Things I Did Today

Only the Best Music Rocks My Casbah

Pookleberry Pie Goes to the Sinema

It was such a good and stimulating day that I had to come home and have an extended nap in the early evening. Now I’ll admit I dread a sleepless or at least turbulent night before my mother and I head to Drumheller tomorrow on family business. I had the Guadalajara omelette at Purple Perk, a personal favourite breakfast food indulgence, briefly hypnotized by the comely lady in yoga pants sitting, and periodically standing, directly in front of me. After that I drove north and attended my favourite weekly meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s my favourite because there are lots of oldtimers there who know what they are talking about and who demonstrate each week without fail that it works if you work it. I’m not going to tell you what anybody said in the meeting because one of the central principles of these principle-rich twelve-step programs is: what happens in these rooms stays in these rooms. I think we can safely assume that this is the one thing David Foster Wallace forgot to jot down in that clandestine notebook of his when he was ‘researching’ Infinite Jest. You all presumably know that I’ve transgressed on this front myself, but in my defence I have for a good while believed that people in this day and age owe it to themselves and the general public to recover publicly, messily, and loud as all get-out. When I got home I consulted my blog and my YouTube channel to see how many people have hit up my latest posts, which made me sad, so I went and lay on the daybed in the phonograph room whilst spinning old-timey banjo music. When I had properly collected myself, I realized that the timing was perfect to go catch the second matinee of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell at the nearby mall. I not only liked this motion picture quite a bit, it’s definitely by far the best thing I’ve seen in the multiplex so far this year, not that that’s a huge achievement, God only knows. It played Cannes in May, but didn’t make the Official Competition, and it currently has a 42% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (If you take Rotten Tomatoes seriously there can’t be any redeeming you #SorryNotSorry.) Though this new film is not quite so aggressively sickening as Only God Forgives (2013) or The Neon Demon (2016), you won’t have any trouble determining that this is the same director. It indisputably contains more ocular trauma than your average violent movie. It really is quite weird. You know what? It actually reminded me a little of the 2012 film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, which I have always argued is underrated. I also think that Winding Refn in certain set-pieces is paying conscious homage to the visual style of French director Bertrand Mandico, who is one year Winding Refn’s junior. I am pretty sure that Mandico’s 2016 short film Depressive Cop is one of the top ten short films of all time, surpassing all of David Lynch’s short films with the possible exception of Premonitions Following an Evil Deed from 1995. One peculiar and amusing creative decision in Her Private Hell was to appropriate the name Johnny Thunders in a manner analogous to how Harmony Korine appropriated Moondog in 2019’s The Beach Bum. I very much enjoyed watching Sophie Thatcher on screen with her crazy teeth and even thought at times that she was like a much less unhinged Paz de la Huerta. At any rate, surely now you can see why I needed that extended siesta! Some days life is just really, really fine and the gratitude slides on in easy as pie…