I am Maxine, I am but a young woman of nineteen.
In my brief time on this earth, I have come to find that men very quickly regress to a bitter, infantilized state because the greater society has not incentivized their proper growth and development, not that I'm so ignorant as to imagine it all a one-way-street sex and gender-wise; my adult sister, for example, continues to steal scissors from the hairdresser's. Why? Ask her. You can expect petulance and remorseless harangues. Sometimes I feel like gentrification is driving me out of the known universe. Are there other colonies at the workshopping stage? Nobody can keep a restaurant open. The restaurant people are all drunkards and rattled by dope. My neighbourhood is a ghost town. Dawn told me she saw an actual tumbleweed on Tuesday.
Last night the guru and I fucked and then watched Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino. There's a bunch of truly excellent stuff in the picture but it's also true that Sharon Tate isn't really any kind of actual person in it and that the whole basic arc of the story has Rick Dalton, played as a temperamental but congenial dummy by grande dame Leonardo DiCaprio, complaining in the introductory act that his career is destroyed on account of his having to go make Italian pictures which are to his mind substandard and unpopular...plus, you know, Italian...only for him to return to Hollywood in the final act to not especially help save Sharon Tate in the company of an Italian wife who looks like a flat-out add for an Italian wife. I told the guru that this is why I hate western civilization. It were as though the interchange of articles of commerce absorbed people along with objects and the people were all flipping through one another like items in a catalogue, all with great haste and impatience, making loud derogatory remarks the whole while. The guru understood. Hold still, he said, and tell me where you feel it in your body. I said my left hip was quivering and my tailbone tickling.
The hips, thighs, backbone, and perineum constitute, says the guru, the power centre of primordial intelligence. There is a canister in there and if you let it blow off steam in moderation you can slowly remove the somatic skullcap without in any way penetrating bone. In your guts lies the power to really and truly and maybe once and for all BLOW YOUR MIND. That's actually basically all Hatha yoga is and it's also at the same time the dragon filmmaker and international bohemian Donald Cammell chased until he found himself staring at his dying face in a mirror held by his wife. Or that's maybe, uh, apocryphal. The guru and I just watched White of the Eye (1987). Holy fuck.
Just watched Drive-Away Dolls (2024) with Susan. Ha ha. So good. A hoot and a holler, as they say, plotted like one of those Donald Westlake novels Aunt Mertle loves so much. I had just seen Margaret Qualley effectively launch her career by way of the languorous demonstration of her exposed feet in Tarantino's supposedly second-last film, so now it is delightful to see her glamming it up all daffy white trash and bringing over line readings that would make Nicolas Cage blush. Susan, who is 95% queer, says they were originally going to call the film Drive-Away Dykes but then weren't allowed. People are pussies and losers. The film was co-written by a lesbian and you can tell. Mos def. Margeret Qualley's mother is the actress Andie MacDowell who my parents really loved in Four Weddings and a Funeral and who I always related to on account of both her and I obviously being basically insecure perfectionist types. Andie's fastidiousness and anal-retentiveness are worlds away from her daughter's lithe unworried goofiness, although I did see a Robert Altman movie called Short Cuts once where Andie MacDowell does a whole bunch of crying and I do remember thinking that she sure does cry kind of goofy.
What a weekend! Yikes. Okay, so I saw this movie called Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021) by the amazing Japanese film director Ryusuke Hamaguchi and let's just say right now I'm just in that place where I'm feeling super grateful that I found the cinema and the cinema found me. I have an idea. Of course, I immediately had to go hash it out with the guru. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is three discreet short films in a way, and the characters in each section are relegated to that individual section alone. The film is above all else about a concept that believe it or not comes from science: communication always and necessarily communicates miscommunication along with its communications (one of the basic traffic hazards of space-time). People can misperceive and misunderstand all too naturally, to be sure, but we can also see instances where people use the tools of communication, bodily and verbal, to actively deceive, to one degree or another, with whatever degree of malice. It gets worse. Every individual person in this situation, which I needn't remind us is basically everybody's damn situation, has tastes and opinions and all kinds of beliefs that overlap and don't or cause disharmony or don't...or which simply make it impossible very often for one person to meaningfully understand in any real way what another person is trying to say. So this was the idea I proposed to the guru: what if you wrote a kind of review of the movie Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, except it's the characters from the different sections reviewing the behaviour and choices of the characters from the other sections in a really catty and judgemental way? Think about it! What could better inform the hyperconnected and totally dislocated 21st century human quagmire? I figure you might as well have a bit of a laugh on the slow slide into the slop. The guru himself laughed as, stretching like a satisfied lion, he said: should figure they could get a computer program to untangle that ball of yarn for us... I know I'd love to hear what I've got against me...
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