The legendary Patti Smith is doing interviews about “Mercy,” a lullaby she composed and performed for Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah, with the idea of snagging a little award-season allure. I’ve been a Smith devotee since ’75 or thereabouts, and you will find no greater fan of Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which I caught at the ’08 Sundance Film Festival, than myself. But as I was reviewing my notes before Smith called this morning, I was telling myself that she’s Patti the Fearless and not a singer of songs that a child would take comfort in. Certainly not in any proverbial sense. In my head she’s one of the boldest and fiercest poet-troubadours to take a stage and burn it down. Which is why I blinked last spring when I first heard of her Noah song.

That’s because I haven’t been listening closely enough, or so Smith implied during our 20-minute chat. She reminded me that while on one hand she’s written and performed songs like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” or poems like “Piss Factory“, she’s always had it in her to downshift and settle into forms of prayer, both musical and meditative. Yes, prayer. Not the kind taught in Sunday school but her own form of it, her own method…which is not something she cares to define all that precisely. And I didn’t persist. Cool.

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It occured to me during yesterday’s JFK-to-LAX flight (departed around 5 pm Eastern, arrived at 7:40 pm Pacific) that we were crammed into a kind of sarcophagus. An airborne tomb for people pretending to be semi-comatose. Sitting coach on a cramped coast-to-coast flight is never pleasurable. You just have to Zen it out. You need to suck it in and button yourself down and endure it and don’t look at your watch too often or the flight’ll seem longer. Focus on your reading, listening…focus on that shitty little screen in front of you. I sat next to two 20-something women. The one next to me started eating some greasy takeout food (battered fish, fries, spicy ketchup) soon after we took off. The aroma was disgusting but there was nothing to do. Sure enough the guy in front of me eased his seat back…asshole!…but not as much as he could have….semi-asshole! I watched my True Confessions Bluray and crashed around 11 pm, or 2 am New York time.

Coach seating on a wide-body jet of some kind (a DC-10?) sometime in the mid ’60s. A wide-angle lens delivers a certain distortion but still…

No back-of-the-hand HE obit for the late Geoffrey Holder. The towering actor, choreographer, director, dancer, painter, costume designer, singer and voice-over artist had a joyful vibe. From today’s N.Y. Times obit: “Few cultural figures of the last half of the 20th century were as multifaceted as Mr. Holder, and few had a public presence as unmistakable as his, with his gleaming pate atop a 6-foot-6 frame, full-bodied laugh and bassoon of a voice laced with the lilting cadences of the Caribbean”…good writing! When I heard of his death I didn’t think so much of Holder’s 7-Up commercials or his supporting role as one of the Caribbean bugaboos in Live and Let Die. I recalled his performing “Under The Sea” and “Kiss The Girl,” the two best songs from The Little Mermaid, during the 1990 Oscar telecast. But you can’t find any videos or stills of this….odd.

Geoffrey Holder (1930 – 2014)

“She’s ‘Ollie’ to her husband and ‘Mrs. K’ to the students in her middle-school mathematics class, and her daughter-in-law insists on calling her ‘Mom.’ But audiences will forever know this unforgettable, irascible woman as Olive Kitteridge, thanks to the remarkably complex portrayal Frances McDormand delivers over the course of a four-hour HBO miniseries she optioned and developed herself, bringing aboard her Laurel Canyon helmer, Lisa Cholodenko, to direct. Even more so than 2011’s Mildred Pierce, this finely crafted, wonderfully cast meller suggests a promising new life for the women’s-picture genre on nets willing to let such stories breathe.” — from Peter Debruge‘s 9.1.14 Variety review, filed during the Venice Film Festival.

Olive Kitteridge, which follows the titular character over a quarter-century, is based on Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 novel, which is composed of 13 short stories. It costars Richard Jenkins, Bill Murray, Zoe Kazan and John Gallagher, Jr. The first two parts of the four-part series will air on Sunday, 11.2, parts 3 and 4 on Monday, 11.3.

The go-getting, well-liked but never particularly hip or innovative Paul Revere passed today (or was it yesterday?) at age 76. I always thought of Paul Revere and the Raiders as a fairly superficial white-boy band with an agreeably cranky metal-bass sound who got lucky with a few singles in the mid to late ’60s. (The enterprising Revere was the leader and keyboardist.) Their four best cuts were “Just Like Me” (’65) “Kicks” (’66) “Hungry“(ditto) and “Good Thing” (’67). I never a huge fan of Mark Lindsay‘s singing style but I always liked that Raider mix of dynamic harmonies and rumbling bassy chop-thunk. They had a nice tight sound. I know that the group never seemed to fit into the lefty-humanist anti-authority mold that 99.5% of musicians default to. “Kicks” and “Hungry” always struck me as conservative anthems. “Kicks” was a “just say no to drugs” song, of course. It was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and was reportedly offered first to The Animals, who wisely turned it down. (If there was one time in the history of Western Civilization to not record an anti-drug song, it was 1966.) And what are the lyrics to Mann and Weil’s “Hungry” (“If I break some rules along the way, well, ya gotta understand”) but a young man’s rationalization for greedy corner-cutting and playing dirty? Revere and the Raiders never seemed to really embrace “the ’60s.” They were talented opportunists who wanted to be popular and flush, and they did pretty well along those lines for two or three peak years. I’ve had this idea for years that Revere was a Republican (despite being a conscientious objector in his early 20s) but I can’t find any links right now to support that suspicion. Except for the fact that he’s been eulogized on a site called Reaganite Republican Resistance.

