The Madison blogger triple feature.

As predicted yesterday, I got everything done but hanging that damned blind. The Bolognese sauce was cooked and consumed. Pasta chosen for the sauce: rombi! I'm guessing that's Italian for rhombus, and who wouldn't want intensely delicious meat sauce served on equilateral parallelograms? The plan was to eat tasty food from bowls while watching movies on TV. I had my DVD player loaded up with some of my official favorites (as noted in my profile).

My fellow bloggers live-blogged the event, but, having gotten up at 3 a.m. and worked hard all day, I was too groggy to blog (and too bloggy to grog!). Nina's account is here, here, and here. The other blogger I cannot link to without pre-clearance. That's her policy, which I follow along with a policy of my own: no!

We played a triple feature, during which I took, oh, maybe, ten short naps. The first film was "Grey Gardens" -- because, really, why not confront your deep fears about decay while eating meat sauce? You can laugh and gasp at the cellulite and cat shit and the raccoons in the attic, but at some point you must feel the pain of your own anxieties and succumb to the intimacy of the humanity of Big Edie and Little Edie. "It's so hard to keep the line between the past and the present."



If I had been more awake, I would have insisted on following up on the decay theme with the other great movie about decay, "Decasia," but the un-spontaneously-linkable blogger had smuggled in "Hair." So bring on the hippies, hopping and jumping around NYC in the Broadway style made famous in "West Side Story." Just as urban gangmembers don't leap about balletically, real hippies had none of the wholesome peppiness displayed by the performers in "Hair."



The un-spontaneously-linkable one sang along with the inspirational songs: "I got my guts (I got my guts)/I got my muscles (muscles)/I got life (life)/Life (life)/Life (life)/LIFE!" So much for my decay theme! Could you be any more life affirming? The film has that candy-colored hippie philosophy that nonhippies are all up-tight straights who have no life at all, but they only need to see the light, let their "shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen" hair down, and become hippies, and then they too could surely live. Life!

"Hair" might be the antithesis to "Grey Gardens," but remember the "Grey Gardens" scene where Little Edie sings and dances? Is there really such a distance between her and dancing, romping hippies?

Are you up for a triple feature? You over there, dozing on the chair arm? You said you weren't kicking us out until midnight! That's quite true, so here is movie three, another one of my favorites, the Errol Morris concoction "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control."



How does this third movie fit with the other three? Well, how do topiary, wild-animal taming, robots, and naked mole rats go together? Errol Morris weaves those things together, and if I wanted to prolong this post, I'm sure I could think of some reasons "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" goes with "Grey Gardens" and "Hair." Naked mole rats have no hair... I'll let you do the official Madison blogger triple feature and find the connections. And feel free to cook up some parallelograms and make some Bolognese sauce. The sauce recipe is in here:



UPDATE: Tonya, the erstwhile un-spontaneously-linkable blogger, has rescinded her pre-clearance policy, thus allowing me to link to her live-blogging of last night's triple feature, which includes a lot of (sort of) transcription of the conversation, including my obsession with the position of Treat Williams's bellybutton, and Nina and Tonya's interest in other Williams body parts.