Brand Upon The Brain! A Remembrance In 12 Chapters (Guy Maddin, 2006).
I don’t often do this, because I’m not keen when people force me to watch videos and I don’t like inflicting that on others, but here’s the full trailer. It’s only about a minute and a half long and there is boobs.
That’s Isabella Rossellini’s voice repeating “The past, the past,” like a bad French student film (in Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World, 2003, she played a tragic baroness who has two glass legs filled with beer).
The thing with Maddin is that there is nearly always a point, usually 20 or 30 minutes in, while I’m watching his stuff that I’m like, “Oh, come on,” because I’m over the striking visuals that sucked me in to begin with and I’m beginning to be irked by how it’s become over-the-top or maudlin in its cult precosity, like on-purpose cheesily cult or derivative, and I become uncertain.
Are these overtly contrived, look-how-symbolic-I-am moments and their anachronistic cinematic dialogue part of an abstract ironic technique made to make me question the tropes of arthouse garbage, or is this straight arthouse garbage? So often with other deliberately unusual movies I go with “straight arthouse garbage,” because I get like that due to dramatic over-exposure to pretentious hipsters in my short life (I’m looking at you, Portland), but with Maddin I pull back from that judgmental jump. There’s a third category: (1) parody of overwrought indulgent nonsense, (2) actual overwrought indulgent nonsense, or (3) … something else? better? deeper? more effective?
Because right when I’m supressing the urge to roll my eyes and spoil any avant garde cognescenti cred I have accidentally accrued, suddenly some really great moment will have a huge impact on my emotional experience of watching the film and I’ll be sucked in and by the end just sure it’s my new favorite.
But then the next time I pop it in to show some friend, I’m back to thinking I’ve been duped by either the ultimate sly hipster or a genuine savant who sometimes falls flat, and I’m initially embarassed for us both. But then — TUG — in to it again.
It’s a rapid, repetitive cycle, like an awkward date with your own gynecologist — you both have an idea of what’s going to happen but you don’t know what to expect. Or watching a really close friend fuck the lines to a scene badly in a drama class, but totally sell it with their eyes, and you worry that only you can see that though it looks messy it’s probably headed somewhere amazing. Uncomfortable and anticipatory. That’s Guy Maddin movies for me.
I kind of love him.
Uncomfortable is, well, uncomfortable, yeah, but it’s so often just right because it’s the truth.
Anyway, I recommend Brand on the Brain!, is the upshot.
(All the caps came from the trailer because I do not [yet] own this movie.)
To say that there are no hipsters in Portland is like saying there were no hippies in San Francisco, no punks in New York. The problem with hipsters is their lack of purpose and ideas. They are not the angry young men and women of counter-culture past, they are leaches of culture. Being a hipster is the opposite of a movement; it’s a crawl toward death. Like an unconscious addict, of course no one admits to being one.
First off, there is no such thing as a hipster. It’s a lazy stereotype. Blaming hipsters for ruining your favorite bar, your favorite band, and your favorite city is akin to blaming Santa Claus for ruining Christmas. Secondly, stop complaining, it makes you seem more out of touch than you really are.
I used to read it all the time, but hipsters have totally ruined the Mercury. Nyuck, nyuck.
For myself, I would rather be “out of touch” than wear a hanky turned like I have just robbed a train and jeans that cut off the circulation to my thighs and lovely ass. Also it has not quite been long enough since their initial time of ironic popularity to once more sport a trucker hat as a sneering referential fashion nod to an original sneering referential fashion nod. Only Judah Friedlander on 30 Rock gets a pass. And when a musician that I like begins to find wider success, I am happy for that individual, not full of embittered proclamations that he or she has “sold out.” Hipsters: it is okay to like something without it being ironic or edgy. Don’t front like you don’t like Jamba Juice and family reunions — you don’t have to make out like they are kitschy or retro to explain that you enjoy them, because it is okay to like Jamba Juice and family reunions and put the period right there.
Also, I know you love you some Pabst Blue Ribbon but I need to say that once, my husband and I bought an actual 12-pack in bottles of PBR, and when we unloaded them in to the fridge we noticed that despite being sealed each bottle was filled to a different level. Some sat at varying levels up the neck, one was only filled directly to the neck, and the weirdest one was literally all the way to the bottlecap. How is that even possible? Don’t machines in a factory do the bottling, and, if so, why would each be filled differently? Is the machine that poorly operated, or is it that old or sunk that deeply in to disrepair? What the what? There is probably lead shavings and rat shit and who else knows what all in Pabst if there is that bizzarely low level of quality control. Please do consider it and think about making Natty Ice or Keystone the new trendy and appropriately cheesey cheap beer? Probably safer bets.
P.S.: Cute hipster boys? Please eat a sandwich cause from behind I thought you were a woman, and I’m not sleeping with someone who could slip down the shower drain.
To be triple-dog clear: the hipster Batman graffiti photos are taken in San Francisco, California. The hipster debate comes from an independent weekly newspaper in Portland, Oregon.
I know it’s weird with us all in estrangement and the like, but the important thing I want you to remember is the time we went to Lucy’s Table and that one waitress who later opened a meditative health center with her husband dropped the champagne as she popped the cork and it spun in the air as it fell and it hosed down THE ENTIRE RESTAURANT in a ten foot radius and the windows and tables and all those third-wave anorexic hipster yippies were dripping with wine. We did that.
