This one was a movie club pick. I've seen it 2 times before. It has always been great. It is still great. I pick out different things to notice each time. This go-round the kids stood out. The movie is nothing without the kids... its also nothing without the rest. It has all the things. The mood(s). The music. The sadness. The strange moments of hope. The picture of LA in the 70s.... it all feels familiar and impossibly far away. 

Love it. 

First off. Amazing poster. I wish I were more than 1 year old in 1982 when this came out. Second off(?)... this is definitely not the wonderfully moody Jacques Tourneur (a house favorite!) film from 1942 starring the truly wonderful Simone Simon (also in Devil and Daniel Webster... another house favorite!). Third off (third-ly?) I truly wish they made insane movies like this today. Honestly, even things half this bananas would be an oasis in a desert. I had to watch this one over the course of two naps (actually "quiet time" which we are still trying to enforce b/c JFC we're tired on weekends). I would guess it is even more potent in one single viewing. 

I'll first list a bunch of things that should get your antanae twitching... The cast: John Heard (of Big fame.... "I don't get it! I don't get it!"), Natassja Kinski (ha chacha cha.. not really for me but in that 80s way...), Malcom McDowell (underused tbh... though I guess I'm glad his character didn't get weirder/grosser/etc.), Ed Begley Jr. (Gets his arm bitten off THEN DIES! from it. Seems like he could have been saved imo), John Larroquette and Ray Wise in very supporting roles. Basically a stacked cast all around but did I forget to tell you that DAVID BOWIE does the song for this movie (Video). Why? No idea. Don't fight the early 80s erotic thriller! All this madness is brought together by Paul Schrader who decides to open with a weird prologue of people from BC times... and also panthers lounging in a tree.

OK so after the opening in Europe(?) during the Dark Ages(?)... we fast forward to an awesome New Orleans in the very early 80s. This time capsule alone is reason to watch the movie. So we find Irena (Natassja Kinski) showing up on the train to go live with Malcom McDowell, her brother who seems pretty into her. :-/ ... also a woman, maid? housekeeper? lives there named `Female` which is pronounced Fuh-mal-ee. Thats pretty bizarre. She ends up in jail later for some reason.

So anyways Irena shows up and after getting creeped on by her brother she wanders around New Orleans by herself a bit during the day and night. While this is happening a panther is skulking around in the night and is killing folks. This whole sitch raises the arm hairs of the zookeeper (John Heard). Irena wanders the French Quarter and it is completely empty in the evening so it must have been an off year for New Orleans. Later she goes to the zoo (as one does... obviously) and John Heard meets her and of course immediately falls in love with her because I guess he had just watched Body Heat and Irena is a lot like Kathleen Turner in that.... The he courts her a bit (they go eat oysters and things) and then gets her a job in the gift shop (lolololo). She loves it! 

[Spoilers Ahead]

So then we meet Annete O'Toole at the zoo who used to date John Heard (IRL she is married to Michael McKean which is fantastic). We find her as she's hosing down an elephant in an 80s erotic thriller way. LOL. We glean that she used to date John H through subtext but she's cool with him moving on. At some point Ed Begley Jr gets his arm bitten off! and we find out he bit the dust later but don't see it. Sorry bout it EBJ. I may be out of order here but then John H and Irena go to the bayou for a little getaway but she won't sleep with him b/c she is starting to be suspicious she's a cat and will eat him after sex... but before all that that there is this awesome exhange:

[Alligators roar(?) and flop in the water]

JH: That's alligators. They're going to eat us.

[blank stare from NK]

JH: There's only one way to keep them away...

NK: ...whats that...

JK: We have to make love...

LMAO... so stupid. The good news is she doesn't fall for it. 

Next they find Malcolm McD (as a panther) and shoot him :( and there is a wild autopsy part where JH saws open the panther with a scalpel (literally saws! scalpels shoudl just slice...but maybe not in the 80s??) and Malcolm McD's ARM flops out of the panther corpse! The corpse then turns into GAS! and melts completely. Truly incredible. There is a weird intermission where Irena tries to leave through the really awesome Amtrak station of 1982 full of wonderful design and red lockers everywhere. She gets like... 21 dollars away but turns around for some reason and is back lickidy split... then is kind of a much bigger creep looking for JH. There is a pool situation (ripped directly off from the 1942 version... but in that 80s sexy way...) and then she finds her man and they smash. She turns into a panther in the grossest way possible right next to JH in bed but she doens't eat him because he's like "Its me".... She then rocks somebody and turns back into a person but goes back for more with JH. He ties her up b/c she'll turn into a panther afterwards and he knows it. Sex panther. 

JH and Anette O'toole get back together. You are left not knowing what happened but it turns out he PUTS IRENA INTO THE ZOO. Thats why he tied her up! F'ing diabolical...

Fade to black. :(

Pretty challenging read. The whole club agreed. Dense. Lots of imagery without much time to process whats going on. I ended up reading several pages multiple times and still was playing catch up. I took four four hour flights and still couldn't finish it until the last minute. 

