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cinemamablog · 5 years ago

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Lana Del Rey Goes to the Movies

I use roughly 1/16th of my iPhone’s storage space to hold my collection of Lana Del Rey’s music, including her (misspelled) self-titled album Lana Del Ray AKA Lizzy Grant and over a hundred of her leaked, unreleased tracks. (If you have an MP3 of “Yosemite” or “Life is Beautiful”... Hit me up, please.) My husband teases me because I have a LanaBoards account so I can read - and occasionally participate in - the pre-release gossip months, sometimes years, before the next Lana album drops.

Just like I make no secret of my Lana Del Rey obsession, Ms. Lizzy Grant pulls no punches when it comes to her idolatry of the silver screen and Hollywood lore. With songs aptly titled “Hollywood,” “Hollywood’s Dead,” and “Super Movie,” she wears her movie loving heart on her sleeve. Lana makes references to movies, iconic (usually dead) actors, and David Lynch throughout her discography. She has also contributed to countless recent movies, providing sultry vocals while matching the vibe of the films, like on the soundtracks for The Great Gatsby, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Big Eyes. In fact, Mary Ramos, Quentin Tarantino’s music supervisor, revealed last summer that Lana submitted music for Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. She also reportedly recorded a song for the James Bond franchise at one point. A casual fan of motion pictures, Lana is not. To which I say: girl, same.

Lana frequently references to Marilyn Monroe in her music, always in a very blatant (some might say distasteful) manner. “If I call you on the telephone, I might overdose, ‘cause I’m strong but I’m lonely, like Marilyn Monroe,” she mews in an otherwise sweet love song named after the actress. She also references suicide and Monroe in her single “Body Electric”: “Elvis is my daddy, Marilyn’s my mother,” she sings in the first verse. By the second verse, she sings “Diamonds are my bestest friend [Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, anyone?]. Heaven is my baby, suicide’s her father, opulence is the end.” On a less morbid note, she also pays homage to Monroe in the intro of her National Anthem music video. In the black and white clip, Lana sings “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” a la Marilyn Monroe, except instead of JFK on the receiving end, she serenades rapper A$AP Rocky.

The reason for Lana’s attraction to Marilyn’s mythos seems obvious to me. They both created their persona by studying the stars that came before them: Marilyn by emulating Jean Harlow, Lana by paying her respects to Marilyn, Sharon Tate, and other young movie stars known for the tragedies that marked their lives. The cycle continues into the 21st century.

Lana has a few other movies and film people that reappear throughout her song catalogue: David Lynch, Scarface, and Easy Rider. I find this appropriate, as all three present the viewer with stylized visions of how the American Dream can go wrong. Lynch explores the nightmarish underbelly of the suburban lifestyle, Scarface follows Al Pacino’s immigrant character up a violent ladder of success, and Easy Rider glorifies living on one’s own terms, a freedom for which the main characters pay dearly.

Lana covered the titular song of David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet on her first studio EP, Paradise. At first, I thought that maybe she just likes the song, but then, on her second studio album, Ultraviolence, she gave an undeniable nod to Lynch that marked her for a fan. In the song “Sad Girl,” she sings: “He’s got the fire and he walks with it,” a blatant reference to the phrase “fire walk with me” from Lynch’s project Twin Peaks. Both Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks focus on the sexual, drug-fueled violence lurking just under the surface of an otherwise idyllic community, much like Lana’s storytelling through song.

“Scarface, sacrifice, sold my soul to make it nice. It was worth it, paid the price, life is death when blow is life,” Lana sings on an unreleased track called, you guessed it, “Scarface.” The lyrics of the song follow the same themes as the movie, describing a life characterized by mob violence and stoned patriotism. Lana also references the De Palma remake in another unreleased song, “Never Let Me Go”: “Like they say in Scarface, kid, you can push your drugs and I can make it big.” I’m pretty sure they don’t say that in Scarface, but still, the sentiment remains the same: the road to the American Dream (and doom) can be paved with drugs, money, and luck.

“Is the sun in your eyes, easy rider?” Lana asks in the unreleased “Angels Forever, Forever Angels.” She sings in the bridge, “Paradise is a hell-colored flame sky. Is it nice to feel free and wild?” throwing out a subtle, decades-old reference to the theme song of Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture hit Easy Rider, “Born to be Wild.” On her third studio album, Honeymoon, Lana recycles the reference on the track “Freak”: “Sun reflecting in your eyes, like an easy rider.” Like Blue Velvet and Scarface, Easy Rider shows the American Dream onscreen as a drug-induced fantasy that can’t end well, but the ride is worth it.

