The company we keeps…

Flickhead often keeps artistic company — sensitive, creative, crazy types usually have to hold on to one another, because the rest of humanity would swallow us whole. Take Bruce Donnola, who has turned me on to a lot of music and movies ever since the ‘70s. He’s a singer, songwriter and musician, and you might want to check out his CD Vaudeville. After all, who but a true Flickhead would write a song referencing Joe Sawyer, the ‘filthy Irish pig’ barkeep in Kubrick’s The Killing??

Faye’s mouth

The Thomas Crown Affair
Original soundtrack by Michel Legrand
Recorded in 1968

1. Theme From The Thomas Crown Affair - Windmills Of Your Mind (vocal by Noel Harrison)

2. Room Service

3. A Man's Castle

4. The Chess Game

5. Cash And Carry

6. His Eyes, Her Eyes (vocal by Michel Legrand)

7. Playing The Field

8. Moments Of Love

9. The Boston Wrangler

10. Doubting Thomas

11. The Crowning Touch

Or download the soundtrack in a zip file

Roadhouse Blues

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003), and there’s really no use in pointing out what I felt were its flaws since the picture has weathered enough of that already. But there is one part in the film when Gallo does something quite remarkable. Shooting from the dashboard of his car, he captures an innocuous stretch of highway and plays Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “Beautiful,” in its entirety. While popular songs have virtually replaced symphonic scoring in films, you never hear a whole song used…and this effect was initially distracting—the hope that it wouldn’t be cut took my attention away from everything else.
    Gordon Lightfoot has a knack for evoking mood and nostalgia in love songs that are haunted by loss. When his “If You Could Read My Mind” came out in the early 1970’s, it served as the soundtrack to my sunny mid-afternoons, when I amused myself in forests or wandering the streets of our small town, the imagination molding those misty-eyed lyrics around whatever activities I’d concoct from boredom. Today, “If You Could Read My Mind” invariably takes me back to a diner at two or three on a Sunday afternoon, eating a cheeseburger deluxe in a room of about ten bored strangers.
    Lightfoot’s “Beautiful,” when heard at Gallo’s dashboard, with those lonely midwestern fields and small truck stops passing in front of a stained, dirty window, sadness and longing wrestle with hope. This is one of the cinema’s great, rare moments of soulful emotion, the kind that transcends the written page, whose understanding could very well be limited only to those who’ve known loneliness as one of life’s quieting processes. Away from the movie, it’s a glint of tragedy that has the potential to provoke tears, if only there were a clear reason to do so.
    Gallo’s unflinching look at that highway brought to mind bus trips I once took some thirty years ago, to and from Long Island to Buffalo, New York. Alone, always alone. And often reading Hesse’s doomsday machine, Steppenwolf, from cover to cover and back again, breaking from Harry Haller’s bleak dilemma at a greasy spoon called The Spot for a twenty-minute chow-down. On those roads from gaudy suburbia to the northwestern edge of the state…Buffalo is a city built on heartache, a place that has seldom seen sunshine, and then only through dense, often odorous humidity. My final destination was Niagara University, a medieval castle unstuck in time, adjacent to a small border town that’s been anticipating a ‘comeback’ for the last forty years. If you look in the fields close enough, past the empty beer cans, cracked bongs, Pink Floyd 8-tracks, and decomposing copies of Dude and Nugget, you may stumble upon the shards of a beautiful, angry boy’s wasteful conceit.

Beautiful by Gordon Lightfoot

Things that go bump in the night

“What impressed me about Rabbit’s Moon wasn’t the film itself — a seven-minute, black-and-white affair in which three clowns prance around in a moon-lit forest. No, what really caught my attention was the soundtrack — a demonic laugh kicked off a jaunty, organ-driven Beatlesque song that sounded like some half-forgotten top forty hit from the glam-rock era.” The search for the song and its elusive composer! A new article on Flickhead by Michael I. Cohen.

It Came in the Night
By A Raincoat (mp3)