it's got the most romantic hero there ever was. he smokes and dopes and outsmarts the coppers and ultimately proves he's sensitive and sensible too. all is redeemed and drugstore belly flops into a very generous happy ending. a junkie keeps his promises! good god!
the best parts are when the hero's acting like a maniac, explaining the hexes and signs by which he lives his life, and, basically, being a drugged up lunatic. it's worst when it tries to show us what bob feels like when he's really high. very silly.
i didn't feel much watching it.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
the bluest eye
The Bluest Eye is about racism and sexism and poverty, but as little people know it. There's nothing in this book about the grand structures of injustice that continue to define life in the United States. Instead, it's about how a ten year old black girl comes to pray for blue eyes. The Bluest Eye is about big evils trickled down into tender psyches.
Cholly Breedlove hated women when he should have hated white people, but that would have "consumed him," "burned him up."
Claudia: "I destroyed white baby dolls."
etc etc.
And so much other stuff too, so much brilliant understanding of people and relationships, of "ministratin,' " of those human whores one can't damn or idealize, who burp when their hearts ought to melt and swoon when they ought to be crass. Of complicatedly ugly people, like that woman with her cat, who're consigned by those grand structures of injustice to dreadful situations, but then staking out that territory and implicating themselves in the dreadfulness.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Notes on Twin Peaks:
I should have started this sooner. Twin Peaks is sometimes funny and sometimes very scary. It's kind of like a soap opera, I guess. The acting is often very "bad" and the plot preposterously elaborate. But the emotions in it aren't overwrought like a soap opera, it doesn't have that hysterical seriousness, if that makes sense. It's difficult to describe the way people are in Twin Peaks. They're caricatures, definitely, but also so creepy somehow, and not just the creepy ones. I guess it's just the plasticity of them, the uncanniness of seeing a kind of robot, a person with a very rigid essence no matter the circumstances. Everybody is so unflappably themselves, or whatever they are in that episode, that nothing really affects them.
I want to remember that bizarre scene when James and Donna and the doppelganger all sing together in Donna's living room and it's so, so absurd, so hilariously sweeeeeet.
I just watched another episode. Cooper and the sheriff saved Audrey. Mr. Smith is menacing Donna and doppelganger with a gardening utensil. Was there anything special in this episode? I think Bobby's haircut is very '90s. It was action packed and slap stick and intense at times. There's a small town judiciary where they recess with a beer. Donna makes an atrociously cheesy speech about a first kiss. It'd be a fairly corny melodrama if it weren't so many disparate things slapped together.
And another! deprive witnesses of schizophrenic medication to release their other personalities so as to interrogate them! I think I like Twin Peaks best as a musical. Leland is marvelous. I don't know, there really isn't much to all this. I don't really have an excuse for watching it, odd as it is. There's nothing much to take from it. Lynch as Coop's boss, with very bad hearing, is wonderful.
I should have started this sooner. Twin Peaks is sometimes funny and sometimes very scary. It's kind of like a soap opera, I guess. The acting is often very "bad" and the plot preposterously elaborate. But the emotions in it aren't overwrought like a soap opera, it doesn't have that hysterical seriousness, if that makes sense. It's difficult to describe the way people are in Twin Peaks. They're caricatures, definitely, but also so creepy somehow, and not just the creepy ones. I guess it's just the plasticity of them, the uncanniness of seeing a kind of robot, a person with a very rigid essence no matter the circumstances. Everybody is so unflappably themselves, or whatever they are in that episode, that nothing really affects them.
I want to remember that bizarre scene when James and Donna and the doppelganger all sing together in Donna's living room and it's so, so absurd, so hilariously sweeeeeet.
I just watched another episode. Cooper and the sheriff saved Audrey. Mr. Smith is menacing Donna and doppelganger with a gardening utensil. Was there anything special in this episode? I think Bobby's haircut is very '90s. It was action packed and slap stick and intense at times. There's a small town judiciary where they recess with a beer. Donna makes an atrociously cheesy speech about a first kiss. It'd be a fairly corny melodrama if it weren't so many disparate things slapped together.
And another! deprive witnesses of schizophrenic medication to release their other personalities so as to interrogate them! I think I like Twin Peaks best as a musical. Leland is marvelous. I don't know, there really isn't much to all this. I don't really have an excuse for watching it, odd as it is. There's nothing much to take from it. Lynch as Coop's boss, with very bad hearing, is wonderful.