Kiss Me Del Rey

LtoR: Lana Del Rey, Gaby Rogers, Candace Hilligoss

Lana Del Rey's panned performance on SNL this past weekend wasn't all her fault -- the mixing was dreadful. I instantly imagined the sound tech guy had hit on her during rehearsal and decided to 'punish' her, as douche bags are wont to do, after she rebuffed his seedy offers. See how protective I am regarding Lana? I feel like she's someone I once loved but couldn't protect as douche bags circled her every step like Kenneth Cole-clad vultures. I cringed and hid behind my book as she stood paralyzed against a white spider web of lights on stage, her legs locked together in a vintage thrift store chanteuse evening dress; her lyrics stuck on the endless repeat of a melody that fades on close audience scrutiny, that only works with clips (she should have had rear projections) as in her "Video Games" video, wherein she was only there for scattered moments, half drunkenly falling over or singing alone-ish, half America's Next Top Model entrant selling the brand "haunted."

Once I heard how far down in the mix she sounded I was hoping for a  moment like the one in Road House (above) when Ida Lupino sings her first song at the lodge and the whole cast of regulars and staff eye her with concern as her frail voice, barely above a whisper and without a mic, clings like Grant on Lincoln's nose at the end of North by Northwest to the melody, a ghostly after-effect of pure will and brassy, nicotine-stained courage gradually cutting through even the staunchest of drunk background conversations. It didn't happen.


As I wrote earlier, I like Del Rey for her hand-crafted post-noir persona but that persona hinges on intimacy, which SNL lacks. Rey's a post-digital artist meant for late night headphones and tear-stained iPhone screens, not sound stages and fancy lighting rigs and an audience keyed up by comedy. Thus we're presented with the same conundrum that sinks Manhattan nightspots I visited in the 1990s, they're now prime real estate 'hot locations,' so the night spots elsewhere; the mainstream snaps at the lonesome artist gentrifier's heels, stealing our small good things and baking them into oversize crap. Well, you mainstream sycophants, some stuff can't just automatically make the jump. I've seen the best bands of my generation destroyed by bottom line AOR guys who brought them up too fast and dropped 'em twice as quick: from Nightingales to The Wetlands to Nassau Coliseum and then dropped from the Humpty Dumpty wall when their 15 minute egg timer clicked crack time. Yeah I mean the Spin Doctors.

In the end the mainstream wants all the things it takes from the fringe to be tailor-made for them, never considering whether or not we invited them to even try on a sample. Thus we make ourselves deliberately off-size to scare away customers, for success means having to be surrounded at all times by douche bag entourages and clingy fans and thus be unable to hone our craft in the isolated anguish cocoons and starving garrets that best nurture our wild gifts. So we let our sophomore album grow bloated, and the AOR guys throw us to the cut-out bins and now not even Nightingales wants us back. One two / princes who adore you / just go ahead now. Yaaaa badibidip Dip deepa doo do da.

Then there's the movies: I finally bought and saw Criterion's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Blu-ray which lived beyond expectations; I've had the MGM DVD awhile and watched it many times but it's a whole different movie now, like a crisp 3D diorama --now Mike Hammer's jazzy bi-level apartment seems to stretch deep inside the back wall at odd, skewed angles, and the sexy girl bare feet seem bigger than life, the treacherous west coast hills down which flimsy stairs carry tumbling thugs now recede deep down into the apartment below me. The two blonde girls who bookend the film are now extra insane: you can see the thin layer of sweat over their faces; when Gaby Rogers gets all glazed-eyed lunatic at the climax, you can practically smell the laudanum coming out of her pores; before that you can smell the sexual heat and traces of sodium pentathol pouring off Cloris Leachman, and later the toe-tingling chlorine and perfume aura of Marian Karr as the gambling kingpin's nympho poolside sister.

