Anyone interested in Uncle Mattie's upcoming picture "Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story" might do well to look at this 3-minute synopsis of the movie, directed by Jim Henson:
I wish to be part of a trio con brio with Stanley Donen and Anne Wiazemsky. Ah, just kiddin'! In point of fact, I hope to some day drink a martini in between Mary Gaitskill and Frederick Seidel. Or just alone with this chick:
The opening eight seconds of Ozark Mountain Daredevils' "Jackie Blue" (and then all the rest). The sheer unbridled terror of Pierre Boulez's "Pli selon pli." The soaring choral sections of John Adans' "Death of Klinghoffer." The strangely unfinished-feeling last fast flight up the stairs at the end of Schoenberg's one-woman opera "Erwartung.""John Cash's rendition of "The Mercy Seat." Sweet's "Fox on the Run" and "Ballroom Blitz." The Nirvana cover of "The Man Who Sold the World." David Allan Coe saying that you don't have to call me darlin'...darlin'. The "tribal" beats on Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. That incredibly sexy-sad opening to Miles Davis' So What. The entirety of Well, You Needn't. The hopefulness-against-all-hope of Glenn Campbell's version of Wichita Lineman. Everything having to do with the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack. The storytelling stylings of Elton John's Levon. The seventies-western horizontal opening-up ambience of Maquiladora. The big aircraft-carrier drift of Low's "Over the Ocean." The sorrowful hustle and bustle of Mozart's 41st. The sheer homicidal anger of Ice Cube's post-Rodney King concept album "The Predator." Memories of Randy Newman's "Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America." Aimee Mann's extreme literariness in "Jacob Marley's Chain." The everlasting grief of Elvis Costello's "Shipbuilding." The gutwrenching terror of Talking Heads' "Fear of Music" (especially Electric Guitar and Drugs). The exquisite smarm of Prince singing "Uptown." The bounce of Elliot Smith's "Baby Britain." The unlistenability of John Lennon's "Two Virgins" and Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music." Childhood memories of the prog-rock pretentiosity of Emerson, Lake and Palmer's "Tarkus" and Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick"--oh, and also Yes' tribute to professional sports, "Going for the One." I love the shameless artiness of all that, so now completely forgotten in the wake of everyone's Ramones fetishism. The terror of Bloodrock's "DOA." The operatic spaciousness of Black Sabbath's "Spiral Architect." The chase-scene anticness of Pink Floyd's "One of These Days." That TV on the Radio about cro-o-o-o-oss the sea in your well-helmed ce-me-teeee-ry... The melodrama of "Don't Pull Your Love Out on Me, Baby...If I Do Better Think That Maybe Iiiiiii...." The long-lived pathos of Roy Orbison, one and all.
Lidsville (as in "Lidsville is the koo-koo-kookiest, Lidsville is the ki-ki-kickiest," etc.) Iconoclasts. The Sopranos. Curb Your Enthusiasm. Entourage. Real Time with Bill Maher. Most of all, The L Word. And, if we go back in Peabody's Wayback Machine: The Wild Wild West. Millennium with Lance Henriksen. The Young Ones with Ric Mayall. No Honestly and The Goodies and The Two Ronnies. And Night Gallery. Especially the Spielberg pilot with Joan Crawford's purloined eyeballs.And I forgot about Uncle Croc's Block and James at 15/16.
All of Flaubert, especially the purple stuff. Hardy and Dickens. Vladimir Mayakovsky's funerary elegy to Lenin. Gertrude Stein's "IIIIIIII." James Wolcott's never-to-be-released epic volume of criticism. DeLillo's "Americana," "White Noise" and "Underworld." Marguerite Duras' "Destroy She Said," "India Song," and the "Le Camion" screenplay. Phil Dick's "Ubik" and "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch." Sade's "Philosophy in the Bedroom." James' "Portrait of a Lady" and his lovably absurdly bad plays. Sam Shepard's "Action" and "The 4-H Club." Above all, Anthony Trollope's "The Way We Live Now." More Trollopean/Dickensian/Tom Wolfean writers seeking to grasp the whole wide world between the covers of a book, please! Fewer short stories about adultery in the English department of a small Midwestern college.
Bill Pullman.And then there's....Theatre: Peter Sellars, Robert Woodruff, Elizabeth LeCompte, Richard Foreman, Charles L. Mee, Jr., George Tsypin, James Ingalls, Brian J. Lilienthal.Cinema: Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Raoul Walsh, Robert Aldrich, Luis Bunuel, Edgar Ulmer, Steven Spielberg, Charles Burnett, David Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson.Literature: John Updike, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Leslie Fiedler, Dwight Macdonald (sort of), Tom Wolfe (minus his right-wingism), Wallace Shawn, James Wolcott, Susan Sontag, Mary Gaitskill, Pauline Kael, Gertrude Stein, Marguerite Duras.Politics: Howard Dean, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters (sometimes), the ex-presidential William Jefferson Clinton.Music: John Cash.And let's not slight this incredible duo of boggling minds:I also forgot. This guy: And, of course, this guy: