Spooky-girls, Sea-monsters

Bloodroot by Adela Leibowitz

Some of these paintings are fun, some are so-so. I like the 06-07 series, specifically The Purple Room, which reminds me very much of the set design and costumes in Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers.

Album Review: Papercuts- Can't Go Back

I have not made a sincere post on the Molly in quite a while and in doing so I wish I could take the time to do so by not producing some minutiae on some awesome book I read, or my trite review of the new Batman movie. Instead I would like to introduce you to a band I had somehow downloaded onto my itunes months ago but have yet to really give them a listen. Papercuts is Jason Robert Quever among other special guests. Quever hails from San Francisco and his 2007 album Can't Go Back delivers pop perfection. Can't Go Back, much like Quever's moniker creates tiny fragments of emotional scars into the listener. There is a certain formulaic matter of song writing going on here, three and a half minute pop/country songs with melodies that tend to stick with you hours after you're finished with the album.

Papercuts records for Gnomosong along with Jana Hunter, Feathers and Vetiver all sort of artists with a similar aesthetic. I'm only hyping this record a year after it came out because I was amazed that I hadn't paid attention to it despite Papercuts name. If you are interested or bored with your current music selection I suggest this beautiful yet simple pop record for what I deem intoxicating summertime listening.


Recommended tracks:
Dear Employee Free download
John Brown
Unavailable

Flying Swings - Old Orchard Beach, Maine

What is your favorite amusement ride?

Had To Cry Today

It is not often that I am moved to tears by a song, but I was today in Dunkin Donuts over an everything bagel with cream cheese. The song I am referring to is, of course, the fourth track on Scott Walker's solo debut, Scott, which is a cover of the sub-2:00 masterpiece penned by Tim Hardin, "Lady Came From Baltimore":

C G F C
The lady came from Baltimore, all she wore was lace
F C G
She didn't know that I was poor, she never saw my place
Am G F C
I was there to steal her money, to take her rings and run
F C G C
And then I fell in love with the lady and got away with none

C G F C
The lady's name was Susan Moore, her daddy read the law
F C G
She didn't know that I was poor and lived outside the law
C G F C
Her daddy said I was a thief and didn't marry her for love
F C G C
But I was Susan's true belief and married her for love
Am G F C
I was there to steal her money, to take her rings and run
F C G C
And then I fell in love with the lady and got away with none

C G F C
The house she lived in had a wall to keep the robbers out
F C G
She never stopped to think at all that that's what I'm about
Am G F C
I was there to steal her money, to take her rings and run
F C G F C
And then I fell in love with the lady and got away with none.

Eclipsing the Hardin version released the same year by a great deal, Walker's performance is nothing short of breathtaking. Highly recommended listening.

Summer People, Summer Not

"Summer People" by Ernest Hemingway.

Browsing through a collection of Hemingway short stories for "Ten Indians," I chanced upon the hitherto overlooked (by me) story "Summer People." As chance and luck would have it, "Summer People" is, like "Ten Indians," a Nick Adams story about girls and the manly art of emotional repression.

Lazy summer nights seem to bring out the worst in callow existentialists and young Nick is no exception. Over the course of one gloriously indifferent evening, Nick shows off his diving skills, holds his breath, muses on the sensual possibilities of fucking a mermaid, decides he must be the best swimmer in Michigan, and for a shallow coup de grace screws his friend Odgar's girlfriend in an apple orchard - afterwards they eat fried chicken and pie.

Favorite passages:

"What are we going to do tomorrow?" Odgar said, his voice becoming husky, near to Kate again.
"Oh, hell, let's not talk about tomorrow," Nick said. "Let's talk about my mermaid."
"We're through with your mermaid."
"All right," Nick said. "You and Odgar go and talk. I'm going to think about her."
"You're immoral, Wemedge. You're disgustingly immoral."
"No, I'm not. I'm honest." Then lying with his eyes shut, he said, "Don't bother me. I'm thinking about her."

and

"Is it good this way?" he said.
"I love it. I love it. I love it. Oh, come, Wemedge. Please come. Come, come. Please, Wemedge. Please, please, Wemedge."
"There it is," Nick said.
He was suddenly conscious of the blanket rough against his bare body.
"Was I bad, Wemedge?" Kate said.
"No, you were good," Nick said. His mind was working very hard and clear. He saw everything very sharp and clear. "I'm hungry," he said.

Wonderfully blunt and unadorned, "Summer People" is a deceptively kind portrayal of erotic self-absorption. Indifference, whether feigned or genuine, disappears when Nick immerses himself in the sensual world, returning only when he comes up for air and in an act of authorial benevolence that transcends forgiveness or affection, Hemingway abstains from any judgment or defense.

Recommended for aficionados of summer nights, swimming underwater and the simple eroticism of an e.e. cummings poem.

What the end could look like -

Moose + Sprinklers = Glorious Awkward Mammal Fun!

