Checking in
Like Roscoe the Bedbug Dog, "I'm workin'," but I'm sorry to neglect you
It’s been a week, as in, it’s BEEN a WEEK, very busy and involved, wrapping up a couple of commissioned pieces, doing revises on one of those, teaching of course, and CHILD SITTING, and a lot of other stuff. As a result of the child-sitting, I can recommend without qualification Hoppers, the new Pixar film directed by Daniel Chong, in his second feature helming gig. The guy, and the movie, have the goods — the story, which is not about rabbits as you might presume but beavers — is a feisty hoot and so are the characters. We were all entertained. Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars is a brisk and pacey documentary about what would have been maybe the world’s longest theater piece, outdoing Stockhausen and even the old joke about how when LaMonte Young says “take it from the top” he means last Tuesday. It’s a thoroughly drilled-down account of “putting it together” — for all his insane artistic ambition Wilson conducts himself like a very collected pragmatist almost the entire time — that ought to convince even the most mainstream philistine that it isn’t easy being avant garde. Back in the day when early-60s mandarins sneered at Cage and Cunningham and called them frauds while they were literally starving and going broke and hauling ass to the hinterlands to show off their work…well this laid the groundwork for what Wilson attempted, but even with widespread respect the money couldn’t get in fast enough. The punchline to the narrative is an irony both ghastly and hysterical.
In the meantime I implore you to get tickets to see Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers, a film I cannot officially review but can deem splendid on this blog as much as I like I suppose because it’s my blog and I’m not bound by ANY ETHICS on it. Okay, by some ethics, but, you know. Stay tuned. I’ve also been digging in to a recent box from Severin called Exorcismo, which collects about 19 films and one expositional documentary (narrated by Iggy Pop!) on ten-discs. It’s amazing stuff, but I fear that certain would-be consumers might be confused by the title, thinking “20 films about exorcism is…a lot.” But that’s not the thing. These are 19 films produced in Spain after the death of Franco, expressing a lot of the pent up fury — political, cultural, sexual — that festered under the strongman’s repression. And hence the title. The manifestations are FASCINATING, and I’ll have more to say about them…later. The week is still packed with action.