From Pathetic Life #21
Sunday, February 11, 1996
I was exhausted when I got home yesterday, with a few aches from the almost-fight. Why I should ache I dunno; my would-be killer never hit me, and all I did was push him to the ground, but I guess it used muscles I don’t usually use, which is most of them.
Anyway, soon as I walked into my room I stripped, crawled under the binkies, and fell asleep until two minutes past midnight, when the dog started barking at shadows, and I was very awake.
An hour later I am still very awake, despite counting thousands of sheep and trying to hyperventilate. It’s 1:30 in the morning, and I’m full of thoughts about Sarah-Katherine and long-lost family, money and violence, and the whole sorry mess that is my life.
♦ ♦ ♦
After a lousy day selling fish on too little sleep and a belly full of coffee, I met my pal Josh on the Ave, and we drove into San Francisco for a triple feature at the Roxie. One of the movies was good but sad, one was not so good and kinda frustrating, and the third was an astoundingly pretentious ode to astounding pretentiousness.
Who Killed Pasolini? ruminates on the death of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, a murder that was covered up, perhaps plotted by his country’s right-wing monsters. He was bludgeoned to death, and the police didn’t even investigate. All the obvious evidence of a conspiracy or hit was ignored. Why? Because Pasolini was gay, a pinko and a poet.
“Just another dead faggot,” says the cop in charge. The few police who cared about the case were quickly transferred to other assignments, and the killers were never apprehended.
The film shows the authorities’ open and obvious disdain for justice, and I hope it’ll pressure someone into giving a damn, but it seems unlikely. The people who’d have to give a damn are, probably, the people who killed him.
Minor complaint: Who Killed Pasolini? includes a violin score designed to tweak tears, but it’s maudlin, irritating, manipulative, and unnecessary. The facts of a murder plus getting away with murder are sad enough. Lose the frickin’ fiddles.
And then the second feature… Orson Welles: The One-Man Band is a study of the famous filmmaker’s grand dreams and failures, made up mostly of clips from several Welles projects that were never finished, due to lack of funding, tax troubles, studio interference, and his own touch-and-go enthusiasm.
The film shows Welles in costume as Captain Ahab in his version of Moby Dick, another of his many movies that never were. The film’s symbolism, then, is that Welles was Ahab, and all his unfinished projects were the whale, or maybe that he was a whale of a talent, but adrift for years and then lost forever. Something like that.
Mid-size complaint: In a documentary fueled by film clips, not a single moment from Citizen Kane or The Magnificent Ambersons? Mr Welles was forced to kowtow to lessors all his life, and toward the end he was reduced to making basically home movies and commercials for wine and whiskey, but he did complete a film once in a while, and they’re among the best movies ever made. A biography so preoccupied with his failures seems like a cheap shot.
And then the third feature. Oh. My. Golly. As soon as the lights dimmed for Nico Icon, I began to frown. I had never heard of Nico until this documentary about her, and if you’re as happily ignorant of her as I was, I’ll tip you off: She was a model in the 1950s, then a singer with the Velvet Underground, and later a solo singer on the nightclub circuit.
What caused my frown is that she was a singer who couldn’t carry a tune! Her studio recordings may have been tinkered with until they were almost listenable, but the footage of Nico in concert is akin to an orchestra of dentists’ drills, industrial accidents, and Yoko Ono, with a jackhammer keeping time.
My major complaint about the movie is that I saw it. The filmmakers are Nico’s artistic equals. We’re constantly shown close-ups so up close that it’s only someone’s eyes and nose, or someone else’s nose and mouth. The film frequently slows to half-speed for no reason, with lots of stop-action freeze frames. The camera is hand-held by a drunkard while everyone explains Nico’s greatness.
Most annoying among many annoyances are the slow-fading intertitles — when someone’s saying how simply mahvallous Nico was, a word or phrase from what they’re saying is written on the screen, often before it’s spoken. “She was like a goddess from Walhalla,” someone says, while the word “Walhalla” fades in, blocks out everything else, then leisurely fades away.
Also, I think it’s Valhalla, not Walhalla.
♦ ♦ ♦
Nico Icon gave me a throbbing headache, which only got worse as we left and Josh said he thought it was great. “I’ve always been a fan of Nico,” he said. “I’ve got several of her albums, and her version of Jim Morrison’s ‘This Is the End’ amazes me.”
I must’ve stared at Josh for ten seconds before I could think of a reply. “Uh, I hated it,” is all I came up with. We talked about Nico and Nico’s movie on the way home, or rather, Josh talked. I was shell-shocked.
Everything ‘amazing’ or ‘goddesslike’ about Nico eludes me, and the movie sucked gas from a tank and swallowed.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
Leave a Reply