Something in the Dirt

Posted on by Bill Chance

The other day I had a couple of hours to kill, so I looked through the television options to choose something to watch.

For no concrete reason I ended up watching a film called Something in the Dirt.

It was good, maybe really good – but more than that it was unique.

Does a work of art have to make sense? Is it fair for a work to be purposefully ambiguous? Can perplexing be a positive attribute?

Or is life too short for all this?

Something in the Dirt is definitely purposefully ambiguous. It implies that it is a documentary – there are interviews with multiple cameramen, special effects experts, and a string of directors – they talk about making the film that we are watching which may or may not duplicate events that may or may not have actually happened.

It’s fun if you can relax and let it wash over you, if you can embrace the chaos – and I imagine it would be maddening and frustrating if you can’t.

The key is, I think, in the dedication at the end. It is dedicated to friends making movies together. The writers/directors/producers/stars have a long string of odd movies in their history – most with much larger budgets and production budgets than Something in the Dirt. Now I’m going to work through the other films, there is some real creativity going on here.

This one looks like the two of them decided to get some friends together and make a little film while they were in Covid lockdown and see what resulted.

And I guess that’s as much fun as anything else.

Free Quality Streaming Movies

Posted on by Bill Chance

“You’re going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.”

—-Fay Wray, quoting Merian C. Cooper on King Kong.

There was the promise of cable-cutting…

First there was cable TV. I remember in ~1983 stringing cable into a bedroom for a second TV (a rare luxury back then) thinking, “I wish that television could come right out of the air, instead of through a wire, then I wouldn’t have to… wait a minute! It does!”

But over the years, cable became more and more expensive… and then cable-cutting! For a few heady years, that was the cat’s pajamas – until the streaming world became more and more bifurcated and expensive, until you have to have so many paid subscriptions that you forget what you’ve got and the one thing that you want is always on a stream you don’t have and you scroll for hours and can’t find anything to watch anyway.

But I have found a streaming service that has a carefully curated selection of wonderful content, no ads, available on all smart TVs, phones, tablets, and computers, and (with some limitations) is completely free. And a lot of people haven’t heard of it.

It’s called Kanopy.

It has fantastic content. I subscribe to The Criterion Channel – which is great – but certain odd, classic, or foreign films kept showing up on this “Kanopy” thing – so I had to check it out.

One catch is that it is only available through your library, if your library offers it. My local library did not, so I was shit out of luck. Until I discovered the next city out in the string of suburbs did offer it – and they had a deal with my town so I could get a card. It was only a few miles drive and I was signed up. So now I had my Kanopy subscription (and a whole new set of libraries to visit).

The second catch is that you are limited to the number of films per month you can watch. But in this new year, I discovered that my city now offers it too – so I can sign up twice and get twice the monthly limit. And I’ll sign up with my wife’s card (and maybe send her to the neighboring city) and get even more.

This is truly the best of all possible worlds.

2023-1966

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’m sitting in my living room, in my comfy recliner, drinking my morning coffee and trying not to watch any YouTube videos (I’m addicted). So I’m listening to music. Instead of Spotify, I’m listening to my own CDs – ripped into digital format and stored on a server.

I upgraded my desktop – installing Linux on my son’s old gaming PC. Then I took my old Linux machine, wiped it, and installed Ubuntu server on it – using it as a headless server on my home network. The most useful thing I’ve done so far is installed Jellyfin on it. That lets me keep digital movies and music on the server, then consume them from any device in my house.

There are hundreds of music CDs on there – over the years, I ripped most of my collection into MP3s and now store the digital files there. I know that most of these are available on Spotify but there is so much there, like drinking from a firehose, that it is hard to find anything to listen to. These old CDs are pre-curated by myself and arranged in a familiar, useful format. 

So there.

At any rate,  I’m listening right now to an album from Sergio Mendes and Brasil ‘66. I love this shit. It is so much better than ANYTHING being recorded right now. A smooth concoction of latin jazz, just sophisticated enough to transcend elevator music, yet not so challenging to interrupt my morning coffee.

So there.

Brasil ‘66…. I remember them when they first came out – they were on all the TV shows. I was only nine, but I remember. 

2023-1966 = 57. This music is from fifty seven years ago. Since I remember it, it doesn’t seem that long ago. I’m sure some of this music is still being played on the radio – on “oldies” stations – on adult contemporary – maybe even on some cutting-edge independent radio. It’s so good it can still be played for itself – not historically, not ironically… shit, I’m listening to it right now.

Fifty seven years old. I was born in ‘57. Music this old, when I was born, would have been recorded in 1900. The gap between 1966, which I remember, and now is the same as between my birth and two turns of the century ago. 

