Friday, 26 January 1996

(Rewrite this anemic Sundance crap—even if it’s not true—and add stuff I wouldn’t have known at the time, i.e. Tokyo Fist by director of Tetsuo movies/Iron Man or whatever—a great antidote to the overdose on cream filled pastry horns that was Renée Zellweger.)

It’s Friday morning, and I'm drinking coffee in our hotel room at the Treasure Mountain Inn in Park City, Utah. I'll try to go backwards with the bizarre things I can remember over the last few days—at least until I'm interrupted again with some bizarre thing, which I’ll perhaps recount at the time. Anyway, I’m becoming afraid I won’t get to remember everything, but then I already don’t already remember names—I mean I forget them five minutes later. In the movie The Player, everyone introduced themselves with first and last names all the time, but very few people have done that to me here. People are all going around with nametags, but I feel stupid squinting and bending to read their nametags. Anyway, that’s not the most interesting thing, anyway. The overall feeling I’ve had is the most striking thing—which I’ll try to describe in mere words and no doubt fail miserably.

Last of all, last night we all went to a midnight screening of Tokyo Fist, a new movie by the Japanese filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto (whose name I’ll look up right now). We went right after The Whole Wide World, which I didn’t like very much. At some point in the evening, I realized I forgot to drink my afternoon or evening coffee—which is usually tragic. Not to mention, I’ve never been able to stay awake for a midnight screening. But this movie was so completely insane, it was impossible to fall asleep. It was easily the most violent movie I’ve ever seen, but it kind of transcended everything that it was—really fast editing, violence—moving camera, lots of symbolic urban landscape shots, alienating lighting, body piercings—which all, on paper, seem to be lame, but of course there’s no way to reproduce the impact of the movie in writing, so why the fuck am I trying? Anyway, I didn't fall asleep.

On our way out to the movies, we discovered that DEVO were in the room off the lobby of the hotel where they were doing on-line interviews (we did one earlier). We started talking to a woman who was watching the kids. It turned out she was the wife of one of the DEVO guys—I think Gerald Casale. Doug and Igor watched her kid (Alex 2) outside while he threw snowballs at cars. She had Chris give her a backrub and told us how she saw a guy from Blue Oyster Cult in the lobby of their hotel who she used to know, and he said something about "bronzing the key" after being with her. Something like that—I’m not sure—anyway, something complimentary and sexist, but she was flattered more than disgusted, I think.

Finally, the DEVO guys came out, and Scott had them sign the DEVO video Chris had happened to bring. Finally, we went down to the movie, but Alex 2 was still out in the snow, so I played in the snow with him a little until Mark Mothersbaugh came out and took over. Oh, and the other funny thing, this woman, never found out her name, said they had a pet bird, a parrot or something, named Derbis. They had named it when they saw someone on the news talking about debris, but couldn’t pronounce it, and pronounced it “Derbis.”