found my notes on Chelsea Girls

I was looking for one of my blank black notebooks to scribble down something in, I forget what, and found the notes I had written on seeing Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls. When the movie originally played in Chicago, I think it must have been 1969, I must have been in prison. It is hard to remember. All I know is, it took me 40 years to finally see this movie projected (and projected properly with random sound and two projectors at MOMA as well).

The inaccessibility of Andy Warhol movies -- the real Andy Warhol movies, not the commercial Paul Morrissey movies -- adds to their status as treasures. (Where can I find Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of? Another one I never saw. I do have fond memories of Lonesome Cowboys, which was shown in a Denver art house in the early 1970s. I took a friend who was aghast. "It's just a bunch of queers running around," I believe was his comment. I'll track down anything with Taylor Mead in it. In Lonesome Cowboys, he plays the nurse and runs around shrieking like a girl. What a brave actor!)

My notes from Chelsea Girls:

Comic figures but

Nico and son and Eric Emerson (from Heat, the masturbation retard)
Kitchen trims bangs for half anhour

Ingrid screeching
Woman injuects into girl 2x then herself
Bridget Polk
Sound varies

Pour water on boy's mouth (Nico's son later becomes junkie? is this the boy?)

Men in Bed, underwear, Eurotrash, pull down, party, roll around, keep pulling his pants, pours water on him.

Zooms in andout of focus
Motion without meaning (I start hallucinating between the two screen images, what is foreground and what is relief, what is the image)
Maria Menken and Mary Waranov, grouchy and scary.
(Color)
Parents?

Lot of Waranov with other women

Young man from Heat (EE) talking about hustling? Love? Leaves hanging on idea of love.

Junkie, Pope of the Village, injects dope
Ingrid "confesses"
Talks to "Paul" behind camera?
Other women
Is literate and funny and extreme
Gets violent with woman, hits her for offense (taste?)
Hard to understand why, but it is jarring

Nico V.U. album cover colors projected on her face
Trying to impose meaning on it all, both random and non-random

Music plays out for full 12 minutes

Shawn will soon be gone

I really don't have time for this right now, but among David Lynch's Inland Empire -- which I could watch repeatedly -- and the Korean films of Hong Song-Soo -- which take time and fold it back upon itself -- and John from Cincinnati, I choose John.

Don't cry for me, Cincinnati

New York Times

John Expires

"John From Cincinnati," the much-anticipated surfer drama and HBO's would-be successor to the critical and commercial success of "The Sopranos," was canceled yesterday, the day after its first-season finale, Reuters reported. The show, created by David Milch ("Deadwood") and the author Kem Nunn, never clicked with critics or viewers despite extensive marketing and the participation of actors like Rebecca De Mornay, Bruce Greenwood and Austin Nichols.


Lee watched the season (and, as it turns out, series) finale with me on Sunday.  I had to go over and physically close her jaw.  There has never been a program like John from Cincinnati in the history of television or the movies.  I guess Venice Beach retrograde LSD besotted hippies isn't enough of a niche market.  I'm going to tape all of the episodes from "HBO on Demand" in case they don't release it on DVD. 

Notes on I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY

Writing has become so strange.  I've forgotten why people keep diaries or journals.  Why do I do it?  Is it for myself?  For others?  Or dubious posterity?  

The blog doesn't allow comments.  I don't want to engage in discussions.  I set out to create something that would exist outside of exchange.

When you have any idea of your audience, that changes everything.  If you write for a specific audience, you are selling something.  If you yourself solely are the audience, with your diary hidden away, that also changes everything and seems kind of pointless.  So I pretend I have it both ways.  

This is a blog that an audience may or may not spy upon, or stumble upon, or regularly read.  I don't know.  I may be curious, but I abstain from seeking this knowledge.  OK, so I am a narcissistic exhibitionist.  Don't remind me.

Thus (I think "thus" is applicable; maybe not), what appears in my own writing continuously surprises me.

Never mind.  I've been enjoying little dabbles in Derrida, finally, belatedly.  My nutshell of Derrida: Everything is text, but there is no underlying definition of that text, thus destroying that text.  One might finally say that the meanings are infinite. Contradictions, as even Whitman noted, are inevitable.  

I absorbed Barthes in the 1970s.  As a movie critic at the time, I found it great fun, taking movies and seeing through their cultural and social and psychological origins.  To apply Derrida -- if one accepts that I am capable of absorbing even a smattering of applicable understanding; superficiality of comprehension never bothered me; indeed, experts and the thoroughly schooled interpreters are rarely fun and not entirely to be trusted -- to apply Derrida would take movie reviews to a different plane entirely.  I know I repeated that phrase.  

