new york stubble

It was strange to arrive in New York the other night with absolutely no fan-fare: no film festival to go to, no friends to meet, no hotel to check into and nobody waiting to drive me someplace. Just me and my suitcase and the keys to an empty apartment. The cab driver said I looked like a New Yorker and assumed I was just coming home from a trip, but knowing that I couldn’t really give directions to were I was staying I figured I shouldn’t play into his misconceptions. “Nope, I’m just a tourist.”

Three days later I haven’t really done much of anything. A couple short walks around the neighborhood, a trip to the grocery store, and lots of sitting in the local coffee shop. Day one was sort of disastrous; not only did I leave my razor in Las Vegas, but at some point on my Sunday walk through Red Hook I also lost my journal. This journal was fairly new and not too established, containing more notes about my screenplay than potentially embarrassing personal anecdotes, but it is always disconcerting to loose a journal. A combination of all the lost memories along with the idea of some stranger reading your thoughts is both tragic and humiliating. But perhaps even more jarring is this lost razor, and the slow realization I am having that New York City is anti-razor. All I want is a new Gillette Sensor, a quality, no-frills razor that I have been using for the past ten years. Razors are expensive, and these days it seems like the only razors you can buy are either these stupid new, super-high tech razors that you put a battery in, or the environmentally disastrous disposable razors that you throw away after you use a few times. Both are completely unacceptable in my book, but after spending an afternoon in Manhattan going to every convenience and drug store that I could find I have come up with nothing. Everyone sold the replacement cartridges, but they were out of stock of the actual handle-part of the razor. K-Mart, Rite-Aid, Duane’s Pharmacy, the Dollar Discount, they all left me hanging with an itchy neck. Perhaps New York wants me to grow my beard back? I don’t know, but this lack of razor blade selection is driving me crazy. Where is my pal Fred Meyer when I really need him.
While roaming the streets in search of a razor I called my old friend Ed Halter who is a film critic for the Village Voice. He is a pretty clean-cut guy and I thought that maybe he’d have a lead or two for me, but alas, his suggestions proved futile as well. However, Ed was on his way to Anthology Film Archives to see Dennis Hopper’s 1971 film “The Last Movie” and I figured that sounded like a good thing to get in on, so I ditched my aspirations of finding the razor and busted tail towards the theatre.
“The Last Movie” has got to be one of the most over-the-top crazy psychedelic movies I have ever seen. The film is about a Hollywood stuntman (played by Hopper) who moves to Peru to set up shop and work for movie productions being filmed in the area, but during his tenure he starts to notice the film companies’ negative impact on the local community’s culture. The scenery is incredible and much of the film is shot documentary style with hand held camera work moving through the streets, markets, and back alleys of rural towns in the Peruvian Andes. But the film is truly insane. Imagine the graveyard acid trip scene in Easy Rider and then draw that out for two hours. I imagine that Hopper was influenced by films like El Topo or some of the early surrealist films by Buniel, and at moments The Last Movie really worked. The film had great sound design and disjointed, random editing that created very confusing but rhythmic interchanges. You never were quit sure what was happening, but it still felt intriguing. But too many times the deep tranced out vibe of the film would either be awkwardly interrupted or simply go on for too long and become boring. Ed mentioned that the film’s narrative didn’t really hold together, or at least didn’t come to a climax that felt worthy of all the anticipation, and we both agreed that the movie felt like it just got completely out of control- like an interesting, ambitious idea that just couldn’t hold itself together. But regardless, it was great seeing this old print in the theatre, and it’s definitely a movie worth checking out.