Comparisons have been made repeatedly about the Noir/Chandler/etc influences and I guess I see it but that feels overblown. I enjoyed the caper but the characters seemed flat to me. One dimensional in a multi-dimensional world. Could have been the juxtoposition I suppose... or the fact that I hear and see William Powell when any noir is mentioned. 

Analog Sea. Not quite a book. Also I didn't finish it. And also this isn't quite a post about a book or film.

I'm in a slump. I'm struggling to get through my book club book (Neuromancer), journaling feels like a great effort, letter writing is near non-existent...

April has been full of erratic travel (some work, some family, some work & family). To complement this travel, my erratic reading has been full of starts and stops, and stops and starts, and reading paragraphs slowly and re-reading paragraphs even slower due to general distraction. I feel completely unable to conjure from the deep depths of my soul any quiet focus. I suppose this is an attempt.

After our first trip in April, I had the pleasant surprise of past Nick actually coming through for future Nick (which is also now past). A rarity for sure. Gemma and Walt and I returned to Chicago on a Tuesday. Work was fast approaching. But lo and behold I had forgotten I scheduled a day of recovery! so instead of returning to work 12 hours after returning home from the West Coast I found myself with most of weekday to myself. It turned out to be one of those sneakily beautiful fake spring Chicago days. 

I took my time leaving the house and made my way on the subway to our office with the intention of hanging a (very heavy) mirror, then buying books and records to leave at the office. After an hour and a failed attempt at hanging the mirror, then ultimately a second successful one, I made my way to the Fine Arts Building and the bookstore on the second floor, Exile in Bookville. It is a really lovely little bookstore. They do a great job of curating beautiful books.  I ended up buying The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes. (I had just been discussing with a dear friend how in love with books I was and how it only increases with time.... It was an incredible boon!) I also happened upon lovely little editions of Analog Sea. The group who publishes it seems to be obsessed with text and books, and their online presence has only 41 words telling you to send them a letter! I haven't yet but I probably will this week. If I can get out a letter to my aunt and two birthday notes.  IDK what I'll say though. 

I've read about a quarter of Volume 1. It is fare perfect for the office. More journal or digest than a book, though it looks like a book. It is definitely an enjoyable mishmash. There is a piece about the incredible benefits of old (analog) phones vs. cellular phones that really sent me back to my cold garage on Sunset Dr. tethered to our kitchen phone in 1994 fumbling for words and listening to a girl or friend on the other end, all nervous energy and sighs and breath and charged silence. 

This one stuck with me. I read it last year and it wouldn't leave me for quite a while. Most of my literary adventures are very private at this point in life... having left classes and discussions behind 20ish years ago. I do have my sci-fi book group but it is as much, or more, social than any actual discussion. That's fine. But for some reason this book hung out in the folds of my brain for months and I had a desire (less than a year later) to re-read it. I cannily conjured a plan to ambush two of my more literate friends from movie club by gifting them the book, thereby creating a splinter book club from movie club!

Even after the second read I'm still not totally sure what it was/is about this one that moved me to re-read it so quickly... and also strong-arm some smart friends into a discussion with me at Skylark on a Tuesday.  TBH even after another read I'm not quite sure... its hard to pin down but at its most fundamental it is human and hopeful and hopeless all at once. So, you know, life. And it's a slice of history I had no idea about before reading (I was also in Mexico City for the first read...). It's lonely. It's sad. But I do I love the whiskey preist for all his flaws written so plain and heartbreaking. 

Graham Greene has always been a name I knew, and knew he was important in the "canon", etc. etc. but had never read a single thing. Then, IDK, two years ago I was eating lunch on a weekday and put on Anthony Bourdain. He's a comfort to me and was a true prince in life and I miss him. So anyhow, I had on Parts Unknown and he is bopping around somewhere in Asia, being in love with the locals as only he can, and then he quotes a passage from The Quiet American, because, of course he does. 

I breezed through that one, The Quiet American, one of Greene's serious novels. It is really great (maybe greater than this one?). Then I read Our Man in Havana, one of his entertainments. (he likes to make the distinction) It is also great in a more mad-cap kind of way. Those two beautiful and interesting books led me to The Power and the Glory. The scenes between the lieutenant and the preist are really what makes it all worthwhile, punctuated by cinematic weather, which I always love. Many of the characters are archetypes to move the plot along (if walking around evading anti-religious authority is a plot... It probably is... No. It is.). I think I do love this book but I'm unsure where the love comes from. I will read it again in a few years. Maybe I'll still love it in a confused way. Maybe I'll see why I love it. Maybe I'll see the flaws more and not love it as much but remember the love I had. Any of those things can happen and I will be elated. Life. Time marches on. Love remains.

Because i still don't know what to say about this book... I'll leave two passages here.

...he began formally to say his goodbyes to the world;

he couldndn't put his heart into it.

This was the last chapter, and in the last chapter things always happened violently.

Perhaps all life was like that -- dull and then a heroic fury at the end.