Strangely, I imagine Derrida as making everything religious.  

Which brings me -- I don't know why -- to I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY, the summer dumb comedy that I had intended to stay far, far away from, since it superficially seems to mock gay people.  But my wife dragged me.  She thought it would be funny.  I was interested in what it was up to, what messages it was selling.

In the end, we both agreed that it wasn't very funny, but it was fascinating in its cultural expectations and depictions of both hetero- and homosexual behavior.

Adam Sandler plays such a randy fireman, sleeping with scores of buxom hooterettes, I found him unsexy and off-putting, especially since Sandler is reaching an age when he turns from young horny dumb guy to resembling hirsuite porn star Ron Jeremy.  Shudder.

The first half of the movie is spent establishing the extreme heterosexuality of the stars, but making that very heterosexuality entirely unsexy and unattractive at the same time. Maybe the American Pie set gets off on this, but the women are strictly pinups, for the most part.  Sandler sleeps with even the Polish cleaning lady, though.  He does anything...  except another guy.

When the gay club scene enters the picture, the outrageous and flamboyant gay-gay-gayness of the participants also seems unsexy and unattractive and unfunny.

Kevin James, the widower of a beloved wife to whom he remains faithful, father of two, has one scene in which he goes to the closet to look at his wife's clothes.  He fondles a skirt, paralleling the moving scene at the end of Brokeback Mountain, and at this point in the movie, it seems that all  relationships -- gay or straight -- really don't make any difference at all.  Committed relationships of any variety are preferable -- and sexier -- than the kind of whoredom that Sandler admits to living out.  (There were children in the theatre behind us; a father had brought his young kids; there was nothing in the gay stuff that unnerved me; but Sandler's calling himself a "whore" and grabbing breasts and so forth seemed beyond PG-13 to me, unsettling even if it was supposed to be unattractive in some sense).

The son of Kevin James is supposed to be gay.  He tap dances, does the splits, and sings selections from Annie Get Your Gun.  He's not very convincing; this is the first time I've seen a child who is supposed to be gay on screen who is obviously acting the stereotype role of a gay person.  I wonder what stage directions the director gave him.  "Act gay now?"

I do like the scene when Sandler shows the boy some straight porno, thinking it would be good for him.  He shrieks and runs from the room.  I know adult gay men who still respond in this manner.  They're not faking it either.  This could be a crucial scene in the movie, in that as repulsed as the firemen at the station and the two principles (who never kiss, even by the end) may be at the very thought of man-on-man action, it seems clear that gay people can have an equal and opposite reaction when confronted with the very thought of man-on-woman action.  

I think that's the point of the movie.  It's not to show sympathy or understanding at homosexuality through parody and drag.  At the final courtroom trial scene, however, when Sandler and James have to profess the validity of their domestic partnership, they actually and truthfully confess their love for one another.  But they can't kiss.  That would be too much.  

By this time, all the firemen have taken their Spartacus moment, come around, and declared their support.  And, in the final scene, there is another gay wedding, and the men do kiss, and everyone dances.

The movie is a mess, and rarely funny, but it is fascinating.  I had to admire Sandler and James and all involved.  It is crafted to a specific audience -- straight people who come to laugh at gay people -- and it doesn't work that way.

Even more slyly, notable gay actors show up on the screen.  Richard Chamberlain plays the judge at the film's end.  His own gayness was never actually announced, but slowly emerged and his presence here is sly and one of the funniest things about the movie.  Similarly, Lance Bass -- from one of those boy bands -- is the bandleader at the wedding party.  I think he came out gay, too.  Or was that the other boy band guy?  See, it doesn't matter.

And Ving Rhames, the big black tough guy who plays a closeted gay man.  Is he really gay off-screen?  I don't know, it doesn't matter, but I have to say, I enjoyed watching him dance naked in the shower.

The next night, to continue our efforts to escape the humidity, Lee and I went to the speedball propulsion of THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, which kept me cool and on the edge of my seat and did absolutely nothing to relieve my paranoia about the government.

OK this is a big mess.  Just notes.  Not a review.  But it doesn't matter.  

Also, the reason I don't like star ratings is because there is no way to give this movie a mere rating.  By what standard?  We enjoyed watching it and thinking about it, irrespective of its craft or quality.  I can't rate movies.

Sorry,  

'YOUR PRE-PAID AUTOBIOGRAPHY GOES HERE'

Last week, a CNN email alert popped into my inbox. Lady Bird Johnson had died.