Spreading its influence out to post-nuclear Japan and films like Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967), and into Altman and the Coens, from its backwards credits to its doomsday ending, Deadly enfolds rather than unfolds, in that sacred timeless backwards space occupied by Jimmy Stewart's Vertigo fingernails and the electric chair-bound flashbacks of Edward G. Robinson in Two Seconds, or Lee Marvin's mysterious resurrection in Point Blank or Naomi Watts remembering her own parallel reality as Samara's mother in The Ring, or those suddenly interminable songs Lana Del Rey sang on SNL Saturday. Nothing is by chance when Death is sucking us up through her rear view mirror.

In the beginning/end of Kiss Me Deadly, Hammer is drugged, beaten, and driven off a cliff with his first lost blonde (Leachman), and maybe he's still dead at the bottom of a sandy ravine and the girls around him the Carnival of Souls reverse gender equivalent of the weird white skinned zombie guy with the crazy hair who follows Candace Hilligoss around. And maybe the big whatzit in the box is an atomic Skynet variation of the Hitchcockian Mcguffin grown suddenly aware of its abstract unimportance to the mise en scene and so deciding to change the game, swallows the universe whole and runs it backwards only in its guilty 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing' nightmares.

Now it all finally makes sense: here it is 2012 and the film 2012 is coming to TNT (my take on it here). The snake, having swallowed its own tail first, continues unknowingly along, its radius tightening, and only as it speeds up to the infinite point does memory finally catch up to its 'this is where we came in' crux apocalypse. Death is from here on out more a dawning awareness than a traumatizing finale, and a parting word to those who will be forced to watch the black hole close around us seems prudent. Thus, Christina Rosetti's (left) poem "Remember:"

  And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

         For if the darkness and corruption leave

         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

If we feel the final darkness closing around us, is it at all possible that we're remembering it rather than experiencing it now, and thus are immortal after all? Maybe we who will die in the coming floods will not our deaths remember but rather still live in a landlocked world where no further burgee cords and yacht club burgees unfurl but for the brief cocktail steward span that bridges sleep and death--that fluttering spasm of alertness; the forgotten hand that clutches once and having clutched drops its eternal bong --and watch will we instead as the blackened water's through the carpet soaked and gone? Soaked...

... and gone? As Mike Hammer says when giving up the key to the whatszit, "I didn't know... I didn't know..."

He didn't know he's been dead all along and the same girl twice has died with him in a drag race (left). As J.J. put it in Sweet Smell of Success, "You're dead son, get yourself buried." Mike Hammer didn't know he really was pulling a Lazarus Scotty Hilligoss Parker shuffle.

Right. Thing is, no one ever does.

So remember to "forget and smile" when the waters are rising higher than any hit count and our apocalypse year begins endlessly over with one January after the other, never reaching the dreaded December 21, 2012, all time slowing down like a black hole's infinite approach, remember what the fortune teller said when Lisa Simpson asked if there was any way to avoid her grim future, "No, but try to act surprised." All else is... Silencio... and those picky, tourist conqueror worms that just won't give it up... for Lana Del Rey!

Secrets of 2012, or the "The Day of a Million Relapses"

Sorry to be so late to the party in loving/trashing Roland Emmerich's 2012, but I got so much to say, You HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME! We're running out of time! First, First, I love the insecure way Emmerich steals bits not just from himself but from James Cameron, and Michael Bay -- they steal bits from each other, as if there was only one 99 cent bag of tired action movie cliches and they had to share it between them, and make it last three hours. Emmerich of course is the worst, stealing everything while sticking to what he knows best - destroying the world on a bigger and bigger scale and refracting the escapes and deaths through the on-the-street perspectives of an an offensively cliche'd cross section of 'everypeople'-- each a unique distillation of stock characteristics defining their Ameri-racial heritage.

