Crash landings

As I was drawin’ me bath this evening, sinuses sodden with oak pollen, Waugh’s Men at Arms within reach, blurry images went through me head, images of the book and of this weekend’s viewing of Atonement. Echoes of the viewing itself, during which I felt film and book blurring as well. The astonishing surrealism of the beach scenes in Atonement seemed to blend right in with Waugh’s dark farce. All that and the fog of my oak-laden head.

I flashed to other art collisions I’ve experienced in the past, and wondered about those experienced by Tribe SA/East and West.

In addition to Atonement/Men at Arms, these come to mind:

1. Hesse’s Siddhartha and the Who’s Who’s Next: Freshman year, home for Christmas break, friend Mary plops the book into my lap one cold Jackson eve: I go home and, to the blaring repetitions of the Who’s tour de force (the violin surge of “Baba O’Riley; the lunar landscape of the entire album), I read and listen and listen and read until 4 in the morning (Van echo, much later: Four o'clock in the morning' / new full moon shinin' down through the trees), until book and music are inseparable. I cannot see the blue cover of the paperback without immediately seeing the four blighters who have just pissed on a concrete monolith (pissing on Kubrick?) in their lunar wasteland.

2. Last week was an odd triumvirate: I Am Legend / No Country for Old Men / The Pursuit of Happyness. The first two collided first, as I viewed the second right on the heels of the other. Both lay in an extremely dark wash on their canvases, into which are introduced the faintest of lights, both films invoking the same theme of small light within darkness. My crazy slip-sliding self then threw in the latter, thinking: I Am Legend is what Will’s character in Pursuit “wins.” I know: it’s my cynical self: I wept through TPOH, wept at the love and desperation and brutality, and yet when Will’s Chris finally (finally…finally) breaks through in the end, we’re given 30 seconds of triumph. 30 seconds. After which, I thought: this was triumph? To have broken through into a business that basically bankrupted the American economy through the 80s, with its rapacious greed? And then the engineered virus “cure” wipes us out. The “good” “cop.”

3. Orlando (VW’s book) and Orlando (Sally Potter’s film): I read the book and then saw the film a few months later. Most folks I knew hated the movie, feeling lost in its swerves and omissions. I’ll be the first to skewer a film for eviscerating its source (don’t get me started on All the Pretty Horses), but this pairing was simply fortuitous: the film ended up feeling like the soundtrack to the book itself, visual pairings that just seemed to work.

4. Frampton Comes Alive/Mozart: I’ve written of this before in the Ark-Hives of an old old classroom blog: thirty years ago in a record (yes, record) store on Broadway, north of the Loop here in Tres Leches, I was the only customer browsing for a good hour or so (needless to say, with traffic numbers like that, the store is no more, though it was a favorite of mine, off the beaten path, plenty big, and plenty sumptuous in its inventory). During one long stretch of this visit, Mlle. Manager played, at Gwar-like volume, PF’s classic “Do You Feel Like We Do?”—a song which has never sounded better. As it was hitting its colossal finish, I wondered, “What next?” PF crescendo splurge, guitar hero endless repetitions on the way out (you can just imagine the blond locks flailing—his, not mine) and then…Mozart. Lovely Mozart. Lilting Mozart. I look the managerial way across the record racks and she sez, “Why not?” And “Why not?” it were indeed.

Y’all out there in your lives who have as little to do in them as I do in mine, lemme know of your collisions.