Listening to a trailing brain of gray desires, foolish rock and roll songs, rich relatives that ain’t the ones you busy your seasons with. Time to prove me wrong, to put the rook in a shower stall and force its move to a frozen corner. She was never the one, Masseuse Chanteuse Number 12. Time for her to put a sunken cigarette out of your misery, out of Rzewski’s apolitical prison. Sorry weeps the lonely gutter, razing lightning with half-chewed machines spit aside by corporate. Your sunglasses are fake, your beard is, too; your pugilistic trances break under pressure from nothing more than a cowboy’s dance.
I’M TELLING YOU, the days are long but the years are short. I can hear my youth’s intentions screaming for an instrument on which to play their rotted shambles. When I was young you sat beside me, That was a long time ago.
…
I made it to the end of “Death Wish” last night, the Charles Bronson film that was the first of what would be 5 movies under that title. There is a nasty rape scene early in the film, yet for as much as I revile rape scenes in movies I found this one strangely theatrical and non-threatening. It was just too inane to think that packs of sociopathic marauders, even in 1970s New York, were trolling D’Agostino’s shopping bags for names and addresses of women to attack. The fact that it was a young Jeff Goldblum leading the pack made it all the more ridiculous to me, though that would obviously have been lost on audiences of the day seeing him for the first time. I believe it was Goldblum who projectile defecated in the midst of the rape. Whichever of the characters did the pooping I have to think it was Goldblum’s idea, because he is just fucking nuts like that, or so I’ve read. I do not intend to go back and analyze the projectile defecation scene to see which actor’s asshole burst.
It is a fine movie in its right. Bronson evolves from a fraidy-cat to a sociopathic Bernie Goetz-type vigilante who somehow draws muggers like fruit flies to a shower drain. I like how the film depicts the grubby New York of those days. It feels like a big family. That is how I ended up watching it. I was looking for movies filmed in New York during the 1970s and 1980s.
In “Death Wish” Bronson plays an architect who lives at 44 Riverside Drive, Apartment 4A. That address, which seems to be real, would be right up the street from that historic spot where I lost my precious virginity. Bronson is seen twice in the film walking down a staircase in Riverside Park. I know that staircase, and believe it also appears in “The Warriors.” There is a somewhat hilarious phone booth scene toward the end. Not sure if it’s worth writing about, though I might just share the clip for a laugh.
The realness of 44 Riverside Drive would be consistent with other Bronson films I remember seeing, in which telephone numbers seen on telephones were not the usual 555-1212 format but rather real phone numbers that one could call today. I tried one of them after spotting it in some Bronson film from Los Angeles. The number led to a fax signal, which could possibly have been a payphone.
Next up on my PLEX couch-potato parade is KLUTE, in which Jane Fonda plays a hooker and Donald Sutherland co-stars. I’m only up to about 10 minutes, but already there was a key phone booth scene. She calls her john (or maybe it was a jane) and says “I need a quick 50. Can you get me a commuter?” She meets a traveling business dude form Chicago in a hotel and they get ready to do some crazy shit right as I hit pause. I don’t get the big deal about Jane Fonda, I never did. She has a beautiful mouth but otherwise she’s not sexual to me. I stood next to her once in an elevator at the CNN buiding in Atlanta. My mother often commented on the fact that she and Jane Fonda were born on the exact same day, possibly within an hour of each other. I think her theory about the hourly temporal contiguousness comes from her understanding that women were put into labor on something like a schedule, whenever possible, and that doctors liked doing that stuff early in the AM. I have NO IDEA where she got that idea but for all I know it is a truthful relic of medical practices of yore.
Whatever the case, she would comment on how she and Jane Fonda were born on the exact same day, and “what different paths” their lives took from this purely coincidental bit of nothingness. I added the “bit of nothingness” part.
I never saw “Barbarella” either. Guess I could give that a try. It’s all draining into the PLEX. I say couch-potato but really I watched very little of “Death Wish” from that piece of furniture.
OK, then, this Bakeway is mobbed today, and crawling with screaming obnoxious young children trailing snot on the floor like snails on the sidewalk.