There's enough great carnage in 2012 to forgive it its trespasses, of course: Las Vegas collapses into a giant flame hole, all of Los Angeles gets a long fly-over as it sinks back into the earth, the Vatican (!!), and other tourist spots collapse and a joyous time is had by all, though it's rather like having a lover who covers up the fact they don't have an erection by performing an elaborate courtship dance. 

But hey, we've all died before in other lives, we know it's hard, and Emmerich makes sure we all are represented by one stock character or the other. Me, I resonated most with Harry (Blu Mankuma), the beautiful old African American jazz man father of the bleeding heart geologist son (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The two have a nice farewell via ship-to-shore phone (Harry's pianist in residence on a cruise liner) and upon hanging up--his responsibility to his son completed--Harry grabs a Jack Daniels off a passing waiter's tray. His old sax man (George Segal) remarks: "Harry, you haven't had a drink in 25 years!"

Harry doesn't even answer, and our movie makes sure we actually get to see him drink that first drink in 25 years, a healthy swig, thus letting us know that (a) he's cool and b) he's doomed, and c) he's relapsed and doesn't give a shit! As someone with half his 'time,' I can't help but cheer!! Someone in that scriptwriting pool knows the score!

Sadly, the next time we see Harry he's not abusive or sprawled on the floor, or staggering around on his second fifth of bourbon, or even playing some mournful blues on the lounge piano as the room fills with water and waiters wade by in slow motion (they're on a cruise). So many missed opportunities... but finally a disaster movie actually put in what every sober alcoholic waits for--the unshakable excuse to relapse. There's an old saying in AA that I made up about promising to drink again when hell freezes over: one day we're bound to find ourselves on a Zamboni machine heading down into the flames.

So that's 2012 for me, and I don't even have to tell you the rest of the plot: A perennially late divorced slacker dad (John Cusak, flailing wildly) racing to pick up his kids for the weekend from hot, beachwood-aged-wife (Amanda Peet) and her shallow dork of a plastic surgeon, lawyer or stockbroker boyfriend/husband (Tom McCarthy). Cusak is one of those dads who talk baby talk to their children long past the expiration date that such condescension passes for parenting. Dude, your daughter's watching the world cave in around her and you're the one panicking like a hysterical over-acting ninny.

I'm always glad to see that Hollywood for all its smarm is deeply concerned about micro-managerial parenting and the crippling anxiety it creates -- especially in men, causing them to run away from responsibility and dread every weekend of custody, terrified the kid will slip and fall on their watch. Like Tom Cruise in Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS remake, our spazzola action movie everyman is caught at ground zero of immanent catastrophe right at the time he's most anxiety-prone: child custody weekend. His first thought once the meteors start is to return the kids asap so he can be free to die with dignity. Is this how real fathers feel, or is it what teenagers are afraid they'll feel as fathers?

I'm childless, no kids y'all, and the whole "road not taken" fascinates me,  not in a fuzzy way but in a queasy way -- like watching your friends fall into a giant threshing machine and come out looking thirty years older, but with a nice shiny 'warm-colored' patina, telling you in their pod person voices "Once you have a child, your whole outlook changes, you appreciate life." Thus, God opens the door right as the floor falls away behind you, and he expects you to jump through only at the last possible second, your mouth agape, going "Ahhhhhhhhhhh!"

Next thing I love about this film? The covert condemnation of liberal bleeding-heartedness. I mean, can we be honest? Do we really care if four billion people die, or an extra hundred crrazy idiots get to come on the ark or not? Would you really care so much, Holly, if one of those little ants down there stopped moving? Either way, why INDEPENDENCE DAY and DAY AFTER TOMORROW did this so much better was by eliminating the whole ark crap. The mad chase across the globe to fight to get on some escape craft is a kind of hack ploy to show a lot of different lands getting wiped out, but a close reading opens up all sorts of THE BOX-style Pandora-ish issues of empathy and survival instinct that  come off best either being addressed in Brechtian reflexivity or in a film noir-style survivor guilt way (ala 28 MONTHS LATER) or not at all. Don't lecture us for enjoying watching ant-sized people falling out of burning skyscrapers if that's what got us in the seats. We didn't come for character development.

