Bergman, AFI 1975

"It's not my role to give explanations"

amazing and brief interview w/ Alain Resnais (which i discovered via film school rejects)
which touches at the start on the ambiguous inscrutability of "Last Year at Marienbad" in particular and filmmaking in general. A very good reminder for me b/c I suspect that some who see 'the black sea' will find puzzlement and want/need explication. By design a movie that starts and ends in different ways, the black sea, features a disappearance and multiple protagonists and dips in and out of several POVs and is not exactly sewn up tidily by the end. 

I need to commit this to memory start saying it to everyone*. My new mantra:

"It's not my role to give explanations..each spectator can find his/her own solution and it will in all likelihood be a good one. But what's certain is that the solution won't be the same for everyone meaning that my solution is of no more interest than that of any other viewer."

*or rather to anyone who asks about the movie. I don't want to literally say it to everyone unprompted lest I resemble that man on the bus a couple weeks ago who was sharing his concerns about socialism as relates to city hall road-paving. or something.

road, north/central WA, 2008

sometimes my desire to say things is met w/ an absence of words. are you like this too?

oblivion tour

flew to SF last week to attend memorial service for M's uncle. Marin sun and sky were warm and blue, a counterpoint to the dark finality of everything surrounding us. Travelling with 2 small children amplified all stress and discord but also small, breathing reminder of the ephemeral nature of this whole ride. a gut-punch coming and going. i didn't know him well but i knew him. enough to feel something large stir as i sat staring at his broad grin frozen on poster-board at the front of the venue, joyous to the end. later in sausalito, boats on the water and tourists with peace sign poses in front of a parkside fountain. I am in a wool suit pushing a stroller, hoping an infant will sleep, the heel of my dress shoe extracting skin and blood. Later that night, watching alcohol shake loose obscured sadness, the true fear and effect of  the ultimate pulsing right there under all our manufactured forms, tiny truth pellets falling into a dispenser one at a time.

 the next day w/ M's dad, back in Marin again warm and blue, his person and form showing signs of decline, the same but different. we go to a park she went to as a girl; we go to her elementary school pulsing with one-upon-a-time Ms; we drive through rolling hills, find the house where M was a girl 36 eye-blinks ago, the hill she rode her big wheel down. ten seeming minutes from now will i/we tour similar terrain? the morning becomes afternoon and have to leave, to cross the bridge back.

 the next day we are w/ dear friend and her son, watching him drive in a run on an elementary school field, feeling the prickled absence of his father, an absence that continues to shadow me, forcing me to confront unanswerable questions. later at their house, the last place i saw him, hugged him, told him 'hang in'. more large things stirring, more gut-punching, continuing as we board the plane, as we return, as we unpack, as we sleep, as we rise, as we go through the motions of daily routine, leading me to a conversation w/ M at the kitchen sink the next night. Why am i perpetually fucked up, why am i 9 parts dark black to 1 part graciousness and blessings instead of the inverse? why does what i dodged continue to extract skin and blood? more unanswerable inquiry. I am exceedingly lucky and I know it but I don't always feel it. I feel the potential result more than the actual. I feel the passing form of the shark that missed me instead of the relative calm blue water i laze in now. when and how will it end?

trains on parallel tracks

The start of Stardust Memories. In many ways the perfect embodiment of how I've felt most of my adult life - a much better time is happening just across the way and I am not invited, per circumstance or per some deficiency unbeknownst to me (or worse, well known to me). Part of this is just part of my internal chemistry but another part was wholly exacerbated by the BT in 2005 and all subsequent years. The me in this world split in two, co-existing in what appeared to be the very same place but in which was in fact a replica minus myself. Nobody could/can understand really.  [This idea surfaces to a degree in    
 the black sea]. I could use words to explain it - as I'm doing right now - but they can only approximate shades and tones, meager percentage of the whole.

As I approach a decade out from this it's slowly becoming clear that this -the separate existence, the parallel tracks, wanting others to comprehend the incomprehensible - will endure. If that's the price of not falling prey to oblivion I'll pay it every time but if I am truly honest the price also contains a deep isolating sadness. Explicating the inexplicable - even if it were remotely possible -  will not unlock the way home.



Also, Requiescat in Pace Gordon Willis

over and over

up early Sunday AM, down Hawthorne Blvd and SE 37th w/ coffees and scones and 2 young kids to watch an old friend passing nearby in road race and a surging tide of runners pass in great swells, expelled from some great bottomless ocean. I am suddenly overcome as I watch - the sense memory of running/training-for several marathons myself, starting with 3 I trained for a million years ago in Los Angeles and in particular one in 2007 meant to demarcate my survivorship after my brain tumor enterprise and all parts therein in 2005 - as well as the simple metaphor of standing, participating, moving despite odds, body, history, as well as the non-stop nature of the bodies: Bodies running, then more, then more, then more. And a line from a song I used to listen to frequently once upon a time loops through my head as I stand holding my son (who's watching the 4 white guys play rasta music out of the rain under their small canvas tent) "...over and over we die one after the other..." and the bodies are all at once confirmation and defiance of this.



later, I have 2 hours to myself so I see Sunset Boulevard at the Laurelhurst, a film I am very familiar with but it too is bottomless. my past and present intersect on and off screen, the aspirant screenwriter who lived in LA a million years ago reads the film different than the non-LA based director of now, but then there has also been time/space in between, and I am exactly between Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond now, so I understand her in different ways, her delusion once so grotesque now more comprehensible and human and hence more tragic. Also, the precision and perfection of some of the shots and tightness of script and casting and score - all a marvel as per usual

There is connection to be made between these two events, these two paragraphs but I don't know how to say it or even really what it is but I can feel it. Something about perspective and sheer luck of being able to have it. Forward and backward and forward and over and over one after the other.

headphones