Love Streams

The video release of Cassavetes' Love Streams, the most interesting film of the ones that came out on video in his own day, illustrates that. Since it was co-produced by Canon Pictures, it was released on video. That's a plus. But the downside was the producers didn't like the fact that the original film had a 141-running time so they retaliated by doing a tiny release of only five hundred video copies and by cutting 19 minutes without telling Cassavetes. You know the Groucho Marx joke? The food in that restaurant is terrible and the portions are too small. Well, it's hard to say which was more discouraging—the tininess of the release or the fact that what was released was a cut print.

If you can believe it, the story gets even worse after that. Canon went out of business a few years later, so the only video release Love Streams ever got was the one back in 1985. The only way to get a video of Love Streams nowadays is to go on Ebay and buy one of the old, cut, used VHS cassettes.

The print situation for Love Streams is equally discouraging. When Canon went under, their library was sold to MGM/UA, and the elements of the film were lost. So until they are found, no one is able to make new prints. The few prints that are still around from 17 years ago are gradually wearing out—getting ever more scratched and spliced.

In a few years, there will be neither prints to screen nor cassettes to view—not even cut ones. Love Streams is an obvious candidate for a restoration project, but since there is no money to be made on the deal—either by a studio or by Cassavetes' estate—is it any surprise that no one is doing anything?
-http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/JCinsecure/cassfilmvideo.shtml

This is so sad. Reading the IMDB message boards about this film is just further depressing. Apparently, Sony recently made a new print of the film, but it appears that at least one scene was cropped. I imagine this is the same print that was supposed to be shown at BAM in the fall, but which was cancelled last minute. This film was also supposed to screen at McCarren Pool this summer, but that showing also was switched last minute to a different film. I wonder if something has happened to that print. I would really love see this film on a big screen in a restored version, but might go to Reel Life and rent the old VHS with 19 missing minutes(!) just to see this film since it does not seem like a restored version is ever going to happen on DVD.

I don't remember the name of one artist whose work I saw last night. I don't particularly care.

Ethan's alarm has been going off for an hour and a half and it is making me lose my mind. The key to his room is in in the living room, which I would normally get and solve this problem, however some boy, a James Dean, is asleep on the couch and I don't want to wake him anymore than I already have.

Yesterday, I stepped on my headphones and broke them. This, I do particularly care about. I want to listen to music on my way to work, on my way home from it.

What I would like to hear: Everybody's Working for the Weekend

I have to go to work soon. I don't feel tired, shitty, or hungover, but I normally don't after going out the evening before until I have been awake for a couple of hours. I imagine it might hit me come one o'clock, but if not, excellent.

I tried to go to the Michel Gondry opening at Deitch Projects, however, so did half of New York, and so I waited in a line that wrapped around the block before finally giving up and, with Bri and Ben, went to Niki's. Then I went to the watering dens of the rich with these three because there were open bars happening there. Open bars are amazing for many reasons, not the least of which is the exploring of new bars you would otherwise never go to without the incentive of free booze. So we went to Sway and drank some Italian beer that I found to be pretty gross and undrinkable. Then we hopped on the subway and went to some fashion party at Bed that Niki somehow was on the list for. And it was here that I had my most exciting celebrity sighting in New York to date. As we were getting in line to get in the club, Jay-Z was coming out of the club. He walked past us and was within inches, this person that I used to see on music videos all the time when I was in high school, and who, at the time, seemed like this emblem of tough New York. So that was pretty exciting. Also exciting was this open bar that seemed to be going on all night with pretty much everything as part of the open bar. There were also decadent finger foods being carried around: salmon and caviar on crackers, deep fried artichoke hearts, and duck quesidillas. There was a bed that I lounged on with these free drinks, free fancy finger goods, and friends that make me happy. There was a boy that was really cute there in a vest. I danced a little at the end to some songs, including some by Jay-Z.

Hall and Oates is the best thing to listen to on these mornings and the sun is shining unhesitantly for the first time in what seems like weeks, and tonight, the fun continues. A girl last night, a stranger, while I was dancing, told me to never stop moving. With that, I am off to work.

power of attorney

As some of you may know, there has been some recent drama between my landlord and her daughter and my landlord and myself. Long story short: Ada (my 73 year old landlord) is fighting with her daughter Iris, who is the person I have dealt with since moving in, paying my rent to her, and who, in turn, pays the various bills that keep this building humming. A couple of months ago, Ada yelled at me for paying the rent to her daughter and turned off my hot water and so I called the police on her. She has ignored me since and I have continued paying the rent to her daughter.

Yesterday, she gave my roommate a letter written by someone with not only an English vocabulary (which she lacks) but also a legal one. The letter:

Attached herein is an [sic] copy of the formal letter that I have sent my daughter revoking my Power of Attorney, and that said power is hereby null and void and is therefore no longer in full force or effect.