The moral quandry is brought up and simultaneously side-stepped by this strategy. Ejiofor plays his bleeding horn whenever he learns someone he knows has died, demanding everyone drop their own issues to acknowledge that these people he knew had NAMES, feelings!  Meanwhile, the "self-preservation" other of the equation is Cusak as the kind of dad who promises his kids front row seats to Justin Bieber  and on arriving at the stadium (without tickets) and learning the show's sold out, panics and proceeds to storm the doors, blow the family fortune on scalpers, sneak in through the back, make a big scene with security about how much it means to his kids, cries and pleads, traumatizes everyone-- not just his kids--and eventually incites a small riot and burns down the stadium, and the kids don't even really care about Justin Beaver, at all; they hadn't the heart to tell him.

There are men who can act rationally when faced with crisis, and men can't, men who've just bled too much from their liberal martyr hearts to see the forests from the trees. These are men who will freak out because they can't find one girl's lost daddy and so righteously go around yelling even as huge fissures are erupting under the makeshift med unit and thousands are dying and burning all around. The only time this scene has been done right was in 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND (left), when Scarlett walks out of the makeshift confederate army hospital to get help and just keeps going right on home, after seeing the mass carnage spreading into the horizon. But Scarlet's morality was inherently dubious, what with slavery and all, and because Selznik hewed to the book, Scarlett was, almost by a fluke, allowed to be totally mercenary and immoral. (Everyone wants to make a film as sweeping and memorable as GONE WITH THE WIND, but have they actually ever seen it? The lead character's an unrepentant bitch, y'all!) GWTW could hardly even be made like that today, with such a ruthless, self-centered heroine. If the suits remade it, Scrarlett would probably end up a saintly single mom, and then all her capricious manipulations and treacheries would be solely to care "for the child" and therefore saintly.

To show you how bad things get without ambivalence and naked self-interest, let's return to 2012 and the only two guys with any maturity in the whole picture: Woody Harrelson as a Yellowstone hippy DJ who greets the huge volcanic eruption of old Faithful with a head full of mescalin (I'm guessing) and Oliver Platt as a blustery political something or other who soon regrets inviting Ejiofor along on the ark, especially when he starts to make emotion-cracked pleas to open up the arks to the unwashed masses rioting outside. Platt screams at him: "You might have gotten us all killed but as long as your conscience is clean." Amen. When Oliver Platt is the only one with any sense, that's a sad crazy day.

My fellow Americans, many must die so that John Cusak and his two rugrats may live and have last minute escapes, one after the other until the law of averages shrugs and walks away as if from his friend's nonstop video game playing. Of course if you really really really want to live, then come on! We have to get on that plane and take off before the earth splits apart but first I have to slowly do five things! There's a saying in AA, you know you're an alcoholic when you have to choose between believing in God or dying drunk, and need time to think about it. If to live you had to endure John Cusak's overacting, there shouldn't be a second thought.

Like, am I the only one who just wishes everyone died in this film? Why be loyal and liberal bleeding hearty to CGI stick figures? Let them die! That's what they're for!!! I remember in 6th grade, my friend and I drew stick figures killing and dying elaborate horrible deaths in each other's notebooks during class - it helped blow off steam. The teacher thought the drawings were cool (it was 1978) but we should pay more attention to class topics. If we pulled that in a 6th grade class today we'd be red flagged and the parents would be called-in, and the teacher would worry and admonish the way Ejiofor does to Oliver Platt: "Those things you drew - they're just stick figures to you, but they have NAMES, feelings! They represent real people!"

