I'm glad

via Things We Already Know

Gilgamesh

why do you grieve because of a mortal father?


How long does a building stand before it falls?
How long does a contract last? How long will brothers


share the inheritance before they quarrel?
How long does hatred, for that matter, last?


Time after time the river has risen and flooded.
The insect leaves the cocoon to live but a minute.


How long is the eye able to look at the sun?
From the very beginning nothing at all has lasted.


See how the dead and the sleeping resemble each other.
Seen together, they are the imaged of death.


The simple man and the ruler resemble each other.
The face of one will darken like that of the other.


The Annunaki gathered in assembly:
Mammetum, Mother Goddess, she was with them.


There they established that there is life and death.
The day of death is set, though not made known.


Gilgamesh, translated by David Ferry




The epic dates from about 3000 BC and was inscribed on tablets.
Its theme is the mortality of man.
Nothing changes very much.

Bottle

Bottle from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.

À nos amours

Brutal and ultimately beautiful movie about a girl who uses sex as a way to rebel, to distance herself from her family, and, perhaps, from herself.


Now, as I read that sentence over it could be misconstrued to make the movie sound like some cheesy softporno flick. It's about as far removed from, say, Emmanuel, as you can get. Instead, it exposes the brutality and viciousness of family life and of the pleasures and imprisonment of being the object of male desire.


It goes deep. It's also one of the few films that shows or speaks not only what you may have thought, but also the thoughts you try to hide from yourself.


And Klaus Nomi is on the soundtrack, singing Purcell in a bizarre and exactly right juxtaposition.







And from the same film, the Cold Song written by Purcell and sung by Klaus Nomi

Debbie Harry and Nancy Spungen

The Selvedge Yard has found nearly every great picture of Debbie Harry ever taken.

Klaus Nomi

A kick in the ass from Seneca

The largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose. What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.


 “The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.” Reflect, my esteemed Lucilius, what this saying means, and you will see how revolting is the fickleness of men who lay down every day new foundations of life, and begin to build up fresh hopes even at the brink of the grave. Look within your own mind for individual instances; you will think of old men who are preparing themselves at that very hour for a political career, or for travel, or for business. And what is baser than getting ready to live when you are already old"

C-Jam Blues/Duke Ellington

Santa Fe

We stared, dutifully, at the Mysterious Staircase in the Loretto mission church. 

The church is now a private museum. No more holy water flows there and the stench of incense has long been cleared away. Now we take in the marvelous staircase -- no visible support! -- as a tape loops through telling a fairy tale story of the mysterious carpenter who built it.

In any case, the stairs rise in a spiral, if not Yeats' beloved winding gyre. They seem to float and to suggest that yes, one should follow the curve upward, this single helix that floats, by illusion or craft.

Later, we enjoyed a large lunch a few blocks away, as local and authentic as you can wish for. Dignified Latina aunts and grandmothers on the left, a new west lesbian in front and, to our side, a very stylish and surprisingly effeminate father with his daughter who goes to the arts high school and manages to send 120 text messages a day.

Real life, such as it is.

We finished our enchiladas and headed to the Pecos pueblo ruins, about 30 minutes out of town. It was late afternoon, nearly the golden hour. We were nearly alone among the cinnamon-colored stones that the Pueblans and put into place a thousand years ago. 

A kiva had been restored. I learned from a pamphlet  that kivas were used for religious ceremonies. This was was round, and underground. You descend a ladder. The ceiling then represents heaven, the center of the room a sort of navel of the world -- a portal from the depths where men emerge, the round room stands for the world itself. You'd have to go down to rise up. Joseph Campbell would have something erudite to say about this, and connect it with other traditions in other times and places. The one story under it all. Part of it right there, the nuns and the Pueblans, rising and going down, like the angels in the patriarch's dream.

But it only made me wonder:  Maybe I need a ladder of my own.  I'd like to get the hell up and out. Crawl out of my skin, my skull, my tired opinions, and my flaccid habits.

I guess I'll have to look around and scrounge up a rail and some rungs, put a ladder together somehow and hope there'll be a place to lean it against.

And something worth climbing to.

photos (c) me

Kieslowski: First Steps

 (image from The Double Life of Veronique)

I keep persuading younger colleagues to whom I teach scriptwriting or directing to examine their own lives. Not for the purposes of any book or script but for themselves. I always say to them, Try to think of what happened to you which was important and led to your sitting here in this chair, on this very day, among these people. What happened? What really brought you here? You've got to know this, That's the starting point. 

The years in which you don't work on yourself like this are, in fact, wasted. You might feel or understand something intuitively and consequently, the results are arbitrary. It's only when you've done this work that you can see a certain order in events and their effects. I tried to fathom out what brought me to this point in my life, too, because without such an authentic, thorough and merciless analysis, you can't tell a story. If you don't understand your own life, than I don't think you can understand the lives of the characters in your stories, you can't understand the lives of other people. 

Kieslowski on Kieslowski, edited by Danusia Stok

"What's wrong with these pictures?"

The first image above is of the character name Meek, in Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff,” just released – I suspect to a fast BO swoon, to speak Varietese. In the story he’s a grizzled guide, wild-man of the west. However in the image, he is fresh out of something like Hollywood costumes, with a thin patina of showbiz “dirt” gracing his buckskin outfit, though we notice his purse is untainted with anything so vile. As someone who lived “rough” for five years in rural Oregon and Montana (no electricity, no running water, no money) I can assure you, out of experience, that a mere week or two of such living makes your clothes a lot dirtier than those seen in these images. Meek is an ostensible frontier mountain-man and his purse should be dark with oil and fat as well as smoke from fires and just plain dirt, all well attracted by the greasy base, as would be his buckskin clothes (which one doesn’t wash). In the next pictures the clothes are so spick-and-span they look incongruous next to the theatrical “dirty faces” make-up job on the actors (which, again, for anyone with experience reads false as to how faces and skin really get dirty – dirt is most visible in wrinkles, where it gathers and stays).

Which then makes one wonder about the rest of the matter at hand, a “story” set in the out back of Oregon’s Eastern desert, which apparently weaves in supposedly true-grit Americana, echoes of “cowboy” movies (which were often shot on transparently false Hollywood sets, or conversely set in real western places, like Monument Valley, where no one lived except for the weakest Indian tribes, forced by circumstances to such inhospitable climes), and then sub-textually of present-day concerns about just how we are. Meek’s Cutoff is a so-called “independent” film, relatively low-budgeted, and yet it persists in the usual historical drama of getting all the gritty details of history wrong while purporting to set itself in that reality. Sounds like it also has a sort of feminist angle. Why not just admit one doesn’t know a damned thing about this and either go Kabuki, a totally obvious theatrical falsity, from which curiously truth can emerge, or just stick to contemporary which one might have a clue about. The images above (confirmed by a few glances of clips from the film) just underline that movie people know very little about the real world, and in turn any truths they might seem to uncover become suspect.

Jon Jost

Brando in 1965, brought to you by the Maysles

The Maysles brothers -- unfortunately uncredited -- put together a series of scenes from promo sessions Marlon Brando submitted to. Even though it amounts to found footage, you learn more about Brando as a man and an actor from these fragments than from nearly any other source I've come across. 

Above all, he seems startlingly alive. Wary, observant, playing a 3-D game in a 2-D frame, alert to the possibilities of sex. A guy, for sure, but as rawly sensitive as an open wound. 

No wonder he later grew fat and baroque; he probably needed the insulation.