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Ram Dass reminds us why we'll always be enough and much more! $$PLAIN_TEXT_PREVIEW$$
MY FAVOURITE THINGS | Dr. Feelgood (Love is Serious Business)
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“You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success – none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always be here.”— RAM DASS
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I’ve been doing a whole lot of reflecting in the final week of the year, looking back on a rollercoaster of a decade come and gone. The twenty-teens heralded my coming of age and saw my twenties come and go. It witnessed my film school days and subsequent deportation from the US of A; oversaw the making of my debut feature film in a post-Communist country and my subsequent return to Paradise City (a.k.a Sydney, Australia). While the concept of time is a construct, it nonetheless plays an integral part in modern life and with every passing year, the journey seems to be getting faster — a reality that is both joyful and downright terrifying. Thankfully, I’m excited for the decade to come and know that so much beauty and truth awaits us all in the years to come. In case I don’t see you I hope you have a beautiful end of year celebration (be sure to let your hair down!) See you on the other side (of the decade)!! XOXOXOXO
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I was saddened to discover the passing of Baba Ram Dass this week after coming across a recent blog post on The Broad Place. While my knowledge of the American spiritual teacher was lacking, I’d been sincerely impressed with his life story after reading Michael Pollen’s How To Change Your Mind. Ram Dass, formerly known as Richard Alpert, was a Harvard professor who would come to play an influential role in the rise of psychedelics in the academic and spiritual world of 1960s America. Befriending Timothy Leary, a fellow professor during his tenure, Leary would introduce Alpert to psilocybin — a psychoactive component found within certain species of mushrooms — in the early 1960s. The experience would forever change the young professor, prompting years of feverish research and controlled studies which would lead to their mutual termination (the Dean of Harvard didn’t care for the drug himself). Alpert’s firing would begin the next chapter in his life with a trip in India in 1967 introducing him to the Maharajji, a venerable teacher, who sparked the young man’s spiritual awakening and handed down his new name. Ram Dass’ cult of personality exponentially rose through the seventies, propelled with the publication of the seminal Be Here Now in 1971. The story of Ram Dass is the story of the twentieth century and a resonant example that it’s never too late to change. While I’m yet to read his acclaimed work I’ve gone ahead and ordered a second-hand copy of his debut from World of Books.
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Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s blasphemous animated cartoon series is back for a fourth installment and it’s safe to say it’s as bonkers as ever. There is something about it that typifies this decade, a show drowning in irreverence and meta-commentary on our over-saturated culture. Harmon and Roiland would meet in the early noughties at Channel 101, a non-profit monthly short film festival that allowed audiences to green light their favourite screenings. The pair would collaborate on an early animated short for the festival that raised the roof and left the audience howling. It wasn’t until Harmon’s firing from running the television series Community that Adult Swim approached him about bringing a new series to life. It’s hard to explain why this television series turns me into a wide-eyed spectator. For one, I am drawn to its surrealist slant and its willingness to tear into the social fabric of our current moment. For another it serves as a figurative blanket in our hyper-rational present, filling the vacuum that science has generated in its rise to power. Just because we’re the only sentient creatures in the known universe doesn’t mean there isn’t room to laugh at the meaningless of life. Besides, what other show guest stars Elon Musk, one of the most innovative thinkers of the twenty-first century and still manages to keep its stripes! What an exciting time to be alive.
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To this day, Robert Towne enjoys a mythological status amongst Hollywood insiders for his contributions to the medium of screenwriting. That being said, I had no idea that the screenwriter behind Chinatown and Shampoo — two classics of the nineteen-seventies — would eventually get behind the camera in the nineteen-eighties. Tequila Sunrise is not your average late eighties shoot-em-up à la Lethal Weapon or Die Hard. Instead, this crime thriller takes a long and wistful detour into some seriously emotional territory. Love and lust lie at the heart of this three-way relationship that plays out between Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell and Melanie Pfeiffer. I’ve always had a soft spot for the way Hollywood depicted Hollywood in the MTV eighties, with its emphasis on eye-popping colours and heavy-handed visual tapestries (films like To Live and Die in L.A. and Colors knock it out the park). The legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall brings the City of Angels — specifically Manhattan Beach — to life in such vivid detail. It brought back warm memories of my own thesis production, of shooting under its iconic boardwalk. While the plot meanders at the best of times, watching Pfeiffer move back and forth between these two Hollywood hunks for two hours was something to behold. There’s a reason why this film cleaned up at the box office and it comes down to two words. Sex sells.
