i came home to bury my dad...and, i don't know when.  

 

Barry Lyndon ('75)

Scorsese (thoughts on the film circa '01)

I'm not sure if I can say that I have a favorite Kubrick picture, but somehow I keep coming back to Barry Lyndon. I think that's because it's such a profoundly emotional experience. The emotion is conveyed through the movement of the camera, the slowness of the pace, the way the characters move in relation to their surroundings. People didn't get it when it came out. Many still don't.

Basically, in one exquisitely beautiful image after another, you're watching the progress of a man as he moves from the purest innocence to the coldest sophistication, ending in absolute bitterness - and it's all a matter of simple, elemental survival. It's a terrifying film because all the candlelit beauty is nothing but a veil over the worst cruelty. But it's real cruelty, the kind you see every day in polite society.

His audacity is to insist on slowness in order to recreate the pace of life, and to ritualize behavior of the time. A great example is the seduction scene, which he stretches until it settles into a sort of trance, what always struck me is the ballet of emotions of the film, watch the tension between the camera's movements and the characters body language orchestrated by the music in the scene. 

tuesday (in the midwest in july)

are past and gone

For reasons better discussed in the history books, in the Spring of 2020 Gillian and I dusted off an old tape machine and did some home recording. Sometimes we bumped the microphone, sometimes the tape ran out, but in the end we captured performances of some songs we love. Five are first takes and five took a little more doing, but they all helped pass the time and held our interest in playback enough that we wanted to share them with you. We sincerely hope that you enjoy

ALL THE GOOD TIMES

 - David & Gillian

sunday morning #july5th #covid #rebirth

Los Angeles, 2020

a covid 4th of july. american pent up energy, frustration & spirit.

st. louis (one sheet)...the park closes at dusk

Thomas Hart Benton

Dave Chapelle as Poet Laureate #june #covid #2020

Double Feature #covid

Red Beard (1965) #quarantine

the super duper missile #covfefe

#winning #somuchwinning and #tigersblood

Homegrown

I apologize. This album Homegrown should have been there for you a couple of years after Harvest. It’s the sad side of a love affair. The damage done. The heartache. I just couldn’t listen to it. I wanted to move on. So I kept it to myself, hidden away in the vault, on the shelf, in the back of my mind….but I should have shared it. It’s actually beautiful. That’s why I made it in the first place. Sometimes life hurts. You know what I mean. This is the one that got away.
Recorded in analog in 1974 and early 1975 from the original master tapes and restored with love and care by John Hanlon. Levon Helm is drumming on some tracks, Karl T Himmel on others, Emmylou Harris singing on one Homegrown contains a narration, several acoustic solo songs never even published or heard until this release and some great songs played with a great band of my friends, including Ben Keith – steel and slide – Tim Drummond – bass and Stan Szelest – piano. Anyway, it’s coming your way in 2020, the first release from our archive in the new decade. Come with us into 2020 as we bring the past.

Mann in Quarantine

I had shot about a third of Tokyo Vice pilot in Tokyo when we stopped production and everybody returned to the States around March 18-19. It was a shock to return to LAX, because probably 70 percent of the people on the street in Tokyo were wearing masks. At LAX, nobody had gloves, nobody had masks - nobody at immigration, or customs, or the Coffee Bean. It was crazy. 

I routinely talk to a lot of other filmmakers - like Guillermo del Tor, or David O. Russell, or Alejandro in Mexico City - about when we can start shooting again, what’s going on. Everybody’s getting in touch with people they haven’t talked to for a while, or people they talk to frequently. I know what Daniel Day Lewis is doing in Connecticut. 

I go out early in the morning, and we make runs to the grocery store. The mood seems wary. There’s slightly more traffic than there was a week ago. I haven’t been home this much during the day and night for a long time. It’s pretty great that my wife and I get to spend a lot of time together. She’s an artist. She spends her time in the studio painting, or sewing masks and baby clothes. We’ve been together for a long time, and I think it’s in crises like this that the nature of a marriage manifests itself - in the outcome of an enforced period of time inside the house together. Our family gets together on Zoom. We’ve got three grandchildren. My daughter Ami was shooting a two-hour pilot in Spain. She got out on the last plane, and she self-quarantined. 

