Category Archives: Art

Pulp Fiction redux

Art, Film

Michele and I watched Pulp Fiction Thursday night and then we re-watched about 90% of it Friday night. What a masterpiece! It makes me want to watch Inglorious Basterds again, and Kill Bill (1 & 2). They are B Movies elevated to Art.

Quentin Tarantino movies are the opposite of action movies, they are all talk movies. Talk movies in which the talk seems to be wandering around aimlessly – the quarter pounder is a Royale with Cheese is maybe the most famous line, but there are dozens of great lines – only to circle back to connect in some improbable way.  There are even more great bits –

Vincent: Want some bacon?
Jules: No man, I don’t eat pork.
Vincent: Are you Jewish?
Jules: Nah, I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine, that’s all.
Vincent: Why not?
Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals.
Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood.
Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.
Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces.
Jules: I don’t eat dog either.
Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?

this is a conversation between two killers, between two people who make the living killing people and, somehow, the conversation is also about  people who make their living killing people – and great scenes that are like mini-plays.  Tarantino movies are collections of scenes with very little connecting them but the scenes are so good, they don’t need the connection.

Think Inglorious Basterds, there is a scene in which Michael Fassbender, as Archie Hicox, is briefed in England

and, in the next scene they are in France and he is disguised as a Nazi sitting with the inglorious basters themselves.

There are no transition scenes, no shots of them jumping out of an airplane in the dark, or meeting up with the Americans. All the transitions are covered by dialog.

Pulp Fiction is the same way. It is really a collection of set scenes that have an overriding arc. The scenes seem to be out of chronological order but the arc of the dialog is in order. Each scene sets up the following scene, so that, at the end, when we end up at breakfast in the coffeeshop, we know we are where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are waiting. Pulp Fiction seems to be a violent movie about violent people and – I guess – that turns alot of people off but the violence is mostly offstage, just being talked about and the violent people are doing the talking.

As Roger Ebert says, “Immediately after “Pulp Fiction” played at Cannes, QT asked me what I thought. “It’s either the best film of the year or the worst film,” I said. I hardly knew what the hell had happened to me. The answer was: the best film. Tarantino films have a way of growing on you. It’s not enough to see them once.”

Paul Fussell R.I.P.

Art, War

Paul Fussell died a week or so ago and I didn’t know until Michele read his obit in Time late last night. Fussell was a writer who I very much admired. Not so much for how he wrote – although he was a very good writer winning a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award – but for what he wrote about. At a time when most writers glorified war with books like A Band of Brothers, he wrote – in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and The Boys’ Crusade – about the horror of war, about  how people die in war in agony,  mutilated, and disfigured. Fussell wrote about a war that was not honorable, a war that is is gruesome.

He knew first hand, having been a front line infantry officer in Europe when the turn over in junior officers was 100% every six months. One story that is burned into my psyche is how his platoon slaughtered a group of trapped Germans. And that was not the gruesome part, the gruesome part was that the story of the slaughter became a joke told to cheer people up when they were down, Remember the turkeyshoot? when we killed all those Germans trapped in the basement?

Fussell also wrote about Class in America, a topic I know by personal experience to be taboo. His book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is a classic and, even twenty years after it was written, still dead on.

I won’t say that I will miss him – like I miss David Foster Wallace – but I am saddened that he is no longer with us.

On the road to Vegas with two lenses

Around home, Art, Camping, Photography

 

Ed Dieden and I took three days to drive to Las Vegas last week, camping as we went. The basic plan was to drive south along the coast until we got to about the southieness of Vegas and then we would turn left and drive east. For me, one of the main attractions was a chance to spend some time making photographs. I was getting my camera back from Canon and we would be spending three days in the kind of country I love, big spaces.

I did get the camera back, but it still didn’t work. After a lot of screwing around, including going back to the camera store,  I began to realize that the camera did work with my wide angle and tele zooms but not with my primary lens. My favorite lens! The lens that I use all the time. Shit!

I am re-reading  The Zen of Creativity by John Daido Loori and – I think – it helped keep me centered on the problem. What I wanted to do was spending some time photographing and being outside and not having my primary lens – my crutch – didn’t change that. In some ways, it could enhance it. It could help me see from a different point of view.

As planned, we drove south on Highway 101 and then turned east on State Highway 58. As we went inland, the country which was already pretty dry, got drier, the spaces got bigger, and the light got softer.

It also got windier and our camp site hunt became a lets find a place with as little wind as possible hunt. Strangely, that was a place pretty much in the open.

The wind stopped, the air got cooler, we put a some sausages and veggies on the grill and I had a couple of glasses of red wine. It was a very nice place in which to sit and feel the day end. (Double click to enlarge and notice the lonely power poles going across the valley.)

I don’t particularly like camping, I camp because I do particularly like being out in spaces like this at eventide. Feeling – more than seeing – the day slowly, slowly, drift into night; seeing the first star come out in the dusk – this spring it has been Jupiter, the king of the gods and the god of sky and thunder according to Wikipedia – feeling the darkness and stillness sop up the light. It is the witnessing of an ancient ritual in a huge cathedral. For me, it is being with The Sacred.