“You know how I always dread the whole year? Well, this time I’m only going to dread one day at a time.” —Charlie Brown
For New Year here in Dallas they put fireworks on the Reunion Tower downtown – which I’ve seen before and is pretty cool. Unfortunately, they had to cancel the drone show (I’ve never seen one – want to) because of the awful accident a few weeks ago.
Still, I had wanted to ride my bike down into the Trinity River Bottoms, find a spot on a levee, set up a tripod and my camera. Unfortunately RWD (real world disasters) intervened and I had to stay home, watch TV, and listen to distant booms at midnight.
More than a decade ago, (not on New Years Eve, I don’t remember why they had the fireworks display) I did ride my bike down to an abandoned parking structure (sprinkled with homeless shit) – which turned out to be an excellent vantage point. I took some pictures with varying exposure times (from a tripod of course – carrying one on a bike is something I’m still working on). Here’s what I came up with:
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
Fireworks from Reunion Tower, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
I remember the first time I saw the Reunion Tower. It would have been a year after I graduated from college, 1979. The thing was pretty much brand new then and we drove past it on the way from Hutchinson, Kansas (where I lived, working in a Salt Mine) to the beach at South Padre Island. I was gobsmacked – the thing was so modern and odd and unexpected.
Then I saw it in the PBS movie The Lathe of Heaven (I saw it on the only time it aired in 1979 – it had a long, odd history, disappeared for two decades, but you can see it now – here’s the part with the Reunion Tower) which was filmed in Dallas, and the tower was a stand-in for the evil scientist’s ultimate reality-bending dream machine. Dallas was considered very futuristic at the time and other spots (City Hall, the Water Gardens, DFW airport’s people movers) were also used in the movie.
Then, when I moved here, for years the revolving bar at the top was a go-to spot to take visitors or to celebrate special events. I haven’t been in decades… maybe it’s time for a re-visit.
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” ― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Orpheus lamenting the loss (for the second time) of Euridice.
Today was one of the most difficult days of my life, but I can’t (won’t) write about that here – it’s not really my story. So I’ll write about a movie.
First, my favorite book is a yellowing big hardback, chockablock with wonderful hand-drawn illustrations by Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire’s called, simply, Book of Greek Myths. I’ve had it since 3rd grade. The inscription on the title page reads:
Book Week Contest 1964 First Prize (Boys) 3A William Chance West Point Elementary School West Point, New York Mrs. Mark Carrigan, Librarian Nov. 6, 1964 (Book donated by 1963-64 P.T.A.)
I remember they had a contest, they showed us drawings and asked us which classic book they came from. I was by far the best read 3rd grader (though I had skipped the previous year and was by far the youngest) and won fairly easily. I loved that book then and still do.
One of the most well-known and often-redone myths is that of Orpheus and Euridice. In short, Orpheus goes to the underworld to retrieve his deceased and beloved wife and his singing is so beautiful they say he can take her back as long as he doesn’t look at her until they reach the surface. Unfortunately, after most of a long journey his faith falters and he turns to check if she is there… and he loses her forever.
OK, another thing I am overly fascinated with is the Criterion Channel’s 24/7 feature. In case you don’t know what to watch, tune in, they run movies continuously, 24/7. Given the channels esoteric and diverse selection – you really never know what you are going to get.
In a fit of tossing and turning insomnia late late the other night, I turned on the channel and caught a striking bit of gorgeous black and white film (with even more gorgeous people on it) – French – very odd… surreal. I wanted to watch the whole thing, so I checked and it was Orpheus (Orphée) a 1950 film by Jean Cocteau. This evening, I sat down and watched it.
Very good, very weird. The scenes in The Zone were filmed in a bombed out chapel and were especially arresting. The movie moves smoothly back and forth from the real world to Hades, using mirrors as gateways. They used a pool of mercury as a practical effect – I had seen that before – but the rest of the movie was new to me and I enjoyed it very much. I especially like the surreal elements and effects.
Not surprisingly, the plot varies a lot from the myth. My only criticism is the ending – I won’t spoil it – but it was updated for ’50’s audience tastes.
“Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility, and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness–powerless and shame-filled–to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid; above all, they would have to look after children, mortal enemies, in their own homes, they would have to pamper them, feed them, worry about their illnesses, provide the means for their education and their pleasure, and unlike in the world of animals, this would last not just for a season, they would remain slaves of their offspring always, the time of joy was well and truly over for them, they would have to continue to suffer until the end, in pain and with increasing health problems, until they were no longer good for anything and were definitively thrown into the rubbish heap, cumbersome and useless.
—-Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island
Long quote there…. I clipped this out of the book I finished last night (my clip actually goes on longer). It struck a nerve . Unfortunately, this is exactly how I feel right now.
Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, New Orleans
In 2002 (reblogged in 2011) I wrote about a question that always bugs me – “Is reading a waste of time?”. I still don’t know… I think it is, there is so much actual stuff to do, but everybody tells me that reading is important, maybe more important that actually accomplishing something.
Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.
Michel Houellebecq
At any rate, waste or not, I am trying to increase my reading – both in terms of quantity and quality. As a part of that, I stayed up too late last night and finished The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq.
It was an interesting read – sort of a Science Fiction/Dystopian/Erotic/Very French tale, told in first person from the point of view of a nihilistic artist that falls in with a doomsday cult and also from the point of view of a clone of himself, thousands of years in the future.
I now have read a handful of Houellebecq and have enjoyed them enough to continue on to a few more. They are bleak and sexy, intelligent and violent, and resonate with me more than they should… more than I’d like to admit.
I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.
Werner Herzog
Found by a photobooth,
Molly’s At the Market, French Quarter, New Orleans
For Christmas… I ask my friends and family for Amazon gift cards – at my age, the stuff I want (my lifelong quota of tchotchke and cute gifts is long overfilled)tends to the expensive side – far greater than the generosity of one person towards me. This way, I can accumulate them and add my February birthday haul to reach my consumerist goal. For example, I saved up and bought a decent camera a few years ago.
One unanticipated benefit of this – if you call a few minutes of amusement a benefit – is the time I spend looking through Amazon, deciding what to get. It’s kinda fun.
This year, I settled on a decent pair of binoculars. I have always had a soft spot for these. When I was a small child, my father brought back a pair of Soviet Military binoculars from Korea (how did he get them? I have no idea. The case had bullets holes in it). I loved those things… They lasted for decades but are now lost… Something had gone wrong, maybe a prism had come loose, and how do you fix something like that? No Russian optics repair shop down on the corner.
They were big and had the traditional porro prism arrangement. Yes,I did research on the various ways binoculars can be designed. Because of that, I was at first leaning toward a porro prism binocular – like this one. But nowadays the preferred arangement of glass seems to be the more compact roof prism. So after some (a lot, really) of research, adding and removing from my wish list – I arrived at the Vortex Crossfire. These are entry level, but quality scopes from a popular brand. Plus, they seem to come with a nice case.
They are now winding their way to Richardson from some unknown binocular warehouse somewhere. I’m surprisingly excited.
So, if you had, let’s say, somewhere between one and two hundred bucks in Amazon gift cards (not a lot of money, but enough for something) what would you buy. Fun to think about… but not to obsess over.
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.
“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 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.
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.
“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?
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
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.
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:
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.
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).
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.
Bill Chance 