how to film a recovering addict 's meditation: by abel ferrara

                                           quiet the mind

                                             feel the fantasy to destroy. pick up..but pick up a bat to hit a tree     

                                            fantasy changes color. action enables the rage

                                              let the thoughts die a natural death.

my OTHER place

henry james had the THE OTHER PLACE, Rivette's films may take place on surreal estates, and in Abel Ferrara's 4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH  NYC is ground zero for the end of days.


NYC, where i live, is like the end of days on any given day. 


Here is MY other place, a place i have been to once before.

(Snaefellsnes Peninsula, Iceland)

finding the love in SAVAGES

SAVAGES (Oliver Stone)

SAVAGES  parallels and deflates the moral compass in modern day SoCal culture with the drug mafia in modern day Mexico.
Just like in Insane Clown Posse (ICP), "family" is the key concept, and here it is also a macguffin.
With the Mexicans, looked down at as "Savages" by the free spirited californians, loyalty and blood ties are  things one may savagely kill for.
The Californians come off vapid, self obsessed and loyal to noone, highlighted in the pleasure seeking  and consumerist culture embodied by good-looking threesome Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively and Aaron Johnson.


 The love that binds those three together is clearly one where are all three participants are victims to their own narcissism. They are each cut off from their families, venture capitalists in hippie garb and at the hippest restaurants, lost in their own pursuits of beauty and self sufficiency.  Their pursuits exist isolated on an island of their own  imagining.  A life path without a sense of history, and a romantic love without context.

The love that binds the Mexican drug crew, helmed by billionaire drug boss Salma Hayek, are based on family, never leaving the one who made you and loved you.  God forbid you cross Salma's Savage Elena; her love of money is solid but not as tainted by self absorption as the Americans.  Undo her blood ties, imagined or otherwise, and she will calmly rip open your heart...with a machete...or a chainsaw.

YOU REMIND ME.

Mayor Koch passed away early this morning. I feel surprised by how saddened i am. I took issue with him politically, but i guess i loved him anyway.   As much as anyone can love or be beloved if others don't directly know you.  i know what he reminded me of .  He reminded me of an older new york i can barely recollect from being a child, visiting here monthly or so to see my brooklyn family.
He reminded me of my grandparents and how they sounded and how they looked, and how old and different they became so very quickly before they disappeared.

It's just that echo of familiarity that makes us think we love or think of one as beloved. It may not be that common and may not be based on anything beyond an echo of times past whisking by us for moments in the present. but it is still something. And it feels like something and someone we know.

I admit I project that familiarity because i identify with him in past tense (my grandparents) and current tense (a wacky new york character; a movie lover. someone who is alone) and future tense (someone who will stay wacky, still love movies, still live in new york and will die alone.)

Please check out the Mayor at the Movies reviews he made last year.  http://www.mayorkoch.com/