Funeral March
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John Schlesinger dead at 77; LOS ANGELES – Oscar-winning director John Schlesinger, who daringly brought gay characters into mainstream cinema with Midnight Cowboy and tapped into nightmares with the teeth-drilling torture of Marathon Man, died Friday at 77. The British-born filmmaker…. died about 5:30 a.m…. |
Schlesinger also directed The Day of the Locust, based on a novel by Nathanael West.
See Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood and
From the latter:
“Then you know your body’s sent,
Don’t care if you don’t pay rent,
Sky is high and so am I,
If you’re a viper — a vi-paah.”
— The Day of the Locust,
by Nathanael West (1939),
New Directions paperback,
1969, page 162
This song may be downloaded at
That same site begins with a traditional Mexican song…
“La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
ya no puede caminar,
porque no quiere,
porque le falta
marihuana que fumar.”
(“The cockroach, the cockroach,
can’t walk anymore,
because he doesn’t want to,
because he has no
marihuana to smoke.”)
This suggests an appropriate funeral march for John Schlesinger:
“Ya murió la cucaracha, ya la llevan a enterrar…” – La Cucaracha
Those attending Schlesinger’s wake, as opposed to his funeral, may wish to perform other numbers from the Pot Culture page, which offers a variety of “viper” songs.
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Bright Star and Dark Lady “Mexico is a solar country — but it is also a black country, a dark country. This duality of Mexico has preoccupied me since I was a child.” — Octavio Paz, |
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Bright Star
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Amen.
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Dark Lady
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For the meaning of the above symbols, see
Kubrick’s 1x4x9 monolith in 2001,
the Halmos tombstone in Measure Theory,
and the Fritz Leiber Changewar stories.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
Oh, yes… the question of
Heaven or Hell for John Schlesinger…
Recall that he also directed the delightful
Cold Comfort Farm and see
last year’s entry for this date.
Ah yeah … but Roberto De Angelis was born on this day (July 27) too. How’s that for Dogma? (another great … Kevin Smith, but his birthday is August 2, so we have some time to kill before that one.)
Comment by oOMisfitOo — Sunday, July 27, 2003 @ 1:53 pm