Please note that all future rents, commencing with the September 2006 rent, must be paid directly to me. Any rental payments sent to my daughter or any other third party will result in my commencing an action for the non-payment of rent.

Very truly yours,
Ada Acosta

However, I mailed my rent earlier in the day before receiving this letter (which, I am pretty sure, actually needs to be drafted by a lawyer to have any force). So in a couple of days, I am anticipating another berating from Ada when she asks me where my rent is. I am not looking forward to that. I called Iris, the daughter, yesterday to talk to her about this and her advice, typically, was to ignore it. Another problem involved here, casting dark clouds, is that our lease was up yesterday. We are now no longer on a lease and thus lacking some of the securities that would make us more stable here should Ada decide to try to evict us. Iris told me, though, that her dad left his half of the building to her and that Ada couldn't do anything to us without first taking Iris to court. Ada asked Iris when our lease was up because she knows she can charge more and wants to. Iris, however, said that she wasn't going to raise our rent and did not tell Ada when our lease was up. To make our position even more precarious here, if this fight between them escalates to court, Iris said that she told Ada if she wants to control the building, she needs to sell it, and give Iris her half. So I don't know how long this can go on, my living here. I don't want to move. I can't really afford to move, and surely will not end up in as nice a location or as nice a room if I do move. I want Ada to take some tranquilizers and just chill out. I have no clue what is going to happen. At the least, I know that I have several months once Ada does decide to try to evict us. But hopefully that won't happen and I can stay for longer.

So I am caught between these two fighting family members and do not particularly like it.

There is that, and then there is the weather, which is lovely. Summer ended without warning a week ago and fall arrived. It has been dreary, rainy, and slightly chilly - and this weather is my favorite type, provoking feelings of nostalgia, melancholy, and somewhere in there, excitement and the feeling of potential. Things are good. I love you.

shit!

I don't like posting these brief two sentence OMG entries - OMG, blah blah just happened. LOL!!!!!

However, this was totally weird and it's a little too early to call someone. Sitting here in the living room eating breakfast, reading, I notice something out of the corner of my eye in the window. I think it is my neighbors on their roof and I look up only to see a scary, gigantic squirrel sitting in my windowsill about to jump down into my living room. I let out a scream and thankfully the squirrel went back outside.

Minnesota

I just got back from Minnesota, where I spent the weekend seeing family and going to the State Fair. It was a pretty lovely weekend. I love the Twin Cities. That area is so beautiful and so cute, so a particular strand of Americanness that I find really charming.

I am sort of in a bad mood right now and am frustrated. I had taken a bunch of pictures this weekend on my digital camera. Riding the bus home from the airport, bored, I took the camera out to look at the beautiful pictures I had taken. A quick Memory Card Error notice flashed across the screen and then it said “No Images.” I am guessing that the camera got beat up in my luggage and that somehow erased all the pictures, but this wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have to check a small backpack just because I bring shaving cream somewhere (fuck you, government manufactured terrorist scares!). I was so excited to share these pictures with you. I don’t have the energy to put into words these images, and perhaps that’s a problem—that I have invested too much into these pictures, that these pictures, by taking them, I had allowed to serve as stand-ins, place-holders for memories. Had I not taken any pictures, I wouldn’t have been sad at about the loss of them, or sad about the imagined loss of memories, but here I am, quite down about the loss of this one particular picture of my family – my mom, her husband, my sister, my grandmother, and my little cousin – in the pig barn at the State Fair all in paper pig ears.

Other things I would show you were I able to:
-a picture of my mom in pig ears looking very serious (another amazing photo)
-my grandmother eating a corndog
-pictures of all the gigantic, prize-winning produce (biggest pea, biggest potato, biggest pumpkin, biggest squash, etc.)
-pictures of me eating fried cheese curds
-pictures taken this morning of my sister trying to block me from taking photos of her as she reassembled this chair, embarrassed, that she had broken by sitting on

And then I had also documented all the amazing _____ on a stick products at the fair, and had about twenty different amazing products all photographed – the signs advertising these things: Puff Daddy on a stick, Mac and Cheese on a stick, Pizza on a stick, Walleye on a stick, Casserole on a stick, Spaghetti and Meatballs on a stick, Coffee on a stick, Eggs and Meatballs on a stick, etc.

I was so excited about the _________ on a stick photo series and so excited to show them to everyone. Oh well. I am seeing lots of meaning in this, that perhaps this is punishment for taking a photo of my sister when she didn’t want one taken, perhaps this should serve as warning not to rely on new technologies, that I should have used real film, and perhaps that I shouldn’t privilege photography at all, that these memories I have (somewhere) are more crisp, more powerful when there is no photo, that my memory tends to slack if it knows that there is a photo of the event and it need not store it also.

