A Question of Solitude, some back story....

In A Question of Solitude there are verbatim re-enactments.  A nurse (Mortimer?) really did leave a message on my apartment phone, which I promptly returned.  She was asking if I was related to, and could therefore consent to treatment for, Peter Dizozza, my long lost uncle, who was hospitalized in Houston for stress fractures from a sidewalk fall.

My father's youngest brother, a red head who had been named after their own father, my grandfather, Peter Dizozza, was living at the Coach Motel, an SRO near Hobby airport, and he wanted to go home.  Nurse Mortimer did not advise that, however.   She said he was well funded and asked if I would approve extended rehabilitation in a nursing home (where he was to die... he refused to eat so they inserted a stomach tube.)

While I was there visiting him some months later, yes, as in the Q of S script, he asked for "a hamburger, make that two."   By the time of my visit to the nursing home I was writing A Question of Solitude, so when we left him we went to The Gulf Greyhound Park to watch the dog races.   I was accompanied, thank you, Kim, by Kim who did accompany me nto the nursing home.  She stayed for many seconds prior to my uncle turning to her and saying several times, actually, "I want to eat your face."  I suppose you could say he sounded crazy when he said that.  What happened to his records?  Why was he well-funded?  Why had he been on disability all these years?  I think I know why, but no the records were lost..  Only the funding was there.

The departure from Gulf Greyhound Park that ends A Question of Solitude's Act 1, includes the favorite dialogue from the Peter Sellars Casino Royale ("What are your movements for the rest of the evening Mr. Bond?"  "I thought we'd get a late dinner, go back to the hotel and turn in for the night.".. something like that...).  It also depicts my understanding, honestly, of what I determined was the murder of my grandmother at the age of 100 years and 97 days...

Seriously, the undertaker let me examine her body.  There were no bruises, not on the hands or anywhere, except of course the single blow to the left aorta that opened up the cable of blood to the brain, which, when cut, filled the skull and herniated the brain into the brain stem, not a bad way to go in 7 hours.  In her lifetime she had no downtime other than that.

My grandmother within the first 30 minutes of this blow needed an emergency craniotomy... so she's found in her 68-37 Yellowstone Boulevard hall, my mother found her, in a pool of blood, only from that single bruise... if you don't act fast it kills anyone.

Just briefly, at 1PM Tuesday, June 20th, 2005 my grandmother lay on the floor of the first floor hallway leading from steps to the elevator.  She always took the stairs from her second floor apartment.  She and her husband  had lived there since these president apartments were built.  She had to slip back and cut the lower left back of her neck on the edge of a step, then move to the middle of the hallway... and there was no blood from the steps to the place where my mother found her.

Look my mother is dead, too, amazingly going through the same manner of passing because a stroke and an infusion of blood thinner created the same problem in the bruised area from a clot of the aorta leading to the brain.  Yes, the doctors managed to squeeze in a craniotomy procedure at a rather late stage in her treatment, this over the course of 12 days, Monday, February 28th to the morning of Saturday, March 12th, 2011 when she passed away.)

I acknowledge that other examples of the slow coma/death from impact to the back of head are clearly accidents.   A boy sliding into home base, a woman resting from a fall at a ski lodge.... there's a gradual loss of consciousness.   They needed an emergency craniotomy.

So in A Question of Solitude at the Gulf Greyhound Park entrance, after they win big, Jimmie awaits Fremda, who went looking for her daughter.  A valet brings them her Nissan Mazima.  The Valet, one of Blofield's lacky's, clearly strikes James in the lower left back of the neck.  He continues speaking until he falls.. this was rather amazingly performed by Zach Pethoud and Mike Allen Hill.   Mike is definitive in the role of the Young James Bond.

Then a misfiring of Blofield's new heart tempers his exuberance, so he needs to return to his hospital for an emergency transplant..

Act Two opens with the two bond girls (Mortimer and Fremda) performing upon the younger James an emergency craniotomy, using one of those manual crank drills creating the perfect sound of surgery.

The young James Bond is saved, and he has the added benefit of a plug in the back of his head so he can release future pressure therein.  Unfortunately the bond girl, Fremda, holds the key that can open that pressure plug....

So there are three James Bonds in a Question of Solitude, Senior Bond, Uncle James, and Jimmy, because there are three Peter Dizozzas, me, my uncle and my grandfather.

Anything else?  There's a line in an old song, Trailing, "She's sunning at a dog race, where dogs are killed if they catch what makes them run,"

That's true because it's just a mechanical rabbit whipping around the race track.  It's really nothing for the dogs to get excited about and, when they realize that, they let it go by without chasing it.

