Road trip!

Review: Cinema

Was stressed out for of couple of reasons and I’ve been waiting for La Moustache to come to South Jersey, so tonight was movie night.

La Moustache: If you’ve read a review, then you know the basic premise: a guy shaves off his mustache, his wife doesn’t notice, hijinx ensues. I thought, what a great idea for a movie, and let’s face it, I would watch Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric read the phone book together. When Arnaud Desplechin shoots those two, one of them is neurotic but functional and the other is a total mess, and they seem to switch off; here they both played off someone else who was a mess. The other Amalric-is-a-literary-type vehicle worth checking out is Assayas’ ‘Late August, Early September.’

When the opening credits rolled I thought, do I really need to see the actual movie? Well, it does utilize ambiguity to milk all the psychodrama out of that comic premise. I’ve been watching Antonioni’s ‘Eros Is Sick’ trilogy and it is a sort of cartoon version of La Notte, and it’s in color, and the third act is in Hong Kong, as I didn’t know if Devos was allowed to leave Paris.

The other funny thing is they used Philip Glass music, which is unusual in a comedy. Usually you hear his music in a movie and you wait for the world to go out of balance, or Mishima to kill himself, the Maoists to repress the Dalai Lama, or John Heard to tell off a pol in Mont St Michel, but here a Glass score is played for laughs.

So this is Ian’s Summer Pick, tho I can’t remember if I saw something else that was good this summer.

Wicker Man: Saw about twenty minutes in the middle, as I only had one choice for my filler until Changing Times, piece of crap, but it does draw you in. I don’t have cable, but it’s the kind of movie people seem to watch when they have cable. I find horror movies to be the most ideological, and LaBute seems to be grandstanding about something here, but I don’t know or care what.

Changing Times: Catherine Deneuve’s first line is her complimenting her son for shaving off his goatee, so already they forfeited what has proved to be a winning dramatic concept.. Once I went to this theater and paid to see Charles Durning play the governor (O Brother Where Art Thou?) and snuck in to see Charles Durning play the mayor (State and Main).

SPOILER ALERT The times they are a-changing. END OF SPOILER ALERT Never thought much of Téchiné, here he creates a lot of characters and gives them two acts of development but with this amount of characters it gets up to 108 minutes. Worth seeing for the acting, though.

SPOILER ALERT France and Morocco are one happy dysfunctional family but the Yanks are gunning down the Iraqis END OF SPOILER ALERT

Factotum: The good news is that now that Mickey Roarke and Matt Dillon have both played Charles Bukowski in essentially the same movie, the chances of Tim Allen playing Bukowski are lessened.

Imagine it. Discover it. (TM)

I was reading about how in Kansas City, you can live, work, eat, and conduct your social existence all within the headquarters of Hallmark Cards. I don’t know what the occupancy rate of this place is but someone decided this is what people wanted.

Here you don’t need to write poems, because Hallmark already has poems for every occasion and emotion! And what verbal contrivance of ironic detachment can rival the stated fact that you live and work in the Hallmark Cards HQ? What purer commentary on the myth of America? But keep the poems coming, folks, please.

Julio Galán

1958-2006

Consumerism without consequence

The most unintentionally funny line of 2005, cinematic or otherwise, would appear to be (spoiler alert) from the special features of the recently released DVD version of Žižek!, where Barry Nolan of CN8 Boston’s TV talker Nightbeat interrupts a Žižek rant with ‘You’re kind of Dennis Leary... from Slovenia!!’

So you see why it’s good to hold off on your year-end awards until the following autumn.

I don’t know what it means: I know that Leary is a comedian who may have a tough parent schtick that may be relatively lacking in implicit irony of totalitarianism metaphors, or a coffee monologue (looking on his Amazon page now), though there’s probably someone who really IS the Slovenian Denis Leary who’s not amused.

Ten gallon line

I hypothesize that the Cowboy Hat Threshold is 100 miles West of the Mississippi irrespective of the curvature of the river.

The Route 44 Missouri Cowboy Hat Threshold relates to the 19th Century migration of abolitionist Irish and Germans (who moved West on a latitudinal straight line and elect the Carnahans and Gephardt) to St. Louis that led to the state voting in 1860 to join the Union and the farming communities further west that supported the Dixie militia that were sent there on the order of Governor Claiborne Fox Johnson after the Union started tapping the state arsenal. Somewhere between Suburban St. Louis and Majority Whip Roy Blount’s Ozark district, which Ashcroft lost the primary for in 1972, it is time to take off the Cardinals cap and don the Stetson.

I like to wear a cowboy hat when it’s sunny, but only in places where the old-timers wear them.

Indeterminacy . 177

I don’t dispute Andy’s contention that Cage’s vispo lacks the phenomenological attentiveness of things to come, but it’s still one of my favorite American road trip poems.

Road trip photos

Here I disseminate the travel photos BEFORE the trip rather than after.

I have to drive to Austin for a half week for work and back here. I have to pay my expenses and get reimbursed, but tho the innovation of flying and renting wheels there, which most of civilization favors, is economically comparable I enjoy seeing the country. Also, looking at a lot of pre WW2 Western art in places like Indianapolis, Tulsa, and Fort Worth vaguely relates to what I'm supposed to be doing.

My previous jaunt to Texas involved researching food stops along the way ahead of time but on the way I learned that it is best to hit a special place once a day and self-cater the other two meals, because of sitting in a car and the portions involved. I generally like to make painstaking plans and ignore them.

Mon 11 Sept

At supper hoping the Hare Krishnaists won’t smell the Chili Dog on my breath from lunch, or possibly stuffed cabbage instead. I used to be a vegetarian but the South and Mexico ruined this for a while. Museums in Pennsylvania all closed on Monday, hence scenic route.

Tue 12

Joseph Mallard William

I feel under no obligation to eat the chili spaghetti but it may happen. If I can hold out 'til Terre Haute there's always Gerhardt's Bierstube.

Wed 13

Stare at the Beckmanns as long as I want, maybe seeing the rest of the collections, maybe not. Saw the New York retrospective a few years back but you can’t look at his work briefly in a crowd; I can’t.

Will see how South Grand compares to Washington Street Philly for Vietnamese.

Thurs 14

Cowboys and Indians in Tulsa.

Stockyards closed Thursday in OK City so I may settle for a salad.

Fri 15

My Favorite Caravaggio


Sat 16-Wed 20

Chekhov’s dinner set, veggies.

Thurs 21

Twombly gallery, plus Rothko Chapel and the Menil Surrealist collection.

Dinner/breakfast? ..in that Mecca of indigenous American cuisine, Beaumont, TX. San Francisco, what’s that? (never been)

Sat 23-Mon 25

Borrowing a condo on the St Augustine estuary..








Wed 26

Get out of the car, stare at this:



then arrive back here.

I may change this post as the trip changes.

Anti-post

I really appreciate the feedback on the critical nuggets here, and I often like to motivate myself by announcing what I’m going to do, like essays on Mallarmé, existentialism and Jain philosophy, discussions of Hejinian’s The Fatalist, etc etc, and there were several ‘unannounced’ essays I was working on. And the two book reviews I wrote last week (on the more visited Silliman’s blog) were heartfelt and a pleasure to write.

However, it is in the same spirit of convoluted motivational tactics that I write the ‘anti-post,’ the post that says I’m overwhelmed by a (creative) work project and I need to take a break from blogging longer essays, because perhaps if I don’t post this I won’t take that break. So I do plan to post stuff, just not literary essays that take hours to research.

I’m not sure how long this will be, but definitely the next week and for the most part the rest of the year, although I hope to take some breaks from my break here and there during that time and write more here.