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.