David Lynch--He Understood Things

I don't think I understood what being an auteur was until maybe my 20's. but when I got the idea of it, I understood David Lynch was definitely one of those. He had a particular vision, an understanding of the art of composing a mood, playing on the sensorium, introducing something new. He understood that art, like life, was about mess and attractive compulsions. He understood there was something wrong with bigotry: those people needed to fix their hearts or die. 

From the weirdness of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks to the dignified treatment of The Elephant Man, he found the human and copacetic in the alienated and estranged. 

He is best remembered through the lens of people who knew him, and the picture of a rare, exceptional director who made an enormous impact emerges. Unique: like no other. You simply have to come see his work so you will know, and let it touch you. 

(All props to the new treatment of Dune, but am I going to forget this? Nope. Not as technically brilliant and high budget, but theatrically intense.)

The Left Behind

 Deedee was just stirring her sweet potatoes, and Naomi braced for the next salvo.

"It's just the waste of the thing, Mama--your inheritance. And Phil and I don't mind you coming to live with us, but you had to know--"

"Your father never told me exactly how much he was putting into it. It was his family's cabin after all and his weekend place. "

"But he had to have showed you! It's not like you never went. He had the whole family up there for Big Mom's 90th birthday! And you weren't curious?"

Naomi considered what she was going to say next, because she knew it would come out. 

"For thirty years I knew he was prepping, ok? Is that what you want me to say, sister? He showed me what he had dug out in there and the fortifications and promised me it was for all of us..."

"Then you saw that little manhole we all were going to have climb in?" 

There it was. Dee on her size bullshit. Here it comes.

N=1

 Adrian was used to a lot of things on his "shambulance"/"Uber for hospital" shift, but the girl who rode in his car and then woke the whole fuck up was not what he was looking to deal with. The ones who just got carried in and stayed dead were haunting, sad, tragic, all that, but the one who was fucking not actually supposed to be alive right the fuck now, but was going to go about breathing and making requests was a whole other thing, one there was no protocol in the old manual for. 

"You'll want to stop me off at my house; we don't need a doctor." 

"Ma'am, we're en route to Cedars--"

"Is this an Amblix? What's your badge?"

He was driving for Amblix, and she was peering through the windows and could DEF see his badge. 

"Amblix is one of mine. The luck. 514 Mockingbird..."

"You had half your innards outside of you!" Adrian exclaimed, a bit alarmed.

"Well, you must have tucked them in since everything seems properly in place NOW, thanks! Things aren't so great when they have to settle on their own. Good job. But I can't be in a hospital, and by now you ought to have figured out why."

He thought about that. Her alive with no business being. And if "Amblix" was one of hers...

Shit--Genevieve Fowler? 

The Danger of Billy Joel

 

We don't talk about the raw sexual danger that is Billy Joel and that's a damn shame. This is the man who has been stranded in the combat zone, and walked through Bedford-Stuy alone, and rode his motorcycle in the rain. Clearly, he's been thinking about how, by being a backstreet guy, he can cruise naive uptown girls in a way that might make their peers very nervous. Note the aggression behind "Only the Good Die Young". against the rearing of a good Catholic girl. 

He wants to pervert her virginal upbringing by suggesting her lily-white frigidity vis a vis her upbringing is what is damaging their relationship, not his transgressive representation as a "Bad Boy."  He shapeshifts himself as "Billy the Kid" and "The Stranger". By creating a litany of leftist complaints in "We Didn't start the Fire", he absolves himself of his own generations' participation in the globalist  clownshow that is the forever wars relating to terrorism as a resistance-movement that totally is not in any way fucked up so stop saying that! 

So actually, what I am getting from this is the modern cover of "We didn't start the fire" is so bad it is giving more briquets and hasn't reintroduced Joel to the kiddos,  and Gen X horror auteurs need to recognize our 90's pop bullshit is mad scary. This song is threatening. Billy Joel is fixing to do the bad thing with a privileged debutante and this young have the open mouth. Say what? 

Billy Joel, y;all. Scary motherfucker. 

Nirvana Unplugged--One of my favorite things

 

On this day in 1994 Nirvana released “MTV Unplugged in New York”

It is considered the greatest Unplugged ever made pic.twitter.com/iA6pymphBM

— 🎸 Rock History 🎸 (@historyrock_) November 1, 2024

I don't know if there is a single CD I got from Columbia Music House that I played more. I mean, I played Hole's "Live Through This" and NIN's "Pretty Hate Machine" a lot and some Tool also, but this one was special to me because it was issued so close to Cobain's unaliving and displayed Cobain's untapped range and what this whole band was capable of. 

