The kids like zombie movies and vampire movies. Why?

Zombies are the people of every day, up out of the grave and staggering around in all their droop-lip banality, threatening to infect them, to engulf them, to make them one of their own.  As Chekhov says, "There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue."  The walking dead. 

The kids fear the zombies—but they long to be vampires, to be artists, night people, exceptions, drinkers of blood.  H. L. Mencken: “The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”

March Weather

Contain me, contain me, I

Would be publishable, I

Would be small and inky, I

Would plant here the seeds of a

Mode of being and become

Great. Start with death, that, though we

Grunt under it, happiest

Of facts (what other faith but

Cloys with your self pity?), then

Redescend the tunnel of

Sensation, quivering with

Spasms. You cannot pick up

An image and be it, it's

Maddening. (Love me for this,

I am brave: death is not the

Annihilation of the

Personality: life is.)

Lightly across smouldering

Memories hasten barefoot

Toward unconditional

Absolution for all that

Does not concur with this your

Straightjacket, your own arms bound

Against remissive gestures.

Strain toward ignorance of

Self, for that is your only

Dignity. Say what in my

Civilized naivety

I could lately not have said:

The solution to problems

Is to ignore them. Do I

Pirouette? Shall I be held

Still? And to what project? To

The psychiatrist I will

Give no ground, I will hold what

May not be mine, nor guess at

Its nature: reality

No longer really interests

Me, frustration's final grace.

Everything can be taken

Two ways: Up. Down. (Two keys in

This score:) Only decisions.

There are no decisions. The

Mind not a thing but an act,

Though "act", you see—Well. Quicksand.

I exonerate myself.

I exonerate myself.

Reduce the impact on me,

I would enjoy. Nothing is

Stable. Sex, impersonal,

Unidentifiable,

And when it comes knocking you

Can't quarrel with the shape it

Takes. Hold what ground? You know too

Much, you can't afford a

Personality. The whole

Effort takes more tact than that.

Tiger of wrath. Criminal.

They'll put you in a cage. I

Am in a cage! OK, think.

I worry about being

A less fortunate. How could

I bear the envy? Isn't,

Though, that other happiness

Accessible to all? Not

To you. Spring may yet destroy

You, wake your impatience with

Melancholy, so wait. Tear

Up your notes. Joy outstrips all

Formulae, and will recur.

In each of these, your phases,

Unsupported, you follow?

Clean. And then there's the moodless

Mood, backstage, in control. One's

Feelings on the john taken

Against one's feelings in the

Shower. You are a blot of

Mustard, an undigested

Crumb of cheese, your intestine

Plays you like a saxaphone

Until you are reduced to

Believing in miracles.

Hang in. The trouble starts when

You stop trusting your charm. Run

The whole bluff, go ahead. You

Don't want to know who you are

(What an intolerable

Burden that would be), for to

Know nothing is ecstasy,

Though granted not sustaining.

A gentle and erotic

Life, to speak tenderly, at

One with your trajectory,

Although to live is to be mad  

You do see that. A madness

Without glamour, an unrest,

An incapability

Of exhaustion. Unclean. Let

Us not transcend life, let us

Look into its mirror and

Go fucking nuts. Let us take

Life on its terms, if such can

Be deduced, like a poem.

The beyond but mirrors life,

The wonder, the completion

(Come on, now, bring it on), for

Is goodness not moving? Can

You help but betray it? No,

Forget that. Your being has

More import than your art. I

Can't keep track of what I am

Or what I feel. I squander.

On the other hand, no steps

Need be taken. Are you with

Me? Don't try to grab your soul,

If you like. Your body too

Knows more than you. Truth hard to

Come by, overrated. A

Low tolerance for crap is

The most you have. Between these

Epistemological

Horns, the charging beast's forehead

Bouncing back your shells of Faith!

Innocence! Joy! I will kill

You if I catch you. Come here.

Don't you trust me? I cannot

Contain myself but I can

Contain the world, in a way.

I can't get it right. Let slide.

Pleasure and amusement, the

Only discipline left. How

I spent my time on Earth. This

Is the Arc de Triomphe. The

Future is not as closed as

It looks. You were not meant to

Be prophetic. Forget your

Body's decay, your dramas

Of digestion, your dreary

Hypnosis. Walk another

Line. Dare to be shallow. Spurn

Especially the traps of

Sentimentality, the

Forsaken's arguments, the

Entertainer's ingenious

Ways of injuring you. Is

Not the naked spectacle

Sufficiently heartbreaking?

Speak gently. All suffices.

Something to believe in would

Compromise the perfection

Of your faith. Cultivate the

Principle of minimal

Effort. You can't become real

Anyway, you've tried that. And

Thank you. Your hysterical

Attempt has persuaded me.

You will never contain me.

Peter Bogdanovich's article on Lubitsch,

"The Importance of Seeing Ernst,"  in which he makes the fetching link in Lubitsch between innocence and sophistication, is at
http://www.observer.com/2008/importance-seeing-ernst.

