"Until Then, We'll Have To Muddle Through, Somehow..."

It seems obligatory, now, to remind as many as I can of the original lyric:

 Through the years
 We all will be together
 If the Fates allow.
 Until then, We'll have to muddle through, somehow...




 Depressing, perhaps. But also, a more accurate, meaningful sentiment than the cheerier replacement:

Through the years
We all will be together
 If the Fates allow.
 Hang a shining star upon the highest bough...

Here's the best version I know with the wrong lyric:

 

Guest Blogger: Jack Kerouac

America's New Trinity of Love: Dean, Brando, Presley 
[Written at the instigation of the two Helens, Weaver and Elliot 1957]


Love is sweeping the country. 


While wars and riots rage all around the world, in a vortex that resembles the dying Dinosaur Age of Violence, here within her sweeter shores America is producing a Revolution of Love. Three young men of exceptional masculine beauty and compassion and sadness have been upraised by its reaching hands. 


This is strange and it is good. Up to now the American Hero has always been on the defensive: he killed Indians and villains and beat up his rivals and surled. He has been good-looking but never compassionate except at odd moments and only in stock situations. Now the new American hero, as represented by the trinity of James Dean, Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, is the image of compassion in itself. And this makes him more beautiful than ever. It is as though Christ and Buddha were about to come again with masculine love for the woman at last. All gone are the barriers of asceticism and the barriers of ancient anti-womanism that go deep into primitive religion. It is a Revolution of Love and it will become a Religion of Love. The Garden of Eden might come back in its pristine form. The old American Hero fought the Devil; the new American Hero knows that the Devil never existed except in the minds of anxiety. There will be no more tempting of the woman by the Devil and no banishment from the paradise on earth. 


It's got to be. A Revolution of Love is the positive answer; banishment of war and the Bomb is only a negative answer. There have been Revolutions of Love before, accomplished always by some isolated individual like Cassanova, Valentino, Sinatra. But now the intensity and the need is such, that there are more than one. It's not a vain and self centered thing, but it spreads. This is implicit in the James Dean movie "Rebel Without A Cause" where, when the hero and the girl sneak off to make love in the empty mansion, leaving the desperate boy alone (Sal Mineo), and all the trouble takes place, Dean says: "We shouldnt have left him alone," the girl says "But I needed you," and Dean states "But he needed you too." This is child-like and innocent. "Suffer the little ones to come unto me." There is the need all around to be recognized and adored by some other human being, the need all around for kindness, for the ideal of love which does not exclude cruelty but is all-embracing, non-assertive, simply lovely. Not necessarily the Dionysion orgy but the tender communion. 


As always when something new grows out of the groaning earth, this earth which is a recent event in the cosmic eternity of light, there are angry complaints raised from all stations. The dryer intellectuals complain that the adulation of the dead James Dean by thousands of American girls represents a kind of unhealthy necrophilia; they point out the fact that 1,000 fan letters a month are still being written to Dean as tho he were still alive, asking for his pictures and asking him to come back because they love him. "Even if you look bad and you're all cut up from your car-crash, come back anyway." Yet if Ste. Teresa can make us the holy promise that she will come back and shower the earth with roses forever, this belief in the immortal lovingness of James Dean by thousands of eager believing chicks is well-rooted in a reverential mystical tradition that has certainly never harmed the sleeping babe in his crib. It augurs well for the world that it will refuse to believe that in death endeth loveliness, or endeth enlightenment. 


Elegant complainers say Marlon Brando is ill-dressed, vain, self-centred, Kowalski-Terry Malloy hoodlumish, irresponsible; they picture him as wandering away to leave his girl crying. Yet what is it he has?--that made a girl say "I just feel that Marlon Brando would know how to love me better than any man in the world, that he would go skipping down the street with me hand-in-hand, that he would do anything I asked him, and be kind. Because his soul is free and that's why he's so beautiful!"... Brando is indeed a free soul; his individual approach to his work as well as to his way of life bespeak a strong faith in himself as a man and as an American.

One is the Loneliest Number

Rise of the Planet of the Clares

Guest Poet, Wallace Stevens: A Pome

Guest Poet, Wallace Stevens,
banks the odds and stays on evens.

Metaphysic on the blotter,
sage t crosser and thorough i dotter.

Pushes up glasses from brim of his nose,
drinks his amusements like Wild Irish Rose.

Guessed poet, Wallace Steven,
increased his own odd with patience for Eden.

All My Dreams Are Secrets

Scenes From A Marriage, in Minor Keys

music by kurt weil & jon brion

voice by The Platters and Walter Houston (?!)

