Where Are We Going?

That might be the best question to ask for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). As the credits start the film, a harmonic chime hums in the background and a lone trumpet croons to its audience. Where are we going? What world have we decided to join? Will be able to get out? I'm not sure about the last question, because of the film's mixture of sexiness and macabre nastiness. To the core, this world seethes and the monsters leech in and out of it. Forget the black and white shadows of film noir. Chinatown is a dirty, muddy brown, where grit and dust attach themselves to sunlight like parasites.

What a fully realized film this is. For the first time, style does not carry the noir genre; rather, storyline, set development, and acting really elevate this film to a masterpiece of the time period of noir. When you develop the world, there really is a feeling (as an audience member) of inescapability, of surrender. As J.J. Gittes watches Mrs. Mulwray's corpse drip out of her car, we hear the blood dripping on the sidewalk, we see the sweat cool on Gittes's forehead. The slutty lights of Chinatown surround us in a hypnotic pulse and this world infects us with its filth.

However, that main theme by Jerry Goldsmith plays on. Something about it remains in my head. It might be the masterstroke of the film. It's not dirty or filthy. It's not broken down by this noir universe. Something about it remains. It manages to breathe despite the fog of crime and corruption. It's a somber tune, yes, but it's romantically somber. It carries the voice of the long-lost knights who pioneered into the California basin and founded this slut of a city. It remains in the valley like a distant echo, beating off the cold-dark wind.

And Gittes. What a man. Go home, Gittes. Go to sleep.

Q & Q

Questions are everything. Gotta try and remember that. Curiosity can take you far.

Waiting, Anticipating.

Look at the boy walking under the streetlights. I see him out of the corner of my eyes late at night and I sit and I stare. Mostly out of some odd amusement, but sometimes a sadness creeps its way in like it does with most things. I sit in my chair and watch as he swings around a pole like a leaf in the breeze, almost like a dance, almost like a waltz. He never looks straight ahead, but always up into the beacons of light. I sit in my chair and watch him flutter beneath the lamps and I feel sadness sometimes. What a life that must be, what an inspiration, what a joy. What secret does he hold that brings him here on these lonely nights to my window? Does he even remember that I'm here, watching him with dejected eyes, watching his skin pulse like the moon? Is he threatened by the tiny things that creep into heads like mine late at night? What does the passage of time feel like for him? What does love taste like for him? What does a hummingbird sound like to him? What are dreams like to him? I know, now, that there are certain moments in your life that will cripple you with their sincerity. There's no symbolism to them, no deeper meaning except in the fact that they are brief glimpses of melody and magic. At times late at night when he comes to my window, I often look away. Not ashamed, necessarily, but I don't want to make eye contact with him for fear he might run away. For fear that life is nothing but two dreamers lying in bed. I place my eyes on the windowsill and watch him waltz under the stars and streetlights. I want to smile but I don't, because it would only be stifled by the urgency to wipe the tears away from my quivering chin. At times late at night, I want to stand outside in the twilight shadows and wait for him to come by, to run up to him and hug him until he's smothered and can't breathe and screams and crys out but makes no noise because there's no air because it's only a vaccuum of fluorescent lights and stars. But for now, I'll keep my eyes on the windowsill, biting the inside of my cheek and smiling.

Are my chances of streetlight waltzes through?


There's a certain bliss implied with an untied shoelace. Sometimes, things are more important to worry about. Sometimes life can be too beautiful or heartbreaking to worry about shoelaces. Sometimes its more important to lay on the grass under the streetlights and feel the cracked skin of the asphalt against the pads of your fingers and smell the hint of long forgotten rains upon long forgotten highways.

Iconic.

"We are a people starving for beautiful images" -Werner Herzog.

A Saloon

Saloon.


I must profess a platonic love towards that word.


Something about it seems adamantly Western.

Better yet, American.


Surely it exists in other places.

But just the sound of it makes you think of the two wooden doors that squeak open as cowhands stumble in for another drink.

Dust on the floor.

Whiskey in the cabinets.

