Everybody knows how much I love Six Feet Under and, after five incredible seasons, its finale and last sequence with Claire driving cross-country and time passing on relentlessly. And I love the song that plays over it and have listened to it so many times but I just came around to see the actual music video of it for the first time: Sia - Breathe Me
Why does it remind me of House of Leaves so much? Along with the video, I think, the song reverberates much much more with the book than Poe's Haunted or Angry Johnny.
Talking about House of Leaves, I came across this book cover art by Bas Alberts, which made 3rd place in the 50 Watts' polish book cover contest:
Since I liked it so much, I altered it and put it on a shirt. It's under a creative commons license and I only have to give the designer's name, which I did above and will tell everybody who asks me about the shirt.
Note: The blue leaves are actually navy-blue and the square next to the word House is exactly 5/16 of an inch big + the whole thing and therefore the words are mirrored. Then I made something up for the back, too.
I still need some suggestions for a House of Leaves inspired tattoo. Shouldn't be as big as these:
Or maybe something Bret Easton Ellis?
or David Foster Wallace?
Why couldn't I find a pic of a thumper tattoo barely an inch from a shaved pussy? This is the internet! Has nobody got such a tattoo? I can hardly believe that.
I am still in the nostalgic aftermath that brought me back in time, pretty much exactly 8 years ago, with the help of a bottle of very fine red wine, humming Aimee Mann's "Wise Up" and "One" alternately. These were actually my high school years, or at least that one summer that I definitely think of as my high school years, to get past the embarrassment and humiliation that usually goes well along with the remembrance of high school as such. And it took me back to a homework assignment that I had to do for a film class, where I did something on Magnolia, by Paul Thomas Anderson, which was my favourite movie for years, around that time.
And I YouTubed it. And I got goosebumps. It passed the test of time. It is still a perfect movie.
It is not only that I love the narratorial introduction, which frames the movie in a realm of possibilities, or the following exposé (for lack of better words) with Aimee Mann's "One" on the soundtrack setting the tone and mood for the movie while the camera is in a constant move to introduce all the main characters that the film will be circling around, examining every and each one of them in short bursts of congenial revelation, or that I LOVE Julianne Moore in this flick and think she really ought to have gotten the Oscar for her performances ever since (I just checked, she wasn't even nominated, but in general this movie lost all its categories to VERY inferior movies, and it wasn't even nominated in all the right categories, though, which were: Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Tom Cruise, which he should have definitely won, because this is his most believable performance that I've ever seen, he is so brilliant! (granted, it is also the least attributable "acting" I've ever seen, because he simply (and genially) plays himself but with such a natural grace that it blows your mind; an award that rather went to Michael Caine for "The Cider House Rules", a movie I always didn't want to see) and Best Music, Original Song for Aimee Mann's "Save Me", which is right here
and lost to Phil Collins's "You'll Be in My Heart" from the "Tarzan" soundtrack (for all American Psycho Fans: This is Collins at his best!) and also it didn't get the award for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, which went to American Beauty (I can't be angry about this one, although Anderson should have won, because American Beauty's Screenplay Award for Alan Ball kicked off the (insert incompatible and most superior adjective) Six Feet Under HBO series). The other Oscars Magnolia should have gotten in 2000 were: Best Picture (American Beauty), Best Director (Sam Mendes, American Beauty), Best Cinematography (American Beauty) and Best Editing (Matrix), that makes 6 Academy Awards total that this very fine and perfect movie was denied. I lost track of all the parentheses here, but think this should be ok.
No, it is also that I first took notice of later Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman and the incredible Willam H. Macy and John C. Reilly and a very fine Luiz Guzmán who plays himself.
Again. This movie is perfect. It needs no exclamation mark. It is its own exclamation mark. And I would really enjoy watching it again. After so many years it's like meeting a long-ago lover you are still in love with. And here is my offer: The first person contacting me (via phone, email or direct verbal exchange) about wanting to watch it with me gets free snacks and beverages of choice (also it will reassure me that I don't write this blog into a mindless cybernetic vacuum) for the whole 188minutes that it lasts, assuming you pay full attention throughout this one dedicated time span (to the movie) or otherwise I'll heimlich you out of my fucking apartment until all of that snacks and beverages that were not thoroughly digested by the time I suspect you of not having payed too much attention to the movie are projectile-vomited out the window, which I will have checked to be open at the designated time, the time you didn't pay enough attention.
Here is the German Trailer. Sorry for all you international guys, but this is actually the best v/a quality I could find on Youtube and it is brilliantly dubbed in German. For all of those considering watching Magnolia with me: I have no problem at all watching it in German, because, as I said, it is perfectly dubbed. First Come, First Serve. Crank Up Your Volume! The screening will be on BluRay. Watch out for all the 8s and 2s.
"What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be 34 in this country."
This is from a DFW interview from Spring 1997 that can be found here and it pretty much sums up what is going on and what has to be done in serious contemporary fiction, i.e. the turning-away from postmodern irony and the turning toward emotional truth. You can see it in DFWs work, most recently in The unfinished Pale King, you can see it in Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, it is what Bret Easton Ellis did in Lunar Park, what Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was all about, as well as Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and also recent TV-shows as Bored to Death - although sometimes they hide it very well -, it is what Terrence Malick does and what Jonathan Franzen's Freedom tries to do. Also Running With Scissors comes to mind, and quite strongly though, i.e. the movie version, I haven't read the memoir. And this is what an LA Times critic had to say about it :
"Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it."
The critic herself doesn't seem to lack the ironic distance that she is actually begging for, though. I don't know where to find it right now, but Jonathan Franzen said it in one of the myriad of interviews he gave in the wake of Freedom. He said that in The Corrections he used irony also and especially to distance himself from certain ideas and emotions presented in the novel. You can basically say anything you want with irony and then easily back out of it if people disagree with you, thus you don't have to stand your ground on very intimate issues, issues that are and feel way too personal to let anyone attack or make fun of them. He said that he wrote a wholeheartedly unironic novel with Freedom, that he eschewed former techniques of irony to get closer to the emotional core of what he wanted to say. And that he is quite aware that exactly that makes him so much more vulnerable if people dislike his work because now the work is much closer to what being Jonathan Franzen really is like. Closer to the emotional truth that is Jonathan Franzen. But people might misread that for sentimentality and naiveté.
Here is something I found in an IRC chat transcript with DFW* shortly after the release of Infinite Jest (and if you are too young to actually have been in one yourself or are now like, my age, and want to get a nice pretty nostalgic trip into the early times of the internet and 90's chat-rooms, you have to read the whole thing (if it doesn't redirect you, click on the Impatient? link). This is pre-facebook stuff. There were actually online chat-rooms BEFORE the internet. Grab yourself a cup of coffee or your beverage-of-cozy-choice and travel into 1996's cyberspace):
"The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion" and
"I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."
Irony can be a lot of fun, no doubt. And as Dave puts it, we can't escape it because we breathe the stuff everyday. And that makes it actually hard to snap out of it sometimes. (Is the transition to this paragraph too rough? I had a hard time coming up with a coherent one after the quotes.) And I think that is exactly what happened to the LA Times critic a couple lines above. She sees the lack of ironic distance and wants her ironical borders restored immediately to not have to look too closely at something that intends to produce exactly this: a close emotional relationship with its audience. It is precisely not about irony, not about safe distance, not about making fun of everything. It is about emotion. And in the case of this critic, and a lot of others, I fear, about the misreading as being naive and sentimental.
*almost all DFW-related sources are found and taken from The Howling Fantods.