The artist, Faith Palmer-Persen, took me to a kennel where we met and helped care for (during one afternoon) some of the rescued ones..

So the last line of A Question of Solitude is "No one leaves here without taking home a retired greyhound."
-----------
Jimmy:  Return to Goldeneye!
Fremda:  And guess who is waiting for us there?
J:  Who?
F: Suzie?
J: Who's Suzie?
F: My daughter.
J: Who's been taking care of her?
F: The bachelor next door,
J: Noel Coward?
etc...

George Ferencz, who helped develop this project at La Mama, helped me discover that Ian Fleming wrote less about James Bond, who is, after all, the orithologist who wrote The Wild Birds of Jamaica, than on cataloging species of birds, fish and plants...

Josef von Sternberg is problematic for throwing likeable people into hell in Shanghai Gesture.  That cast is cute.

Legend has it that the Shanghai Gesture is thumb-to-the-nose/pinky-to-the-recipient-of-it gesture...
(Let's add the texture to the harmless pause or gesture, that it's done when there was not one gives it gravitas and punch.  I bite my nails 'cause it's too much.)  

Shanghai's ancient history, accessible in the Town God Temple and Yu Garden, dates back to the 15th Century.
The European visitors who divided it into sectors arrived around 1850 and in 1945 Mao began the new people's era lurking behind the Japanese occupation in 1939?

The playwright of The Shanghai Gesture, John Colton, wrote it in the 1920's.  He also wrote the play Under Capricorn.  He also wrote the intertitles for White Sails in the South Seas.

Walter Huston was in the movie.  I still can't get over his recording of Lost in the Stars.   He also played a foreign occupier of old New York, Peter Stuyvesant.  

speech recognition

I'm in the car experimenting with voice recognition course there is traffic I'm going to pick up glasses how much longer can I speak. Well the answer is all that cock down on the speech recognition the glasses I'm getting our light and they are the glasses I've had for a long time I needed to replace the lenses because by playing on my scratch them. Well that was a little less successful by cleaning the glasses I scratch them and that's because they have some coding that I paid for I think to prevent them from reflecting in addition they have a coding for polarizing the light and darkening according to the amount of light and they are bifocals they are I guess gradually changing from from nearsighted to less nearsighted because as I get older my vision improves. I am entering the 59th street bridge lower roadway on it is many roads leading to Tulane so there is always traffic was you're on those two lanes going toward Manhattan you can get in pretty steadily rain is falling 2 on the bills call keys your team this is attributable to TLK more joking the name that is associated with Joe

Balancing the interests of the one among the many
Owner Occupied Realization
Coops favor owner occupants.   I'm just writing...  not as an authority... Some people write about that which they know.  We write about what we want to find out about... 

We shareholders may have a lease issued by a corporation but we own that corporation.  The coop is not our landlord.  We maintain our own places and when there are building issues we either directly pay for them or share their expense with all shareholders.

We have a reserve fund from which to draw for repairs, renovations and improvements funded by an underlying loan secured by the deeds to our two properties..

That loan functions as a hot potato which people who live here upon its maturity must face.

But all possessions have the quality of a hot potato.  We are but stewards of what we possess.....
     

Searching Street Views on Google Maps

That's right I'm at a deposition searching google maps for the location where the testifying pedestrian says she was crossing.  It was Elizabeth Street near its intersection with Canal.  She's saying she had to cross there, that the sidewalk was blocked by a ribbon attached from building to a dumpster.  That is new information to me.   So she's claiming she had to cross in the middle of the block (rather than at the Canal Street crosswalk) when the car hit her...

The google photo of the address listed on the police report shows me a dumpster with a ribbon blocking the sidewalk; it even shows people crossing the street there, and it documents the photo as being taken one month prior to the accident.

So thank you... I forget who told me... for the ctrl print screen paste into paint program save as .png or .jpg commands (this applies to windows/dos operating systems).  

This picture is impossible to find, though, if I search google maps by using its arrows to explore the area.  I have to enter the address; it is not even the address where the dumpster is.  

Google's street view photo composites are from different times (and they, the google programmers, are saving prior photos, too, dating back to 2009).  However, only this one photo shows the street dumpster and the ribbon blocking the sidewalk behind it from it to the building.

Anyway, it's saved.  Yes, I think it is evidence.     

He was in Labyrinth, too, yes?

