My head is full of complex thoughts today, largely on account of the increasingly mind-boggling craziness of Australian and American politics, so I find myself falling back on the search for distractions.
Thus, you get a link to Kurt Kuenne’s 2007 feel-good fable, Validation, which stars T.J. Thyne (aka that guy from Bones who generally brings the awesome). If you need sixteen minutes to chill out and get your mind off the complexities of the world, it’s not a bad way to pass the time:
ONE
I went and saw Labyrinth at the China Town mall last night, which meaning posting this and inviting you all to get your groove in is practically mandatory:
If you aren’t at least singing along to this, wishing you were Jareth and drawing odd looks from your workmates, then I’m afraid you are dead to me.
TWO
I love this movie. In fact, I love it with the kind of deep and abiding love that can only come from being exposed to *sheer, raw awesomeness* when you’re very young. God knows how young, ’cause I couldn’t actually tell you when I first saw it, but I’ve watched the film *a lot*.
Like, as often as I’ve watched the Princess Bride a lot. Or as often as I re-watch The Gilmore Girls or The West Wing a lot.
And yet, it’s not a movie that I love unconditionally. It’s simply the bits that I love, I really love, while the bits that I don’t love leave me kind of ambivalent.
I am not, for example, a fan of the Firey’s with their removable limbs and random singing (I’m frequently irritated by people bursting into song in movies. It makes musicals particularly painful, and Labyrinth mostly gets a pass on account of David Bowie).
I’m also not a fan of the entire sequence at the end, in which the pre-climax can largely be summed up as have Sarah run around in an Escher painting while David Bowie sings something vaguely threatening. They went to such effort to build up the sidekicks in the film, and they largely get set aside for no good reason. Bah, I say. Bah.
THREE
And yet, immediately after David Bowie’s threatening (and somewhat pointless) singing, he gets one of the greatest villain monologues ever:
*Everything*! Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me, I was frightening. I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for *you*! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations. Isn’t that generous?
Creepy David Bowie is my favourite David Bowie ever.
FOUR
Wanting to steal every single jacket Jareth wears in this film is the closest I’ve ever come to understanding cosplay.
I’d probably steal the walking stick too.
There’s on way in hell I’m taking the pants, though. No-one should be wearing pants that goddamn tight.
FIVE
It’s possible this blog post explains far to much about me worldview.
SIX
One of the fascinating things about watching a film like Labyrinth in a public mall is the moment when people wander past, catch sight of what’s on the screen, and momentarily become kids again. It just kept happening, time and again, and a handful of people actually stopped and sat down to watch the rest of the film.
And really, so long as that happens and keeps on happening, there is something going right in the world.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating accross the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated…
– Howl, Allen Ginsberg
It’s been a long time since I engaged with Howl in its entirety. Those first few lines, sure; if you’re into poetry in any way, there’s pretty good odds you can reel off the first line and half of Howl from memory. They’re among the most well-known in American poetry, and there’s no getting around the fact that they’re a brilliant opener (Although, I have to admit, in my head I punctuate it differently – I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked – which is actually kind of sad considering I once wrote an honour’s thesis about the use of space and punctuation in poetry and how it should affect the reading of a poem. In a form that already has a natural break in language generated by the existence of a poetic line, for example, what does it mean when you add a comma to the end of the line, effectively generating a pause within a pause?)
In any case, it’d been a long while. Then someone at work alerted me to the existence of the movie Howl, based on the obscenity trial that surrounded the poem when it was first released, and my natural weakness for cinema about beatniks and poetry led me towards tracking down a copy. It’s a brilliant film that sidesteps many of the problems that usually afflict films about the beats (ie, over-focusing on the various artists tendency to self-destruct) and actually explores why Ginsberg was interesting and how important the publication of Howl and Other Poems ended up being. It goes right up there with Bright Star as one of my favourite films about a poet, ever.
However, my favourite part about the film lies in its special features list – there’s recordings of both James Franco and Allen Ginsberg doing readings of the poem. I can count on one hand the number of poems I actually enjoy when they’re read aloud – most of the time I find myself getting irritated at readings, trying to reconcile the foreign rhythms being forced on the material with the rhythms I hear when in my head when I read on the page. Howl’s one of those rare exceptions, though, given that it’s rhythm is based on the metric of the human breath and it’s got the kind of easy repetition of phrases that’s hard to get wrong. It’s also possible – although I don’t remember for sure – that I came to Ginsberg’s poetry through his readings first, and his voice is generally distinctive enough that it gets lodged in your head.
The other nice thing about the film is that it prompted me to go and re-read the “and other poems” part of Howl and Other Poems, and I got to revisit a bunch of poems I’d forgotten I’d loved: A Supermarket in California; America; In the Baggage Room at Greyhound. It’s been a long while since I mainlined a whole bunch of poetry, rather than reading individual poems, and it reminded me of how much I used to enjoy reading it before study and endless poetry readings and the nightmare of my thesis sucked all the fun out of it.