Further adventures in ???

Sadly, January passes without a Final Song. Soon enough there should be another one.

Welcome To Devils Island from Lana Connors on Vimeo.

Yeah, I don't know what this is about either. But somehow I dug it.

Walkin' after midnight, searching for you

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is an unusual horror movie in a few ways.

For one, it apparently aspires to look like Prince's Under the Cherry Moon. Well, that might not actually be the model. But it does evoke the era circa 1986-89 when rock videos classed up by going monochrome. Its black and white is much more reminiscent of old MTV than old(er) movies. My speculation on the reasons for that in a minute.

It does not really have a lot of jump scares. The direct cause of this absence is that the vampire is also the protagonist. You could call her the hero, even. With one apparent exception her attacks are on behalf of wronged women.

Still, while there's not a lot of shock horror, the film maintains a very eerie atmosphere in its unusual urban setting.

The third quality that sets it apart is that the dialogue is in Persian. This despite the fact that it was shot entirely in California, and Elijah Wood is one of the producers. Its setting of Bad City is both an American and an Iranian one, really taking place in a world of symbolism.

Due to its content, this is not a film that could have been shot in Iran in its current political state. But I feel it was made for Iran. This is a movie made to be secretly traded as a bootleg in places it's not supposed to be. That's the reason for the rock video aesthetics. It's part of the tradition.

I like that, because while America's successful movies are exported all over the world, we don't often take the trouble to talk to other peoples on their own terms.

Oh MY

Matt Fraction is an interesting comics writer. He wrote a too-short-lived Marvel book called FF, about a handpicked substitute group that watched over the Fantastic Four's property while they were away.

He also turns out to be a pretty sharp film critic, here analyzing a memorable but somewhat controversial scene in the Coens' Fargo.

It doesn’t come immediately after the Mike Yanigata scene (there’s José Feliciano, sex, violence, a box of money, and a red ice scraper before we get there) and, like that scene, it feels weird at first blush: “Hey remember that funny scene a few minutes ago? Yeah that guy was even sadder and creepier than he appeared. Ha ha! Can’t believe you fell for that.”

It lets us know, though, that Marge pushing the guy out of her booth and back to his own wasn’t remotely selfish or unkind. Her evil detector pinged. She forced the bad guy out of the frame. 

A few people have expressed bafflement to me over what the Mike Yanigata scene was doing in the movie. While I never objected to it, I had a hard time coming up with a straight answer. He does come off as manipulative, in a way that men would do well to memorize with a "don't be like this" warning appended. Adding him to the mix as a demonstration of Marge's policewoman instinct is a move of sneaky brilliance.

The long haul

I heard - overheard, the conversation had started when I got there - a bus driver saying that he gets up at 3:20 in the morning. I had to ask to make sure I'd heard that right. But he was used to it because he'd been a long haul trucker before that. Trucking is a notoriously weird and disorienting job, and you can see why.

He also said that he knew a bus driver who kept a six pack in the trunk of his bus. Thereby hangs another tale.

Whiteout weekend

I have a theory that when it snows on the weekend, everybody goes into emergency shutdown mode much quicker.A storm is a storm, but it gets inflated. No one really wants to work on Saturday anyway.

This past one was a string of little inconveniences. Some places never opened, like the library. Others closed early sometimes before I could get there and sometimes not, but when not I was cutting it close a lot.

A Meetup I was in on wound up not happening, but I only found out when I realized I was the only one there.

Of course looking at other parts of the country, hung up by much larger snowstorms than they're used to, and with a few fatalities, it becomes clear. Not only are thse First World problems, even some others in the First World have it wrose.

Old friends

I recently started William Browning Spencer's Résumé with Monsters and I figure I'll finish it soon. It's not long, and perversely fun.

The Old Gods of H.P. Lovecraft have their part to play in it. But here's another thing. The protagonist is named "Philip Kenan", which made me think right away of Philip Kindred Dick. And the book has the feel of his work as well. Bleak hallucination bleeds into bleak reality.

There could be some Raymond Carver influence as well. Or at any rate someone who's practiced the art of writing about shit jobs.

Posters, people

Direct your attention to an interesting story on anartist's progress. Mark Grotjahn had already started on his art career when he, in essence, went back and became an apprentice sign painter.

Painters often go through a phase of not painting in order to make their way back to it. Grotjahn's way back to painting began in a conceptual discourse on the function of painting itself, how it communicates, where, to whom, and possible processes open to it. Donald Judd memorably wrote that the chief challenge for any artist is to find “the concatenation that will grow.” Meaning, a chain of abstract ideas that can produce things the artist cannot predict, and that can sustain an artist for a lifetime and grow. That's what this exhibition shows us: a fabulous lesson for young artists looking to buck rigid artistic structures and find their own art.

I'm not, I must confess, real familiar with Grotjahn as a painter, only having seen a few works. So I don't really have a verdict on the worth of his work. But it is kind of cool that he's showing his roots, putting the broadsheets that inspired him out front there.