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This television show has been making the rounds in conversations wherever I go, so much so that it left me with a serious case of the FOMO’s. After streaming the first few episodes on SBS on Demand, I’m beginning to see the light. Kirsten Dunst continues to surprise me, bringing characters to the screen that have made me stop and reflect on her chameleon-like abilities in front of the camera. The series follows the life of a former beauty queen turned housewife whose overworked husband (Alexander Skarsgård) has become indebted to a pyramid scheme and is convinced his salvation lies in the hands of its enigmatic leader. When he suffers an unfortunate accident at the end of the first episode, (spoiler alert!) Dunst is left to pick up the pieces and get the job done right. I remember being mesmerized while watching her in the second season of Fargo opposite Jesse Plemons and was downright excited when the star-studded pair began sharing a bed off-camera too (can you believe they have a little baby boy now!). I know that Dunst has the chops to carry this season through without breaking a sweat and I’m particularly excited to see this superwoman decimate the entire male population of Orlando.
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My nostalgia has been getting the better of me in the final week of the decade. So much so that I stumbled back over one of my all time favourites. Listening to it brought so many memories bubbling to the surface and was akin to reuniting with an old friend. There is so much to savour on this 1970 LP from the former founder of The Mamas and the Papas, a record that seemingly captures magic in a bottle. The entire album is laced with a youthful irreverence, a lust for life and a desire to throw bad juju under the bus. John The Wolfking Of L.A. was Phillips’ debut outing as a solo artist after splitting with the band in 1968. There is a whole lot of darkness dancing right under the surface of these pop tunes, much of which was a reflection of his divorce to Michelle Phillips. I remember being stunned when an old friend put this album on for the first time. It unlocked something inside me. Helped me to comprehend how pain and trauma can be processed into something pure. While the album itself was not a commercial hitmaker, time has been exceptionally kind to this debut, placing it on the level with George Harrison’s break-out All Things Must Pass after his split from The Beatles. I can’t think of a better album to close out the year and bring on the roaring twenties.
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Alexandra Dean’s low-budget doco Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, released in 2017, rehabilitates the life of a Hollywood icon whose radiant beauty and exotic charm would become the fodder of future generations. I was particularly taken with Dean’s accounting of her early life. To witness a teenage Lamarr walking into a film studio in nineteen-thirties Berlin and demanding work is awe-inspiring. When she managed to pull off a similar feat with Louis B. Mayer, a founding father of MGM studios, I was sold. While Lamarr would consistenly accuse Mayer of blacklisting her for starring in Ecstasy — a provocative German film that Hitler would subsequently ban — her beauty was undeniable in front of the camera. Dean paints a portrait of an artist who chose to stand up for what she believed in regardless of the costs. She was a hyper-intelligent person whose zest for life brought the world’s most powerful people into her orbit. Upon meeting Howard Hughes in the 1930s, he indulged her passion for the sciences, endowing her with equipment that would help her patent an idea that still plays an intrinsic role in the development of bluetooth and WiFi technology (in turn she helped him re-design the wings of his planes). The starlet would even try her hand at producing two independent epics for the screen, both of which ultimately failed commercially. For all her strength, Lamarr would come to pay a heavy price for her stubborn refusal to play by the rules. Her fall from grace, the result of several failed marriages and film projects, led to her filing bankruptcy and suffering a mental breakdown for which she never recovered altogether. The aging actress would become a recluse in the ensuing decades and would succumb to her death a few weeks into the twenty-first century. The iconoclastic feminist was eighty-five. “I don't believe in life after death. But I do believe in some grinding destiny that watches over us on earth. If I didn't, the safety valve would give and the boiler would explode.” — Hedy Lamarr
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