I’ve admittedly been remiss over the past couple of weeks about reposting my little essays that first appeared over at BearBlog. Here, though, are links to the latest:
“In Search of Civic Ritual“—the first post in which I figured out how to caption images!
A diss of surveys and their particular form of bad faith
And now back to Sunday reading, wishing a good remainder of the weekend to all!
Well, though I just posted a new essay over at Off-Modern Onions, I’m somehow unable to copy the full text here. Behold, then, the link, in hopes that I’ll one day get myself together, and that I haven’t ruffled too many feathers by questioning some aspects of reading challenges.
Good lord; because I seem unable to make things easy on myself (and maybe on others), I’ve stopped my posts at Substack, and am going forward with those particular musings at BearBlog—which has been interesting, since it’s forcing me to learn HTML and get back to basics. Making sense of what’s essentially a new language is ridiculously fun, but also equally frustrating—because just as happens in, say, your first week of Spanish class, the taste of what’s possible drives you immediately to attempt advanced constructions filled with obscure verb tenses. As I keep on keeping on, then, I’ll continually remind myself to be patient (and recognize the new things I learn at every turn), and hope that I don’t exasperate readers with my remedial understandings and practice.
I do hope you’ll check it out, though; here’s my latest post!
The problem with trying to pull a big project together, when you have neither the financial nor connectional means to get an agent, is that there’s a lot to be done, and a good fifty percent of it has nothing at all to do with successfully finishing the so-called product you wanted to create in the first place. Because once the thing you’ve brought into the world is standing complete before you, you have to wrap it in shiny packaging and turn yourself into a sort of digital carny to attract attention to it. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, of course; you can’t just put something on a park bench and hope to be discovered. But there are good reasons that skilled professionals make a deserved living getting the word out. Until I get the resources to hire one of those people, though, it’s up to me and my spare energy to give it a shot (and to avoid all the unsolicited advice about how you could do things better, and/or confront said advice by requiring that all advisors do something concrete with their expertise or remain silent until asked to provide their input).
Hence, about a month into the game, I give you the belated announcement about the reading-focused podcast I’m running, with a new episode every other week. As the blurb for Plain Reading states, we’re all about about books, reading, words, and the ideas and enthusiasms they inspire—and on a more general scale, just good conversation, period.
Here’s the great thing: it’s the conversations that keep me going. It seems it’s gotten more difficult, especially over the last few years, to let yourself fall into sustained, unapologetically enthusiastic discussion with another person or people. Admittedly, it’s best when you’re just sitting across from one another in the same physical location—but for all the infuriating aspects of contemporary technology, I am at least grateful for the ways in which we can keep our relationships strong and our curiosity renewed through what remains at its base the least technologically intensive practice we have: talk.
Anyway. Whatever this post has been—half ad, half plug for plain old gab, I guess—I’ll bring it to a close, get back to editing, and hope you and yours can just sit down today and share your thoughts with each other.
Like I said in my first post on this theme, I’ll either get this list together gradually or not at all. So here’s my go at the next part of the list.
9. Lou Reed: “Vicious”
“Hangin’ ‘Round,” with its combination of retro-ish rock and I’ve-had-it sentiment, was long my favorite song on Transformer, which I still consider Reed’s best album. The whole musical outlay is pretty much representative of a time when I was moving out of true youth and catching up on so much culture I’d missed while trying to fit in. And in that prolonged growing-up process, I was also beginning to learn about how to set boundaries. Apparently like the singer here, I wasn’t yet able to entirely separate myself from people who were no good for me—but I could at least recognize and assert about, if not to, them that “you’re not the kind of person that I wanna meet / O babe you’re just so vicious.”
10. Iggy Pop: “The Passenger”
Another incomparable anthem to the sort of restlessness that can’t be met by anything but night driving and taking in everything around you. Said restlessness will not, of course, be cured in the least by this activity,(*) as evidenced by the fact that the song just keeps going and circling back on itself, with a steady beat and very simple set of chord changes that even I can master—but it’s the only available way of not exploding in your own lonely and desperate and frustrated skin, a way of admitting that nothing is right, that you don’t know what to do about it, but that you’re at least not sitting in your dark cave—nor are you reveling in or glorifying adolescent sadness. And in getting out, “the stars come out tonight”—and now you’re even with someone in some way, “and it was made for you and me,” whatever that might mean.