There’s been a lot of consuming of media, and staying up very late. I sense that the inventory of current programming is going to get depleted. I’ve been reading a lot of books, particularly John le Carre. I read After Dark by Murakami. The Ballad of a Small Player by Larry Osborne. In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes. A bio on Miles Davis. I also started getting serious about going back and looking at some great films, like That Obscure Object of Desire, and The Phantom of Liberty by Buñel, and Hiroshima Mon Amour by Resnais. And Asphalt Jungle by John Huston and Out of the Past by Jacques Tourneur. 

Also watched the insanely great episode five of season three of Amy Sherman Palladino’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, with the spectacular Cuban night musical club sequence - one of the best in cinema. I watched Fauda, and all of My Brilliant Friend, the best series on TV, down to background color of the end credits and Max Richter’s score. I also binged Jason Bateman and Andrew Bernstein’s Ozark.

The news is unwatchable. Totally unwatchable. But you’re sucked into it anyway. The self-serving sociopathy of Trump is in such stunning display. There’s a complete disregard for the fate of the working class, lower-middle-class people living in circumstances of close proximity, who are looking at dwindling supplies of food, dwindling opportunities for medical care, dwindling opportunities for employment. There’s not the least concern for any of their well-being from Trump and his entire administration, who would just throw them on the fire if it meant a small increase in poll numbers for his prospects in November.  What’s stunning is the transparency of that, the lack of any pretense. He’ll say anything at all - ‘People should get UV light inside of them,’ and ‘maybe take IV Lysol’ - if it gets the stock market rising. Historically, you look at 1930s Germany and wonder how public institutions and people can behave in that manner, and you need someone like Hannah Arendt to do meaningful analysis. And yet here we are in the middle of it, living through a different version of the same thing. 

My hope is that the underlying anger is so extreme and underestimated that the amount of people who come out to vote for Biden, or basically to vote against Trump, is a tidal wave. That there is an underestimation of the amount of anger out there. True was never very effective as an executive of any endeavor. When he got elected, I thought that the silver lining in a really bad situation was that he’s a terrible executive - a wily conman, but a terrible executive - and that he may not be that good at actually being a politician. But he’s clever and smart at how he manipulates the instruments right at his fingertips. It’s a real bizarre time.

I think that there is no playbook for what’s coming next. No matter how things go back together, life is not going to be the same. When was the last time the entire globe was living spontaneously? Where everybody was conscious of the circumstances affecting everybody on the planet, more or less at the same time? The answer is never. The closest you get is 1968…

The difference right now is that it’s all happening in real time. It’s like a science-fiction movie, you know, where there’s a threat to Planet Vega! You get to Planet Vega, and everybody there is all tuned in to the same channel simultaneously. Well, that’s us now; we’re all on the same channel simultaneously. Everybody all over the planet, whether they’re in Mozambique or Thailand or Taiwan or Detroit, is dealing with the same thing simultaneously and everything is totally interconnected. That’s never happened before. 

The Bewitched Mill (Franz Marc, 1913)

HyperNormalisation - Adam Curtis #covid19 #quarantine

HyperNormalisation is a word that was coined by a brilliant Russain historian who was writing about what it was like to live in the last years of the Soviet Union. What he said, which I thought was absolutely fascinating, was that in the 80s everyone from the top to the bottom of Soviet society knew it wasn't working, knew that it was corrupt, knew that the bosses were looting the system, knew that the politicians had no alternative vision. And they knew that the bosses knew they knew that. Everyone knew it was fake, but because no had any alternative vision for a different kind of society, they just accepted this sense of total fairness as normal. And this historian, Alexei Yurchak, coined the phrase "HyperNormalisation" to describe that feeling.

I thought "that's a brilliant title" because, although we are not in any way really like the Soviet Union, there is a similar feeling in our present day. Everyone in my country and in America and throughout Europe knows that the system that they are living under isn't working as it is supposed to; that there is a lot of corruption at the top. But whenever the journalists point it out, everyone goes "Wow that's terrible!" and then nothing happens the system remains the same.

