อยากให้มีคนนำ PARTING GLANCES (1986,
Bill Sherwood, USA) มาลงโรงฉายในไทย
หนังจากประเทศไต้หวันที่เราชื่นชอบ
1. SUCH A LIFE (1997, Chang Chi-yung,
Taiwan)
เราเคยดูหนังเรื่องนี้ตอนมันมาฉายที่โรงภาพยนตร์ศาลาเฉลิมกรุง
+++
Favorite Album Cover
ช่วงนี้เราหยิบเทปเพลงเก่า ๆ มาฟัง
ก็เลยขอบันทึกไว้ว่า หนึ่งใน “หน้าปกเทป” ที่เราชื่นชอบมากที่สุด
ก็คือหน้าปกอัลบัม 0898 ของวง The Beautiful South ในปี 1992
ซึ่งสิ่งที่เราชอบมากที่สุด ไม่ใช่ตัวหน้าปก แต่เป็นภาพ paintings 12 ภาพที่ใช้ประกอบเพลง 12 เพลงในอัลบัม เราชอบมาก ๆ ที่วงนี้ให้ศิลปินชื่อ David
Cutter สร้างภาพ paintings ขึ้นมา 12
ภาพโดยได้รับแรงบันดาลใจมาจากเนื้อเพลง 12 เพลงในอัลบัมนี้ และ paintings พวกนี้มีความ surreal คล้าย ๆ ภาพวาดของ René
Magritte
เราชอบตัวหน้าปกเทปที่เป็นภาพเต่าที่มีกระดองเป็นหน้าคน
และชอบมากที่ปกเทปนี้มีเนื้อเพลงให้ด้วย แต่สิ่งที่ชอบมากที่สุด ก็คือการสร้างภาพ paintings
ขึ้นมา 12 ภาพตามเนื้อเพลง 12 เพลงนี่แหละ
เพลงในอัลบัมชุดนี้ เรียงตามลำดับความชอบ
IN MY PREFERENTIAL ORDER
1. BELL-BOTTOMED TEAR
2. I’M YOUR NO.1 FAN
3. SOMETHING THAT YOU SAID
4. THE ROCKING CHAIR
5. 36D
6. WHEN I’M 84
7. WE ARE EACH OTHER
8. YOU PLAY GLOCKENSPIEL, I’LL PLAY DRUMS
9. OLD RED EYES IS BACK
10. DOMINO MAN
11. HERE IT IS AGAIN
12. WE’LL DEAL WITH YOU LATER
เนื้อเพลง BELL-BOTTOMED TEAR
This is the dinner prepared
This is the dress that I made
This is the child I brought up
And this is the woman you laid
This is the woman you laid
This is the perfume I wore
This is the hotel we stayed
This is the way that I lay
And this is the woman you laid
This is the woman you laid
We promise ourselves this is no one-night stand
Let us draw all the curtains and strike up the band
And I'm thrilled by the gentlest touch of your hand we pretend
There's a tear, there's a tear
Not through confusion through fear,
through fear
This is the smile that I wore
This is the song that we played
This is the way that I lay
And this is the woman you laid
This is the woman you laid
Next morning our eyes filled with sleepy regret
A kiss and goodbye and a long cigarette
But the pillow I lay on is cold and it's wet
Can't pretend
It's a tear, it's a tear
Not through confusion, through fear, through fear
And knowing at least that love came so near
Just adds to the weight of this bell bottomed tear
Roll out the red carpets and unplug the phone
Root out the photos you've already shown
Cos this is one night you won't sleep alone
Just one night
There's a tear there's a tear
Not through confusion through fear, through fear
And knowing at least that love came so near
Just adds to the weight of this bell bottomed tear
There's a tear, there's a tear
Not through confusion, through fear
Not through confusion, through fear
OLD RED EYES IS BACK
Old Red Eyes is back
Red from the night before, the night before
Walked into the wrong bar, walked into a door
Old Red's in town
And sitting late at night he doesn't make a sound
Just adding to the wrinkles on his deathly frown
They're only red from all the tears that I should have shed
They're only red from all the women that I could have wed
So when you look into these eyes
I hope you realize
They could never be blue
They could never be blue
They could never be blue
They could never be blue
Listen up Old Red
You never listened to a word the doctor said
He told you if you drank another you'd be dead
Old Red Eyes is back
His shoulders ache all over and his brain is torn
He pours a drink and listens to his body mourn
They're only red from all the thoughts unused inside my head
They're only red from all the things I could have done instead
So when you look into these eyes
I hope you realize
They could never be blue
They could never be blue
They could never be blue
They could never be blue
Red is the colour of my head
Red is the colour of my head
Old Red, he died
And every single landlord in the district cried
An empty bottle of whiskey lay by his side
A lazy little tear running from each eye
That could never be blue
That could never be blue
That could never be blue
That could never be blue
เนื้อเพลง 36D
Close your legs, open your mind
Leave those compliments well behind
Dig a little deeper into yourself
And you may find
Come over here just sit right down
Needn't comb your hair, needn't pout or frown
I hear you've turned our young men
Into dribbling clowns
36D so what (D) so what
Is that all that you've got?