I felt sadness, in part because knowing who Lady Bird Johnson was meant I had reached a certain age myself, but also because I had admired Lady Bird. She was the only person I knew who was named after a bug. In the 1960s, she helped rid the world of billboards, especially those mean-spirited ones declaring in 8000-point type, "BEAUTIFY AMERICA. GET A HAIRCUT."

Forty years ago, long hair was virtually a crime. My college gym teacher shoved me against the wall for not showing enough ear. Long hair is coming back, according to reports of pre-teen tonsorial behavior patterns, but this time without political overtones. Long hair, along with promises, war, torture, words, art, and death, have lost all significance.

Maybe the only things that still matter are celebrity fundraisers and celebrity drunk-driving arrests.

"Everyone writing about Lady Bird will use the word 'billboards,'" I thought. "And 'beautification.'"

Sure enough, there they were, billboards and beautification, near the beginning of the full-page New York Times obituary.

This, I thought, could be a new puzzle game for Will Shortz or TV quiz shows. This could be the next Sudoku, the next Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. To reduce a person's entire biography into just two words.

"Watergate, China" could only be referring to Richard Nixon.

"The Chief, UI Professor." Tell me you didn't think of Stephen Kauffman.

"Altamont, No Satisfaction." That would handle both Keith Richard and Mick Jagger efficiently enough.

"Demi, Punked." No one else but Ashton Kutcher.

"Iraq." Obviously, George W. Bush only needs one word, four letters, although you might want to toss in "Apocalypse" as well, just to feel safe.

What would my two words be? This gives me pause. Using just two words would certainly cut down on my own obituary cost, now that the News-Gazette charges five-and-a-half cents per character for "personalized obituaries." I might even get by for less than five bucks. "Gregoire Melville died Friday. Angst, Cucaracha." Random perhaps, Kafkaesque, but strangely appropriate. And it would cost less than a cup of Starbucks.

Nevertheless, I do plan to write my own obituary and to use more than two words. The News-Gazette issues a guide for doing so, called "Honoring Your Loved One in Print." It has helpful writing tips, including sample expressions to include, such as "He always said he could weld anything but a broken heart or the crack of dawn" (not making these up) and "She graciously accepted the fact that her only grandchildren would have four legs, a tail and a bark."

The writer of the guide may have been attempting levity in the Face of Death or perhaps this is a ploy to increase the cost of a person's obituary.

The guide encourages you to write a do-it-yourself obit so you don't put other people in the position of inventing polite lies after you kick. You can make stuff up. You could write the poetry that the paper otherwise never allows in print.

Someone I would describe as a good man once asked me what I would say to sum up my life. I stuttered something inane, like "I tried?"

I meant to convey that I had hoped to create something lasting, or that I had given it my all, or done it my way, or more likely I had no idea what I meant.

What would YOU say? I asked.

"I loved," he said soberly, and he meant it in the best sense.

Unlike many people, I am in favor of the paid obituary. I always read the obituaries. People my age do that. It goes with the AARP territory. Paid obituaries are more entertaining. People do write about their pets. Sometimes they include stories of unlikely hobbies or family relations that make no sense to outsiders.

Best of all, paid obits can include the cause of death. Unpaid obits in the Gazette do not include cause of death, the single thing that most people are interested in. I always want to know. He was only 43. Did his liver fail? Was he doing the crossword puzzle while driving?

For my own posthumous self-description, my father-in-law once said I was the kind of person who should live in a cave. That should be included in my obit. I tried to change my nationality last year and become Mexican. Even though the effort failed -- it's extremely hard to replant yourself in other soil -- the intention should be included, one of those "I tried" components of my life.

At the very least, I would mention Champaign-Urbana. If I didn't, the Gazette editors would manage to slip in a reference. Last Sunday, they added a reference to Champaign-Urbana in George Will's column about Antioch College, a reference I'm fairly certain he did not write himself. Part of the function of the News-Gazette is boosterism, to promote itself and the community every chance available. Such is the nature of your garden variety small city inferiority complex.

If the newspaper did publish poetry, someone probably would add C-U references there as well, as in Robert Frost's famous "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood in West Side Park."

In the Oscar-nominated movie "Venus," Vanessa Redgrave, playing and looking both old and comely, attends a funeral and sagely notes, "When you die, everyone wants to be your friend."

In my case, it will more than likely take at least that long. When that time comes, if you would please remember the words "cucaracha" and "angst," then I will have died happy.

-- Gregoire Melville