“Inherently and unfairly, timing counts in the Oscars. These days, potential winners try to land in the consciousness of voters sometime between Columbus Day and Thanksgiving. A movie that opens in the last couple weeks of December can’t hope to define the race, only to disrupt it, which is probably why no December release since Million Dollar Baby 10 years ago has won the big prize. However, a movie that opens as early as Boyhood did (on July 11) has almost as big a challenge. It doesn’t have to just beat every other film, it has to withstand them — and if it does, it then has to withstand complaints from people who will be bored by how long it’s been the front-runner. So it’s safer, and probably more accurate, to consider Boyhood an underdog right now. Just like Crash and The Hurt Locker were at this point in the year. That, too, makes it formidable. In October, a long shot is exactly what an Oscar contender wants to be.” — from Mark Harris‘s 10.2 Grantland column.

I was standing outside a pizza joint on 71st and Broadway and just gazing around and loving the way New York makes me feel. Sometimes it feels assaultive or I feel too whipped to engage, but rarely. Every time I step outside and hit the street it’s like being part of an unruly world-class orchestra. Just being here is enough. Most experiences seem to fade a bit as you get older but the old streets-of-Manhattan rumble feels exactly the same as it did when I was 13. The twee Brooklyn vibe isn’t the same. I love the way Manhattan energy ignores you and pushes in at the same time…the din and the smell and the way you just want to walk for hours or maybe forever. Which I do every time I’m here. It’s not that walking feels less attractive in Los Angeles but all I ever seem to do there is ride my scooter. When I have time to kill, I mean. I walk more on 24 Hour Fitness treadmills there than I do on the streets.

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I didn’t mean to sound uncool or disrespectful when I tapped out last night’s Inherent Vice riff. I said a couple of times that it was probably more my fault than Paul Thomas Anderson‘s that the film didn’t turn me on that much (although some of it definitely made me feel spacey and swoony and half-baked) and…you know, tested my patience and all. But that’s almost par for the course. Starting with Magnolia my initial exposure to Anderson’s films have felt like stretching exercises or mindfucks of one kind or another — never easy, always a climb or a tangle, always in front of the line and beckoning to the folks in the rear…c’mon, guys…don’t hang back. And then with the second or third viewing they seem more engaging, less gnarly…of course! But you always have to come to them — they never come to you. And that’s cool.

Prior to start of last night’s 9 pm Avery Fisher Hall screening of Inherent Vice.

I’m fully down with the notion (as I said last night) that Inherent Vice may kick into place for me during my second or third viewing, or certainly when I watch the Bluray. I started to read the Pynchon novel about a month ago but then I lost the will. But I have it on iBooks so there’s always the flight back to LA (departing today at 4:30 pm) or…you know, within the next few days. I just wish I could have been a little more engaged as it happened. I never felt like I was “in the car.” I constantly felt like I was running alongside or eating the exhaust.

I think it’s a foregone conclusion all around that Inherent Vice was made for the edgies…for those who think strange and rarely concentrate on the obvious. Joe and Jane Popcorn…who knows? Naah, I’m evading. Joe and Jane are either going to avoid this puppy like the plague or show up for the sake of Martin Short‘s seven-minute cameo and come out fuming or confused. Vice isn’t a soother but it sure is an eye-opener of sorts. It’s candy for the kind of people who are on the bandwidth, but how many would that be exactly?

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I need to think about Inherent Vice a bit before writing anything. It just broke an hour ago and then I just hopped on the train. I was thinking about it while I was watching but that only got in the way. A friend wrote and said “how was it?” Here’s what I wrote: “Oh, dear God. Maybe it’ll come into focus after I’ve seen it a second or third time, or when I catch in on Bluray and can access the subtitles. Maybe by then I’ll have grown enough as a person or as a moviegoer or as a dog catcher. Maybe someday I’ll be as perceptive as Drew McWeeny or Scott Foundas. One thing is for sure and that’s that tonight I just wasn’t hip or smart or observant enough to really get down with Inherent Vice. I kinda got where it was coming from but I couldn’t get to a place of delight. I certainly got portions of it. I know I chucked at a few lines. But I’m basically too fucking stupid and my ears are too full of wax or something. So it’s me — I’m the problem and not PTA. Vice is a meticulous recreation of an early ’70s film complete with dirt and scratch marks…it’s like you’re watching a semi-decent print of a film made in 1971 at the New Beverly in 1986. It really is an immersion and a half. Beautiful atmosphere, perfect Nixonian vibe, bleachy lighting scheme, ultra-dry humor, Aryans, dopers, a Neil Young tune or two, endless manner of perversity and duplicity and what-the-fuck-ity…but I couldn’t figure out a whole lot. Some but not enough. It’s in, it’s out, it’s back in again, it moves left and right, it drops its pants, it takes a hit, it bongs out again…it makes your brain feel like cheese that’s been left on the counter overnight, and it goes on for…what, two and a half hours? If only I was smarter…if only I could hear more of the dialogue…if only I had several lines of heroin to snort while I was watching it. You know what? Forget the plot. Solutions are for squares, man. Just submit to the period-ness and let that be enough. Let Joaquin Phoenix‘s mutton-chops rule. Doobies, sandals, hippie chicks, waves, the residue of Manson, shiny 1970 cars…all of it, dude. Be a “yes” person. (Clips of today’s press conference courtesy of Blackfilm‘s Wilson Morales.)

I won’t be seeing Inherent Vice for a couple of hours (it’s now 7:03 pm) but Xan Brooks’ tweet is perfect. And a technical violation of the embargo because it constitutes a comment. He’s saying that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film doesn’t add up in a whodunit sense, and if that kind of thing is a make-or-break then…what can I say? You’re probably not in the right head space, bro. Man, I mean.

Tweet from Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn: “THE BIG SLEEP, THE LONG GOODBYE, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, INHERENT VICE: Not a ranking, but a tradition.”