Friday, November 27, 2009

aimez-moi moins, mais aimez-moi un long temps



Les chansons d'amour (2007), Christophe Honoré

P.S. you may also remember him from other amazing musical scenes as this

Saturday, November 21, 2009

a real family christmas



If you haven't already you should see this film at ACMI AKA A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noel) this Christmas - second chances dont' come around that often.

the first serious song i ever wrote -



- and it was called 'Waitin' Around to Die'

Excerpt from 'Heartworn Highways' - need to see this film really badly - times like this its tough living in Australia where nothing like this is easy to find. Also looking for a copy of Be Here to Love Me (Townes Van Zandt doco) and Fallen Angel (Gram Parsons doco) if anyone has the country doco hook ups?

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Pocket Poem

If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I’d opened it a thousand times
to see if what I’d written here was right,
it’s all because I looked too long for you
to put in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.

— Ted Kooser

I was very flattered by the sex-kitten thing because I never thought of myself as that.



Phyllis Gordon



Ann-Margret

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Because Richard Linklater is f**kin' awesome

Richard Linklater on What Makes an Icon

An icon is someone who floats above the culture. Consider Orson Welles, the subject of my upcoming film Me and Orson Welles, and an icon if there ever was one. He was a larger-than-life personality and immense talent who has come to mean a great deal to many people. But the more you study his life, the more unknowable he becomes. He was a notoriously unreliable narrator. He never distinguished between fact and fiction. Everything — from Shakespeare to his own personal history — was open to reinterpretation.

Even though most of us know Orson Welles by name, or at least by Citizen Kane, none of us really knows him. When you’re an icon, you’re not just a person—you’re a myth. Perhaps that’s good for a certain kind of ego, but it’s not good for an artist. People think they have you figured out. Being an icon can be a curse.

And yet, the supremely talented have a way of upending expectations. Truly creative people are never fixed, they’re never simple, they’re always works in progress, they’re always moving. The late Paul Newman, for example, filled his career with iconic performances. In the hands of a lesser actor, they might not have been memorable at all. Every time we thought we had him pegged, he would do something different.

When thinking about the definition of an icon—which, like “genius,” is a word I don’t use lightly—I always look to the elders. Bob Dylan is a living icon. Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen are living icons. Kurt Cobain was all the rage during the last three or four years of his life, but icon status, because of his youth, probably wasn’t official until after he died. Icons have bodies of work that stand up over time, and are always changing—as are our relationships to them.

I think about my feelings toward Welles over the years. At some points in my life, I thought he was a hero. At others, I focused on the flaws in his personality. Trying to make a movie about him has made me reconsider my position yet again. I only have understanding, love and forgiveness for him now, even though people keep trying to convince me he was a badly behaved enfant terrible.

Today, you can click a button and watch all three of James Dean’s movies. You can see all of Marilyn Monroe’s films whenever you want. We’ll be able to listen to Michael Jackson and watch him dance forever. The performances, rich to begin with, have become even more layered and infused with various meanings, because we bring so much knowledge to watching them.

- Richard Linklater

(via black book mag)

Monday, November 9, 2009

the fucking clocks are fucking wrong



“I had final cut, and I cut my own throat.”



I'm sad you're not coming to Melbourne.

(image via them thangs a blog so good it made my brain hurt)

Personal Poem

Now when I walk around at lunchtime
I have only two charms in my pocket
an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me
and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case
when I was in Madrid the others never
brought me too much luck though they did
help keep me in New York against coercion
but now I'm happy for a time and interested

I walk through the luminous humidity
passing the House of Seagram with its wet
and its loungers and the construction to
the left that closed the sidewalk if
I ever get to be a construction worker
I'd like to have a silver hat please
and get to Moriarty's where I wait for
LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and
shaker the last five years my batting average
is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don't give her one we
don't like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it's
cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don't want to be in the poets' walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich
and walk on girders in our silver hats
I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is
thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi
and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go
back to work happy at the thought possibly so

- Frank O'Hara