Michelangelo Antonioni
Pink Floyd original music
Grateful Dead
Opens with a revolutionary student meeting. Talking about the Pigs. Talking about shutting down campus. I’m willing to die. Look man, if he didn’t come to join us he shouldn’t have come at all. College campus. Angry students. Talking about black kids and white kids, white experiences and black experiences. What kind of nonsense is that . . . if he wants to be a revolutionary he has to work with other people.
Company Rules
Guard seated within circle of security monitors. Farmer Meats. Large mural painted on pork plant, farmer and pigs, a pig wrestle; to a string of businesses along the boulevard, set to trippy squeak music, bros driving red Ford pickup through the streets, once a smile, past motorcycle cops, driver flashes peace sign, Bethlehem Steel Los Angeles, Brown Bevis Industrial, Pacific Metals Div., know the place the Americans created! Original, completely wack, eccentric, its own thing, riding a vibe and an economic model, complicated as fuck with many millions. Humans billions many. The poetry of the Whole Thing. Heller Machinery – they drove by fast. Makes me want to drive around East Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Ontario, San Bernardino, see with a capturing, set-aside vision of the thing, distance of a critical measure, set a sign to seeing, offering a version, not here not there just a version. Nostalgia of the present. Drive America! Make this world up, based on principles in contest, with a driving standard from the get-go, the origin, private enterprise, credit and debt, freedom and democracy, representative government, the rule of law, construct this property regime, and we the runts run it. We for ourselves, and the entire world, with China, with Russia, now throwing shit in the cage with Iran. We the monkeys.
In the cage. Bethlehem Steel. Scrap metal rail yard. Shot from the freeway driving quickly. What of port, know scrap metal mountains. Ships with cranes take the rusting product away, out of Narragansett Bay. Who are these people, and what do they do and what are their names?
What are We and Who Are We Doing?
What are We and What Are We Doing? Versions of knowing being. There’s an actual and we breathe it. Twilight of the Idols. But what is this, scrap metal rail yard. Expanding crazy, vigorous global markets, test your ability to conduct small wars. World War III trending. Young people googling “Draft.” A police station and the cop “maybe five minutes maybe five hours” to beaten-up protest kids, Nixon’s punks. Fun as fuck to see it from his and their perspective. All you people who live and the mechanisms we live by.
The Associate Professor of History
“Occupation?”
“Associate Professor of History”
“That’s too long, I’ll just put down ‘clerk’”
Name?
“Karl Marx.”
Laughter.
“how do you spell it?”
M-A-R-X
Can I help you boys?
We need some guns right away, for self-defense.
If you see it as ruined it shall be ruined. If you see it glorious, you will know glory. The Miracle of America. The Bugging Interpretation of History. Los Angeles, California. What are you? Do you see yourselves properly? What madness miracle! Spawn and order, this a show! Office Smog Inspection Station. After the shooting on campus – did he shoot the cop after the Building Occupier was killed? – he’s on the run. Fly United to New York City. Lost Angeles 1970s America I love you! It appears as if he’s stealing the Lily 7. What a nice plane, shots inside the cockpit, like a classic car but more shit comprises dash. He’s started the little prop, on his way. Flying into the desert.
And she, too, now on an adventure in the desert. Looking for Jimmy in the middle of the Mojave. What is that, a dead piano? A dead dusty harp he’s playing in the dirt. The shot where he flies Lily 7 toward the car on a lone desert road is awesome.
Manly Beacon
Manly Beacon?
Manly Beacon it is. There! When? Now! At Play in a Wonderful World. That’s the one.