I ate in a malt shop, sat by Lake Harriet, looked at old houses that belonged to old relatives and old friends of my mom, went to church, ate so much yummy, cheese heavy food, drank lots of Leinie’s beer, and none of these were documented with my digital camera and so I feel like none of these were lost. It was a really lovely trip, heavy on the nostalgia, but sometimes, often times, that is okay, a good thing even.

Rigoletto

Last night, I went with Niki to see the Metropolitan Opera perform Rigoletto in Central Park. The night started off with me gritting my teeth, annoyed that I was waiting on a corner for Niki, who was 40 minutes late. But she came bearing gifts and so I couldn't stay too annoyed for long, especially when one was a guilty pleasure magazine, and the others were fancy food for a picnic. So we sat there on the Great Lawn under the night sky, drank wine, ate cavier and brie, and listed to lovely music. It was such a perfect little moment, almost unreal in how nice it felt. The people next to us were, because it is the only appropriate descriptor that we will both understand, so white trash - and totally amazing. It made me miss, in some small way, Florida, and even Virginia - that people like this, a little unmannered, a little boisterous in a very specific way, don't really live in New York, or at least they conceal it well. They were probably in their forties, were smoking cigarettes nonstop, and I am almost positive that they were on ecstasy. They had this spinning light machine that they kept putting in front of their faces. They kept rolling around on their sheets and were giggling nonstop. It was totally amazing! That, next to me, the dark sky above me, a city skyline behind me, and an opera ahead of me - oh, it was a lovely night.

I, again, have to go to work again way too shortly and so cannot say much, but just want to point out two really good sentences that I have read recently, both from last week's New Yorker. There is also an amazing article about Roger Federer that was in last Sunday's Times. It was written by David Foster Wallace and is filled with really amazing sentences and is so good, somewhat surprisingly, given my normal distaste for DFW.

"The effect, when it works, is like staying in the pause at the top of a swing, suspended between rapture and collapse."
-Justin Davidson, "Measure for Measure: Exploring the Mysteries of Conducting"

"After all, if the world is not a text because it does not have an author, then [Walter] Benjamin is not an interpreter but a poet, creating meanings rather than perceiving them. Ultimately, his strange, beautiful works are best read as fragments of a great poem--the poem of a longing that no world, and Benjamin's least of all, could possibly satisfy."
-Adam Kirsch, "The Philosopher Stoned: What Drugs Taught Walter Benjamin"

Dog Day Afternoon

There are points in my life, certain events that seem to be reenacted over and over again, which occur so often that the documenting of them here or the recounting the story to a friend becomes so easy. That it is a remake of an old movie - similar themes worked out again a couple years later - an American remake of a J-horror flick. But this director, me, was even able to get the original cast together again. And perhaps for you readers or you friends who already roll their eyes at just the mention of the star attraction's name, you may be thinking that the director is stuck in a rut, recycling the same old themes over and over again a la Woody Allen.

However, this is the first time in recent weeks that I have felt compelled to write, felt compelled to share, felt that giddiness that I had been lamenting the absence of last night to several patrons of the Metropolitan. And, of course, it would be the case that in ten short minutes, I am supposed to leave my house for work and so I cannot really tease out this subject as much as I would like to, probably much to the delight of some of you.

The story involves Matt and it really is not so much a story as me, again, throwing myself at him shamelessly. That's pretty much the whole of the story, but I really was going to tease it out and try to examine all the threads of it, asking questions about desire and life, and why it is that this one particular body, more so than perhaps any other, has the ability (has had it for years now) to make me a total mess and to ask where this desire stems from and why it emerges in this instance and not others - talking about the role of either chance or something more fatalistic - either way, examining this with the insistence that there is nothing rational about it, this attraction to this boy, or its broader category, that of desire.

After not so subtlety checking him out through the course of the night, at some point, he, by himself, was standing against the bar. I went and said hi to him. He gave a hug obviously very drunk that, I am certain, was slightly sexual in nature. It was longer and more gentle than a friendly hug. And in that instance, despite the fact that I had had no sexual desire to speak of all night, I suddenly felt this thrill throughout my body, its epicenters at the points of contact where our two bodies were touching, the thrill coming from the hope that those points would be connected, that more points would be plotted on the maps of these two bodies and that it would be one big point of contact. And so perhaps that is why I asked him to make out with me. Perhaps that is why I asked him to sleep with me. All these perhap's - perhaps this, perhaps that - all of which lost their indeterminate nature with the starkness of a couple of no's. And, really, I have to go to work, where I will surely crash in a couple of hours and feel hungover as shit, and will count down the hours until I can come home and take a nap.