There is a sense of everything being slightly unreal; that you fight a war that seems to cost you nothing and it has no consequences at home; that money seems to grow on trees; that goods come from China and don't seem to cost you anything; that phones make you feel liberated but that maybe they're manipulating you but you're not quite sure. It's all slightly odd and slightly corrupt.

Tree of Paradise (Séraphine Louis, 1928)

David Lemieux on Jai Alai Fronton, 6.23.74

To my ears, the best Dead shows are those that not only fit the criteria that make them amongst the best of a year, but that are also completely unique for their era - - shows that fit perfectly into their year of performance, but also fall somewhat outside of the norm for that year. Harpur College, Veneta, Cornell, Cape Cod, and Augusta are all shows that are objectively excellent, and if they are not the best from their respective years of performance, they are certainly unique. Miami 6/23/74 falls into that category: not only one of the very best shows this outstanding year, but also one of the most interesting and unique. It's certainly worthy  of many, many deep listens.

(**I'd add Orpheum 7.17.76 onto this list)

The Overstory #april20th #covid19

April 20th #covid19

6:34pm

Throne of Blood (1957)

Almodovar in Quarantine Pt. 3

These last few days I've woken up lacking energy. It seems the confinement will stay in place for several more weeks. The novelty feeling of the first few days, where one would experience new sensations, has already disappeared. I suppose that is one of the dangers, to give yourself to routine as  one day follows another, and so on. 

American Dharma (dir. Errol Morris) #covid #quarantine

I believe that you need some fairly radical restructuring of this, and rethinking of this.

The permanent political class that controls our country is going to stay exactly like it is, until you have true disruption. 

It’s a tough story to tell…The West Point girls’ volleyball team was going to get new uniforms, and they bring the uniforms in boxes off to the side, and the girls are practicin’ in this huge old dirigible hangar, where the volleyball team plays — from the 1920s. Looking at this, looking at the West Point girls, and I look over at the boxes. I just kind of go over and look at the new uniforms. They’re sealed. ‘Made in Vietnam.’ ‘Made in Vietnam.’ I lost it. ‘Made in Vietnam.’ Fifty thousand dead, you know, a hundred thousand wounded, families torn apart, the whole of Southeast Asia, what, 10, 20, 30 million people murdered? Right? What was it all for? What was Monaghan’s kid, what was that for? ‘Made in Vietnam.’ 

With all the jobs lost to globalization. It was an incredibly clarifying moment for me.

It wasn’t the common man that got us into WW I, and in WW II, and in Vietnam, and all the other wars that have been fought. It’s Monaghan’s son that’s always the recipient of all that crap. When you say, these ‘nation states,’ it’s the elites that got us into that mess, and then they came up with some sort of supranational apparatus that’s gonna take care of it. I disagree 100%. They are the ones that drove the destruction of the 20th century. 

Morris: What good does it do to allow corporations to pollute the environment? Is this populism? Or is this something much uglier?

Bannon: Uglier being what?

Morris: Serving big business and the rich. It’s anti-populism. That’s what bothers me. That’s what makes me think you’re crazy. 

Bannon: And why?

Morris: Why? Because I think there’s an inherent contradiction in the views that you hold.

If [Hillary Clinton’s] going to preach identity politics, and we preach populism and jobs and bringing manufacturing jobs back, we got it. For all their brilliance and all their money and all their professionalism, they don’t have an understanding of what this election’s about, and that’s when I knew we had her. 

The 16 candidates the Republicans had, all of them combined, could not have beaten Hillary Clinton. It took a blunt force instrument. He understands that the modern world, particularly the modern political world, has become media. The medium is the message and he understands that. That’s why he can speak in a very plainspoken vernacular, not in political speak. He’s an armor-piercing shell. From the first day he came on the campaign in June of 2015 until today, the news cycle’s Trump.  

[Trump] actually said, ‘I thought it’d be different. I thought the NY Times would be wishing me well and everything like that.’ And I said, ‘You do understand they hate you. They literally detest you. Everything you ran on, everything you stand for…everything you won on. And the people that support you they detest. This is gonna be trench warfare every day.’ And by the way, I’m the enabler and I take great pride in it, that just, ‘Here’s what we ran on, here’s what we said we’re gonna do. Let’s just do it. You’re not a politician. You’re a leader. Don’t act like a politician. Just do it. Build the wall. Eradicate ISIS, right? Get manufacturing jobs back here. Confront China. Get us out of Afghanistan. Get us out of Iraq. Just do what you said you’re gonna do. 