This is The Next Day...
Oops, I still don't have the program in front of me.  There is a music director who also worked on The Next Day recordings.  He was at the synth last night.
As I try to reconcile the familiarity and beautiful completeness of the waif (meaning I didn't notice the focus but only appreciated the wonders of the women's poses last night), all I can say is, this marks the return (from nearby) of Hans Bellmer imagery.  Which waif is smaller?  Which has the bigger voice (obviously Ms. Caruso).   And finally, Are they (is poupee) real?  The entire cast is beautiful and there are great supplemental participants.  I suppose a third woman was also a character, part of a supplemental love story spoofed by the brother of the man from another planet...(Mr. Valentine.  It is Valentine's day... also a vision consistent with my own of Valentine's Day).
The sonic landscapes of all his songs are coming to mind now.  Immediate highlights include The Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud... as soon as I mention that, which sounds like an inspiration for the science fiction book by a Mr. Travis?   Well that goes back to the scholastic book source I know of by the fellow who wrote the disney live action witch mountain yes?  OK, Daniel Keys wrote about Jon in The Forgotten Door.   This is the source material I think underlies everyone and everything here.. x (This is completely wrong.  Alexander Key, who also wrote Escape to Witch Mountain, published The Forgotten Door in 1965.  Walter Tevis, who also wrote The Hustler, published The Man Who Fell to Earth in 1963.)
So Wild Eyed Boy... and the other great wild sonic landscape folk song is The Bewley Brothers.  A definitive statement of The Other brother.
There was a momentary projection of Mr. Newton by characters.  Basically all theatrical stops are pulled out for the occasion and, guess what, they work.
What you'll also hear is, and whenever someone says, I can't, yet want to, die... the definitive prior declamation of that statement is:
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman

Also, it's hard to lose that bossa nova for The Man Who Sold the World.

Is David Jones blissfully separated from his manifestations?  Does anyone actually believe there is a transformation of a complete visionary artist, that this return of David Bowie is different from his other returns... there is continuity and consistency from the children recordings (?) to today.  

One thing I've consistently heard from him is... Project yourself on me.  

Make Me a Miracle Man

Seeing Lazarus rise from the dead I enjoyed the many songs, some of which were unfamiliar, many of which come from The Next Day album, they all sound great, as you can imagine.  No texture is lost in the dense harmony.  The bold brash strokes of chordal movement are sounded precisely as composed.  It seems difficult to identify the levels of creativity (I'm thinking that many great musicians help create the textures of a Bowie song).  There is also the song structures, including all the young dudes, simply a verse pre-chorus and chorus, with asymmetrical repeats, built on a measure of three beats.   

The greatest compositional light appears with the progression of Life on Mars.  The achievement there remains for me off the charts.  I feel hope for the world when I hear the emotional impact of that great musical achievement.  As for other things, how can you fault the unbelievably nice and appealing cast?  The angst level is high, but they are up for it.  The techno level of the production is also off the charts, but that is incidental to the hodgepodge montage of material arising from the bizarrely devoted cast and the commitment they needed to satisfy director Nicholas Roeg.  It seems impossible to imagine actors achieving that intimacy with one another today (yet they must in the Lazurus production).  Perhaps some recent last gasp comedies have also done so.  

The confusion of commitment in the movie (the man who fell to earth) returned with greater confusion here.  “Hello Mary Lou goodbye love” is the song we hear to identify the impact Candy Clark had on the David Bowie character.  She was Mr. Roeg’s girlfriend as she threw herself at the alien.  She and Mr. Bowie are both too cute for words and then Rip Torn picks up the pieces after they tear themselves apart.  The alien forgets about his family mission when he embraces her.  I all too readily confuse her with Anita Palenberg in Performance.  My girlfriend at the time was attentive to the charms of both Ms. Palenberg and Mr. Jaggar and it was somewhat mysterious to me, although I felt grateful for the appeal they radiated for her.   She was basically as off the charts as they were in terms of insouciant beauty.  Her natural beauty image was better than theirs. 

So after Mr. Jaggar and before Art Garfunkel, David Bowie fell into the cinematographer’s world and he, Torn, Clark and Buck Henry, proved themselves worthy.  What I’m suggesting is that the movie became part of their life experience, they were so soaked in it.  And now Bowie is back with his own soundtrack.  I always feel it necessary to mention that John Philips provided the soundtrack for the movie because it accompanies a favorite cinematic continuity sequence from the failed rocket launch to the Icarus drop from the high rise to the rhumba of the wheeled food cart through the rubble into the hidden bedroom.  

Sam mentioned the bullet through the brain coming out through the townhouse onto the sidewalk as Mr. Jaggar takes his walk to the mob car.  There’s a woman soulfully screaming in the musical accompaniment there.  That’s another fun moment of cinematic continuity.

So now this is Bowie’s chance to express the surrealism others created for him from being inspired by him.  He already achieves great emotional intensity in his sometimes obscure lyric songs.   He’s given them a new place to live.