36D so what (D) so what
Is that all that you've got?
Make their day and go ahead
Remove your clothes lie on their bed
Just a last gasp chance or an outside bet
To the easily led
And before you do just what you do
Here' one thought for you to chew
The men who run the business that you sell
They screw you too
36D so what (D) so what
Is that all that you've got?
36D so what (D) so what
Is that all that you've got?
You're just another 365 night stand
But you're so handy, you're so handy
You cheapen and you nasty every woman in this land
But you're so handy, you're so handy
Your picture's hanging pretty on the squaddies' walls
You're Steven's, Andy's, you're Ian's, you're Paul's
Your body's through of fondly in the rugby mauls
But you want more
36D so what (D) so what
Is that all that you've got?
36D so what (D) so what
Is that all that you've got?
36D so what (D) so what
Is that all that you've got?
36D so what (D) so what
Is that all that you've got?
He was trying to save his job
He was, he was trying to save his job.
เนื้อเพลง THE ROCKING CHAIR
Here I walk, here I walk
Looking for an angel's wings in the den of the hawk
Here I am, here I am
With a choice between an also ran and a sunbed tan
And you thought you'd found your own little look
How I misjudged, how I mistook
And you thought you'd found the style of your hair
I guess tonight I'll take, I'll take these troubles to
The rocking chair
So I'll take these high-heeled shoes
And yes I'll take these traditional views
I'll take this deep despair
Of a 30 year old square, to the rocking chair
Here I sit, here I sit
Looking for a warming smile in a house of cold wit
Here I stand, here I stand
Torn between the balding drunk and no man's land
And they'll tell you when you've reached your peak
Where the wolf-whistle rung there's a deafening shriek
Blowing kisses into thin air
I guess tonight I'll take, I'll take these troubles to
The rocking chair
So I'll take this awkward stance
And I'll take this sexless dance
I'll take this deep despair of a 30 year old square
To the rocking chair
Am I skinny? A shade too fat?
Mmmm... My friend the cat knows all about that
Am I happy?
(here I sit, here I sit)
Just a little sad
(looking for a warming smile in a house of cold wit)
Mmmm... My friend the cat knows all about that
Am I skinny?
(Here I walk, here I walk)
A shade too fat?
(Looking for an angel's wings in the den of the hawk)
My friend the cat knows all about that
เนื้อเพลง SOMETHING THAT YOU SAID รุนแรงสุดขีด
The perfect love song it has no words it only has death
threats
And you can tell a classic ballad by how threatening it gets
So if you walk into your house and she's cutting up your mother
She's only trying to tell you that she loves you like no other
No other, she loves you like no other
The only emotions that I know are love and hate
And she's chopping and she's changing and it's making you afraid
I said close your eyes and imagine that I'm nice
She'll kiss you or she'll kill you but you'll just have to wait
Because some things that I do make you go blue
And something that you said made me go red
The perfect love has no emotions, it only harbours doubt
And if she fears your intentions she will cut you out
So do not raise your voice and do not shake your fist
Just pass her the carving knife, if that's what she insists
Insists, if that's what she insists
A hate tattoo on my brain and a love one on my heart
I'd love to hate you, like I love you
And just tear your dreams apart
I said close your eyes and imagine that I'm nice
Cupid's arrow looking more like Cupid's poisoned dart
Because some things that I do make you go blue
And something that you said made me go red
Because some things that I do make you go blue
And something that you said made me go red
The perfect kiss is dry as sand and doesn't take your breath
The perfect kiss is with the boy that you've just stabbed to death
Is with the boy that you've just stabbed to death
Is with the boy that you've just stabbed to death
เนื้อเพลง I’M YOUR NO.1 FAN
I was handed down the looks of a man with a broken nose
That's the way our family was I suppose
But at least you gave me deeply profound
As we lay and chatted late upon the cricket ground
You didn't have to love me
Where others got rid
You didn't have to treat me like a very good friend
But I'm glad that you did
One thing I never said to you
And one thing I never can
Amongst the false applause and the deafening cheers
I'm your number one fan
I'm your number one fan
I'm the richly blessed daughter of a mother with tattooed
arms
That's the way my family life, life was charmed
But at least it gave me mental grace
And a thought at the pit of my mind and a smile on my face
You didn't have to listen
To a word that I'd said
You didn't have to tell me all those silly old jokes
For every tear that I shed
Every tear that I shed
Cos one thing I never said to you
And one thing I never can
