Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1982)
Instant favorite. Transcendent vibes. A great “inflation era” movie. It has this laconic inflationary aesthetic, where large sums of money/jobs/decisions in general are treated as important but meaningless at the same time: relevant today but useless for the future. A film noir where everyone thinks the guy trying to solve the crime is wasting his time; not because there isn’t anything to gain, but because gain itself seems pointless.
Fascinating tricks are played with the concept of identity. Characters keep being introduced in a way that fosters a distinct set of assumptions (at his first introduction, an aggrieved line cook who we’re told always wears the same T-shirt can be interpreted as a working class guy) only for subsequent scenes to carefully incorporate details that completely contradict those assumptions (that guy is so rich, one character says of the line cook—turns out, he owns eight restaurants; he shows up next scene in a fancy suit). Characters and situations continue to be presented in this volte-face way, until even our protagonist-detectives begin to comment on it, like film critics noticing a pattern in the plot: “He’s been lying to us,” one says to the other, regarding the elusive Chan. “Every time we go to somebody different we hear a different story.” Identity is not only the reason Chan is in trouble (a complicated series of twists and turns involving divisions amongst members of the Chinese expat community in San Francisco)—identity is the reason his friends can’t figure out exactly what trouble he’s in.
Because, like the vibe, identity is inflationary. The self is ever-growing new faces, new forms; but reaches nothing, like a vine growing into empty air. In the end, the heroes recover exactly what they lost, nothing more. There is simply nothing more to be gained.
Interview with a Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1984)
Watched this with a group and we absolutely lost our minds because it has the Babylon ending, up to and including its own version of the Avatar appearance. I’m not even kidding. I couldn’t possibly be kidding because I could never make up something like this; I could never gaze this long into the dark heart of reality.
So (spoilers, I guess? Not that anyone would even remember that Interview with a Vampire has this scene, it is oh-so-very inessential) we’re near the end of the movie, and it’s the 1920s. Vampire Brad Pitt goes into a screening of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and, as he’s watching (and in voiceover rhapsodizing about the joy of seeing the sun again for the first time in years), you, the viewer, are realizing the film you just watched is kind of a supernatural adaptation of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Then suddenly we are thrust into a chronological montage of powerful sunrise scenes from the history of cinema, culminating with an iconic shot of Christopher Reeves as Superman flying in the stratosphere—a parallel, as I said, to the Avatar coup de grace of Babylon.
What are the odds of these two movies having such similar set pieces by chance?? (For those not in the know, Babylon’s version of this involved Singin’ in the Rain.) I can’t even tell. The movie magic of the scene is so strong, it overpowers my sense of what is possible.
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin, 1957)
Jayne Mansfield’s first major film role was a parody of Marilyn Monroe! I didn’t know this. (She apparently denied it was a parody of Marilyn Monroe at the time. But, you know, it clearly is one.)
This is possibly the funniest movie I have ever seen.
The Hobbit (Jules Bass & Arthur Rankin, Jr., 1977)
I think as a youth reading the book I missed how much of this story is a joke about employment contracts.
Beast (Baltasar Kormákur, 2022)
A movie about Idris Elba fighting a lion, but shot like it’s Sam Mendes’s 1917.
Q (Larry Cohen, 1982)
Nobody has ever hated New York as much as this movie hates New York. This movie thinks New York is a madhouse, an isle of the damned, a cesspool of degeneracy. It made me think about moving. Five stars!
Man (Neneh Cherry, 1996)
How is this so perfect? This was my March vibe. Cool and clear.
Quiet, Heavy Dreams (Zach Bryan, 2020)
This has dominated my mindscape lately. I’m a sucker for these little couplets. “I will leave you broken and in ruins / Call you when the work’s through just to find out what you're doin'”
20 Jazz Funk Greats (Throbbing Gristle, 1979)
“We did the cover so it was a pastiche of something you would find in a Woolworth's bargain bin. We took the photograph at the most famous suicide spot in England, called Beachy Head. So, the picture is not what it seems, it is not so nicey nicey at all, and neither is the music once you take it home and buy it. We had this idea in mind that someone quite innocently would come along to a record store and see [the record] and think they would be getting 20 really good jazz/funk greats, and then they would put it on at home and they would just get decimated.” From this interview.
Pat Suzuki (Pat Suzuki, 1958/2015)
A song of hers plays over the end credits of Chan Is Missing, so I got into it. Nice listening.
She had an eponymous album in 1958 but I think somehow the one on Spotify is slightly different from the original; the songs are in a different order. This isn’t really important but it’s bothering me!!
Dopesmoker (Sleep, 2022 version)
A 60-minute song about crossing the Mental Wastes in search of the Perfect Vibe.
Spotify playlist Chopin - All Works in Order by kevin kim
I’ve listened to all 16 hours and 10 minutes of this several times, so I am invincible now. I’ve unlocked the deep power.
Chopin’s Prelude in A Minor
…[Sand] later recalled a night when she and the children, coming back from town, were delayed by a storm; on their return, they found Chopin at the piano “in a kind of frozen despair, playing his wonderful prelude and weeping.” At the sight of them, he leapt up, as from a waking nightmare in which he had seen their violent deaths. “I knew you were dead,” he told them. He was seeing ghosts.
Twenty-three bars long, the Prelude in A Minor, second of the twenty-four that make up opus 28, has received more critical scrutiny than any of the others. The piece has been called “disturbing and disturbed” and one of late romanticism’s “impossible objects.” Forged of disjunctions, the prelude’s harmonic clashes in the bass accompaniment, the melody’s ominous descents followed by silences, have seemed to expose an artist riven by oppositions: of body and spirit, classicism and romanticism, naked introspection bound by constraints of mathematical precision.
A serious amateur pianist, Andre Gide experienced the prelude as trauma—visceral and psychic. The music’s intensity of feeling assaulted him with “something close to physical terror,” he said…
—Benita Eisler, Chopin’s Funeral
Eyes Left Podcast — “Ron DeSantis’s Military Secrets: Torture & War Crimes” (Mike Prysner, 2022)
I think I made the Julia Louis-Dreyfus *nervous laughter* meme face the entire time I listened to this.
Beyond the Blinds — “Tom Hanks: An American Treasure” (Troy McEady & Kelli Williams, 2022)
We truly live in a golden age of people being able to say whatever they want in a podcast.
Trillbilly Worker’s Party — “Infirmary Blues” (Tarence Ray, Tom Sexton, & Tanya Turner, 2023)
Gabriel Winant talks about The Next Shift. It was nice. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to listen to some different podcasts in an attempt to tamp down my parasocial relationship with Robert Evans.
Behind the Bastards — six part episode on the Illuminati (Robert Evans, 2023)
A list of facts I wrote down:
The original (real) Illuminati was just a scheme to help liberals in a conservative part of Germany pay for banned books (Enlightenment-type stuff, Voltaire and so on) by tricking rich people into paying dues for a supposedly ancient cult.
The original (real) Illuminati’s activities were revealed to the public when a messenger was struck by lightning and the contents of his courier pouch became widely known.
George Washington and several other Founding Fathers believed in the Illuminati conspiracy (the original one, i.e. the conservative fever-dream that the Illuminati secretly orchestrated the French Revolution) and thought that they were, somehow, combating it? Sort of like Trump and QAnon I guess.
The earliest version of the conspiracy in America claimed that book reviewers, magazine editors, and booksellers were behind it. I want to confirm that this is still the case.
One of the founders of Discordianism, Kerry Wendell Thornley, wrote a novel based on the life of his friend Lee Harvey Oswald—before he killed JFK. Just because he thought Oswald seemed like a neat guy.
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