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They're only fighting for the chance to be last
1. I have Tom Lehrer's "That's Mathematics" stuck in my head for no apparent reason except that within the last forty-eight hours I said to someone, "That's paranoia." I am so not filking that one.
2. I am tired. I just took the last of my ten days of antibiotics; they have wiped me out. I had a solid eight hours of sleep thanks to Daylight Savings (no thanks to the house painters who arrived at eleven-thirty on a Sunday morning what is that I don't even) and another hour in the afternoon and I might still fall asleep before two in the morning.
3. At one point in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cucumberseed's masterful "The Love Song of Admiral Piett," the narrator exclaims, "It's like grave robbers exhumed Kurosawa and splashed his guts up on the screen!" Watching Walter Hill's Streets of Fire (1984), as derspatchel and I did on Friday at the Brattle, is a similar experience with the director's id.
Having seen The Warriors (1979) and now its obvious thematic next step, I can tell you nothing about the man personally. I wouldn't know his birthdate from a Markov chain. But he likes his rain-wet city streets. He likes men with an ambivalent relationship to shirts and/or sleeves. He likes codes of honor and characters who say no more than they need to and fights with really unlikely objects. And he likes rock music, but if you can't pick up on the prevailing mood from the subtitle A Rock & Roll Fable, I suspect this is not your film to begin with. I was genuinely impressed by the way it doesn't feel for a second the need to explain its world to its audience: The Warriors slid its retro-futuristic gangs into the cracks of a recognizably real, night-mythologized New York City, but all Streets of Fire gives you is "Another place . . . another time." In their clothes and slang and taste in music, its characters aren't living in a 1980's pastiche of the 1950's: they're occupying both decades at once.1 As Tom Cody, Michael Paré looks like a WWII-demobbed soldier in his high-waisted trousers, his suspenders and duster and collarless shirts; Amy Madigan's McCoy fastens her jacket at the throat like an earlier war's gas cape, holsters her semi-automatic over what looks like a flight suit and pulls her baseball cap down over her feathered pale hair. Diane Lane's Ellen Aim is all Bonnie Tyler half-shouldered dresses, but her lipstick is film noir. And then we have Willem Dafoe as Raven Shaddock of the Bombers, a walking piece of pure fetishism no matter his year of origin: all that black leather, right down to the shirt; that Goth-pale Lucifer-face and his slicked-back sneer. His address to Cody, appreciative and insinuating: "Looks like I finally found someone who likes to play as rough as I do." I can only imagine the slash for this film is legion. I mean, sledgehammer fight. Would we like to get any more symbolic?2
That's probably the best description I can give of this film, really: it has songs by Jim Steinman and cars by Studebaker, a rockabilly biker bar where the stripper wears a black leather G-string and all-over fishnets, and there's a sledgehammer fight. It is quite possibly a functional version of Orpheus and Eurydike. I had a wonderful time watching it. I have no idea if it was any good. I don't care.
1. They are also sometime in the nineteenth century, because the structure of Streets of Fire is a classic Western, from the outlaws to the drifter to the showdown, but it doesn't show up so much in the mise-en-scène. This is the sort of thing I see done in fiction much more often than on film. Off the top of my head, the examples that come to mind are the collaborations of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the work of Rian Johnson and then I get stuck. Julie Taymor's Titus (1999) doesn't count: it has an explanatory conceit, the survival of the Roman empire into the modern day. Ditto anything with an actual future date.
2. Attempting to deal with Walter Hill's treatment of gender in a footnote is a doomed endeavor, but I did appreciate that while Ellen is all but plot-useless except as a counter between Cody and Raven, Deborah Van Valkenburgh makes the most of her supporting part as Tom's sister who has no time for his stoic bullshit and Madigan's McCoy is a staunch, smartmouthed soldier-of-fortune who isn't written as lesbian to explain it or turned into a potential object of romance at the end. She has a boyfriend in her past. Cody's not her type. They don't ride off into the sunset, but I don't think there is one in this film. You're surprised enough every time there's a scene and it's daylight.
4. DooWee & Rice is my new favorite amazing affordable restaurant. I can vouch unreservedly for the Vietnamese chimichurri steak and the ginger chicken bao; I have slightly more qualified feelings about the braised pork over seasoned rice, but only because it doesn't come with the great white sauce and that stuff is addictively tasty. The eggrolls are just very solid. Rob and I ate there two nights in a row. I want to go back for the crispy chicken hearts (with or without fries underneath) and the Vietnamese pumpkin soup I saw on the board on Friday, although of course it may have changed by now. The chicken wings with death sauce—"By ordering, you are verbally signing a waiver"—are probably calling my name.
5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is putting its entire back catalogue of publications online. Goodbye all the time ever.
More and more, I hear about the impending demise of Livejournal, but I will never find Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook a viable or even attractive alternative when it comes to social media. I need long-form. Movies. Books. Photobombs. Random assemblages of days. I'm sure there's an art form to them, but I was not designed for minimalist updates or conversations I can't keep. We might be evolving toward permanent tl;dr. I still need the room to write.
