imagine the ethereal, earthy tones of a native american flute. so meditative, so calm. no better way for white people to experience the pure, indigenous connection to nature felt by those noble, majestic tribes we spent the last 400 years slaughtering. actually, perhaps there is a better way: why not play Amazing fucking Grace on the instrument? who couldn’t appreciate that?
why yoga instructors think it appropriate to include native american music at all in their class playlists is baffling to me, but then again yoga is all about syncretism. the class i heard this song in was a “yin” yoga class. “yin” is chinese philosophy. yoga is indian. like, south asian indian. not native american indian. if it were native american indian then i might understand the flute music. what yin has to do with yoga i don’t know. the class is nice though. long postures supported by blocks and bolsters where you surrender to gravity, low in active (yang) effort. really gets shit opened up, and my body was very tense after traveling over the weekend then spending the first half of the week sick on the couch. anyway it’s all love to my yoga studio, on the off chance someone sees the sticker with my blog URL on my water bottle and comes here to see me talking shit about the yoga instructor.
something this little project of mine will force me to accept is that i can’t always manage people’s perception of me. sometimes i’m gonna write something that offends people. even now as i’m thinking about this, my mind is reeling with the fear that i’ll reveal the secrets that unlock what i’m up to artistically. instead of being so plainspoken (i talk about this a lot i feel) i ought to be more oblique, more provocative. but that’s not really what a blog is for. plus there’s like, 5 people maybe who look at this anyway, so if you’re one of those people, you probably already know me. but that’s not a safe refuge, because ideally more people would read this, and it’s okay if i just say how i feel! if people don’t like it it’s fine! it’s not actually more artistically satisfying to be a sphinx all the time, and being direct here, on my blog, doesn’t preclude me from being gnomic or cryptic or hermetic or whatever in fiction. separating the two out will actually probably help rather than hinder. so if i offend you, i don’t mean to, unless i do mean to, in which case, good riddance.
tangential to this: people are facing personal or professional repurcussions for speaking out about what’s happening in palestine. curiously, the only comments i ever receive on this blog are from israeli spambots, or at least i think they’re spambots, bc if they’re not then they’re very cryptically trying to scare me that i’m being surveilled by israelis. which maybe i am. the internet is not a safe place. it was designed precisely to track and control information by intelligence and military agencies. all of which is to say, i wonder if i went really hard into talking about how israel has killed 36 palestinian journalists in the past month, would some shadowy PROMIS backdoor shut down my site? if that were so, that’s pretty cool! that little ole me poses such a threat to the zionist settler colonial death program.
back to the american settler colonial death progam, I’m about to head to the theatre to see killers of the flower moon.
obligatorily, i must admit that was the longest i’ve spent in a movie theatre, maybe ever. definitely in several years. the last “new” movie i saw in a theatre (maybe the last “new” movie i saw? idk i haven’t seen many new movies since the pandemic) was parasite.
(reminding myself that this is only the second day of this project, and it’s important that i build momentum more than anything else at this point, but goddamn i really don’t want this to be like, a “blog” of my day to day life, that’s boring, and that’s not even what i’m doing really, but whatever moving on)
the trailers that played before, all 25 minutes worth of them, only confirmed my deep conviction that martin scorsese isn’t allowed to die. who else is going to make Movies, nay, Films like this? it should be illegal to promote marvel movies before a scorsese feature. also there’s this movie, from the people who made the kingsmen movies, called argylle? and with like, john cena and bryce dallas howard and sam rockwell, and like, the most memorable thing from the trailer is the horrendous CGI cat? did CGI effects get worse in the last 10 years? it’s always been bad but jesus. the writers and SAG should have included a ban on digital effects in their contract negotiations. (there were some digital effects in killers of the flower moon, because obv it’s cheaper to fill out a scene with CGI cows than it is to get a bunch of live cows on location. I’m just saying, maybe if filmmakers/studios didn’t have the option to just “add it in post” then they’d make more deliberate choices, and maybe better films.)
but the movie. (uhh minor spoilers i guess?) the last 40 minutes is really the only section that drags a bit in an otherwise supremely tight 206 minute runtime. a few bits fall kind of flat: brendan fraser overacts. we could probably do without the indian visions of owls as harbingers of death. the references to the tulsa bombing might have been better integrated.
aside from that? an incredible picture. to think that marty’s been making movies 60+ years and still he can manage something new, something that fits perfectly alongside goodfellas but at the same time feels nothing like anything else he’s made. a work of art that grapples with the brutal realities of white supremacy, the greed and paranoia surrounding the oil industry, the complex interplay between love and fear. is there a more apt and surreal image of america than a parade with Native American “Mothers of Veterans” immediately followed by the Ku Klux Klan? a true gift. he’s not allowed to die.
still not quite up to word count on this, even less than yesterday, but i need to craft a letterboxd review.
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