On a Harper's magazine from November 2008 that I found in the subway there is an excerpt from "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks", a novel co-authored by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac in 1945 but published last year. The excerpt is from a Burroughs part and it begins with a girl refusing to have dinner with some friends because she was broke, even though she was being invited by one of them, who later told the story to rest. One of the guys said, "People get silly ideas." Then the narrator comes with this: "'Yeah,' I said, 'but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.'"
Film Comment magazine help me discovering filmmakers and rare films, and now that I have control of my time, I've been upgrading my cinema map. Last week, I saw Marco Ferreri's "La Casa del Sorriso", a beautiful piece about a lady trying to love and have fun while being in a retirement home in Italy. This morning, I've been inducted to the work of Portuguese director Manoel De Oliveira with "Party,"an obscure drama between four characters. It is not a film to love, so to speak, but the dialogue (written by Agustina Bessa-Luís) is as dense as the dark indoor scenario or the fog the characters talk about it. There is a sentence from the Irene Papas' character that reminded me the Burroughs one: "Bad reputation is not a disgrace." And there is another one from the Michel Piccoli's character, more political: "By excluding others we call rationalism...and its wars."
The kind of things I like to hear. That is what I'm talking about!
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A tip: I found out that magazine subscription is tax deductible...Because we all do research to survive. Hopefully, they keep it for the all online-green era.
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On Sunday, I found out that Burroughs had collaborated with Gus Van Sant, including being Father Tom in "Drugstore Cowboy." Here is a quote from his personification: "I predict in the near future right-wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus."