Occasionally, Lana sings about the real dark side of Hollywood, where the bad decisions and late nights aren’t a fun game or even a choice anymore, but rather the price of artistic success, demanded of her by men with sinister intentions. In Lana Del Ray AKA Lizzy Grant’s “Put Me in a Movie,” Lana teases a powerful man in the movie industry: “Come on, I know you like little girls... Put me in a movie.” Some of Lana’s other lyrics came under fire in the media shortly after the accusations against Harvey Weinstein publicly surfaced. Lana sings the lyrics in question during the bridge for the already-controversial song “Cola”: “Harvey’s in the sky with diamonds and he’s making me crazy.” She’s since claimed in interviews that she won’t sing “Cola” anymore due to the backlash, but I think the song has made its point: Lana’s always known that men like Harvey have the money and power (“diamonds”) to drive desperate people crazy.

In her penultimate album, Lust for Life, Lana doesn’t let up on the Hollywood imagery. In the album’s teaser trailer, Lana lives inside of the Hollywood sign, stirring a witchy potion and pondering the fate of the world from above the LA lights. She climbs that same Hollywood sign with the Weeknd in the music video for the titular song, “Lust for Life.” While the album begins on this upbeat note, by the third song, “13 Beaches,” we return to a familiar sense of isolation and sadness. An audio clip from the cult classic movie Carnival of Souls plays over string instrumentation: “I don’t belong in the world. That’s what it is. Something separates me from other people. Everywhere I turn, there’s something blocking my escape.” (This monologue is only available in the deleted scenes of the recent Criterion Blu-ray release and in unrestored YouTube videos. Lana knows her independent horror movies.) This cinematic depression haunts the rest of the album, with lyrics like “Cherry”’s “My celluloid scenes are torn at the seams, and I fall to pieces” and the disturbing Charles Manson references in my all-time favorite LDR song, “Heroin”: “Manson’s in the air and all my friends have come ‘cause they still feel him here… Something ‘bout the sun has made these kids get scary. Oh, writing in blood on the walls and shit…” Even when Lana tries to shift her audience’s focus to her lust for life, she can’t help but revert to her old melancholic ways. But as she sings in the final bridge of “Heroin”: “I hope that I come back one day to tell you that I really changed.”

“You move to California, but it’s just a state of mind,” Lana sings on her latest album, Norman Fucking Rockwell, and the rest of the album echoes that sentiment. Her disenchantment with the City of Angels has been a running thread through her discography and yet she returns to it over and over, in songs like “Bartender” and “California.” On Honeymoon, she sang “I will never sing again. With just one wave, it goes away.” On Lust for Life, she sang “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sick of it.” Now on NFR, she sings “I guess that I’m burnt out after all.” But after three albums of threatening to leave it all behind, I don’t think Lana Del Rey will ever really be done with Hollywood. In the words of the last song on NFR: Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like Lana to have… but she has it.

#music #critique

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snowleopard59 · 6 years ago

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follow that car

It’s a coverup, the whole thing is one big coverup and almost everyone knows it but almost no one wants to admit it. At eight years old he heard on the news that the files related to the JFK assassination would be sealed for 75 years. Why? At eight years old he answered his own question and promptly covered it up within himself as deep and sealed as the files themselves.

Still walking, he ascended a rise in the road which revealed a large sprawling cemetery. The first tombstone had his name on it- the epitaph read – he died unhappy because he didn’t try hard enough. He went to the next- it read - he died unhappy because he tried too hard. And then the next – he was to blame for everything. And then the next - he was not to blame for anything. Rows upon rows of tombstones, all with his name on them.

I couldn’t read anymore. I looked away, and saw not two vultures, but now two crows perched on an iron railing. Wait, this is the cemetery of past lives, that’s the only possible explanation. He came to a section marked- suicides. The first stone read – he thought he was going to get away from it all. He was wrong.

And then the next – he thought this would help him figure it all out once and for all. He was wrong again. And then the next – if you’re reading this, you’re still alive, so don’t do what I did. Or do, I don’t really care. What? No karma, no suffering depression as penance for committing suicide so many times in his past lives? He walked on, saw more epitaphs – he led an undistinguished life. But he was happy. He was kind. He helped people when he could, but he did nothing to write about in any history book.

And then he was aware a Cadillac El Dorado had slowly pulled up beside him on the narrow asphalt between the tombstones, it’s engine silent as the cemetery grass itself. The car had stopped that day in Dealey Plaza, too, although that part of the film was taken out. You hear what might be a shot and you put the brakes on? Or did he mean to do it? El Dorado; the golden one.