I love the covers. To me, Nirvana's cover of "Man Who Sold the World" hits me better than Bowie's does in roughly the same way Guns'n'Roses' cover of "Live and Let Die" (and, to be honest, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door") give me more than the originals. The sheer haunting that is "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"!

This was that band. 

It was a mood in a way I don't think anything I ever heard before was. The songs were cultivated mood. The performance was an entire mood. 

I implore the children to hear it in the way I was cultivated to listen to the Doors and the Beatles. It is the good shit. You hear the good shit in your life one time, and it breaks you down and you can't accept the music that doesn't reach you that way ever again. You go and search "where is that good shit music"? 

You go and search your own Nirvanas, you beautiful rainbow children. But if your mom and dad came up on NKOTB and Britney Spears I do not know how to introduce so much funk into your life. 

I can point you to Black Sabbath, Genesis, the Commodores ("Night Shift" is CHURCH) and Lionel Richie. And Billy Joel. Mike McDonald. The good shit is out there. Billy Ocean. Sade. Public Emeny, The Clash and The Police. 

Metallica. Bonnie Raitt. The son of a bitchin' Rolling Stones.

The real-ass play from your heart vistas. I want you all to get it, experience it, know it. Blisters on the fingers. Blood on the stage. 

It even explains the life we are in. I am not making this up. It does. 

Clash of the Titans - Medusa battle (original) 1981

I loved this a lot when I was young because Medusa was very scary and Harry Hamlin was quite something. I think I became all about Greek myth because of this movie. I personally wanted a clock work Owl Friend. I guess I understood what a mythic hero actually wanted--some kind of proof via gifts and stuff that you were heroing right? 

Anyway, my tutelary deity was exactly Athena from this movie and books I read at a really small age. And in some way, I never stopped being that age.

Is the Odysseus Discourse on X an Op?

 

No cap, if the commenter is just fooling with us, this is totally goated. After all the "Gen Z" don't write cursive, don't write checks, can't read entire novels, don't know what a rotary phone or a Walkman are stuff, pretending not to know the first thing about Homer would be, um, EPIC!

How does Christopher Nolan even find these wild things man? Does he even speak like, Greek? 

What even is this:

Yes, because when Ulysses, as he was then called, was a big old book in the early 20th century, it was written by an entire American not a notable Irish...

Grrr. I do not believe this discourse. I picked up The Iliad and The Odyssey both in one of their many, many English translations, from the used books at a Salvation Army thrift store when I was like, eight years old. I already had some acquaintance from sword 'n'sandals movies and Classic comics what I was looking at. I wanted to read the Big Kid Books. The serious grownup literature.  Are there young people seeing "Odessey SUV's" and hearing about "Achilles' tendons" and going around with no idea what those names are all about?

What Faustian bargain has our youth unaware of Helen of Troy, whose face launched a thousand ships?  What have they gotten in return? Joe Rogan and Mr. Beast? 

What do kids get read to them these days? Do they know what the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales even are? 

I feel weirdly conservative when I say that kids should learn of Achilles and his wrath or Odysseus and his peregrinations and feel like Keats looking into Chapman's Homer--like some part of the ancient past had the power to totally blow their little minds. Knowing ancient mythology and the names of ancient heroes is only additive for appreciating so much of what came after: Frankenstein in the context of Golems and Galatea, the Wicked Witches of Oz through Circe. Bryan Johnson and his desire not to die through Gilgamesh. 

Every human story spawns a replay of an old game in which not a single one of us is an NPC, but all of us are everyday heroes, with a tie to something greater than ourselves. Is that the missing puzzle piece? Are the youth fooled by false narratives because they haven't been schooled on the existing really cool ones? 

These kids today, they don't know what the old heads have been saying. This is why they are so disrespectful. Which I know from my reading goes back at least to Aristotle. At least! 

But now, these kids need to know about gorgons outside of Versace labels and all that. (They can't be missing out on The Kraken, Percy Jackson, I mean, these ancient stories are still out there--anime, and whatnot, right?) I'm happy to send kids to Padraic Colum and Edna St. Vincent Millay (I'm an old soul!) and let them go wander into a world where we had belles lettres before no one knew how to write thank you notes. What harm would it even do?

(None.)