Women on the stairs.

We should change the White House to a Saloon.

It's time for a revolution.

The Southern Gothic.

I met a troll today along the riverbank
Minding his business, for the most part,
Stringing some barbed wire on the lip of a riverbank.
His name was...well..maybe thats not important
I'm sure he wouldn't care too much.
He was working on building a bridge for the next two years
That made too much sense.

I found myself terrified of his hands
And where they had been.
They slapped and pawed at whatever they met
Like two steel jaws who had been at work
all their stale lives.
I could imagine them closing over me and I shuddered.
He didn't notice. Of course he didn't notice.
He wasn't a troll of small and meager emotions.
An inbred packhorse, more like it. A walking golem,
his backbone transformed to seedy granite.
His adam's apple bobbled like a stone,
chortling beneath his cracked skin.

His eyes never really seemed to focus on anything.
For too long, they had stared at the same tasks
Over and over again.
The mind starts to wander, perhaps,
Until it wanders too far.
And the eyes leave soon after.
I could hear him talking, but the orbs never really met.
They were just there, windows to an abyss.


He had plenty of stories though, great ones at that.
He has a girlfriend, and I find that too ridiculous to even deny.
Scratching the hair on his reptilian nape,
He told me stories of times long ago.
Times when he held 6 men at gunpoint,
Times when he spent months in jail,
Times when he worked on this road and that bridge,
Times when a man created his own grotesque code of chivalry,
Times when a man could become a monster
And the whole world never took time to notice.

I can sense him now, lurking in the night,
not in a dangerous way, but lurking nonetheless.
For how could something like that ever exist with peace?
What hideous mistake did someone make to allow that man
to come to this fate? What tragedy must have befallen?
Sometimes I shudder to think that at night, he
drops to the ground and sniffs the moist earth for
Stories from his fantastic ancestors,
His fellow Gothic monstrostities.

And yet,
I wonder where he trods off at times to sleep,
like a bear or a mammoth to hibernate.
I wonder what haunts his dreams, or what
plagues his past. I wonder why he prounounces iron as "Eye Run" and
where the Gap exists that he says he grew up within.
I want to follow him deep into the darkest hollows and
spy out his wretched lair.
I want to wrap my arm around him and laugh at the same time I shudder.

He's Bigfoot. He's Beorn. He's Grendel.

I met a troll walking along the riverbank.
And I wonder what he's thinking.

Autotune

The great thing about pop music is that it reserves itself in your memory as a distinct representative of a time in your life. Every once in awhile, the song goes beyond this idea and becomes a cultural icon, something to define a generation, at least in a canonical sense. Think MMMbop. But when that happens, the song really only puts things in an historical perspective. When I hear MMMbop, I don't dance, because I may or may not be having a history lesson from 1997. Thus, I must cling to the pop songs that succeed in attracting only MY eye, and not the general population. And, you know, it's amazing how fast a pop song can become absolutely miserable to endure. Bleeding Love may go down as the best song of 2008, but after 8 months of that song, it's like pulling teeth. So fuck that song. What we (or less pretentiously, I) must do is record the three pop songs from 2008 that will hopefully be retrofied by college students in 20 years. That thought comforts me.

3. Leaving by Jesse McCartney- Forget the lyrics or message; the initial happiness created from the opening computer twerks of this song never lets up.

2. Can't Believe It (Remix) by T-Pain and Justin Timberlake- Fuck you Lil Wayne. This version never lets go with its catchiness. Try not humming it. Try it. Also, the argument over Autotune has to stop. Who cares? Whether or not it adds to the song, it's part of it. No one wants to hear this song live anyways. It's best to listen to in the car or with all your white friends.

1.Forever by Chris Brown- Impossible not to smile when this song comes on. If anyone can step up to the ranks of Michael Jackson, look for Chris Brown and perhaps Timberlake. A Herculean task, yes, but have you listened to these songs? Forever undeniably challenges the rift between art and kitsch. Whereas film has established a post-apocalyptic trend, Chris Brown just wants to dance.


Fuego.