He walks like an actor or a dancer. Very Theater. He killed that run down the steep slope. Would have injured most and he kept going. Oh my her arms, her arms, the way she holds her arms when she runs. I will never forget those arms. And they’re running through the desert. He does a freaking somersault. OK, Actor. But good okay. Man and woman naked in the desert. Kissing. Hands. Movement. Have actors naked. Have beautiful young women in films. Mud wrestle dirt love is that the Grateful Dead? Desert dirt wrestle love. Now it’s a love orgy, kissing and pushing one another over in the dust. Take it there, Antonioni! This could still withstand the new critical paradigm holding the moral high ground. The new untouchables. But here they are, love wrestling with four in the American desert. Appears darn consensual, though he threatened her with an airplane. And now she’s on drugs. How many wrestle lovers are there? Actor Wrestle Pushing Games. “OK, contact improv in the dirt everybody.” A UCLA theater department? Get to the bottom of this. They definitely have dirt in their mouths when shooting.
Red-painted port-o-potties in the Mojave Desert. Death Valley. Summer temperatures. Now they’re painting Lily 7. Looking at those instruments, gazing at cockpit seats, speed of highway approach, steep climbs, deep dives, views out the window at the desert, makes me think I should learn to fly. Flying before piano. Surfing with sharks before flying. Flying! What a kickass plane. Now’s the time to research small airplanes and hours-of-flight. Fifth career crop-duster. Bay and lake landings Alaska. The No War Plane, with breasts between the wings. Now have to get off the couch, grab a camera. How’m I not gonna shoot Suck Bucks? Please shoot Suck Bucks, and share it! I promise you we do not listen to fiddle music enough. Flying a helicopter, too. I mean, Juergen Klinsmann flies his own helicopter to training. Stay away, that’s dopeness. Dr. Dopeness approves. Rollin’ wit dopeness.
Antonioni succeeds showing the joy, beauty and thrill of flying a small plane, more palpably aeronautic than sitting in a commercial jetliner balling at 40,000 feet. Though dope. Not gonna lie knowing. Dang, banking above the clouds by yourself flying! In the painted He-She-It plane!
Kid returns to Los Angeles. The stolen plane caused concern. Maybe that’s right, especially during the reign of terrorism. The insane of terrorism. Media assembled, oldschool cops with reee-rurrr sirens. But what the what-up? Aviation. They take training to fly seriously. Why do we take it so seriously, more than cars? Is it the psychology of flight? An airplane’s potential danger. I’m going the former. We just freak on flying more than driving. Landing a little wobbly, would you lose nerves and rise again? No, dude, flying’s harder.
It’s not supposed to be the real thing, art’s representation. Expresses feeling about the thing within experience. A puppet show and we know the more. Neorealism is cool. Fantasy is cool, too. What a big, insanely beautiful ridge-perched desert house. Wonder who’s house that was then? Those touches were sex touches. Filmic. Action in the shot smoke rising from ashtray cigarette. Close-up, sometimes unfocused, on her head, hair, face as she runs up the stairs. Arizona Impress.
Seven shots after her drive-away, stop, look back: House from distance; balcony from the railing National Geographic flick-flaps in a breeze, radio that you’re about to see; third is ashtray smoking National Geographic patio side table; four is pack of cigarettes and radio; five is side of living room with door and doorknob chair lamp statue of . . . Jesus I don’t know horse?, gong? Set within circular wall cutout; six a wall of guns, large image, ashtrays, newspaper coffee table, couch, telephone, view of mountain, gonna say tray of vodkas on the rocks and books, shot from coffee-table height; and back to her in the car from behind.
All right, that’s it. You win me forever with the house exploding. Loud af exploding desert house set among pink and red rocks like Sedona blown the fuck up, shot from multiple angles, incredibly loud not turning it down. Go through this again. Exhilarating. Fourteen times. And stunning. Take us there, shot of the pool and patio during the explosion, slow-motion. Blow up the clothes rack, dresses flying through the air. Blow up the fridge. That is a flying Special K box. A salmon, cucumber, to Pink Floyd. If you’re on acid for this, all the power to you. I mean, he had to film this, had to get this vision down. Explode the TV. That’s a lobster and an orange and impossible head of lettuce. They blew up books and the books flew through the air. And then there’s the Pink Floyd Complete Zabriskie Point Sessions, Rome, Italy.
