Something/Someone Old

My Something Old this week is this little cult gem from the early eighties:

I freaking *love* this movie, and I'm not sure I can tell you why. Of course, I can tell you that the sets are marvelous--as my mom said, "There's nothing that's NOT atmospheric about this movie:"

I love it when directors care what their movie looks like. I know, I know, all directors--well, most of them--care about that. But in some movies, the visuals truly look like works of art. I'm not saying this movie is comparable to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu, or Zhang Yimou's Hero. It is to those movies what truly great graffiti art would be to the impressionists. It doesn't matter to me, though, whether the visual art is lowbrow or highbrow--just that it's well done. And this is.

They called this movie "a rock and roll fable," and it is rather like a fairy tale, if the fairy tale in question had crash-landed on a little-known noir film from the 50s. The main plot is not what draws me to it, and though Diane Lane and Michael Pare did perfectly competent jobs on their characters, as the beauty who gets captured by the bad guy and her roving soldier ex-boyfriend aka the bad boy hero who saves her, it's not the leads that remain in the mind after the movie is over. This little movie is star-studded: Willem Dafoe plays the unfortunately dressed but still menacing bad guy who kidnaps the girl so he can have sex with her for a couple of weeks before dropping her (my mom said, "He looks like what would happen if a naked man decided to go fishing:"

Rick Moranis plays her mercenary, geeky manager/new boyfriend:

and Amy Madigan gives the performance of the film as the tough, funny sidekick the hero picked up in a bar. The part had been conceived for Edward James Olmos, and the director wanted Madigan to read the part of Cody's sister. She insisted on reading the part of McCoy, a tough, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking Army veteran, and she did it so well they had to cast her. She stole the show.

If you’ve never seen Streets of Fire, the first thing you must understand is that there’s nothing like it. Despite featuring the convergence of a multitude of generational talent (the film’s stars include Willem Dafoe, Bill Paxton, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, and Diane Lane, with Jimmy Iovine as the soundtrack’s primary producer) it was a box-office bomb; its legacy today is very much that of a cult film. By his own account, Hill made the film in an attempt to create what his teenage self would have considered a perfect movie — something with “custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets, and questions of honor.”

It's a fun ride.

Something New

I rarely put up my periscope, musically speaking, spending most of my time deep in the past. This track makes me think better of that stance. Maybe I should break surface more often. Damn, Shannon Lay! What an awesome piece of work. Extra points for doing something new and lovely in folk music, probably the second-least "cool" musical genre around (next to bluegrass). Have I mentioned that I love folk music and bluegrass?

Many thanks to the Pitchfork website for bringing this song to my attention.

https://pitchfork.com/best/

Apparently Lay has been both a folk and a punk artist. Woman after my own heart. Her previous work in bands includes time with Facts on File and a band I'd never heard of called Feels.

By the way, I'd be remiss if I didn't include something very new indeed: there's a commemorative stamp coming out for Ursula LeGuin. LeGuin is one of those authors that you read your whole life through. Her work has grown with me since I was about 13, and it's still not exhausted. She is one of my moral touchstones.

The background of the stamp is a scene from her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, set on a winter-bound planet peopled by an ambisexual folk called the Gethenians. For those who know the book, those small figures are Therem Harth and Genly Ai struggling across the Gobrin Ice.

Something Borrowed

Now, I would not have the guts to cover Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You." Finding out that somebody actually set out to record a cover of that song reminds of the time my friend Vic from grad school told me he was writing a novel. "About what?" I asked. "Well, it's a rewriting of the Odyssey," he replied.

I know I said something in response, but my brain was slackjawed. You're going to rewrite a story already told by both Homer and James Joyce?

I felt an echo of that moment when I found "A Case of You" on a list of best-ever covers.

But it works.

I hope somewhere, my friend Vic, whom I have not seen in over twenty years, has had a similar success with his novel!

The following was NOT on any of the lists of best covers I found--a sad failure of judgement on the parts of the listmakers! Get a load of The Lottery Winners' take on Nickelback's song "Rockstar:"

Nickelback were so delighted with the cover that they made a full-length video with The Lottery Winners. If you're feeling down at all, put this on. You'll feel better:

Something Blue

I love Steven Kenny, who is what I think of as a magical realist painter, though I guess technically he'd be considered a surrealist. (He also happens to work at the Salvador Dali Museum as a docent, so, yeah, I guess he is a surrealist!) His paintings combine human figures and mechanisms with the natural world in truly lovely and startling ways. I like him much better than Dali, actually.