That doesn’t feel right. Think about 1900 – did they even have recorded music then? What the hell? I mean, in 1966 nobody thought about having music on a computer and streaming through the house, but that’s only a difference in convenience. I could easily have a turntable and listen to a 1966 album – lots of people I know do – I imagine that some Brasil ‘66 albums are still being pressed and still will be fifty seven years from now – at least in some form. 

My mind reels. I feel the flow of time, the death of possibility, the terror of eternity. 

Better finish my coffee and get some errands done. 

Bookish Thoughts Part Two

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

(click to enlarge) Book With Wings Anselm Kiefer Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Yesterday I sussed out my first three Desert Island Books – I’ll finish out the list here.

I started out making a list of possibilities: LOTR, The Riverworld Series, Sputnik Sweetheart, The War of the Rull, Jealousy (by Alain Robbe-Grillet)….

As I was thinking, number four popped into my mind.

4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A slam-dunk – although I liked Love in the Time of Cholera almost almost as much.

And that’s how I completed the ten. I kept listing books and every now and then one would jump out at me. I wrote: Lolita, Pale Fire, Under the Volcano, Absalom, Absalom, Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, Waiting for the Barbarians, 1Q84, The Brothers Karamazov, A Clockwork Orange… – all worthy candidates, but the ones that I selected (and will change constantly):

5. Moby Dick

Of course

6. Dune

Of course

7. Crash

The J.G. Ballard novel

8. The Sound and the Fury

One of my Difficult Reading Book Club selections – the second on the list.

9. On the Road

10. Catch-22

So, What do you think? What have I missed? What have I not read?

Bookish Thoughts

Posted on by Bill Chance

You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

Kindle
Call Me Ishmael

I just finished a book last night… finished one for a Science Fiction Book Club that meets this Saturday. It wasn’t very good – though, in the end, I sort-of liked it… interesting… all though it wasn’t very well written.

So I was thinking… make a list of my favorite novels – maybe ten… ten Desert Island Novels. Right off the top of my mind, three stand out.

  1. Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

I love McCarthy and this is his Magnum Opus. I’ve been working through a five hour YouTube summary/review of the book, it reminds me how amazing and horrible the thing is:

2. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

I have written about this novel often – for example, It was the first novel I read with my Difficult Read Book Club

3. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

This one took me by surprise – an innovative structure – it packs a wallop over time. It really resonated with me. I remember when I read it, I thought it was unfilmable – then they made the movie and I discovered I was right.

Three down… seven to go. I have two pages of notes… I’ll edit them down and type them up tomorrow.

Sky Mirror

Posted on by Bill Chance

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that’s akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror.

—-Anish Kapoor

Sky Mirror by Anish Kapoor, Arlington, Texas

Monday the whole family went to the Cotton Bowl – my son Lee graduated from Tulane and a bunch of his friends were in town to see them play USC (Roll Wave).

I wanted to leave The Death Star from the east entrance because I wanted to see the Sky Mirror, a sculpture by Anish Kapoor (the guy that did The Bean in Chicago).

While not as cool as The Bean – it was a pretty impressive hunk of reflections. It was a perfectly gray sky, so the other side, the one that reflects the heavens – wasn’t too impressive. I would love to see the thing at sunrise.

Cthulhu?

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
― H. P. Lovercraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

Cthulhu

From the 2022 Cedars Open Studios Tour.

I saw this window displaying the back side of James Allen Tucker Rodriguez’s work at Good Coworking during the Cedars Open Studios tour.

I thought to myself – cool – that looks like Cthulhu – the giant head with horrific tentacles. It’s hand was cradling a shark with a laser gun.

But from the other side – it was a portrait of a woman – the tentacles were just hair.

I’m sorry , I was a little disappointed. The art is way cool, though.

James Allen Tucker Rodriquez Instagram

Yella Balls

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Ol’ man Simon, planted a diamond. Grew hisself a garden the likes of none. Sprouts all growin’ comin’ up glowin’ Fruit of jewels all shinin’ in the sun. Colors of the rainbow. See the sun and the rain grow sapphires and rubies on ivory vines, Grapes of jade, just ripenin’ in the shade, just ready for the squeezin’ into green jade wine. Pure gold corn there, Blowin’ in the warm air. Ol’ crow nibblin’ on the amnythyst seeds. In between the diamonds, Ol’ man Simon crawls about pullin’ out platinum weeds. Pink pearl berries, all you can carry, put ’em in a bushel and haul ’em into town. Up in the tree there’s opal nuts and gold pears- Hurry quick, grab a stick and shake some down. Take a silver tater, emerald tomater, fresh plump coral melons. Hangin’ in reach. Ol’ man Simon, diggin’ in his diamonds, stops and rests and dreams about one… real… peach.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

Yella Balls Grapefruit

From the 2022 Cedars Open Studios Tour.