The View Goes Marching On... Elsewhere
Greetings, fellow travelers, from your interminably stational wanderer. I trust all is swell and well out there in the wild world; I trust too that one day, some day, while a soon still exists, this exile, this internment, shall end, and I'll be there to share in the swellful wellness of it all.Alas not right yet. As you may have noticed, I seem to have lost my View. Well, I haven't lost it exactly, but it has been obstructed, if putting a blindfold on a blind man who sits in a blank room can be considered an obstructing. In deference of my keepers, I've had to leave the House outta the picture; which means I've set aside the minutiaed itch and scratch of the noose that binds my scrawny neck. In deference to a town already beaten silent, I've kept my mouth holstered. I mean, why break a broken jaw thrice?
Worse, most, finally, my eyes have fallen sore from the strain of looking into a void. Either there's absolutely nothing to see here or I'm just not the man to see it. Little matter. With no insight, there can be no View.
Not that there hasn't been things to commit bloggery over. I could easily've waxed pathetic about Thanksgiving (turkey loaf with sex offenders), or Christmas (a brother's saving me from a day of cold cereal and Bergman), or the limbo which has so tired me of two-steps (do the yawn!). I could well've maxed ridiculous over the unsuitable slog (blue never was my collar), the thus far idle offering of editorship (Scranton will never be my town), or beat the banter about the last night of Test Pattern (for one brief shining moment, there was almost a there here).
There are the movies, which have taken me farther and further and wider than even my wildest imagine. Since the release of Domino (Where are you, my dear friend?), flickery has flown me to New Wave Paris (Bob le Flambeur, Breathless, Band of Outsiders), Depression-era Vancouver (The Saddest Music in the World), depressing Dublin (Intermission), depressible, unimpressible New England (The Stranger), postcard-perfect Kentucky (Elizabethtown), postcard-ruined Minnesota (North Country), feckless Florida (Monster, Sunshine State), feckle Austin (Slacker), the Persian enGulfing (Jarhead), the swing of London then (Night and the City), and almost now (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), the sun of San Francisco before (Thieves' Highway), and after (House of Sand and Fog), and near (Sideways), all over the road (Two-Lane Blacktop, Detour, Gun Crazy, Almost Famous), into the future (Minority Report), out of a past both wicked (Gosford Park) and delicious (The Hours), through a serio-comic crime spree (Sin City), to places that defy anywhere (Punch-Drunk Love, Memento, Spun, 21 Grams, I Heart Huckabees), in an airport (The Terminal), at a Bee (Spellbound), amid some sexed-up Indiana (Kinsey), a loved-up New Jersey (Garden State), where I witnessed fortuitous couplings (Before Sunrise) that have begot great conversation (Before Sunset), had popcorn good (King Kong), bad (Dukes of Hazzard), indifferent (War of the Worlds), and reliably, if middlingly funny (Fun with Dick and Jane), spared myself a suicidal Swedish threesome (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, Silence), brought Killer Bait to a Monster's Ball on Scarlet Street, a Blue Narc to Dogville, and, natch, tripped fantastic the coastal capitals of L.A. (Crash, The Limey, Collateral, Adaptation, Two Days in the Valley, Short Cuts) and N.Y. (Gangs, Birth, Coffee and Cigarettes, I Shot Andy Warhol, Party Monster, Two for the Money, Knockaround Guys, Deuces Wild), plus spent splendid days living entire seasons in a delightfully peculiar old west (Carnivale), a despitefully colder Older West (Deadwood), on the mean streets of Baltimore (Homicide, (The Wire), and Bergen County (The Sopranos).
And it is through the sights of all those sundry seers that I see.
Then I hear. Most notably the mad mellow triumphant of Elbow (angled about here), the rad tears of a crowned and marked Antony and the Johnsons (heard best here), a Dore-dripped slip of 16 Horsepower (witness "The Hutterite Mile" in the last Paste sampler), some uncommon clever cool in the Kings of Convenience (the video for "I'd Rather Dance With You" never fails to make me smile wide) and OK Go (ditto the dance of "A Million Ways"), and, now, with all my soul and my longing, Cat Power, who shall forever remain among The Greatest.
It is of course through these songs that I hear.
And, yes, I read, though not nearly as much as I should. Thrice fallen again for the infallible Elmore Leonard, (Mr. Paradise, The Hot Kid, and When the Women Came Out to Dance), two of '05's Besteds, one a bit thick (McEwan's Saturday), the other incredibly rich (Gaitskill's Veronica), and a very much-hyped de-serving of the very very (Lipsyte's Home Land).
But enough about others and what they so do to me; it's high hard time to do myself for myself, and, if I let luck leave me duly diligent, for me to do what they do to and for others as well.
It is in such spirit that I proudly pronounce a new hot spot in cyberspace:
therealjohnhood.com
Yep, you read correctly. A site of my own, at long last. Put into play by an kind, cool and ever-auspicious Aussie named Brent Airey (a cat I've yet even to meet but feel as if I've know forever) and placed at the world's mercy by yours too truly, it will be the place to go for me, what I know, what I don't know, what I've seen, done, and what I've gleaned from the collisions. There are still a couple kinks to be sorted, but the site's up, I'm up, and I shall see again.
Watch.
posted by John Hood. @ 10:28 AM
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