What Have I Done? (Col. Nicholson from The Bridge on the River Kwai)

Paths of Glory is based upon the beginnings of the mutiny, when the French soldiers said, ‘We’re not going to do this anymore.’ They couldn’t take being treated like animals. That’s the Deplorables right there. The officers and the politicians are all in these chateaus. They’re having balls — It’s the Deplorables that are in the trenches. I’d like to have those guys in the trenches make decisions. But that’s the problem, it’s the elites making the decisions. Think of all the bad decisions that have been made on globalism by this kind of scientific engineering-managerial-financial elite. Look at where the country is. Look at where working class people are. Look where the middle class is, particularly from the financial crisis. People have been getting fucked. We have a consolidation of power. We have a consolidation of wealth. You have to tell the establishment, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ You just have to. What the little guy wants is to fuck you to the establishment. I’m on a mission to try to remake the Republican Party into more of a workers’ party. 

You may be better fed, better clothed, in better shape than 18th century Russian serfs, but you’re nothing but serfs. You’re not gonna own anything. They’ve got you in this consumer environment where you’re always paying off your credit cards. They’ve destroyed thrifts, so you can’t save anything. Saving doesn’t make any difference. And then digitally they’ve taken all your rights, they’ve taken all your personhood, and they’ve written these algorithms that treat you like — like a hamster.  

You’re totally controlled, absolutely totally controlled. You can’t fulfill your destiny. You can’t fulfill your dharma. You can’t do it. You’re nothing but a serf. You voted for that (i.e.Hillary)…There’s going to be a revolution in this country. It’s coming. We can’t kick the can down the road like this. We can’t. We’re gonna have another financial crisis, that everybody that’s smart sees is coming. 

A complete rejection of the system. It is coming. 

Almodovar in Quarantine Pt. 2

That night, I knew I was going to try to go out the following day; I felt as if I was going to commit a premeditated crime. As if giving yourself to a forbidden pleasure and you cannot do anything to avoid it. So that Tuesday morning I got dressed to go out and I felt like I was doing something exceptional: dressing! It's been 17 days since I last did it, and I've always experienced getting dressed as something intimate and very special.

The morning after the ceremony, I received a phone call at the hotel, a woman's voice. She tells me, as if she were not conscious of its impact, but confident that her voice was going to have an impact on me: 'Hello, it's Madonna, I'm filming Dick Tracy and I would love to show you the set. I'm not filming today and I can dedicate the day to you.'

Almodovar in Quarantine

Today is my 11th day in isolation; I started on Friday 13th March. Since then I organize myself in order to face up to the night, the darkness, because I live as if I were in the wild, following the rhythm marked by the light coming through the windows and the balcony. It's spring and the weather is truly spring-like! It is one of those wonderful everyday feelings, something I'd forgotten existed. Daylight and its wide-ranging voyage till night-time. The long journey to the night, not as something terrible, but joyful instead.

The good thing about not having a timetable during the confinement is that rushing disappears. 

Do You Consider Writing to be Therapeutic? by Andrew Grace

After my father died
I should have gone to therapy.
I tried instead to solve my grief
with alcohol and poems.
Now I am almost 40
and all I can tell you about grief
is that when I found my father
on the floor of the machine shed
the radio was on and wind
pushed against corrugated metal.
Of course I still hear it.
I should have talked
to someone before now
and not you. Poetry is not talking.
This is just art
and therefore could never
cover my ears when I, suddenly,
am back in the shed
and I learn again that my father
has died every day
since he died.

For Dad (April 9, 2020)

80/20

Narrator: 

On Wednesday, September 28th, 1960, at Fenway Park in Boston, forty-two year old Ted Williams — the last man to hit .400 — came to bat for the last time in his career.

Injuries the season before had brought his batting average below .300 for the first time, and he had felt so bad about it that he had volunteered for a cut in pay. 

Despite steady pain from a pinched nerve in his neck, he had brought his average back up again to .316 in 1960, and despite having missed four seasons in the military, had a lifetime total of 520 home runs and had compiled the highest career batting average since Rogers Hornsby — .344. 