Like everyone's going to crack up with cheering and weeping if Cusak (who in his Jar-Jar spazzing nearly destroys all humanity) survives. If he had been a real hero, he would have just let his ex-family die like everyone else -  he'd be spared all the running and flailing, but no, he's that kind of dad, a total victim of the idea of "proximal morality" -- that is, the condition wherein something is important based on its proximity. You might be running to stop a bomb in a crowded restaurant, but if you pass a dog with a thorn its paw, you have to stop and pull the thorn out. That dog has a NAME, feelings, people! The dog's proximity preempts the bomb in the restaurant, cancels it out -- the squeaky wheel-greaser dad in action.

Thus, the ambivalence of Scarlett lives on in a passive aggressive display of parenting anxiety: Worrying about his children exempts him from responsibility for all the billions of lives that are being left to die. In this manner Cusak's no different from Billy Zane in TITANIC (1997, left), muscling his way into a lifeboat by claiming to be the guardian of some random kid he scooped up. If it was actually his own kid, he'd be considered a saint,. And aren't we all children of God, Nic? I mean John? Now which way is the bar on this sinking tub?

POST SCRIPT: See also on Bright Lights:
Shyamalan's a Ding-dong (Will Smith is a great dad, please)
Dads of Great Adventure: A Guide to Cinema’s Post-Apocalyptic Hyper-Parent

More Tentacles from the 5th Dimensional Rift

Last night I finally saw THE MIST (2007), which is based on an old Stephen King novella I read in high school. I can't remember if the biblical elements are all in the King version, but one thing I do remember, for what it's worth, is that there was a hell of a lot more drinking! The lead character in the book drinks beer nonstop all through the story. What the hell happened? The only beer drinkers in the movie are condemned as "not taking the issue seriously." Jesus Christ, people!

I don't want to spoil things, but the presence of tentacles and the concept of the military opening a hole into another dimension, and having tentacles and mantis-like monsters escape to destroy civilization has become so common - from Lovecraft, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Futurama (see below), to The Mist, and god knows how many Amazing short stories... not to mention the reports from those brave space cowboys who voyage into third eye realms with the aid of shamanic ritual, DMT, psilocybin, Salvia Divinorum, etc. And then there's "Revelations" in what you earthlings call the bible, and the eerie resemblance of "the Spaghetti Monster" to the transdimensional space octopus the Hebrews called "Yaweh." Call me paranoid, but it all fits together like a giant mantis claw pointed at the calendar to 12/21/2012, or what James Cameron would call "Judgment Day."

As I've said in the past, my own mystic visions have corroborated these fictional testimonies, and the recurring presence of a) dimensional rifts as signals of the apocalypse and c) tentacles and mantis-like beings issuing forth and devouring human souls and feeding off psychic energy (most commonly pain) in both fiction, visions/hallucinations, biblical prophecy, comedy, and paranoid crackpot UFO witness sightings/testimony, all seem to indicate the same horrible truth; a truth perhaps too horrible to look at straight on, (which also corroborates my vision of this devouring god as a sort of rotating space Medusa. To look at it head on is to die or turn to stone, so we can only glimpse it through the warped funhouse mirror of fiction, dream and astral projection).


Why am I risking condemnation, judgment, and perhaps mantisassination by telling you this? Because knowledge is power and actually every time I visit the space octopus/Medusa, She always first wants to know if I've preached Her word... i.e. to bring forth the glory that is the return of Medusa/space octopus onto the world! For the embrace of the space octopus is what shall save us from being devoured (your soul has to be nice and light first - for no mantis can eat the sun).

Other interesting paranoid parallels: the resemblance of the many-armed Hindu deities to the "vision" of flowing tentacles, and our own ability to feel and manipulate auric tentacles.

 

My Nostradamus-esque prophecy is that we will be seeing more and more images and renderings of trans-dimensional rifts, human-devouring mantis-beings, and tentacled heads rotating through space as we approach the fated date of 2012, all this as cosmic preparation for our collective journey into the fifth dimension, past the illusion of time and space. Are you ready to open your third eye and start waving hello to your new overlords with your newfound auric tentacles? You've got four years to start, my tasty human friends! And check out this crazy T-shirt!