Oodles of sprinkler fun:

Holy Ground

Badassery, thy name is Peckinpah.



The ante has been upped.

Sally Who?

Best performance by an actress in a supporting role in a film I watched recently: Sally Hawkins.


Despite being given little to do in Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream but provide a sweet and unwordly counterpoint to Hayley Atwell's sexpot classassin, Ms. Hawkins turns in a lovely, quietly memorable performance.

"Satan laughing spreads his wings..."

"Angels are partisans not of Good, but of divine creation. The Devil, on the other hand, denies all rational meaning in God's world. World domination, as everyone knows, is divided between demons and angels. But the good of the world does not require the latter to gain precedence over the former; all it needs is a certain equilibrium of power. If there is too much uncontested meaning on earth (the reign of the angels), man collapses under the burden; if the world loses all its meaning (the reign of the demons), life is every bit as impossible." - Milan Kundera

In Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter & Forgetting, he not surprisingly deals much with the idea of laughter and its meaning. According to Kundera, the Devil invented laughter: "Laughter is the province of the Devil. It has a certain malice to it (things have turned out differently from the way they tried to seem), but a certain beneficent relief as well (things are looser than they seemed, we have greater latitude in living with them, their gravity does not oppress us)." In light of this, the Devil is thus both a liberator and a tempter. He is a singularity of abyssal irony, something we all find in ourselves but could never become completely. He both repels and attracts; he is a she and she is an it. As Max Von Sydow reminds us in The Exorcist, "Satan is a liar and a cheat." But does he ever lie about that?


In Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, The Joker, so superbly played by the late Heath Ledger*, is none other than a modern take on this Devil character, i.e. humanity's absolute Other. Unabashedly unified in his chaotic whimsy, he is also lacking the strength of restraint and the power of compassion, the stuff angels are made of. The choice to have The Joker tell two completely different stories about how he got his scars shows how completely inhuman he is; for him, there is no past and no future. His seductive qualities lie in his complete immersion in the moment, in the act of orgasm, of complete and singular fulfillment of desire above all.


Batman, on the other hand, is very human. He needs the rich, kung-fu-chopping Bruce Wayne to exist (as all the imitators make painfully obvious). Furthermore, if Bruce Wayne ceased to exist, Batman would surely descend into the world of The Joker. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Alfred burning Rachel's note, ensuring that Bruce will never know the truth about himself, has secured Batman's reality as a role and nothing more. While Bruce Wayne's reserves about being Batman are deeply human, his choice to persist as Batman is divine. The twist is his status as an anti-hero, but even this is no more than par for the saviour course; after all, Jesus being crucified was part of God's plan, and his being part-God was just as critical.

To withdraw from Theology and move over to Idealism: Gotham City is nothing less than the jumbled mind of Man**, disconnected from its destructive instincts and irrationally but ignorantly bound to a superficial order of things. In Gotham, you basically have The Joker as Chaos, Batman as Jesus, and People as People in all their near-sighted, vain, but ultimately endearingly graceful glory. Chance is the absolute reality these people must face, and it is their attitudes towards it that define them: The Joker laughs at it and does what he can to master it for his own amusement, Batman gravely looks it in the eye and does what he can to combat its destructive downswings, and People are largely trapped in its ebb and flow. Indeed, The Joker and Batman are apart from Chance while People are caught in its gears, perhaps even constitute it. Within the sphere of Chance, The Joker's anarchic machinations create the necessity*** for Batman, and without either, Gotham wouldn't be Gotham and humans wouldn't be humans.


Bullshite analysis aside, I loved this movie. The performances were explosive and the plot sizzled with relentless excitement. I think Harvey Dent was an extremely interesting sub-plot and I think his necessity to the story is fascinating. In reality, he saves Batman and is the hero Gotham needed, albeit thanks to a white lie. Harvey Dent "falls" because he cannot fathom The Joker; he cannot account for his existence. He naively believes that evil is evil and evil is not him, thus with blind good conscience he makes it his goal to eradicate it. One devastating twist of fate, however, leaves him a shell of a human who, like Anton Chigurh, begins tragically to worship the amorality of Chance in order to quench the often seemingly unquenchable thirst for justice in a world where The Joker not only exists, but thrives. Also, it is probably his cleft chin, but he continually reminded of the Father in Troll 2 (!).

A question for other people who have seen The Dark Knight: Does The Joker intentionally mix up the addresses of where Dent and Rachel are being held or is he mistaken? If it's totally his show as it seems, how did Ramirez enter the fold? Was it a mob set-up that The Joker happened to privy to, or did he author it?

* - SO FUCKING SUPERBLY.
** - I apologize for this sexist lapse. I only use it for rhetorical effect as well as appropriateness. Come on, those German assholes were straight-up misogynists.
*** - I say necessity in terms of Freedom being the ultimate goal of human endeavor. The Joker seems free, but of course he is not, being slave to his whim and endless desire.