But, yes, sometimes these incidents are so familiar and have been played out so many times that I wonder if it might not just be better to copy and past an entry from the past three years - that there are so many with the same plot - and yet, I never tire of this film.

on doorknobs and other knobs

Three years after moving into this apartment and three months after living in this bedroom, my bedroom finally has a doorhandle on the door. I am and I am not sure why that took so long to finally do. There are other things that I would like to get for my room: curtains, bed frame, nice art. Tomorrow, if it is not raining, I will see if these things can be found on the cheap in my neighborhood.

Today, I painted my door, nailed in wood to close the gap between my door and the door frame, and installed that door handle. That was way more tiring than it should have been. And the reason it was so tiring was probably partly because I am out of shape and easily winded by even riding my bike, but is even more so due (so I am hoping) to my excessive alcohol consumption last night. I went to Savalas where there was an open bar, went to Royal Oak, went to a bodega on Bedford for beer, went to a closed Fun, went to a packed Metropolitan where some nice old couple bought us all drinks. I did not make it out to Park Slope even though I had promised two friends to attend their parties, one a going away party even. I felt mildly guilty about this - as guilty (which is very little) as you (or, at least I) can feel when drunk. (What is up with all the parentheticals (aside from, of course, my love of them)?)

But, yes, the proof of how drunk you were is always the bruises found the day after. There are physical ones and metaphorical bruises, asking yourself, "Did I really do that?" - sleeping with this or that person, puking, making an ass out of yourself - the variety is so finite here, but yet, never ceases to amaze or to be embarrassing in the recounting. And I do have a pretty nasty bruise on my left thigh, gotten I know not how. And I don't have any totally embarrassing metaphorical bruises, but when I did wake up this morning, I did ask myself, "WTF? Did I really?" And I asked this because last night, late in the morning, drunk, I found myself on Manhunt, wrote a local boy, went over to his house, and exchanged blowjobs before finally (I was getting way tired) jacking ourselves off. That was my first time hooking up with someone on that site, and it was fun, and the boy had a massive cock, but it was done in a fog of drunken horniness, and this morning, with that fog cleared, I had a hard time imagining that I really went over to some stranger's house at four in the am, some dirty basement apartment.

David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives was sitting on his coffee table by his door. I noticed it as I was leaving his apartment. It is one of my favorite books and its appearance, in this scene, seemed very appropriate.

Gimme Shelter, American Dream, Grey Gardens

Over the last two nights, I watched these three documentaries. Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter are both directed by the Maysles brothers. Both, as you may already know, are quite excellent. Out of the two, Gimme Shelter is definitely my favorite. That film, about The Rolling Stones and their Altamont debacle of a concert, is a nightmare - an oft cited analogy of the end of the sixties, of the problems with that era's (perhaps naive) idealism.

This movie, though the first of the three watched, is the one that is still occupying my thoughts, that still has a grip on me. I have been contrasting it against another Stones doc from that time period, Godard's Sympathy for the Devil, which, though unbearable at points in its Godardness, probably was a more true document of the artistic process. The tedium of that movie comes from watching them record take after take of the titular song, and in this movie, Gimme Shelter, we do not see that; rather, we just see them listening to the finished product of "Wild Horses," pleased as butter, aware that they are geniuses and had just recorded something timeless. I can't remember who it was that talked about this scene before I had ever seen this film, perhaps it was Jamie, or perhaps it was one of you LJers, but whoever this person was, this was essentially what they said - that in that scene, you could just see it on the faces of The Rolling Stones, that they knew they had just recorded something amazing and that they should be proud. Of course, that is the prettier (and nicer to believe) story about art-making, that there are end results apparently easily produced that you can then be proud of. This contrasts so much with Godard's depiction of the process. Perhaps this is the Maysles' Americanness and Godard's Frenchness making their differences clear.

Regardless, I love this movie so much. I am determined to watch more Stones documentaries from this era - Cocksucker Blues and Rock and Roll Circus.

American Dream, Barbara Kopple's documentary about the Hormel strike in Minnesota in the mid-80s, is another tale of defeat, of American social forces crushing one's idealism. This movie is so good, Kopple having followed this story for the couple of years that if unfolded and having nice footage from so many points in the story, but for these reasons, it was also so sad - that this happened, that this is the story of labor in America now. They fought so nobly and so valiantly, and you want to believe that if you do that, then you will win, but that is not the case and who has the power becomes decisively clear. This movie also inspired me, sort of recharged whatever radical tendencies are in me, making me more frustrated about my current life and what I am doing with it, made me again ask the seemingly unanswerable question of what I could do in my own life to meaningfully effect change.

Grey Gardens was unreal, a hallucinatory dream of a crumbling house and a co-dependent aging mother and daughter living there, living in the past, and the fact that it is a documentary seems almost preposterous. That if it were a fiction, I would have brushed it aside as too contrived. I would say more, but my job, which I am becoming increasingly eager to change, calls.