Now he had finally had enough. 10,454 loyal fans came out to say goodbye.

Ted Williams:

Lousy day — damp, drizzly, heavy. And I hit two balls that I think some days would have gone out for sure, but this day they didn’t, caught ‘em up against the fence. 

But the last time up, I got the count 2-0 on Fisher, and I missed a ball…I don’t know yet how I missed that ball. And I know he thought he threw it by me, he thought he threw it by me. And he couldn’t wait now, there is an experience thought there, because I could just sense he said, “Gee, give me that ball, I’ll throw another one by him.” And I could just see all of that developing in his own mind.

Sure enough, he came back with the same pitch, and I hit it good, and it went for a home run, which is kind of a storybook finish. 

Narrator:

Williams hit it into the Red Sox bullpen scattering his teammates. Then he circled the bases for the last time. His long career of feuding with the fans and the press was over. Some hoped he might finally tip his cap, something he had not done since his rookie year. 

Ted Williams:

I just — I just couldn’t do it. I even thought about it going around the bases knowing this is my last time there, but… It was 80/20 of not doing it. There was just a little thought.

Narrator:

“I had a really warm feeling,” he said later, “but it just wouldn’t have been me.” 

Bob Costas:

For my money, Ted Williams is the greatest hitter of all time. I’d take him over Ruth. I’d take him over Cobb. I’d take him over Cobb because of the combination of power and average. I’d take him over Ruth because with Ruth you can only speculate about what he would have done in the modern era. Ted Williams hit .388 at the age of thirty nine in 1957. 

He was what few of us ever become. He was exactly what he set out to be. He said he wanted to be able to walk down the street some day and have people say, “There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.” 

And if they don’t say that, it’s only because they don’t know what they’re talking about. 

china, covid bureaucratic/political failures, radical reconstruction, aldo raine, and kayfabe

•who are the "break glass in case of emergency" people
•the gated institutional narrative //the guy who is willing to dance with them who is joe biden//"steady hands"//legacy media
•the rebel end of corporate, the corporate end of rebel - lt. aldo raine is this interface between regular army and the psychotic jews who'll kill nazis. you need people who'll interface between the bad boys and the regular units. important nexus, rebel end of corporate//kayfabe (carnival speak for fake)

dispatch from dr. mert erogul (brooklyn's maimonides medical center)

So today in the middle of all the madness there was a one hundred year old Hasidic lady with Covid pneumonia and I was desperate to send her home so she wouldn't die in the hospital, but she dropped her blood pressure and we had to keep her. And then for an hour her son kept calling me to find out how she was and I finally told him look, she's a hundred years old with pneumonia in both lungs. She's not good. She's not going to do well. And then he wanted to talk to her and I said you can't, I'm too busy, and he called back ten minutes later and I said, listen sir, your mother is not conscious anymore. And he said that's okay, it's very important that I do a prayer for her, could you hold the speaker to her ear. I had ten other pressing things to do. But I stopped what I was doing out of respect for this 100 year old woman and put the cell on speakerphone and told him to talk. He started the prayer of the dead and he began to cry and could barely get the words out. And I saw she had numbers tattooed on her arm. He was crying for his mother and praying the schema, the verses of unity and it woke up some emotion in me that I had forgotten about. Time slowed down and I felt restored to myself. When he was done he thanked me and blessed me and I said thank you to him.

Drive-in #covid19

the road to where i was not yet (Ольга Кваша, 2017)

Hans Herr House (Andrew Wyeth, 1949)

Woke up in the 4am hour...

Early Spring - New Hope (Daniel Garber, American 1880-1958)

Vertiefte regung (Deepened impulse) (Kandinsky, Feb. 1928)

'‘Do remember they can’t cancel the spring’ (David Hockney, Normandy)

Sky Above Clouds IV (Georgia O'Keefe)

Happy Anniversary 2.24.74 / Twin Peaks Day

Joe Rogan Podcast with Dr. Rhonda Patrick (from 2017)

sunday afternoon (february)

Saturday (February)

Ben Affleck

"People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time that they're trying to make go away. You're trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can't break. That's at least what happened to me."