The driver, a dark-haired woman, asked him if he could drive her to Las Vegas. She said she wasn’t feeling well, she tried calling 911 but her cell phone battery was dead. She sat there briefly like a great blue heron perched on a favorite branch above a favorite fishing spot; silent and surmising the variables.

He said he would be happy to drive her, adding how familiar she looked, and that the last time he’d seen her she’d looked so sad. She just slid into the passenger seat leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She loves me, he thought. He knew it, he felt it, that she loved him, that she really did even though she might not outwardly show it. So many things didn’t show, didn’t seem to make sense, any sense at all apparently.

Like Catholic confession and the JFK files just to name two. Moreover, as he stole glances at her from watching the apparently interminable road stretched out ahead of them to the dusky desert horizon, he knew he loved her he really did. Scott really loved Zelda, Zelda really loved Scott, but they burnt out on their lifestyle.

She loved him he loved her but they were driving this Cadillac down a dangerous road. Never one to not fall prey to the most outlandish mental meanderings he considered that he had been surreptitiously programmed by the CIA rogues, all still alive and well, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the infamous assassins and usurpers of governments in the 50s and 60s and 70s, that when he heard a loud pop he would stop the car.

And when he stopped the car that would allow the shooter a clean shot. That’s what they did to Greer. Like Sirhan, like Ruby, a hypnotic trigger to behave a particular, demonic way. Child’s play for the LSD scientists and behavioral modification experts. But it went deeper than that. Much deeper. He loved her she loved him and what they were doing, despite the outward appearance of apparent suffering, had a point.

All suffering then must have a point. Holocaust suffering had a point Hemingway’s suicide had a point, Zelda insanity and Scott alcoholism had a point. It was to achieve a better result. For me and the woman it was to live out our years without having to work or if we wanted to work to work at something we enjoyed and which made much more money than what we used to work at that we didn’t enjoy.

It was the holy grail, the alchemists stone – you don’t get that at Wal-Mart. It takes suffering apparently. Maybe there’s another way but so far humans have only been able to come up with suffering. Because direct knowing is too much of a shock- well some people can do it but most are fried- and then he remembered waking up from naps and contemplations with the startling energy of an electrical shock.

He would flee from that consciousness; it was too much he was not strong enough how do you get strong enough to withstand the full energy of God to put it a certain way- you suffer- a little or a lot – you can build strength other ways but you have to be able to withstand the energy. And then she told him telepathically that she was the lady of life’s lake.

That the nature of yin and yang, the truth of duality was as the sages of the east and many others knew for eons, was that there is a yielding and a forward motion. Souls incarnate as forward motion male energy and life is yielding feminine energy but they mix and they change and the truth and wisdom of it is to make a dance, a loving dance.

Rumi and the Sufis tuned in to this most poetically of course; to love all life to seek to please it as a seeking to please a lover so that then it seeks to please you back. Eyes still closed, she just smiled. They both knew the, they both knew when they got in the car together that afternoon.

Don’t put the brakes on! Speed up, speed up dammit! He heard himself say, in a dream. And he was in the car, and he felt the pain of the bullet and knew the driver had slowed down, to a stop even, so as to assure the shooter the kill shot. But there were still a few seconds left. But nobody’s going to save us now he thought.

May as well start carving that tombstone now. Checkmate is checkmate, that’s just how it is. For now. She woke up, she knew he wouldn’t stop the car until they got there. Well, maybe to pee. It would be ok to pee in the desert. The desert would appreciate it probably.

But she wouldn’t have to try to jump out of the car this time. Better to run away and live to fight another day. Demosthenes, 338 B.C. Oh well those Greek philosophers had an answer for everything didn’t they? No, they didn’t, they were stumbling around like we all have been forever, only occasionally tripping across a jewel. A particularly luminous seashell on our stoned walks on the beach.

We pick it up, feel it, look at it, sense it, maybe smell it, but mostly, know it. This is it, our shell, our special shell. We put it in our pocket and walk on, walk home, to our studio apartment maybe, put it on a shelf or in a drawer and forget about it. But now, he remembered the seashell in the drawer. It was shaped somewhat like a classic 1955 El Dorado Cadillac.

He knew who he was, he knew who she was, he knew why they were in the Cadillac and where they were going. He didn’t know how he knew only that he knew. This was going to take some getting used to, because most people could not be told these things he knew now. Socrates, remember? It wasn’t that he thought that highly of himself, just that he wanted to stay alive awhile longer, especially if it might be with her.

Yes, she’s married but she might not be later. Or maybe they could just be friends he thought. He knew she was well-read; literature, history, philosophy. She probably could change the oil in the Caddy as well if she had to, which she never would. Because of course, she was also rich.

