Swept up in The Fall

The most beautiful film I may have ever seen is Tarsem Singh;s The Fall.  Many who saw Singh's previous film The Cell with J-Lo and Vincent D'inofrio have marveled at Singh's capacity for creating imprcably layered and stunning visual images.  The Fall brings it tenfold. 

The Fall is a tale within a tale, initially set in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s, wherein a little Serbian girl, Alexandria, has a chance meeting with a depressed and death-driven stunt double, Roy.  Both characters suffer their injuries from a fall, one picking oranges in the LA groves, one on a horse off a train bridge in an attempt to end his life.  Ever suicidal over not only the loss of the woman he loved but also now the movement of his lower limbs, Roy lures Alexandria into his confidence with a marvelous tale, in hopes that she will steal enough morphine tablets for him to finally kick the bucket.

The tale he tells is an epic, with elements from around the world.  What Roy describes, however, is not completely what we see, because the masterful visuals of the tale are through the imaginative young eyes of Alexandria.  Roy's characters, for instance, include an "indian wounded over the loss of his squaw," but Alexandria, whose family immigrated from Persia, conjures him as katara-wielding man, clothed in fine vibrant silk.

The Exile of Anna Prucnal

Anna Prucnal plays secondary heroine Anna Planeta in - you guessed it - Dusan Makavejev's 1974 cinematic masterpiece, Sweet Movie.  

Looking lovely as a young lass, pre-Sweet Movie.  She was a fairly prominent Polish stage and cinema actress and had a decent career as a singer.
At some point in the late 1960s/early 1970's, she found herself playing a scandalous role in one of the most talked about-not-talked about films to ever be made - Sweet Movie, near and dear to the hearts and minds of BC/HF.
Curiously enough, her character in the film would somewhat foreshadow what she would experience upon its release.

Her role is that of Anna Planeta, free-thinking, Marx-loving captain of the ship Survival, welcome nowhere on land.  She encounters the highly sexualized ex-sailor Potemkin, who she invites on board her candy-laiden vessel upon which they develop a very passionate, ultimately fatal relationship.

Oh yeah! That is totally sugar that they are covered in. Fascinating. Delicious.

The bed of sugar returns...this time more sinister. Too many sweets will rot your teeth, Potemkin.

This is possibly one of the most alarming stills from the film. Looks innocent enough, or does it? One of the main themes in Sweet Movie is sexuality, and often this sexuality is confusing or frightening to the recipient. Miss World Virginity, Carol Laure, has a very unpleasant honeymoon experience which leads to another odd sexual encounter with a certain Mr. Muscle.

This blog, however, is not about Carol Laure. It is about Anna Prucnal. In the questionable photo, she is seducing a small group of young (did I mention young!?) boys. On her ship of death, there is plenty of candy and sugary sweets to spare. Are the sweets there to interest the children or for Anna Planeta's pleasure?

 Either way, little boys like candy. Little boys also like semi-nude women, and Anna's got that covered as well.

Before you leave in utter disgust, take a moment to think. Cohorts have expressed to me that they felt most sexual as a child. Freud certainly got into that shit. We are all sexual as youngsters, though not necessarily involving others. Then we grow older, and we are taught to be embarassed. We might not like the idea of childhood sexuality, but it exists. That's the beauty of Sweet Movie. It shows the ugly truth, from the Katyn Forest Massacre (which had not been formally acknowledged at the time of the films release) to absurd displays of American consumerism.

Well, the Polish government didn't see things that way...

The government thought the film was "pornographic" even though it is only implied that Anna has sex with with the children, as opposed to graphic images of child nudity or anything of the like. The children appeared fully clothed, looking curiously at Anna. The rest is in your filthy imagination after Anna pulls the curtain. She does have sex with a grown man, but come on! It's 1974, people! The government of Poland also saw the film as "anticommunist" because it is heavy with political allegory.

So, what's a country like Poland to do?

Ban Anna from using her Polish passport, of course! Can't go home. Poland gave her the finger. That's like getting kicked out of New Jersey. Humiliating, but worse than that was that due to this political bullshit, Anna could not be at her dying mother's side. Like her character, Anna Planeta, she was unwelcome and forced to wander a world filled with death. France didn't seem to mind Miss Prucnal, and she continued to have a career there and in several surrounding countries, but spastic fans like BC/HF will mourn the ignorance of her home country as Anna mourns the loss of her mother.

miniature update

 Remember that one time I started egg vignettes?  Well now they are finished and on display in the hf/bc laboratory.  There are 2 more unfinished eggs, but no one wants to see those yet, so here are the duck pond and arctic hare eggs.  Not for Easter.