(*) Nor is it really justifiable now, given the climate crisis. Maybe the song would work while just walking; if I’m ever up late enough to try it, I’ll experiment with this change in mode of wandering. Somehow, though, subways/trains don’t seem to fit here; the song seems streets-based, even if “I ride and I ride” would seem naturally to include hanging out on trains.
11. Lauryn Hill: “Doo-Wop (That Thing)”
In line with songs like “Vicious” that somehow convince you to stand up for yourself, “Doo-Wop” gives a ton of aural support without sounding or even meaning to be preachy. I’m amazed I didn’t wear out The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, given the fact that it was on near-constant play for a certain period. But this song in particular was like the taking up of the legacy of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” giving the nod that you could both dance and understand that “respect is just a minimum”—that if you weren’t being seen and loved as yourself, it just wasn’t worth it, and that even more, you were worth more than whatever you thought you needed out of a crummy situation or relationship.
12. Joy Division: “Transmission”
How not to be fascinated and a little frightened by the voice, not to say the phenomenon, that was Ian Curtis? (After all, I never would have wanted to meet the guy, knowing how uncool I would have been in comparison.) But that build-up and all-out release in “Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio”: there was somehow nothing at all optimistic or encouraging in all the delicious darkness that was the band and its output—but the song at the same time granted permission from the truly cool crowd (what we would later call the alternative set, before they too got taken up and doused in capitalist saccharine) to go in your room and dance, as they say, like no one’s watching (and in this case, in a manner akin to the muppet Animal). And OK, yes, most Joy Division songs will do this for you (“Warsaw” is another that’s disturbingly good for this purpose), and I’ll always be devoted to “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” even if it felt like the poppier beginning of the bridge that would lead the band’s post-Curtis transformation into New Order. But much like “Queen Bitch,” that bass line, followed as it is by the drum lead-in, is just simple brilliance.
Thanks to my friend Ben, I’ve realized that something very much like those questionnaires of early email days—cousins to the slam books of twentieth-century high schoolers that demanded the recipient write their answers to innocuous personal questions before being passed on to the next eager viewer or participant—has been going around in the form of a challenge to lay out your “personal canon of twenty songs.”
At one point in my life, I would have jumped right in; I was, after all, a champion mix-maker, one of those over-invested dorks who handcrafted covers and liner notes for both cassettes and then CDs, playing with the limits of a medium’s time and/or memory capacity to deliver a unique musical message to the recipient: an obvious, if unspoken, admission of infatuation; an offering of solace for a depressed friend; a set-up for a dance party; a getting-to-know-you gift to an interesting new acquaintance. And I was also one of those young people who vehemently maintained that I would never become another statistic who lost interest in new music somewhere around the age of thirty.
Here I am now, though, a former music fiend who might get in a few minutes a week listening to college or free-form stations. Although I’m not entirely sure what finally caused my former, passionate commitment to just dissipate, it has something to do with COVID, at the beginning of which I was so weirdly traumatized that I was unable to listen to anything with words at all, whether music or plain talk. And I’m guessing there’s also something there about no longer needing music to speak for me, or for all those overwhelming young-person emotions that make you feel freakish about pretty much everything, much less about admitting to or talking about any of it. I have, in other words, grown if not old, at least stereotypically middle-aged.
But here we go anyway, semi-ready to take on a challenge. At this point, I don’t have a main criterion for including songs, which will fall in no particular order—but I’m guessing some themes might occur, one of which will probably be the singer’s good fit with my own vocal range, since I also can’t help singing along to pretty much anything I like. (And also, after days’ worth of piddling about, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to do this gradually or not at all—so I’ll offer here what will hopefully be the first of a series of partial lists that will eventually add up to twenty songs.)
