The Bus Bench

Wrong Way Main Street

Earlier in the week, while dining at the wonderful Pete's Cafe, we watched yet another driver go the wrong way on Main Street. While this such a scenario is often quickly rectified, this driver insisted on continuing the wrong way. For once, it were a damn good thing that a couple of otherwise annoying off-duty cops were on hand (for a small film project) to make the driver stop (no small feat, as the cops' comments make clear) and eventually turn round.

-BusTard

A Clockwork Orange renewed

Oh, my brother. Sir Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday. Not too many years ago, Stanley Kubrick kicked the bucket. Were either alive today, he would no doubt understand deeply the experiment engaged recently at three british prisons.

-BusTard

Thin

have been busy, and judging from the paucity of posts on BusBench, so, too, has been Browne.

Coming out of my weeks-long work, however, I elected to watch a documentary titled "Thin." Browne suggested it, and I reluctantly agreed. It is a recent doc about eating disorders.

I was not particularly impressed, and had less sympathy for anyone involved very quickly. This did not change throughout the viewing.

I imagine many folk have commented on the poor girls' plight. I will not weigh in on that aspect, but on the staff. The people alleging to help the girls at the rather pricey clinic are indicative of the very problems that have prompted the patients to seek thinness at any price. At least half of the staff are by a strict medical defintion morbidly obese. There is a propensity for wearing name-brand fashion crap such as Abercrombie T-shirts and Adidas baseball caps that should be abolished for reason only a complete idiot would fail to immediately comprehend. And there are at least two staff members whose middle-aged attempts to remain beach bunnies - replete with bleached hair, too much make-up and ridiculously girlish clothing - are hideous as well as pathetic.

It is outrageous that people who possess their own eating disorder are being paid good money to advisehow others should resolve their own eating disorders. There is a pear-shaped man in his late 20s or very early 30s who could easily be 125 lbs. less were he to eat healthfully. There are several middle-aged women who simply do not get off their collective fat arse. Why should someone with  the problem of binging and purging listen to someone with the same problem minus the purging part?

Must I explain the bit about name brands on apparel? Very well, since the staff of the clinic under review - Renfrew Center in Coconut Creek, FL - are too damned daft to understand the bleeding obvious. Is not the fashion world in the western hemisphere what is well known to have prompted the tidal wave of eating disorders? Would you give running shoes to a man whose legs were recenlt amputated? Would you give Jesus Christ a stump of dogwood were he to come back to save your arse? What the hell is wrong with you morons?

The two women who could easily be my mother - and note that I am 40 years of age - need to give up the bleaching of hair, wearing of heavy make-up and the entire "I'm still just a surfer girl on the beach at Spring Break" bullshit. Is that desire to be a sexpot not the same one that their patients espouse yet cannot handle? It is highly unprofessional not to mention pathetic, unless one is seeking to star in MILF videos on BangBros.

In the end, all I can state is that the one girl who was pushed out of Renfrew's little community (by the same fucked-up staff who would do well to stop raiding their refigerators at night) was apparently purged owing to lack of funds albeit under the auspices of the patient being problematic.

-BusTard

Films to fuck your downtown state of mind. . .

For the first of three nights of five films to be screened at REDCAT, I missed what I had hoped to be a weekend of jaw-dropping, eye-opening, mind-blowing and highly controversial cinema and debate: All Power to The People: The History and Legacy of The Black Panther Party. (White guy that I am, I opted to see some friends ice-skate while former good friends Leather Hy-, er LISTING SHIP, performed at Pershing Square. From there things turned to a favourite chair that has long known my olde arse at the Biltmore, then quarrelling in the streets and making friends with fellow crazies along midnight on 6th Street halfway to any given mission between San Pedro and Central.)

Anyhow.

So what I missed Friday were three films: "Off The Pigs," "Repression" and "The Murder of Fred Hampton." Three scary films for anyone who understands how things were and, for the lack of daily riotous outbursts, how bad they may well become. Come Saturday and Sunday, however, (and amid all I have to do to get a particular theatre up and running by 21 January), I will be seated to see the rest of this too-brief series.