The many tentacles of Love: FUTURAMA - THE BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS

Every once in awhile a film comes along that justifies all your own crackpot psychedelic visions. For me, such a film is FUTURAMA: THE BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS, a feature-length animated film released directly to DVD that's light years better than most crap out there, including the FUTURAMA TV show. And it actually brilliantly dovetails into an array of metaphysical postulations and out-there conspiracy theories! Both of which I am a huge fan of.

The titular beast is voiced by David Cross and rather than a menace is actually a loving God-like diety from another dimension who takes advantage of a cosmic rift in the universe to lock his loving tentacles into the backs of the necks of all human beings, lifting us up to ecstatic union with an all-powerful benevolent other. I won't spoil where it goes from there, but this concept alone is so brilliant it taps into the fundamental needs in the human soul for love, god, and drugs, not to mention the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft (i.e. the elder gods, Cthulu, et al)

And the idea of a tentacled overlord amongst us is in fact the exact vision that more than one of us shamanistic cosmonauts have had in our astral voyages, especially as we countdown to the end of the Mayan calendar, 2012. What the bible foretells as a hole in the earth from which the creatures of the dead shall walk, including giant mantis like beings with whips of fire, some of us have witnessed past the cosmic veil as also an opportunity, for those of us with light enough density to cross over into the arms (tentacles) of our benign ruler, the one beyond good and evil, who oversees even the lizard reptillian aliens that devour the souls of the self-centered (or dense).

These multi-tentacled intra-dimensional beasties have been described and discussed since the dawn of time, witnessed only with the third eye, usually by visionary crackpots and writers like H.P. Lovecraft. The mythological creature Medusa is also one such being (my own vision of this was a giant medusa head rotating through space, on which all humanity lives, as microbes, soon washed by cosmic noxema from mighty mistress Medusa's olive green complexion.)


Sounds like a lot of cosmic bufoonery, doesn't it? And that's exactly why BEAST WITH A BILLION BACKS is such a hilarious and essential film. All these harsh cosmic lessons are perhaps too much to endure without a great sprinkling of levity. Now I've never seen Futurama--except for the original episode which I didn't like exactly, being a dyed in the wool Simpson fan, but in this humble blogger's opinion, BACKS is actually better than the Simpson movie, that is as far as laugh a minute genius is concerned, so at least add it to your Netflix list and when you get to the part with the fabled octopus, remember, this sucker is real, and when judgement day comes, the real litmus test to whether you get eaten by the mantis beings or allowed to pass into the next dimension is going to be based on your soul density-- the more selfless and outgoing and loving you are, the less dense you get, (i.e. the extension of self reduces density), while the more selfish and self-centered you are, the more dense (your self contracts inwards, small and hardened). This has nothing to do with dogmatic interpretations of Christianity, but it does have to do with being nice and not judging others, even the stupid and ugly who deserve it. This amusing and soon to be important little nugget of information, incidentally, is something the powers that be don't want you to know, which is why they've trained you since birth to react to blogs such as this with ridicule. Stay dense! Imagine Captain Crunch at the helm of his ship, urging all the little peanut nuggets under his command to stay sugary and crisp, rather than getting themselves salty and stale and unappetizing to their giant devouring Other who even now shakes the box and sends them squirming and screaming into the milky bowl of intergalactic breakfast! I stand before you, risking your condemnation, urging you to go stale and salty, and thus be passed over during the cosmic snack time that looms large in a scant few years.



PS. If you are interested in learning more about where I pick up such nonsense, may I recommend Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Flight of Quetzlcoatl, and/or High Strangeness by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, or you could just find a way to go deep into the 5th dimension and learn for yourself. Seeing through the third eye is believing! Just don't believe too much, for dogma hardens fast as cement once exposed to certainty's withering sunshine.