why shame?
Milch: It’s self-imposed. More than anything else, one would like to think of oneself as being capable as a human being. The sad truth, imposed with increasing rigor, is you aren’t. You aren’t normal anymore. You’re not capable of thinking in the fashion you would hope to as an artist and as a person. Things as pedestrian as not being able to remember the day. Sometimes where you’ve been. There have been a couple of times when I haven’t been able to remember where I live. And then there are compensatory adjustments that you make in anticipation of those rigors, so that you can conceal the fact of what you can’t do. It’s a constriction that becomes increasingly vicious. And then you go on.
Singer: I’m sitting here listening to you, and you’re describing what you’re describing, and there is to me an immense irony: this is the same mind that I’ve known for as long as I’ve known you.
Milch: That’s a blessing of this conversation, and I’m concentrating and thinking as hard as I can. I’m asking for the grace and dignity of a lucid cogitation. I’m asking of my faculties, such as they are, in whatever diminution they are, to meet you fairly.
I’m different recognizably, unmistakably, from one day to the next. I’m capable of things on one day that are absolutely beyond me. Down to things as rudimentary as sometimes where I live. One tries to adjust to those rigors and disciplines as they reveal themselves, as the day unfolds. At one level—the level of vanity, I suppose—there’s a shame that shows itself as anger, an anger that is quickly internalized as unfair to the disciplines or ambitions of the exchange in which I’m involved at that moment. And I try to adapt to that because it’s a distraction from what the invoked purpose, the proper purpose, of that exchange is. Sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t. At a rudimentary and humiliating level, I’m incapable of lucid discourse. That’s no fun.

I think that is the chief blessing of art, the opportunity to organize one’s behavior around a different reality. It’s a second chance.

Singer: You once told me that you try not to think about writing when you’re not writing. Did that mean that writing was easy for you, and did that change when you were working on this new film?
Milch: It’s not a self-conscious process. I try to think of an interior logic to things. Exploring that interior and kind of walking around inside it. And, for better or worse, finding things as I go, which instruct me how to proceed, so that it’s a kind of exfoliating logic that I’m pursuing. You have to be content when a path that you’re pursuing turns out not to be rewarding. It’s a journey in that sense.

Singer: Right. So, when you talk about loss, sadness, are those sentimental feelings or objective realities?
Milch: Objective realities. There’s increasingly little to hold on to. A kind of relentless deterioration, and that’s disconcerting.
Singer: I’m so sorry this is happening. . . . And, now that I’ve said that, I feel like an idiot. When people tell you they’re sorry, what’s your response?
Milch: “Thank you.” It depends on who I’m talking to and what the ambitions of the conversation are. In a lot of ways, it feels like you’re living a dream, with those relentless aspects.

Milch: The world gets smaller. You’re capable of less work and you have to learn to accept that—that’s a given of the way you have to live. And that’s a sadness. But it’s also true that a focus comes to your behavior which is productive.

Myrtle Beach

Best of the Decade (dir. Richard Linkleater, '16)

My birthday is July 26th this year.

Dome & Musso's on July 26th

I think of it like my memory piece. Alfonso had ROMA and Mexico City, 1970. I had L.A. and 1969. This is me. This is the year that formed me. I was six years old then. This is my world. And this is my love letter to L.A.
--QT from the Cannes red carpet

Cinema

From Scorsese/Hogg conversation

Best of the Decade (dir. Jarmusch, 2014)

"how can you live for so long, and still not get it."

Best of the Decade (Zero Dark Thirty / dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2012)

Frederic Edwin Church's Rainy Season in the Tropics, 1866

aka Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

Thursday Night

Springsteen/Scorsese

“If you’re an artist, the darkness is always more interesting than the light. It’s nice when you let the light in at the end of something, but I was always interested in what were the things that didn’t go right,” Springsteen said. “I had a habit—I would drive back to my hometown and I would do this over and over again and I used to ask myself, ‘what am I coming back here for?’ And I still do it. I’m nearly 70 years old… I don’t know  if you’re going back to fix things that went wrong or so much happened there that informed your work and your life, it still remains a rich location, but I always wanted base the heart of my work in the dark side of things and then you had to earn the light.….The artists that are interesting: You think of Hank Williams or Elvis or Frank Sinatra or Bob Dylan or Marty Scorsese, it’s ‘What’s bothering that guy? ['A lot,’ answered Scorsese, with a laugh]. That’s what keeps us watching. That’s why you can watch Bob DeNiro’s face on the screen for two hours..it never gives up its secrets. I don’t think there’s necessarily an answer, but you do ask question after question in the work that you create and those questions are fascinating and they bring you closer to a certain kind of truth and that’s the best you can do.”

January 2nd, 1970 (Dave's Picks)

Set 1
Mason's Children
Casey Jones
Black Peter*
Mama Tried
Hard to Handle* (Pigpen!)
Cumberland Blues
That's It for the Other One*
Cosmic Charlie

Double Feature: Long Shot (dir. Jonathan Levine) / Avengers: Endgame (dir. Russo Brothers)

i cried. in both. (and during the Blinded By the Light trailer)

notes:
Avengers, despite being on eight screens, was still almost completely filled for a 4pm standard screening. Young children on laps included.
Long Shot also had more people than expected. 60 year old couples, and some scattered thirty-something dudes.

Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, 1948 (Diego Rivera)