2. I am tired. I just took the last of my ten days of antibiotics; they have wiped me out. I had a solid eight hours of sleep thanks to Daylight Savings (no thanks to the house painters who arrived at eleven-thirty on a Sunday morning what is that I don't even) and another hour in the afternoon and I might still fall asleep before two in the morning.
3. At one point in
cucumberseed's masterful "The Love Song of Admiral Piett," the narrator exclaims, "It's like grave robbers exhumed Kurosawa and splashed his guts up on the screen!" Watching Walter Hill's Streets of Fire (1984), as derspatchel and I did on Friday at the Brattle, is a similar experience with the director's id.Having seen The Warriors (1979) and now its obvious thematic next step, I can tell you nothing about the man personally. I wouldn't know his birthdate from a Markov chain. But he likes his rain-wet city streets. He likes men with an ambivalent relationship to shirts and/or sleeves. He likes codes of honor and characters who say no more than they need to and fights with really unlikely objects. And he likes rock music, but if you can't pick up on the prevailing mood from the subtitle A Rock & Roll Fable, I suspect this is not your film to begin with. I was genuinely impressed by the way it doesn't feel for a second the need to explain its world to its audience: The Warriors slid its retro-futuristic gangs into the cracks of a recognizably real, night-mythologized New York City, but all Streets of Fire gives you is "Another place . . . another time." In their clothes and slang and taste in music, its characters aren't living in a 1980's pastiche of the 1950's: they're occupying both decades at once.1 As Tom Cody, Michael Paré looks like a WWII-demobbed soldier in his high-waisted trousers, his suspenders and duster and collarless shirts; Amy Madigan's McCoy fastens her jacket at the throat like an earlier war's gas cape, holsters her semi-automatic over what looks like a flight suit and pulls her baseball cap down over her feathered pale hair. Diane Lane's Ellen Aim is all Bonnie Tyler half-shouldered dresses, but her lipstick is film noir. And then we have Willem Dafoe as Raven Shaddock of the Bombers, a walking piece of pure fetishism no matter his year of origin: all that black leather, right down to the shirt; that Goth-pale Lucifer-face and his slicked-back sneer. His address to Cody, appreciative and insinuating: "Looks like I finally found someone who likes to play as rough as I do." I can only imagine the slash for this film is legion. I mean, sledgehammer fight. Would we like to get any more symbolic?2
That's probably the best description I can give of this film, really: it has songs by Jim Steinman and cars by Studebaker, a rockabilly biker bar where the stripper wears a black leather G-string and all-over fishnets, and there's a sledgehammer fight. It is quite possibly a functional version of Orpheus and Eurydike. I had a wonderful time watching it. I have no idea if it was any good. I don't care.
1. They are also sometime in the nineteenth century, because the structure of Streets of Fire is a classic Western, from the outlaws to the drifter to the showdown, but it doesn't show up so much in the mise-en-scène. This is the sort of thing I see done in fiction much more often than on film. Off the top of my head, the examples that come to mind are the collaborations of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the work of Rian Johnson and then I get stuck. Julie Taymor's Titus (1999) doesn't count: it has an explanatory conceit, the survival of the Roman empire into the modern day. Ditto anything with an actual future date.
2. Attempting to deal with Walter Hill's treatment of gender in a footnote is a doomed endeavor, but I did appreciate that while Ellen is all but plot-useless except as a counter between Cody and Raven, Deborah Van Valkenburgh makes the most of her supporting part as Tom's sister who has no time for his stoic bullshit and Madigan's McCoy is a staunch, smartmouthed soldier-of-fortune who isn't written as lesbian to explain it or turned into a potential object of romance at the end. She has a boyfriend in her past. Cody's not her type. They don't ride off into the sunset, but I don't think there is one in this film. You're surprised enough every time there's a scene and it's daylight.
4. DooWee & Rice is my new favorite amazing affordable restaurant. I can vouch unreservedly for the Vietnamese chimichurri steak and the ginger chicken bao; I have slightly more qualified feelings about the braised pork over seasoned rice, but only because it doesn't come with the great white sauce and that stuff is addictively tasty. The eggrolls are just very solid. Rob and I ate there two nights in a row. I want to go back for the crispy chicken hearts (with or without fries underneath) and the Vietnamese pumpkin soup I saw on the board on Friday, although of course it may have changed by now. The chicken wings with death sauce—"By ordering, you are verbally signing a waiver"—are probably calling my name.
5. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is putting its entire back catalogue of publications online. Goodbye all the time ever.
More and more, I hear about the impending demise of Livejournal, but I will never find Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook a viable or even attractive alternative when it comes to social media. I need long-form. Movies. Books. Photobombs. Random assemblages of days. I'm sure there's an art form to them, but I was not designed for minimalist updates or conversations I can't keep. We might be evolving toward permanent tl;dr. I still need the room to write.
no subject
I am looking forward to visiting Boston!!
no subject
I know people who are less glossy on Facebook: theirs may be as carefully constructed a self-presentation, but at least it's a self-presentation that includes stress and colds and traffic jams and sleeplessness and upchucking cats and/or children, which I do consider more honest (and more useful, if what I'm trying to do on Facebook is keep track of people's lives). I agree with you that that doesn't seem to be the mainstream, though.
I am looking forward to visiting Boston!!
Good!