Charles Portis (and thinking of Ronald, Andy's Cousin)

I'm really looking forward to reading this and knowing that it exists, The Dog of the South (1979)

From The New Yorker "What Charles Portis Taught Us" by Wells Tower postscript

In part, I love Portis because I feel less mean when I read him. It's not just that his novels are gentle and funny; it's that Portis's books have a way of conscripting the reader into their governing virtues - punctuality, automotive maintenance, straight talk, emotional continence. Puny virtues, as Portis himself once put it, yet it is a great and comforting gift (in these days especially) to offer readers escape into a place where such virtues reign.
It's hard to know whether Portis's work ushered much comfort into his own life. My sense is that he was lonely. I imagine he had a fair bit in common with Jimmy Burns, described in 'Gringos' as a "hard worker," "solitary as a snake," and, yes, "punctual." Portis never married and had no children. He never published another novel after 'Gringos,' from 1991.

Thelma Schoonmaker on The Irishman (Podcast)

Marty spoke to me early on that he wanted it to be a leisurely pace, not quick cutting, and that long slow push into Bob at the beginning of the movie is in some ways slowing you down and letting you know...

Meet the Nominees 2020

No better way to celebrate Oscar morning than listening to the nuts & bolts of the craft with a cup of coffee.

Paul Fortune's Fake Club (Lily Anolik)

This would make a good film. Does anyone remember laughter?

Can a Person Change? (Scorsese on The Irishman)

The opening shot of Irishman, in a sense, played itself out by listening to..."In the Still of the Night." And when I heard the song, I just knew we had to be floating down the hall at this assisted living facility and wind up on this old man sitting in a chair. I get it.

I knew that...it would be compared to the long take in Copacabana in Goodfellas. But it didn't matter, because ultimately, it's been 20 years, and so I've spent a lot of time in these places and hospitals and emergency rooms and assisted living places...[with] people having difficult times in their lives and also people at the end of their lives. I know the routines. I know what it's like in the middle of night in the hospital while you're waiting because a patient is very close to you. What do you do? You just sit there. Nurses go by. The light changes. Lives go by. Beds go floating by. And all these lives, we know nothing about them. They just become old and gone. And it's a whole life has gone by, in a way.

But it's the mood and tone of those places that I spent a lot of time in.

P-H-A-R-O-A-H (New Yorker interview)

aka take me back to Jazz Fest '07

What do you listen to these days?

I haven't been listening to anybody...I listen to things that maybe some guys don't. I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.

beast speaks sense

Greta, what is cinema?

Also, on the importance of writing & stories from vanity fair.

"life seems long...until it's short"  captures the irishman

CATS/Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker (Landmark Glendale)

double feature

advice/wisdom

don't mistake the stakes for the challenge. you've got this!

Little Women (Keystone Landmark)

My Mom's two favorite genres are: 1) The Sound of Music, and 2) Little Women

...so every twenty-five years (when Little Women is re-made) it's a movie date.

*Still love Gillian Armstrong's '94 version. Winona Ryder as Jo still glows. And so does Saorise Ronan.
*Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper) and Beth's quiet connection is a nice addition from Gerwig.

Dunkirk

A re-appreciation with QT. Definitely a film that warrants multiple viewings. First time, I remember vividly a numbness and distance from the film.

Todd Haynes on Carol (visual storytelling/style)

"You'll see in 'Carol' a lot of shots shot through windows and glass, with interruptions between where we are and where object is. I hope that that conjures the whole act of looking as a predicament, as something that is never easy and completely attainable."

Scorsese on The Irishman (NY Times)

But the film could say something about “the process of living and existence, through the work we could do — you could depict it, the actors could live in it.” And he could not resist the story of criminals whose lengthy life spans become a curse that burns their misdeeds into their souls. He quoted a lyric from the Bruce Springsteen song "Jungleland": “‘They wind up wounded, not even dead,’” Scorsese said. “And that’s even worse, in a way.”

“The Irishman,” he said, was not a repudiation of his previous crime dramas nor an expression of regret for how he’d depicted their swaggering characters. “I don’t think it’s regret,” he said. “This is different. Here, it’s the dead end, and everybody has to reckon at the end. If they’re given the time. And that’s where we’re headed.”

New Year's Day