This could be an epic post, what with my perspectives on anti-statism, violence, mob mentality and rapid change of the world, but I will give it a rest.

-BusTard

No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men

Spent the day trying to stomp pigeons (failed), be nice (more failure) and enjoy a great film (success, at last.)

The film of choice was No Country for Old Men. I had read a few reviews of it by folk whose perspectives I appreciate. Try as they might, the best critics were at odds attempting to thoroughly review the latest Coen Brothers film without giving too much away. Even Rex Reed, as brilliant as he is in the field of film criticism, could not prepare a ready viewer for the random horror of this flick.

In a setting that many times thereafter tips its modern-day cowboy hat to the pioneer of spaghetti westerns, Sergio Leoni, as well as his crowning piece in the trilogy (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), our protagonist, Lewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) , stumbles upon a scene that seems to have been raped by Sam Peckinpah. Lingering scenes and extreme close-ups set the mood but never once invoke the possibility of boredom; simple albeit very effective metaphors are brought into play as naturally as the black cloud that accompanies Moss as he assess the discovery of the bodies, firearms, heroin and $2 million. And in an ironic play on how semi-antagonist “the Mexican” Eli Wallach (from The Good. . . ) found the white guys—all of which were dead save the one in the horse-drawn carriage—and managed to get some information about millions in gold stashed somewhere, this time a white guy finds a bunch of dead mexicans as well as one live one in a horseless carriage. Just like Leoni’s linchpin scene, at the crux is water first. But this time, no mention of money, and no water on hand; not soon after, Moss find the money and then leaves it all behind. But only for the moment, as the action picks up when Moss goes back after dark to deliver water to a dead man. Like the gunshot dog looking back at the carnage and whose hurtful glance led Moss to the scene (and away from the dog’s direction) as if to convey that even as a well-trained, well-fed and formerly dangerous fighting dog even he would rather die of thirst in the desert then remain where his masters and brethren were shredded, Moss realises that he should have done the opposite then and now.

From there, the tension and action never stops despite their not being a two-hour fest of non-stop explosions and gun fights.

What has yet to be discussed is the metaphor of the weapon employed by the bounty hunter hired to track down Moss. It is a pneumatic bolt-thrower meant to immediately dispatch cows and other bovine at slaughterhouses. The almost completely unemotional Anton Chigurh (whose odd rug and naturally painted countenance are not at all disarming but highly frightening, especially when he smiles), played by Javier Bardem, is a giant, psychotic dutch boy whose perspective of people is that they are cattle. And that is why they are eliminated in the fashion of an air-driven bolt. When he understands that Moss is not of the bovine mind-set, he sets aside the highly pressurised blow-gun and takes up the chase with a 12-guage shotgun outfitted with a giant can (“silencer” in civilian parlance). It his way of appreciating an apt adversary.

Once the desert is left behind, the small town action takes invokes the harrowing shadows of Orson Welles circa Touch of Evil. It is round this time that yet another bounty hunter this one played by Woody Harrelson is brought in. His name is uncanny, owing to the obvious cinematic influence: Carson Wells. And his character is just as cocky as Welles' Capt. Hank Quinlan. I refuse to believe it is a coincidence, what with the later scenes of the U.S.-Mexico border, the river and bridge and all that.

Despite all references to unforgettable classic western and noir films, No Country for Old Men will hold its own in the canon of the same. The film is not afraid to exhibit its lineage even as it asserts its own as an adult. And this is where the title comes in, in a fashion: Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell makes this immediately clear right from the start with his opening narrative. I will not repeat it here, but I will implore you to not miss this brilliant endeavour.

-BusTard

Bee Movie.

I have not BEEn keeping up with animated movies of late, but I got a wild hair up my ass Saturday night and decided to pop over to the cinema. I wanted to see “American Gangster,” but for some strange reason the final curtain was at 8 p.m. But “Bee Movie” was showing at 9:40, so I settled for that. It was a great choice.
(There was one other person in the house, and I think he was asleep. I believe he laughed once at an incongruent time. He remained in his seat, unmoving, until the end credits. I am pretty sure he was not dead.)

