Five Line-Readings: Manly Cinematographic Sign of Life

When I was writing all those unwieldy essays on the social media site Goodreads, tagging the side of the somnambulist literary establishment like a phantomic Graffiti maverick, or so I imagined, the run-off added up to a manuscript of nearly 400 pages and boy oh boy was it a hot mess. However, during that protracted period of funnypages prurience and caffeinated mayhem I came to a powerful realization about the five juiciest lines uttered by male actors in American movies, from hilt to kilt: 1) in sublime 1941 romantic comedy The Strawberry Blonde, featuring top-ever performances from James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland, Cagney says, indignantly, "Well, that's the kind of a hairpin I am!"; 2) in Dennis Hopper's extremely surprising 1969 blockbuster Easy Rider, a dying Peter Fonda, lying by the roadside, says: "You know, Billy. We blew it," and he says so 'cause they sure as shined snakeskin boots done did so, don't get confusin' yourself; 3) at the end of 1974's Cockfighter by Monte Hellman, Warren Oates places the severed head of a fighting rooster in the hand of his horrified beloved, causing the poor lady to run off in disgust and indignation, then shortly thereafter says to his assistant, proud as a cock, having been intentionally mute for the vast majority of the picture 'cause of he previously humiliated himself running his mouth: "She loves me, Omar"; 4) in 1981's Cutter's Way, the alcoholic Vietnam vet and amputee played by John Heard, asked why he isn't getting wasted and combusting in the aftermath of the suspicious death of his common law partner, says: "Tragedy, I take straight"; 5) in Quentin Tarantino's 1997 jewel of a picture Jackie Brown, Samuel L. Jackson says to Robert De Niro before shooting him in a stationary vehicle, with a mere huff: "Our ass used to be beautiful."     

The Tall Coiled Sorcerer and the Morose Greengrocer

Winslow Homer, Eight Bells, 1887

The tall coiled sorcerer and the morose greengrocer

Made a date to eviscerate a marmoset 

That had not paid his dang grocery bill yet;

Those caught watching from the street corner 

Were entirely fascinated by the morose greengrocer.

In the insidious plots of the haves and have-nots

Two dollops of thought can go a long way

T’ward permanently boxing the seat of the plot;

If your instinct is that your instinct is right

Then go ahead and fly your sky-blue kite.

You put a heap of chaos with just a little order

Suddenly regular citizens think they’ve

Sorted the disorder, got it backed into a corner

But the jeering meanness rolling back up at you

Is simply the Universe and you're not its keeper.

All is Well

 

All is well, I'm trying to take a short break...

Little Blue Rogue Cop

 

1976 Motion Picture Dish

The foremost motion picture that is an exact genetic splice of exactly two previously distributed motion pictures on the public record is John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which is a clean and mean genetic splice of Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo and George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Don't knock it 'til you've rock-a-cock-cuck-cocked it. Bird is the wüürd, sailor.

Jason Philip Wierzba presenziz 

The Trashmen playin' "Surfin' Bird"

 

 

Dressed as Jupiter

I’m left with little more than my basic kindness and generosity when you take away the name that would live in infamy. The war was asymmetric but I was barely with it. You can’t storm a garrison with a soup spoon. My tendency to harass and harangue seldom pleases me much more than it does the target. The rolling thunder of compulsion leaves me feeling lost in blurry motion in mid-contortion. Folks have all kinds of opinions and believe their opinions and beliefs to be sacrosanct. They would oftentimes have you be different from how you presently are so that they’ll be able to fit you in their hip pocket and massage you like a pet rock while they put on lip gloss and walk-and-talk. Never really knowing the real you that never was. If you know the game is rigged and you continue to play you shouldn’t expect legislators to come save the day. If you want to get the stalactites of peanut butter from off the roof of your damn mouth, you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. Naturally, I’m plenty able to wince at what enmity compelled me to do…upon such occasions that it has actually been me what gone done it. They say that resentment is drinking poison in the hopes that the other person will die. You can turn your guts to motor oil. It is a beautiful summer day with a breeze. I have not really gotten manic this summer. How can I be sure? I often need one or even two short naps during the daytime. I’m feeling a lot of pressure in the surrounding atmosphere and my head is frankly more thought-clogged than I would prefer. Sometimes my sinuses feel like they’re clogged with gravel. The cumulus clouds over the city are riding low and easy. Every few years I get to a place in my creative work where the spree comes to a short halt because every single first next step is a step into oblivion and the discontinuous stellar lines of the outer limits. I need to huddle inward and hum. If you let your thinking do your thinking for you, don’t be surprised when good fortune choses to ignore you. The voices you should be listening to are not going to sound a lot like friends to you at first, but either you take on the mass of that divided part or the open air may no longer be there to saturate your hiccupping heart.

Arnold Dreyblatt, "Resolve" 

Definitions of 'Plot' and 'Story'

When it comes to narratives and the art of making them bustle and boogey—whether we’re talking about a barroom joke told to a woodpecker, a short story, a novel, or a major motion picture from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the main thing a person ought to know about plot and story is that story is the entire planet and all of time stretching back to the Big Bang and the void of no yesterdays that precedes it, whereas plot is Google Maps. One of the fun things the marvellous and drunken detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett likes to do with plot is to employ it in the opening chapter in such a way that the reader starts off with a bit of a mistaken idea of what the story is and where we’re physically supposed to be atop its surface. In Russian Formalism, “fabula” is the earth’s crust and crudeness and wanton babbling brooks—its timequakes and spaceways—and “syuzhet” is the plot, a grocer’s itemized inventory as scrolling banner advert. There is a special feature behind-the-scenes documentary on the Arrow Blu-ray for Terry Gilliam’s classic 12 Monkeys where we see the director arriving on set early in the morning looking like he got his ass kicked by a kangaroo and complaining, as he no doubt searches for the script supervisor, that he never remembers what he’s supposed to be doing on any given day of production anymore. That is a man who is swamped in story and has lost the plot. The secret truth behind how you build suspense that’s used by all the top professionals is that you have the story everywhere all around you at all times and then the plot moves like a slow, rickety sled through the, uh, permafrost. Things are materializing in front of you and you’re impatient because you can’t see them clearly yet. If there are trapdoors in the plot you can play snakes and ladders with the story. Actors who ask their directors for backstory should be ashamed of themselves. The whole fucking cosmos is backstory, thespian.    

Sun Ra, Spaceways [Full Album]