paint a different color on your front door

Promise I’ll get back to Capote eventually. First things first, however: last night I watched Fallen Angel, the new-ish (new to DVD, at least; I guess it was originally released in 2004) documentary about Gram Parsons. The cinematography and general putting-together of the film at times made me laugh — it had some of the trappings of your run-of-the-mill rock documentary, but shared just as many features with, say, a Rick Sebak joint. For a while I wasn’t sold on it, but the content is enough to make it worth seeing. I wasn’t particularly familiar with the bizarre events surrounding his death, and the way the filmmakers chose to handle it is slightly jarring, and makes the last 15 or so minutes of the film fairly riveting.

Throughout the film, his remaining family members are slowly pitted against his musician friends, and especially Phil Kaufman, but not in a dramatic way: their remarks about one another are simply slotted next to one another in quick succession, and I was a sucker for it — I felt really nervous at points, like a fight was about to break out in the middle of the movie. It was actually quite clever, as narrative structure is concerned, and made up for a lot of the amateurish feel of the actual shots and montages.

The other major weakness was that I didn’t feel like it explored some important parts of his life a lot — the way certain relationships were affecting others (there was plenty of talk about Keith Richards, but not so much about the ladies in his life, other than oblique references here and there), and the real importance of what he did musically and how it affected future musicians (this part almost felt as if it was assumed knowledge).

Reccommended? Sure. Nothing comprehensive, but worth checking out.

oppressive most oppressive

I was going to write about Capote, which I watched last night finally, but the it’s just too hot to really think hard enough to do that. When it’s this hot/humid, not only does the heat deplete my brain cells, all the noise from the fans in the house, and the constant sweep of the fan-circulated air on one part of my body or another sort of sends me into sensory overload. Thus, I get a little depressedish. So, I won’t even try. Expect nothing that makes sense until it cools down a little around here.

i can be your long lost pal

I’m currently sitting on the question of whether to pay $15 to go to the Red Krayola show at the Warhol on Friday. I’m leaning toward just sucking it up and laying down the money — I’m in plenty of debt already, so whatever, I can go into more, and I suspect if I don’t go I’ll regret it at some point in the future.

I’m also currently listening to that hilarious and sort of great but sort of bad Paul Simon song “You Can Call Me Al” courtesy the site where you can stream 500 classic albums that are compressed at such a low bitrate they sound like they’re coming through a tin can and string telephone system.