They're only fighting for the chance to be last

[sovay]

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 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.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

This makes me wonder what you would make of the film Bunraku (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181795/), if you haven't seen it already. It's . . . I don't even know what it is. I thought of it when you brought up Westerns, because it's this ridonkulous collision between samurai and Western genres, not in the Kurosawa way, but in the way where you've got your nameless drifter and your lone samurai and they team up to fight crime in the form of Ron Perlman. The staging of it is outrageous, and deliberately so, and I'm not sure the plot makes a lick of sense but who cares.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Re: footnote 2 (and let's not think about what this says about my .... everything), the only things I remember about Streets of Fire are, precisely, that slick wet nighttime streetlight look--and the prisoner girl tied to the bed. That must have been Ellen, right?

Re: Livejournal, my current feeling is that it's just going to end up being a much smaller community, but I do believe that the community that remains will be pretty intense and committed. Though, within that framework, what gets to me is one's sense of vulnerability when one of those intense and committed people pulls away, for whatever reason. You miss each person that much more if, for whatever reason, they can't or don't post.

[rose-lemberg.livejournal.com]

I am in the same boat about Livejournal and its demise. I want to write and read in long-form. I cannot stomach Facebook, which imho encourages people to seem fake, or Tumblr, which is to me both incomprehensible and upsetting. Twitter is all right for small things, but it is just an appetizer. I agree with Francesca that the community will shrink but never quite go away - in fact, it has already shrunk, but it is still here. Some of us need the long form.

The Vietnamese food sounds wonderful.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

I can only imagine the slash for this film is legion.

You would think so, but no. I considered it once, back when I was seventeen, but then I realized I would have to preface it by explaining what the fuck this film was to most people, so I settled for internalizing it.;) It did, however, become one of the centrepiece arguments for my foe-yay 'zine Open Mouth, Insert Gun.

[mrbelm.livejournal.com]

Another fan of DooWee & Rice here. The "great white sauce" is just Kewpie Japanese mayonnaise, which is more flavorful than the American stuff.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

"Streets of Fire" sounds pretty damn' amazing.

I use Facebook (I find I prefer commenting these days), but I'll always prefer LJ. For one thing, I just find it a much more friendly place than the other alternatives. And long-form, every time.

"That's Mathematics"

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

I'm now broadcasting "New Math" into your head to replace it.

[liquidmorpheme.livejournal.com]

"We might be evolving toward permanent tl;dr. I still need the room to write."

When I read your entries, I don't find any of that time was wasted, and yet most of the 140-character or less posts I read waste it tremendously.

[gwynnega]

Though I don't post as often to LJ as I used to, I still read it every day. I suspect LJ will continue, just not in the centralized way it once did.

[greyhandshakes.livejournal.com]

Hi. I've actually just added you because I share your feelings about livejournal. I had a journal I kept up for 10 years and last month, my last reader decided to delete their journal. It hit me hard and I decided to jump from friends' list to friends' list, reading entries of people who still write and adding those I find interesting. If you look at the entry in my journal from 5 or 6 days ago, it echoes your comments regarding the LJ community.

I have two entries on my new journal, but I plan to update once a week. I live in LA, and grew up in Boston and will likely be writing a little bit about the culture shock of interacting regularly with B and C list celebrities, as well as my discovery of the California landscape through hikes and day trips.

Don't feel pressured to add back, but I hope you don't mind if I read and comment on your entries occasionally.

[selidor]

1. Tom Lehrer is one of the unsung geniuses of this world.
3. I hereby declare cucumberseed another of the unsung geniuses of this world.
3a. Netflixing this already.
5a. I just turned off my Facebook (the not-delete is odd). Ostensibly for thesisgrind reasons, but also I'm just finding Twitter & LJ far higher signal-to-noise. (It amuses me also that I use them in completely different ways). I do like small doses of cute fluffy animals & political snark; but I also like being able to curate my own content, & FB was slowly pulling that out from under people. It is odd being sold as the product. apropos.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I can imagine worse songs than any of Tom Lehrer's to have stuck in one's head.

I hope you've had some good rest and that the antibiotics have done their job.

I'm not sure how I missed "The Love Song of Admiral Piet". Streets of Fire sounds interesting; I'm glad you had a wonderful time, and your review shows it.

The restaurant sounds lovely. I wish they had a branch where I could visit it.

Thanks for the excellent news about the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the back catalogue. I only found the time to download one book of African ivory carvings, but I expect to be making frequent use of this. You're right about saying goodbye to time, of course.

I agree that Facebook and the rest aren't a substitute for LJ. I'll be staying here as well, for similar reasons to your own. Even aside from the fact that I'm on FB under my real name and am friends with relatives, which means that I pretty much can't admit to writing anything I write that's not nonfiction.

FB is handy for keeping up with folk, especially folk with whom I play tunes or whose concerts I'd want to be at. Most everybody in Irish music is there, and there's a sizeable Irish language userbase, so I find it useful. It's also a nice way for certain friends to share their vast collections of cute animal photographs, and seems to be the only way some few friends of mine can ever manage to communicate that's not face-to-face. But you're right about the lack of space to write. I couldn't give that up, either.

[rosefox]

Surprised not to see anyone mention Dreamwidth yet. Does it just not have the critical mass yet for you?