1. Kate Bush: “Cloudbusting”
At first I was amazed I included this one, much less started out with it. But then I understood that the song’s repeated assertion that “I just know that something good is gonna happen / I don’t know when, but just saying it could even make it happen” pretty much encapsulates what music was doing for me throughout my young life: letting me hold onto the tune’s expressed faith in the near, good future everyone in my generation had essentially been promised—or if not complete fulfillment, then something beyond loneliness. Combine that with “every time it rains / you’re here in my head” and Bush’s build-up and slightly not-pop style, and you’ve got an anthem of young adult longing that’s a little bit different from the Top 40 stuff that couldn’t help you maintain faith in anything at all.
2. P. J. Harvey: “You Said Something”
OK, longing of a different sort. And in addition to this being one of the few songs I can play and sing while I’m doing it, it’s just such a clear evocation of mood and possibilities—of one of those occasions whose significance you know, even while it’s happening, will stay with you for as long as your brain continues functioning. You’ll lose touch with the people there with you; you might even forget exactly what the really important thing was that was said—but the immersive spirit and all those pressing feelings—maybe some of the only truths we can hold onto—will always remain. “A rooftop in Brooklyn / one in the morning / watching the lights flash / in Manhattan.” Although I’ve never been on a rooftop in Brooklyn, recalling any of a number of rooftops spent late-night with friends in rare conversation puts me right back into that place of being fully and passionately, even if quietly, convinced that the moment, your life, even, is significant, and that there’s greater meaning burbling beneath the surface of the simplest ways of passing the time. “I’m doing nothing wrong / riding in your car / the radio playing / we sing up to the eighth floor.” And then I’m once again drunk on Harvey’s voice: that range that’s so close to my own, I can almost believe we’d understand each other just by that chance anatomy-based similarity that’s neither here nor there.
3. Fleetwood Mac: “Gypsy”
OK, look, it’s impossible for me to decide which of this band’s songs is my favorite, or has had the most impact on any aspect of my life. “Seven Wonders” or “Little Lies” are both strong contenders, as are “I Don’t Want to Know” and “Secondhand News,” all for different reasons, but most of which have Stevie Nicks’s inimitable, amazing voice right out front. This one is all about nostalgia that you dip into, that helps you recognize who you were and how you’ve gotten to now—but instead of getting trapped in reverie, you appreciate what’s been and can move on.
4. David Bowie: “Queen Bitch”
That driving bass line—that bass line! I can’t quite describe the fantastic feelings behind what seems like this song’s full embrace of living into music and all the scenes and scenarios it enables—and Wes Anderson’s use of it in the closing scenes of The Life Aquatic (a film that would itself make it into my top 20) was the perfect victory anthem. So many Bowie songs enable that full immersion in the music, but this one has long remained tops for me.
5. The Smiths: “Ask”
It’s always hard to pick a representative Smiths song; as the title of Simon Goddard’s book had it, theirs were the songs that saved my [teenage] life. Although “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out” is a mainstay, it may be falling out of favor in comparison to some of the band’s others, because the desperately lonely-longing feelings it conjures were thankfully so particular to young adulthood that when reminded of the tune at all, I’m just glad I’m not in its emotional space anymore. And much as I might hate to admit it, The Smiths/Morrissey are ever less a part of my present life—maybe because I don’t feel like the embrace of all that sadness (or “terrible sincerity,” as Morrissey called it on a late-night talk show he was on to promote You Are the Quarry—itself what I consider Mozza’s last truly great album) does me much good anymore, even if the peppy music backing it all is still tremendous. I think my devotion finally came apart after reading Morrissey’s autobiography (which could have done without, as a friend called it, the re-litigation of The Smiths trial), and hearing too many accounts of his apparently race/culture-related crankiness. But I still do very much need “Ask”‘s reminder that “shyness can stop you / from doing all the things in life you’d like to.”
6. The Violent Femmes: “Kiss Off”
There’s no better song for yelling out when you’re feeling hurt or frustrated or angry—and recognize, even as you’re in the midst of it all and even kind of cultivating the mad whirlwind you’re whipping up, that you might just be acting a tad paranoid and/or self-centered. (After all, in counting off your hurts, you “forget what eight was for.”) A quintessential song, in other words, for teens to let off steam—or adults who understand that dancing around and singing off key is a better alternative than, say, punching a wall or pacing around muttering.