Pelicans Eating Things They Shouldn't

Mystified as I often am by nature documentaries, I was spending a pleasant evening watching Life, Planet Earth's spin-off series.  While being informed by Oprah's commanding voice, I was shocked and appalled to find out a new and gruesome tidbit that has resulted among animals due to overfishing.  Lately, pelicans in certain areas have begun to prey on the young of smaller birds nesting on neighboring islands to their own water-locked nurseries.  They swoop over and pluck the chick up in their fleshy bill, and therein it flails, almost perfectly outlined and distinguishable in their weird neck sacks.  Then they feed them to their own young.  Terrifying, no?

Here is the video for you to watch it yourself...

Here at BC/HF, we could go on and on about our distress related to global warming, over population, the horrors of the food industry, and so on.  Let it suffice for now to say that incidents of this type - seabird unnaturally pitted against fellow seabird - are popping up everywhere as a result of man-made destruction.  Many scientists have agreed that most fish being bought and sold on the market today - and that includes canned tuna - is not safe to eat because of conditions in fisheries, let alone being taken away from the thousands of species who also depend on the fish as a vital source of life and energy.
This blog entry is primarily comical - most beings without hands use their mouths to explore, and here are many pictures of pelicans doing the same - but its roots are in the sobering notion of just how far humanity has led itself and its fellow creatures.

Most likely being preyed upon by this bird really, really. fucking hurts.  I know you don't have hands and have to use your mouth to explore things, but c'mon maan..

A Very Vintage Easter

We at Holdfast/Bellacozy have always grown up celebrating easter in fairly conventional American ways.  Now that we have grown and experienced life, we have, let's say, less American views.  We are into it less for the spiritual reasons, although identify much more with the Pagan fertility, etc. viewpoint.  Our appreciation for it is purely based on the saturated, unrelated features - namely the rabbits and chicks.

In other nations who celebrate easter, the non-jesus cultural icons are just as absurd as our own.  In France for instance, rather than an easter bunny, a giant chocolate flying bell flies through the countryside delivering fish-shaped candy treats into the shoes of little girls and boys who have leftth

Color me anything

Bellacozy/Holdfast live to behold.  Images of all sorts rule our lives and a strong component we look for is color.
As evidenced in many contemporary art pieces, color decisions can make rubbish art much more pleasing to the eyes.  People like Mark Rothko and Joseph Albers have made a name for themselves just by having good color sense - and little else.
Color is something that doesn't come naturally, and BC/HF, in their own art creation, were pretty bad at it for a while.  After you recognize enough examples of good color pairing, though, it has begun to slowly set in.  Though it may be tough to create good color pairings of our own, to recognize them is an instantaneous human act.

One of HF/BC many areas of interest is Synesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.  This creates the amazing sensation of tasting color or seeing smells.  It is difficult for those not afflicted with the condition to even fathom, but one might agree that the prospect is fascinating and highly desireable.

Didi Conn only had bubblegum hair for one number in Grease, but I always thought it suited her better than being blonde or red.

BC/HF love to look at nail polish, specifically because it immediately illustrated the product - pure color. Similarly to paint swatches in a hardware store, we could look at them for hours, and always take them.

In nature, the importance of color is highly evident.  In most species of birds, the males' worth is based upon flashy displays using beautiful plumage.  In other animals, their outward appearance is ruled by the seasons.  Sometimes, color and pattern can mean life or death.  To humans, most camouflage attemts and artificial eyes are successfully deceptive, but have only been made so after millions of years of life dependent on color.

Many bakers have produced or attempted production of rainbow cakes.  I know they have a lot of dye in them, but you better believe I'd still eat it.  This is not synesthesia.

Natural color phenomena is not limited to plants and animals, either.  Since the dawn of time, minerals have created gorgeous displays in stones, caves, sand, and riverbeds.

The flamboyant cuttlefish can change not only its color but also its texture, to warn predators of its venom, or to avoid them by blending in to its surroundings.

One of Banksy's first exhibitions, featuring an elephant in the room, painted to match the beautigul wallpaper.

Much to Holdfast's significant other's discontent, we are very into wrist watches, and prefer to wear two or more at a time.  Striking color makes telling time all the better.

Thanks to modernity, both candy and pills now come in a range of delightfully bright and appealing colors, so much so that they bear a striking resemblance to one another.

Holdfast is having a candy buffet at her wedding and Bellacozy is super-stoked.

Minerals and bacteria at work in places populated by humans change the appearance of things, too.  Rust has long been a thing of beauty to some, and backbreak to others.  A method of acheiving a rusty patina on the fly is to douse the metal with racehorse urine.

Color seems to carry a lot of weight with regard to the appeal of food, as well.  Scientists say that red and orange make us hungry, and I find food with a variety of colors to be far more appetising pre-consumption than a plate of bland.