But since that day she had been skeptical about letting other people drive her. Ok maybe they won’t shoot you but they stop the car at the worst moment. They’d both seen the original, unaltered film. The car comes to a complete and total stop. The car and the country.

The fact that she let him drive her was an awesome display of trust in his ability to protect her. If she needed protecting, which she didn’t now, but it was a good feeling, a warm gesture after so many disappointments. The sun was coming up, they were approaching Las Vegas. Of all places. They should have just called it El Dorado, the lost city of gold, or city of lost gold.

It all depended on your definition of gold, and lost, and found. Are we really locked into pay as you go spiritual growth or lack thereof as he, and so many others had been taught? You’re sworn to secrecy, because, again, Socrates, Galileo, JFK, well you know the list.

But you go ahead, shout it from the rooftops if you want, and then, after they drag you down and William Wallace you, or Joan of Arc, or, well you know the list. Then you can come back and not get in the car if you don’t want to, but sooner or later, something will get you, if only your own reliance on prescription meds.

Sir Henry Neville could write Othello and all the rest today without fear or trembling of being imprisoned in the tower of London. He would have to contend with the tower of Babel still. No need to waste money on a ghost nom de plume pseudonym Shakespeare that would go on through centuries to come as the imprimatur of great literature.

No matter, Sir Henry knows who wrote what. They crossed the city limits, and then were in town. He pulled the car up to a decrepit dilapidating motel called the Blue Angel. They parked, got out, went into room five. A 20-year-old man was there crying on the bed.

The room glowed with warm, soothing Himalayan salt lamp light. How could such a room, in such a place and time, for such a sad young man, glow? Sufis again – when the heart weeps for what it has lost the spirit laughs for what it has found.

She took out her phone and showed him the most recent text from her husband. It simply said all is well. When did she charge the battery he wondered? And then he knew. And then she went into the bathroom and came out with a warm washcloth which she placed on the young man’s forehead.

He breathed deeply, relaxed, and fell asleep. Their work here was done. They went back out to the parking lot and got in the car again. The young man was the young him, of course, broke and depressed in Las Vegas without a fake i.d.

Creating one had been a waste of time. No one asked him for his i.d. They were happy to take his meager earnings at 20 years old as they would be at 21 and beyond. Days later, bleary eyed from exhaustion and weeping in some end of the world place like Tonopah or Winnemucca, however…

Playing nickel slots in the bus station, an ancient security guard asked him for i.d. Heart still weeping, spirit at that point couldn’t help but laugh. But now, he was with her and they were at Caesar’s. She had reluctantly agreed but insisted on choosing the game.

Fine. Roulette. A little illusion of European elegance in this corporate rodeo borne of mobster roots and rootless mobs. Here, no clocks, ultra-oxygenated air, and a wildly changing assortment of other psychotropic influences, they would put it all on one roulette number.

Lose. Of course. 38 to 1 odds, c’mon! Except of course right now in this cosmic non-duality state of mind and being they couldn’t pick the wrong number, just couldn’t. They picked 17. 17 came up. She gave it all to the roulette dealer.

A middle-aged woman whose credit card debt was almost the exact amount of the payoff and who needed to see a doctor about her bipolar condition but had no medical coverage. Back to the Cadillac. And the winding road out of town to a place called the Mt. Charleston lodge.

They were late; no, they were right on time, for a wedding. The crowd was already gathering. He didn’t really like crowds but this one was different, this one would help not hurt. He hoped Elvis would be officiating; real Elvis not some faux Vegas Elvis impersonator.

Real Elvis had a spiritual side that got lost rather quickly. And then found. There he was. Real? Real enough to officiate this wedding. They stood in the back, and then were called to the front as the witnesses. They knew the couple being married and they knew how much in love they were. And they knew, like Elvis, there would be some rough edges to smooth out.

But if Elvis could do it, and, obviously, he had. He stood there, young, slender, strong, vibrant, the sound simply surging from him even as all in the crowd and wedding party were silent, sensing the ceremony soon to begin. Best wedding I’ve ever been to, he thought.

I ought to know, she thought. And then he saw the man from the all the films and photographs walk up to her, and they were together again. Resplendent as usual in his blue suit, a man not just for all seasons and all countries but all times.

That’s why he was there. He was her bodyguard for the short trip. He helped her drive, she helped him know. Helped him know about the coverup, about why he knew there was one, and why, once he knew just how absolute it was, he knew what to do, and what not to do about it. He stayed behind now with the rest of the wedding party, including preacher Elvis, and watched them walk away together.

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alizasprague111-blog · 7 years ago

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