Have just re-watched Bogdanovich's own At Long Last Love (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=394qokwYNpk&feature=related), and for sheer joy and frivolity it’s one of my favorites.  It’s not just the music, it’s the ethos: “Is that your car?” she says about his Rolls; “I like you more and more.”  And the “Friendship” number is laugh-out-loud hilarious.  It does the master proud—by whom I mean Cole Porter.

The dancing dolls, the silent scenes, doing a musical with actors who are not all trained singers but are having a palpably good time, all that would have delighted the master—by whom I mean Lubtsch.  “If you ever need a friend, click on Send.”

Casanova, Come Back!

Reg’d © Library of Congress

The modern Casanova longs to settle down with one woman, but she resists him.

He’s coming to Oxbridge to give a poetry reading and speak to a few classes…

…and the girls are sort of interested!

The great lover's great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson—
 

(You didn’t know he was secretly married?  It happened in England—a nun who had already taken her vows, the Mother Superior outraged, powerful people to please…)
 

—has the same name, the same weakness for women (and they for him, or at least for his reputation), sports the same drag and is a so-so poet on the campus circuit.
 

How can he get steady work as a teacher when trouble dogs him everywhere!  No one takes him seriously except as a—Except as a—
 

So when he arrives in Oxbridge he announces that he’s impotent.
 

Ah, but he’s played here before, and now his past rises up to confront him.

Proposed cast: Ulrich Thomsen (Casanova)

GIACOMO CASANOVA (“Just make it Jack”) takes advantage of his ancestor’s reputation to spice up his act as a performing poet with eighteenth-century costume, and it works on the ladies.  But what he needs is a steady job, and a life.

Proposed cast: Anna Friel (Henrietta)

He doesn’t remember her but some years earlier he had played Oxbridge and it had worked on HENRIETTA PASTORLY, now a lecturer here with a young son who speaks a private language—one that only Casanova can speak with him. Could it be…

Proposed cast: Donald Sutherland (the ghost)

The GHOST of the original Casanova haunts his great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandson, criticizes his choices and kibitzes the action. No one else can see him and sometimes Casanova almost thinks he’s real.

Proposed cast: Emma Thompson (Deborah)

Chairwoman DEBORAH BLAKE, the no-nonsense head of the Oxbridge English Department, can’t help but be intrigued by Casanova’s reputation.  Or is it excited?  Or is it, as her husband suspects, in love?

Proposed cast: Dianna Rigg (Cissy)

LADY CISSY SNABE, a benefactress of the University, falls from a dangerous height into Casanova’s gallant arms, much to everyone’s relief. She’s beyond suspicion in such matters, but who is that mysterious visitor at her bedroom window?

Proposed cast: Alan Rickman (Rafe)

DEAN RAFE HARWICK’s wife and underage daughter are both in erotic trances over the arrival on campus of Casanova–and so, it turns out, is the Dean!

Attached:

And the seventh character is Oxford.  Or rather Cambridge.  Let’s call it Oxbridge, as so many do.  Hell for some; heaven for others—like Jack, who could live happily ever after here as a simple lecturer.

Pretentious Pictures presents an elegant comedy.

Reg’d © Library of Congress

Agustina Bessa-Luís on God

Bessa-Luís wrote the script for de Oliveira's The Uncertainty Principle: "Even about God we can’t be sure whether he is good or evil."

Herman Melville on God

"Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright."

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE, A Comedy with a Dark Center

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up middle-aged and finds her life with a younger man undignified.

The stage version was performed in New York at the Creative Place Theatre.  Think of...

...only this is her movie, and she gets the younger guy.

Diana, a woman of a certain age, deals with a birthday by throwing out her younger live-in Jim.

They're right for each other, and she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back: her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

So she makes do with the respectable but empty new life she'd thought she needed—with older lawyer Griff.

Jim gives a driving lesson to frantic neurotic Betsy, who almost shoots them off a cliff.  He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.


Proposed cast: Sharon Stone (Diana)

DIANA, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.


Proposed cast: Gael García Bernal (Jim)

JIM is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes.  Together they’re fast company.  They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked.  She tells him he has to go.  She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late.

Which shocks him.  He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.


Proposed cast: Kathy Bates (Betsy) 

BETSY, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her.


Proposed cast: John Goodman (Griff) 

Diana's lawyer GRIFF, more her age and on her success level, has been in love with her for years.  Now’s his chance.  When Jackie tells Diana the lie that Jim has seduced her Diana gives up on Jim and tries to make a go of it with Griff.


Proposed cast: Adelaide Clemens (Jackie) 

JACKIE, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her.  Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy.  She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.


Proposed cast: Jack Roth (Dylan) 

Betsy's son DYLAN—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably.  He disgusts her.