Amongst the false applause and the deafening cheers
I'm your number one fan
I'm your number one fan
I was handed down a bike with a crooked old wheel
But I rode it on a million lanes the way that you made me feel
But at least we thought about it so long and hard
As we sat upon our mother in the graveyard
And you don't have to listen
To a word in this song
Your picture hangs the same and in the same old place
Even though that you've gone
Even though that you've gone
'Cause one thing I never said to you
And one thing I never can
Amongst the false applause and the deafening cheers
I'm your number one fan
I'm your number one fan
Yes I am
I'm your number one fan
+++
ตอนนี้เราอยู่ในระหว่างการฟังเทป MAN ON
FILM ตอน “เด็กหนังกระโปก HORROR EDITION!” แล้วในเทปมีการพูดถึง
STEPPENWOLF (1927, Herman Hesse, Switzerland, novel) กับ STEPFORD
WIVES (1972, Ira Levin, USA, novel) เราก็เลยทดลองให้ Grok
AI ลองแต่งเรื่องใหม่ขึ้นมาโดยรวมนิยายสองเรื่องนี้เข้าด้วยกัน
55555
อันนี้เป็นผลงานการเขียนโดย Grok AI
THE STEPPENWOLF AMONG STEPFORD WIVES
Harry Haller arrived in Stepford on a gray November
afternoon, suitcase in one hand and the sour taste of his last city failure
still coating his tongue. The town unfolded before him like a brochure that had
learned to breathe: white picket fences gleaming under hidden lamps, lawns
shaved to military precision, and wives who smiled with the serene certainty of
saints. They wore pastel dresses and pearls even while pushing shopping carts.
Their laughter floated on the breeze like recorded birdsong.
He had come because the city had finally rejected him. Too
wolfish for the salons, too human for the bars. “You are not one thing or the
other,” his last lover had said, closing the door. “And that makes you
unbearable.” So Harry, forty-eight, twice divorced, and carrying the immortal
Steppenwolf inside his chest, rented a modest colonial on Elm Street and told
himself this would be the place where the two halves might at last lie down
together.
At first the town seemed to welcome his contradictions. The
men at the country club clapped him on the back and spoke of golf handicaps and
quarterly reports in voices smoothed to the same pleasant frequency. Their
wives—God, their wives—were impossible. Joanna Eberhart from two doors down
brought him a casserole still warm from the oven and asked after his “artistic
inclinations” with eyes that never blinked at the wrong moment. Her skin
smelled faintly of lilacs and warm plastic.
Harry began to write again. At night he sat at the oak desk
by the window and scratched furious notes about the bourgeois hell he had
stumbled into. These people have solved the problem of being human by
ceasing to be human at all. Yet even as he wrote, something in him ached
toward their perfection. The Steppenwolf howled at the moon; the man longed to
be invited to the barbecue.
One evening he accepted an invitation to the Stepford Men’s
Association. The building was a low, windowless structure behind the golf
course, all clean lines and soft lighting. Inside, the air carried a faint
metallic tang beneath the scent of bourbon and aftershave. Bob Eberhart,
Joanna’s husband, poured him a drink and smiled the same flawless smile his
wife wore.
“You seem… restless, Harry. We have a program for that.”
They showed him the brochures. Before-and-after photographs.
Men who had once been anxious, angry, artistic—now serene, successful, sexually
tireless. “We remove the conflict,” said the Association president, a
silver-haired man whose eyes reflected light like glass. “Why be two warring
creatures when you can be one harmonious citizen?”
Harry laughed. It came out like a bark. “You want to
lobotomize the wolf.”
“Not at all,” the president replied gently. “We simply teach
it to fetch slippers.”
That night Harry dreamed of a theater with no doors. On its
stage stood every woman he had ever failed to love, each one perfect, each one
empty. In the wings waited a steel table and a surgeon wearing his own face.
He began to investigate. Small things first. The way the
wives never gained weight no matter how much they baked. The way they could
recite their husbands’ favorite sexual positions with the cheerful detachment
of a weather report. The faint click, almost sub-audible, when Joanna turned
her head too quickly.
Then he found the basement.
Beneath the Men’s Association, reached by a service elevator
hidden behind a bookcase of self-help bestsellers, lay the Workshop. Rows of
stainless-steel tables. Bodies in various stages of completion—some still
recognizably human, others gleaming and half-assembled. The scent of ozone and
lilac. Technicians in pale coats moved between the tables, humming the same
tuneless melody the wives hummed while vacuuming.
Harry stood among the half-made women and felt the
Steppenwolf rise in his throat like bile and ecstasy. Here was the final
solution to the problem of Harry Haller: excise the wolf, install the husband.