Anyhow, here’s the lowdown: “bees” are jews, people are WASPs, Italian Vogue is mentioned twice in such a fashion as to brazenly invoke the catholic church’s complicity in the Holocaust, John Goodman as the prosecutor is Clarence Darrow’s evil twin, the military-industrial complex is represented by Honex (as in Honeywell) and Chris Rock’s mosquito, which has about four minutes, is nothing less than brilliant with his bit.

Also of note was the protagonist bee’s father. While explaining how he was chosen to fulfill his position at Honex, he described how as a stirrer he went in there and took hold of that stick with both hands and just started twisting it for all he was worth. It was a great metaphor for how the typical job is a masturbatory experience about which many folk speak highly even as they get little satisfaction from doing it by themselves.

The fluidity and nuance of the animation was superb. No mo-cap creepiness, either.

-BusTard

An inadvertent rehearsal for Dia De Los Muertas

'Nuff stated:


Osk2007
Video sent by shametrainla

Jerry's Video on Hillhurst. RIP. Los Feliz. 9/26

Do any of the big kids remember Jerry’s Video on Hillhurst. One of the last hold outs of the family of video store owners that knew their shit in the neighborhood.

Of course this was not always a good thing.

“I’d like the movie Sixteen Candles please,” me.

Jerry just stares at me.

Jerry didn’t exactly rhyme with friendly.

Remember the 90s when people wouldn’t allow (without much grief) you to get a movie that didn't have subtitles, foreign directors or artful nudity. That was when sarcasm and smart ass comments were born.

In the 80s no one even knew that irony and satire could exist among the unwashed masses, but the 90s changed all that. You couldn’t even order an ice blended coffee drink without someone giving you shit.

“Why don’t you just go to McDonalds and order a shake?” barista.

BusTard and I had to go to Jerry’s since we didn’t feel like walking to Video Journey’s (the indy video place that actually has customer service, keep that number in your address book.)

We were looking for the video Guerilla, which has something to do with Patty Hearst.

We go to the store and it’s closed, but not just closed it's ransacked. I pressed my head against the gate and peered inside (because I’m nosy) and I saw videos on the floor, empty boxes and empties. BusTard tried to reach his hand inside the mailbox, but I suggested he stop.

“Don’t do that. What if he’s dead in there. The only fingerprints they’ll be able to find are yours and then they will think you killed him and if you are in jail whose going to do the production for my magazine?” me.

“Shut-up, they can only get your fingerprints if they have your fingerprints on record,” BusTard.

So I decided to ask questions around the stripmall, but shaped like a square complex.

First I talked to a lady who owned the liquor store next door and she said, “He moved.” She seemed nervous when she said it, but maybe I wanted her to be nervous, so my whole he was dead and rotting in the back would have some high heels to it.

I then went to Daily Donut a place I used to frequent more, but now I’m pretty dedicated to staying a size 2.

“What happened to Jerry?”
“I don’t know?” Donut guy.

In my head I was like,"Oh yeah he’s dead." I was so convinced, but then Ernest came up.

Ernest is a person I had never met before this day, but he seemed to know everything.

BusTard and Ernest almost got in fight because Ernest is pro-changing and business and BusTard is a crustie (he says back when I was a little Browne in the 80s and he is no longer that way, but he seems pretty crustie to me) and not into change.

Ernest told me that Jerry wasn’t dead and that I had an interesting imagination. The deal simply was that his rent had gone up, so he had to retire. He also told me that the lady who helped Jerry run the store, but never talked, was his wife and the younger guy who actually had the physical ability to smile, was his brother.

All of this time I thought Jerry was just one of those video freaks hanging out in his apartment with lots of videos and lots of books by himself, but no, I was wrong he had an actual life outside the video store.

Probably a freakish Harvey Pikar life, but still that's a life.

So at first I was kind of bummed he wasn’t chopped up in little pieces in the back, but then I was happy to know that I had completely misinterpreted him and he was more of human being than I thought, but still he could have been a little nicer.

John Hughes is not that horrible of a director.

Jerry's Video RIP 8/30/07 - You guys were assholes, but you had a great selection of films.

by Browne