A POOR MAN'S LOVE POME

You once accused me of stealing from us.
“Peter robbing Paul to pay Peter and Paul?” I ask.
“Your thrust is unjust. I’ve been fishing.”

Simon said
He found a coin in a miracle fish’s mouth worth
Twice the temple tax.
I’ll wait for Dawn and, the Dawn, it shall come, when
The rod and the reel, upon rows of cast steel, first feel the fish tug as real.

Then, like the fish pot with gold coins and seaweed, stirred and stewed,
Your meddling, muddling mind has melded with mine.
Where the water is fine, and the peaches divine
With chocolaty wine and yoga mat spine,
I'll teach Peter to lend and Paul to spend
All the days of our lives in a world without end,
And the bells will all peal
For the fish tug is real!

Joy is almond.
Amen.

My Favorite Freud, Freud's Favorite Me

An Epiphany in Progress

O Brave New Olivia

Got Malick?

Ride DeBussy to DeRiver's Edge

There Will Be Malick

Mystic Cinema for the Masses

I heard Terrence Malick's latest showed up at Cannes this year and my neck hairs tingled. The guy has made a handful of films in his long life, all tethered by an unmistakable aesthetic.

Having seen the trailer a coupla times, I know as much about his latest as you. But I have suspicions...

Dali, Disney, Destino

Psychic Lionesses, Unite!

A Bloomsday Retrospective in Cinema Verite

"The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary...The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure...The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has."

Francois Truffaut

The Sound Garden
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4H4k_9qPjs

I Broke The Pumpkin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uAlh4WIMGE&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PL93774BBA3417750D

Irish On The Run
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng9Z1Fp0ces

You're Lookin' Swell, Dalai!

Because Epiphaneers come in all sizes, shapes and colors...

http://dalailama.com/liveweb

My Submission to the Clevelandia International Film Festival

@ Buzz'd Roost, Ides of March. Beware.

March Comes In Like A Lion Diverted Into Confusion By The Legs Of A Chair

Raised a Catholic, I have been taught to split the concept of God into thirds -- Father, Son, Holy Ghost.  I have often suspected some smoke and mirrors on this point, as if this trinitarian notion was specifically designed to mislead us, divert our attentions, confuse us into submission.  I recall the lion tamer in Errol Morris' Fash, Cheap and Out of Control, who reveals why they seem to provoke their animals with the four legs of a chair:  the lions can concentrate on only one leg at a time and will soon get confused and lie down.

Nevertheless, there is something appealling about things trinitarian:  disparate concepts synthesized into one.  I never expected to find a cinematic trinity that would hold such sway over my views of film, but now that I have, I will run with it.

My Cinematic Trinity: Magnolia, Network, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  These films are connected in ways you do not expect; mysterious ways.

I begin with Melinda Dillon. In CE3K, we find her cowering in the corner, clutching her child, terrified and screaming as an unimaginable "supernatural" event occurs outside.  In magnolia, we find her cowering in the corner, clutching her child, terrified and screaming as an unimaginable "supernatural" event occurs outside.

Then there's the TV show host collapse.  In Network, Mr. Beale endures a disturbing episode or seizure and falls to the ground in front of a live studio audience.  In magnolia, Jimmy Gator does the same.

The "look" of the WDKK? set matches that of the Howard Beale Show.  While Network has no musical soundtrack to speak of, it does include the stirring drumroll/brassy theme to Beale's Show, echoed in magnolia by Jon Brion's swingy WDKK? theme.

Music is integral to the story telling in both CE3K and magnolia, and both include a "musical crescendo."  The musical note communique recieved by Dreyfuss in CE3K is parodied in magnolia by the musical note quiz questions.

Anderson clearly reached back to the 70's for thematic and visual inspiration. The magnolia DVD extras actually includes him screening Lumet's film for cast and crew, asking them to look at the cinematography and pay attention to the "old school" television men, like his own father, Ernie "Ghoulardi" Anderson, a late night Cleveland horror show host.

If I have convinced you that these movies are intentionally connected, then pull back your lens a little further and consider this: Network is The Father, CE3K is The Son, and magnolia is The Holy Ghost.  Network, the dark, cruel God of the Old Testament, savage and vengeful, it ends with a "crucifixion."  CE3K, the loving, benevolent God of the New Testament, hopeful and joyous, it ends with an "ascension." magnolia, the kitchen sink God of everything else, the God of the Next Testament, perhaps, it ends with a shocking Exodus 8:2 reminder that "this is something that happens" and we simply can't explain it all away: sometimes, we have to let the mystery be.

Grrrr! Lion! Sit! Look At These Chair Legs!

A Trinitarian Notion: The Smiths Sabbatical Soundtrack

The Littlest Lebowski

Epiphany Soundtrack