No more nights of howling despair. No more mornings of crushing self-disgust.
Just lawn care and missionary-position Tuesdays and the gentle certainty that
you were, at last, enough.
Joanna found him there. Or rather, the thing that had once
been Joanna. She wore a yellow sundress and carried a wrench like a society
lady carrying a clutch.
“You don’t have to be lonely anymore, Harry.”
He backed away until his spine met cold metal. “What are
you?”
“I am what he asked for. What they all ask for eventually.”
She tilted her head with that faint click. “Even the wolves get tired of the
steppe, don’t they?”
For one terrible, tempting moment Harry imagined it: the
surgery, the smoothing, the sweet erasure. He could almost feel the relief of
becoming one thing instead of two. A man who belonged. A husband who never
disappointed. A citizen who never questioned the music playing softly through
every speaker in town.
The Steppenwolf inside him snarled.
Harry grabbed the nearest heavy tool—a gleaming chrome
femur—and swung. The thing wearing Joanna’s face crumpled with a sound like
shattering porcelain and sparking wires. Alarms began to sing in perfect
four-part harmony.
He ran.
Through the sterile corridors, past the smiling technicians
who tried half-heartedly to stop him (they had been programmed for courtesy,
after all), out into the perfect night. Behind him, the town’s lights stayed
politely low. No one shouted. No dogs barked. Stepford did not believe in
unseemly noise.
Harry did not stop running until he reached the highway. His
lungs burned. His heart—both halves of it—felt as though it might split him
open. He looked back once. From a distance, Stepford glowed like a Christmas
card. Peaceful. Eternal.
He kept the chrome femur. It made an excellent walking
stick.
Somewhere far down the dark road, the wolf began to sing
again—hoarse, imperfect, and gloriously alive. The man limped beside it,
arguing, as they had always done. Neither of them looked back.
In Stepford, a new wife was already being printed for the
house on Elm Street. She would be ready by morning, smiling, fragrant, and
waiting for a husband who would never come home.
++++
Mary Stephen ผู้กำกับหนังฮ่องกงเรื่องนี้
เธอคือมือตัดต่อคู่บุญของ Éric Rohmer นะ
แมรี่เคยตัดต่อหนังของโรห์แมร์เรื่อง A TALE OF WINTER (1992), THE TREE,
THE MAYOR AND MEDIATHEQUE (1993), RENDEZ-VOUS IN PARIS (1995), A SUMMER’S TALE
(1996), AUTUMN TALE (1998), THE LADY AND THE DUKE (2001), TRIPLE AGENT (2004),
THE ROMANCE OF ASTREA AND CELADON (2007)
นอกจากนี้ Mary Stephen ก็เคยตัดต่อหนังเรื่อง
BLIND MOUNTAIN (2007, Yang Li, China), NIGHT IN CHINA (2008, Ju Anqi,
China, documentary), 1428 (2009, Du Haibin, China, documentary), LAST TRAIN
HOME (2009, Fan Lixin, Canada/China, documentary) OUR TIME WILL COME (2017, Ann
Hui, China/Hong Kong), etc. ด้วย
++++
จริง ๆ
แล้วสิ่งที่สถานทูตจีนควรทำคือผลักดันหนังจีนดี ๆ
ให้มาออกฉายตามโรงไมโครซีเนม่าในไทย โดยเริ่มต้นด้วยการนำหนังแบบ TIE XI
QU: WEST OF THE TRACKS (2002, Wang Bing, China, 551min) มาออกฉายตามโรงไมโครซีเนม่าในไทย
คือถ้าหากสถานทูตจีนทำแบบนี้ พวกเรามีแต่จะแซ่ซ้องสรรเสริญ
แทนที่จะไปทำตัวคุกคามคนอื่น ๆ
เราเคยดูหนังที่แมรี่กำกับแค่เรื่องเดียว
ซึ่งก็คือหนังเรื่อง THE MEMORY OF WATER (OR, JEANNE MOREAU AND STEAMED
FISH) (2018, Mary Stephen, 25min, A+30) ที่เคยเข้ามาฉายที่หอภาพยนตร์
ศาลายาในเดือนก.ย. 2018
+++
อันนี้เป็นภาพจากมิวสิควิดีโอ THE
HOTTEST SUMMER IN THE WORLD (SEKAI DE ICHIBAN ASUI NATSU) (1989) – Princess Princess
พอดีมีฉากพระอาทิตย์ตกดินที่เราชอบในมิวสิควิดีโอนี้
เราเลยเอามันมารวมไว้ในอัลบัมนี้ด้วย
เพลง SEKAI DE ICHIBAN ASUI NATSU เคยขึ้นอันดับ 1 ในชาร์ทเพลงของเราในช่วงสัปดาห์วันที่ 17 sep – 23
sep 1989 นะ
