This post is more for me than for all of you, but in the spirit of our exiled poet-scholar, and because I first saw this movie there, I've decided to review Tarkovsky's masterpiece by recounting my favorite movie-related memories from Las Vegas.1. Watching this scene from Nostalghia in late December 2002 and then sleeping for twenty-six hours:
When I woke up, I felt as though my veins pumped mercury instead of blood. Strangely, my first waking thought wasn't "why do I feel so sick?" or "I'll never do that again" but "damn you, imaginary dog, this is your work."
2. Preparing to see The Matrix Reloaded with my buddy Mike by loading up on cheap pizza and telling ourselves that the key to a good, bad movie is "a little bit of Foucault and a little bit of ninja fighting."
3. Watching every single installment in the Planet of the Apes franchise in a single sitting--an unforgettable, unrepeatable, unbearable sitting.
4. Repeatedly touching the walls of my apartment in order to feel close contact with Life after watching The Thin Red Line on Christmas day, 2000. In retrospect, I see that this behavior is more autistic than transcendent.
5. Feeling at one with the deprived protagonist of Bresson's A Man Escaped, having watched it sympathetically after eating nothing but scraps from a single loaf of stale bread for over two weeks.
Note: The above action was no righteous gesture of solidarity but the consequence of refusing to check my bank balance and ending up with $1.32 for most of July, just enough money to buy an old baguette from the Vons on Maryland and Tropicana.
6. Desperately fighting the freezing weather in the middle of November, 2002, by numbing my senses with the Vonnegut clunker Harrison Bergeron--starring Sean Austin of Rudy and The Goonies??--with no heat in my apartment save that escaping through my gaping, chattering mouth, genitals, and useless hands and feet and ever-useless head.
7. Haunting the Virgin Megastore located at the ninth circle of Hell all the way at the back of the Caesars Palace forum shops, where a maze of ringing, dinging lights and witless ambulating tourists, no clocks and certainly no signs to keep the path, serves to distract you from your plan to buy that elusive, overpriced copy of Peppermint Frappe. My brother and I spent most of the years 2000-2002 making exactly this pilgrimage--past the Terrible Herbst casino on Flamingo marking the last bit of township before Las Vegas turns into Las Vegas! somewhere between Maryland Pkwy and Paradise, through the disembodied epilepsy of Las Vegas Blvd, and, finally, under the Dantean parking garage of Caesars Palace itself--making this pilgrimage and not buying Peppermint Frappe, because, honestly, why would we?
8. Being chased by Seorin outside the Sunset Casino after Monsters, Inc., deep in the lovely November of 2001.
9. Having my brother explain to me in excruciating technical detail the wiring process by which he transformed Alex studying the image of the crucifix in A Clockwork Orange into the "dancing Jesus scene" by means of magnificent blaring speakers and some kind of esoteric slow motion function on his DVD player.
Note: I cherish this memory in particular. At the time, my brother lived in a complex where--I kid you not--packs of mysterious wolves ran through the ravine behind his apartment and hordes of frogs appeared after every rainstorm. On the night of the festival of the dancing Jesuses, he tried for hours in the most deliberate, pot-broken English to convince me that Stanley Kubrick, wildlife in general, and this "HAL-like triumph of technology" (his words) conspired to "evolve the cosmos from its psychic embryo" (ibid.). Then we played Hot Wheels Two on Playstation, snickering whenever the voice recorder announced the selection of "Evil Weevil!"
10. Regretfully buying a McDonald's breakfast at 6:30 in the morning in order to stay awake for my meeting with Claudia Keelan at 8:45, and then not at all regretfully blowing off that meeting to watch Taxi Driver.
11. Cutting my sixth period computer programming class in high school to watch Starship Troopers at the Sunset Station. It was the first time I'd ever seen a movie in a theater by myself--a fun experience, actually--and I remember thinking that it was an improvement over my usual cutting of first and second period English and physics to hang out in the McDonald's on Stephanie and Sunset and read Chess books.
12. Catching a slew of homoerotic arthouse movies at underground theaters throughout the Vegas valley from the spring of 1997 to the early winter of 1999 and trying very earnestly but very unsuccessfully to mistake my dandyism for authentic gayness. My brother, who accompanied me on these delusional jaunts, likewise failed. We had read, it seems, too much Verlaine, which is any Verlaine, and assumed, as he did, that holding a posture and having a purpose are identical, or at least cooperative, pursuits. Helas!
13. Taking Seorin to see Carlos Saura's Tango at the Sahara cineplex where, just six months earlier, my brother and I, in one of our quest-for-gay fire offerings to the gods, had punched through the kaleidoscopic faceboard mask of Velvet Goldmine and raised what we thought was the gutterheart. I remember thinking afterward, while I mused upon that evening's episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that it must mean something, her agreeing to watch with me this inscrutable salvo to metafiction and fancy dancing. And I was right: it means she loves me.
14. Listening to the menu screen music from Freaks and Geeks play over and over and over many a morning while housesitting for a professor in the summer before moving to Austin. Two or three times each week I would wake up to that sound, stumble out to the den, see my brother in a state of drunken abandon and/or unconsciousness, and make the logical inference that it is far, far better thing he does. . . .
Note: All other mornings I awoke to the sounds of The Aqua Teen Hunger Force, seasons one and two, also in menu screen mode.
15. Giving an incomprehensible presentation on Leos Carax for my narrative theory seminar in 2002. Standing up there, struggling to explain why two vagrants falling off a bridge is the coup de maitre, I realized for the first time in my life that most of what I say is complete gibberish and that people pretend to understand only because they assume I know something they don't. If they saw that the inside of my head actually looks like the thought bubble drawn from Homer Simpson's mind in which two chimps are grooming each other, or the one with the goat playing "Turkey in the Straw," they wouldn't be so generous and would recognize my extemporaneous rhetoric as the very obvious bullshit that it is.
16. And of course my very favorite memory: being unable to run the air conditioner in my apartment and watch television or a movie at the same time. It was the most dilapidated and best apartment I've ever had.
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