Then we went to sit outside with our dessert and that very nice but drunk as shit first-wave yippie lady told us about walking around naked in front of her son when he was young, and then she apologized to us at great length for her generation being poor stewards of the earth and they misspelled “Congratulations” in some kind of very expensive alcohol-and-caramel-dulce-de-leche reduction sauce on your flourless chocolate cake plate.
Sometimes I forget that through no deliberate actions of your own you are somehow elected by the forces in this universe to be a one-man wrecking-crew of every situation you enter. Thank you for being a genial agent of chaos akin to Pigpen, because the anxious uptight energy of my yin at that time deserved and needed that yang to grow and see that what we must always try to do in this world is to stop time and bring back what’s died and it is not a thing we can do alone.
I know this guy who claims controversially when drinking in a crowd that he doesn’t like the film Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001). This guy will say he happens to think that it’s a dumb, boring, pretentious piece of crap that tries too hard, and people only pretend to like it because they’re afraid of looking not-hip. I geniunely love the film Donnie Darko, but it’s okay, because I happen to think that this guy is a dumb, boring, pretentious piece of crap who tries too hard, and people only pretend to like him because they’re afraid of looking not-hip.
Originally posted on November 14, 2009 at 1:07 pm. This song still WAILS. So good, seriously.
Grant Hart – You’re the Reflection of the Moon on the Water
Grant Hart is best known for his drumming and writing with Hüsker Dü and for co-founding Nova Mob. This track comes from his fourth solo album, Hot Wax, which came out October 6th. It’s awesome.
Witchy and melodic and also super-strong, with this really wicked organ-and-rides vibe that makes it driving and Doors-y, the song is basically the same four verses repeated and I didn’t even notice until I typed out the lyrics. The music is so insistent that it just seemed natural. Hart has said that the lyrics are inspired by the Dalai Lama and the composition by Patti Smith; both influences are totally there. You’re going to love it! Listen!
You’re the reflection of the moon on the water
You’re the reflection of the moon on the water
You’re the reflection of the moon on the water
but you’re not the moon
You are the scent of the sea on the night wind
You are the scent of the sea on the night wind
You are the scent of the sea on the night wind
but you’re not the sea
You are the shadows from the light of a fire
You are the shadows from the light of a fire
You are the shadows from the light of a fire
but you’re not the light
You are the sound of the rain on the dry earth
You are the sound of the rain on the dry earth
You are the sound of the rain on the dry earth
but you’re not the rain
You’re the reflection of the moon on the water
You’re the reflection of the moon on the water
You’re the reflection of the moon on the water
but you’re not the moon
You are the scent of the sea on the night wind
You are the scent of the sea on the night wind
You are the scent of the sea on the night wind
but you’re not the sea
You are the shadows from the light of a fire
You are the shadows from the light of a fire
You are the shadows from the light of a fire
but you’re not the light
PSA: August is going to be Sharon Tate Month around here.* Did You Know? Pass it on.
You are the sound of the rain on the dry earth
You are the sound of the rain on the dry earth
You are the sound of the rain on the dry earth
but you’re not the rain
*In a beautiful and upbeat, positive “respectful-celebration-of-her-life” way — not in a scummy, explotive, tragic “let’s-dwell-on-stupid-asshole-murderers-and-not-the-people-whose-lives-they-took” way, because I am fully fucking sick of that shenanigans overshadowing her beauty, talent, and sense of humor. (Sorry to drop massive f-bomb out of nowhere but there is just no call for how much horrifying b.s. people still bloodthirstily associate with her instead of letting her good deeds and fun performances stand on their own.) Call it Sharon Tate’s ACTUAL LIFE Awareness Month or something. Join me for that!
If you must get a tattoo, I will not make too much noise over this one, chitlins.
This shot pretty much fires “awesome” on all six cylinders; if I had a gun to my head and someone was like, “You HAVE to get a tattoo to prove you believe in at least one thing, E, or we will kill the people you love most!” I would frantically shout back, “Okay, okay! — I assume I will never stop thinking a t-rex sporting a monocle with top hat and balloon bouquet is pretty great, so, fine — tattoo that on my untouched milky skin, you fiend!” and be pretty much okay with it. (Seriously, my skin is caramel-macchiato-con-skim-leche-fine paradise. You will probably never experience it. What is that like, suckaaaa?)
Did you know? My “estranged” husband, Husbandly R. Husbandson the First, Esq.*, is an artist. He has a blog now.
He puts up his pen and ink drawings on there. So far my two favorites are from a series he did while moseying about hipster haven, the city of Portland, which also has a strange intersection with the detritus of decaying industrialism, so you have these two disparate populations constantly mingling.
His note on this sketch was, “He was psyching himself up to do something,” and I like how correspondingly large the hands are as the subject contemplates them. Must’ve been something that loomed large in his mind, to need such big hands for doing it.
The other one I like is this one of a man at the Fred Meyer grocery, I can only guess the one right by our house, badgering the retired gentleman who is merely working as a greeter because this country cannot care for the elderly and who never signed on to hear personal political and social diatribes from some stained-shirt-sporting young pudgy stranger who is either a) a knee-jerk liberal which is just as ignorant and open to the dangers of hypocrisy as going in the other direction, b) a recent parolee whose brain is addled by meth, or c) a die-hard, Ayn Rand-reading, every-man-for-himself, you-must-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-even-if-you-are-paraplegic, bidet-sniffing son of a bitch who doesn’t believe in social programs or stop signs (in Portland, it could go either way):
The Thought Experiment 