Proposed cast: Rosie Perez (Maria) 

MARIA, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed cast: Stockard Channing (Gwen)

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego.  She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him!  Just kidding.  In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills— 

—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

The stage version of Chocolate and Champagne was produced by Love Creek  at the Creative Place Theatre in New York.

Pretentious Pictures presents a comedy with a dark center.

Will You Please Fuck Off?—the movie

The one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.—Salvador Dalí 

Toby travels with a woman who pays. He's got it made, except that her nine-year-old daughter is smarter than he is.  Based on the novella:

Lazy, good-for-nothing, pleasure-loving Toby, in flight from his creditors in America, has tried it as an English-teacher in Paris ("know-your-words sort of thing") and as a tour guide in Italy and Greece ("I've always regarded Europe as more or less of a restaurant.")—

Proposed cast: Jason Connery (Toby)

—and has now relaxed into the good life, traveling with rich bubblehead Marcie,

to Bali, Hydra, Puerto Vallerta, wherever he can avoid cold weather and alarm clocks.  Marcie is the widow of a scientific genius, now dead in some wacko experiment, and her nine-year-old daughter by him, Andrea, thinks in megabytes.

And there's the rub: "Marcie is no smarter than anybody else; the child is smarter than anybody else"—including Toby, who she treats as her yo-yo.  She'd have got rid of him long ago but her mommy loves him, so she keeps him around to, what, play with. 

Proposed cast: John Goodman (Haze)

Marcie’s father-in-law, billionaire Hazelton Turnbull “Hard Turd” Harding IV, loathes Toby, and loathes giving Marcie her allowance to feed him.  But he loves his little granddaughter, and there lies the control.

Now Haze has summoned Marcie and Andrea to London, so they can pose as a family while he pretends to buy and old house, but in fact wants to marry Marcie to Lord Michael, and pass the title on to Andrea.

Proposed cast: Scott Hinds (Lord Michael)

They distract Toby with Dr Lu, a hooker posing as a psychiatrist,

who lures him into compromising situations; one of which involves dropping his dry goods in front of the Queen.  

Proposed cast: Mary Reynolds (HRH) 

And as if he didn't have enough trouble, the house is haunted by a gay ghost who's in love with Toby.  

Proposed cast: Mat Baynton (Oliphant)

  Will You Please Fuck Off? is part of the Toby series:

 Pretentious Pictures presents a London comedy. 

Jack Nicholson on God

Nicholson wrote the script for Roger Corman's The Trip, in which Peter Fonda is on LSD and his guru Bruce Dern says,  "See those three crosses on the hill?"  And, wow, Fonda has never seen the Three Crosses on the Hill before!  Not in LA!  "The one in the middle," says Dern, "is channel thirteen."

Dom DeLuise on God

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52efG_Mz5SQ&feature=fvwrel

Kiss of Death

A black comedy about a young man with a fatal kiss, and the women who need it:

A boy whose kiss kills doesn't dare have sex—until he starts sleeping with terminal patients who need a way out.  Trouble is, he's in love with someone healthy.

Set in Leeds—

—it begins on a Greek island:

When middle-aged Otto brings his twenty-year-old mistress Anita to Greece, she betrays him in the woods with a mule-driver, while Otto climbs toward a monastery and dies of a heart attack.
 

After dark she finds the body, and he comes briefly back to life and forces her to have sex—or was it a dream?  "Oh, Otto, I hope you didn’t make me pregnant!  What would come out?"

What comes out is Felix.  When he kisses someone, she dies.   That's how it happens when he's a kid.  The islanders think he has the evil eye, and run them out.

At high school in Leeds he doesn't dare kiss Dorothy, the girl he's in love with, which is not something she can accept or understand.

Attached: Skyrah Palli (Dorothy)

His mother Anita can't understand or accept it either, and urges him to get a girl.  So he gets a girl—and she dies in his arms.

He's a bright economics student at the University, but without Dorothy, without any love life, he's suicidal.  Then he meets a terminal patient who wants out—and helps her out—and has his first sex with another human being.

Now he has found his niche: financial advisor by day, mercy seducer by night.  The police are taking an interest but what can they prove?  We'll have rending and funny performances by older and middle-aged actresses.

Only with Bald Woman does he decline to follow through.

Motorcycle tough, she has made her chemo baldness part of her butch style, and falls for Felix.  He evades her because she’s too full of life to kill, but in pursuit of the kiss of death she finds him and wreaks havoc on his day job—not to say on his chaste relationship with Dorothy.  Like Tristan and Isolde, they sleep with a sword between them.

His mother Anita watches in pain while he lives out Otto's curse, agonizes over the career of dangerous judgements he's embarked on, and does what she can to interfere.

When she sees how in love and how frustrated he and Dorothy are, she knows she has to do something.

Otto, like Hamlet’s father, is a vengeful ghost. His son can’t have sex without inflicting death, and Otto sees to it that Anita will pay that price.

Pretentious Pictures presents a black comedy.