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

New Year Ideas

*Be present. Focus on the present. In the moment. Accomplish one small step at a time.
*Write daily (even for 30 minutes)
*Read daily  (more books, less internet articles)
*Exercise daily
*Be kind to yourself

merry xmas on dec 20th

cats

down a thirty year rabbit hole (but this is celene dion batshit / ridley scott alien)

love letters

https://variety.com/2019/film/spotlight/ari-aster-the-irishman-steve-zaillian-1203448277/?fbclid=IwAR0_198jZKA2-f8DdQFo2hcMBY-ov_vjK2YM6RIURTqZDREGfXQHvqxPCU4

movies i've seen in the theater recently

pain & glory/parasite (double feature)
ford v ferrari
the irishman
dark waters / (some of the irishman)
a marriage story/knives out (double feature)
jojo rabbit / (some of the irishman again, first half of waves, some of ford v ferrari)
richard jewell/a beautiful day in the neighborhood (double feature)
the irishman (again in full at the landmark glendale)
a hidden life (xmas eve 4:30pm)
uncut gems (dec. 26th)

#decade

back on my bullshit (sunday night will rogers follies edition) #cinema

Magnolia "Interpretative Dance" starring fiona apple

Tuscaloosa

young neil. autumn. harvest moon

here we are in the years
after the goldrush
out on the weekend
harvest
old man
heart of gold

time fades away
lookout joe
new mama
alabama
don't be denied

October 16th-20th, 1974 - The Last One - Winterland

Magic. These 5 shows before "retirement." Dosed up the ass.  What a culmination. What a run. What a sound.

They're home. Never to be the same.

Tim O'Brien

on a hero's journey bringing back the boon from vietnam. a new book reflecting on fatherhood in america.

back on my bullshit

2016 #horace&pete #louisck #bestofthedecade

Nick Paumgarten on Robert Hunter

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/robert-hunter-gave-the-grateful-dead-its-voice

american beauty

The first time I went to England, it was the second day I was there, everybody went and left me alone with a case of retsina.

Suddenly I realized, you know, here I was in London, the city I had always dreamed of going to, and I was very, very happy that I had come home to some psychic place...maybe the home of Robin Hood and Peter Pan. Mind you I had only drank half a bottle of this retsina but it was having the whole case there that was important.

I sat down and wrote, I wrote 'Ripple' and 'To Lay Me Down,' and 'Brokedown Palace.' It was a magic day. I knew I was writing stuff that would live forever (laughs)...

Oh, would those days would come again.
Oh they will, they will, but not for me.

--Robert Hunter 💔🌹💀

one more saturday night (last picture show) (pat garrett & billy the kid)

So these last four Italian flicks, after nine years together, would be Rick and Cliff's final rodeo. Cliff doesn't have a clue what he's going to do. The only thing the two men know of for sure, tonight, Rick and Cliff will have a good old-fashioned drunk. Both men know once the plane touches down in El Segundo, it'll be the end of an era for both of them. When you come to the end of the line with a buddy who is more than a brother, and a little less than a wife, getting blind drunk together is really the only way to say farewell.

the deuce (this monday) (succession on sunday)

one last thing.

pta & haim (another late night)

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (one more night)

in the wheelhouse. it's a male fantasy

pta & haim

late night hooked on their videos (greek theater, like a star is born)

best of the decade (from the 2019 oscar telecast)

Paul Schrader

1 hr · 

Watched Apocalypse Now tonight in Imax. The film remains as problematic as ever in terms of theme and intent. It's like vibrating under the spell of juiced up pro war amphetamines while, in the distance, hearing a dour somewhat confused country preacher declaiming war's evils. But visually and auditorily, man, it stands alone.

Added comment. The schizophrenic nature of the film goes back to the script itself. John's original script was all bravado and gung ho crazy. Francis has the opposite sensibility.. The Ride of the Valkyries, the surfers, the bunnies--that's Milius. The Michael Herr narration, the plantation exposition, the meditations on evil--that's Coppola.

favorite films of the decade (working draft)

tree of life
inside llewyn davis
zero dark thirty
inception
only lovers left alive (patterson)
twin peaks: the return
horace & pete
the deuce
vietnam war
long strange trip
wolf of wall street
lady bird
midsommar
once upon a time in hollywood

greenberg
the master / inherent vice / phantom thread
everybody wants some
toni erdmann
suspiria
rolling thunder revue

Grateful Dead - Uptown Theater, 12.3.79

That late fall 79 sound...Brent's keyboard/Phil's bass...cokey dirty bar band tempo**...

Set1
Alabama Getaway**
Promised Land
Brown-Eyed Woman
El Paso
Ramble on Rose
It's All Over Now**
Jack-a-Roe
Lazy Lightnin'>
Supplication
Althea**
Music Never Stopped

NYC - Parker Posey & Louis C.K.

Hey Baby, It's the 4th of July (Greeley, 2019)

Are You a Deadhead?

Birthday is inching closer. 

Best last scene of the decade (dir. S. Lelio). Best last scene of the decade (dir. S. Lelio) .

Life isn't about finding yourself. Or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself.

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)