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19 Jun 09

untitled

gutenberg.net.au/...0200991.txt - Preview

celebrity modernism Virginia Woolf novel

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of Buckingham
Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they
waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at
Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running
water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall
first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners
out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while
this car passed and that; and all the time let rumour accumulate in
their veins and thrill the nerves in their thighs at the thought of
Royalty looking at them; the Queen bowing; the Prince saluting; at
the thought of the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon Kings; of
the equerries and deep curtsies; of the Queen's old doll's house;
of Princess Mary married to an Englishman, and the Prince--ah! the
Prince! who took wonderfully, they said, after old King Edward, but
was ever so much slimmer. The Prince lived at St. James's; but he
might come along in the morning to visit his mother.

14 Jun 09

Let’s Get Lost - Chet Baker - Film - New York Times

www.nytimes.com/...03raff.html - Preview

“It was a dream.” Although in the preceding two hours Mr. Baker has delivered a fair number of dubiously reliable utterances, you’re inclined to believe him on this one because that’s what the movie feels like to the viewer too. It’s nominally a documentary (Oscar-nominated in that category in 1989), but it documents something that only faintly resembles waking reality. And Mr. Baker, who wanders through “Let’s Get Lost” with the eerie deliberateness of a somnambulist, appears to be a man who knows a thing or two about dreams.
And what Mr. Weber winds up doing in this original, deeply eccentric movie is giving Mr. Baker a luxurious fantasy world to live in, a holiday condo of the imagination, where age and time are utterly irrelevant.
3 more annotations...
- The ’50s die before your eyes in “Let’s Get Lost.” It feels like the last stand of something that may not have been worth fighting for in the first place.
- When Mr. Weber starts interviewing people who loved the musician not from afar, as he did, but from too close — his bitter wife, a few girlfriends, three of his neglected kids — you see how tough it’s been: how many drugs it took, how much willful indifference, how much hollowing out of whatever self may once have inhabited the pale frame of Chet Baker.
- The enduring fascination of “Let’s Get Lost,” the reason it remains powerful even now, when every value it represents is gone, is that it’s among the few movies that deal with the mysterious, complicated emotional transactions involved in the creation of pop culture — and with the ambiguous process by which performers generate desire. Mr. Baker isn’t so much the subject of this picture as its pretext: He’s the front man for Mr. Weber’s meditations on image making and its discontents.