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the saddest blog that ever was
6.23.2004:
i am OBSESSED with Dian Fossey now. She's fucking crazier than i dunno what, something crazy. this woman was not allowed to sit at the dinner table and eat with her mother and stepfather until she was ten or eleven years old. before that she ate alone in the cellar or something. then she grew up and saved all these gorillas 'in the mist' and was the next jane goodall until she went nuts and kidnapped all these poachers and did crazy things to them. i'm so excited about the movie its next in the netflix lineup. i am going to start something, a band, a cooperative housing unit, an arts collective, a front for selling dope and cocaine, a zine, anything as long as its called 'dian fossey.'
i am also obsessed w/ Action Attack Helicopter. they forbid me access so i want more. they talk about "Wonderful Educated Bears." i need you action attack helicopter! also the 43 second version of some dead kennedys song i accidentally downloaded which cuts off just when i want it too. It Is So Good! and then, i am obsessed with Shigeru Ban, japanese paper architecturalist extraordinaire! psst psst: there will be a flyer soon for "Your Face Here" on sad blog here, and other wonderfully educated places for bears. the fundraiser benefit is slated for mid-july at mishka. pass the word hummingbirds. okay i'm gonna stop sounding like a thirteen year old girl now.
i am so sad i missed the spunk, and will miss the cloyne sham wedding. i went to two ahem 'casting calls' this week. i am now a bumble hair model and will get free haircuts so long as i have hair for them to cut! i am also going to be licking ice cream off a cone for volkert's friend who i saw where giant adult diapers for volkert's own movie. 'nuff said. my skin makes me so sad. i have doctors bill and pharmacist bills and general gauze tape/sterile pad/hydrogen peroxide bills which if things need to be changed twice a day adds up fast! must find sublet. easier to move own self out it appears than to move others out. ho hum.
working notes feel free to critique, because most of all, i have become ultimately, tragically, unbearably obsessed w/ bottlerocket
Bottlerocket: Or, The New Genius
The Wes Anderson of Bottlerocket and Rushmore is the Gabriel Garcia Marquez of film. Stylistically speaking, he approaches the almost annihilating genius of a Jorge Luis Borges in The Royal Tenenbaums, with constant self-referential analogies and internal ‘algebra y fuego,’ as Borges liked to say it. But unlike Borges’ best stories, there is a strange disconcerting sterility that tragically haunts The Royal Tenenbaums, all the fire is gone and the pathos is taken for granted too much. His movies are the magic realisms of the cinematic art. They are not ‘magic realist’ in the expressionist sense, where the settings are highly staged, exoticized and surreal. Instead, the very opposite: it is as if someone, well Wes Anderson, took the storyline of say, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and translated it quite literally into a screenplay. Like Marquez, Anderson and Wilson script us into an already unfolding mis-en-scene and proceed to offer us “a tale for children,” as the subtitle to the Marquez story states, rendering the ridiculous and incredulous innocent and mundane in the transformation. This is the quality most admired by Mikhail Bahktin in his Dialogic Imagination when he writes of the emancipatory release unleashed in the carnivalesque and the grotesque. It is obvious, and apt, that Anderson does indeed incorporate a multitude of extra-cinematic traditions within his films, building slowly up from the curtains framing each scene of Rushmore to the actual premise that The Royal Tenenbaums is a novel shot for our eyes and ears, narrated by Alec Baldwin and deftly scored, again, as are all of the movies, for the soundtrack of our lives. Anderson inserts his protagonist into a variety of classic film motifs. For instance, there is the scene in which Anthony takes a swim at the motel right before he lays eyes upon Ines for the first time. This particular shot of man underwater in a swimming pool, completely unscored save for the sound of a solitary man’s breath and the ripple of water around him, has become a hallmark symbol for confusion and epiphany in film, most notably done in The Graduate. Our almost always young hero flounders along in life, diving into one thing after another, searching and finding. It encapsulates in condensed form the filmic equivalent of the German novelistic technique of buildungsroman and all its yearning for the answers to the self.
The equilibrium between the character’s and their constant, ever shifting assessments of each other offer not only poignancy and many fucking hysterically funny moments, but also an entryway into the complexity of modern day magic, of just how fragile it is to preserve a realm where whimsicality does not descend into a blunted unsophisticated and overwhelming madness. Owen Wilson’s character is the perfect crucible from which such magic is forged, and Luke Wilson’s Anthony’s one enduring gift is his ability to perceive this perfection in others (he also sees this in Ines). To borrow a phrase from Danto, it is the transfiguration of the commonplace that makes great art, and in turn, art great, today. The success of the Anderson/Owen Wilson team is completely deserved and a little embarrassing to the auteur-driven film criticism culture industry. But look again at the case of Marquez (as opposed to the more obscurantist Borges), who is one of the best known writers of any language in any country today as well. Populism of a limited circle and a circumscribed class is still populism enough to fill the theaters. The enduring popularity of the Wilson brothers as well as the star-studded ensemble cast for The Royal Tenenbaums attests to this unequivocally.
The same could be said of Bertolt Brecht’s poetry almost a hundred years ago. Brecht was the originator of the Adbusters-style re-appropriation. He took parody to its most extreme, farcical limits and somehow ended up endowing the form with utmost profundity. The poem Legende vom Toten Soldat, or Legend of the Dead Soldier, in which he reworked a native German folk ballad from the 18th century (from the Clement Greenberg translation) goes something like this:
And as the war in its fifth spring gave no prospect of peace, the soldier came to the logical conclusion and died a hero’s death.
The war was not quite over yet, it caused the Kaiser pain to have his soldier die it seemed ahead of time…
And they immediately took the soldier along, the night was blue and fine. You could see, if you wore no helmet, the stars at home.
They poured a fiery schnaps into the rotten body and hung two nurses on his arm and his half-naked wife.
And because the soldier stinks of decay, a parson limps to the fore who swings a censer over him so that he can stink no more.
In front the music with ching da-da-da plays a merry march. And the soldier, as he’s been trained to do, flings his legs from his arse…
TRANSITION--!
Yet the flaws of Bottlerocket are many and easily enumerated. For instance, the trad and retrad role of unhappy man rescued while rescuing confused inarticulate woman has been done often enough, just see Woody Allen and his Soon-Yee, the mute witness to his neurotic self-engrossed comedy.
duude!! i've gotta drink less coffee. these quinlone pills are like the medication you take to prevent malaria and like those they make you feel like you're on acid when you should be sleeping.......
Blog // 4:15 AM
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