7. Portishead: “Glory Box”
Maybe the best way of describing what this song provided (and still provides?) me as a young adult was a model of stylishly alluring indifference, or rather, an example of someone who’s ceased to be overpowered by emotions and illusions. That’s an odd thing to say, given the song’s determination to “give my heart away,” and the longing in Beth Gibbons’s voice that comes out in the chorus. But the additional, and I say fundamental, creepily-spoken decision to “leave it to the other girls to play” was what I still keep hearing and hold onto.
8. Otis Redding: “Cigarettes and Coffee”
Was there ever a better conjuration of what it feels like to talk all night with someone you’re totally comfortable with, to want to be nowhere else and with no one else? I think that’s all I really need to say about this one; we should all be so lucky to have experienced, even once, exactly what’s going on here.
Right: I’ve got the other twelve songs queued up, but this little list is all I can handle at the moment. I’ll do my best to send out another dispatch soon.
When you’re reading and viewing multiple things at once, strange thematic (or other sorts of) connections often present themselves—and such has been the case with my amazement in my last post at what I called Carl Lee’s presence in The Connection.
Behold, last night and this morning, two conversations or comments on charisma have pointed to exactly what I was thinking about in those initial ruminations on Lee. In the order in which I encountered said comments, then, here’s the first, courtesy of Karl Ove Knausgaard, in vol. 6 of My Struggle:
The aura of the charismatic individual contains an element of disinterest, of detached ease, an independence verging on the sovereign and somehow discouraging; to be seen or even liked by the charismatic individual is to be bestowed with favor, a gift with no ulterior motive, hugely covetable. Indeed the charismatic individual is free of the bonds of the social world, standing in a certain sense outside its domain, and this sense of boundlessness is what lends such force to their presence: the charismatic person is unrivaled.1
Bingo. Lee’s Cowboy doesn’t give a damn what you think of him: whether you like him, approve of his fashion choices, even how you feel about the drugs he’s delivered. Although he is in a sense economically dependent on his customers, he has no need of “the bonds of the social world”—and if the heroin business turns out not to be a great one, you know he’ll find some other way of making the sort of living he needs to live the life he wants. At the same time, everyone who’s dependent on him is in his thrall. He’s their supplier, yes, but even if they’re arguing with him, The Connection‘s characters— and I’ll assert even the more or less self-contained Solly and the detached cameraman J. J. Burden to some degree are included here—they recognize the fact that Cowboy is an existential level above the rest.
Additional insight comes from source number two, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. Her goal here isn’t to delineate what constitutes charisma or presence, much less to celebrate it; what she’s describing in the following excerpt is, in fact, disgusting to her. But here we go with what I think is pretty germane to this particular conversation:
For the kid to want Daddy’s approval it must respect Daddy, and, being garbage, Daddy can make sure that he is respected only by remaining aloof, by distantness, by acting on the precept ‘familiarity breeds contempt,’ which is, of course, true, if one is contemptible. By being distant and aloof, he is able to remain unknown, mysterious, and, thereby, to inspire fear (‘respect’).2
We’re not quite at Knausgaard’s charismatic individual standing outside of social bonds—because Daddy’s whole show of aloofness is undertaken in order to elicit certain reactions, to create certain types of bonds or “sticky” emotions, from and with and within certain people. But indeed, there’s something about Cowboy that’s inaccessible, unknowable; he plays his cards extremely close to his chest, and there’s no way he’ll open himself up to you out of something as silly as the need for human companionship. He’s above all that—more like Knausgaard’s charismatic individual.
Hence, where Cowboy doesn’t fit Solanas’s description is that he’s in no way related to the Daddy figure, who’s invested in rushing his family off to the suburbs, the better to keep them from exposure to anything that might show them how uninteresting and vapid, and hence, unworthy of respect, he really is. Cowboy’s mysterious inaccessibility is of a much different sort—probably because he does contain a real personality, not dependent on anyone else for fulfillment and not looking to anyone else to serve his needs, whether physical, emotional, or otherwise, Whereas Solanas’s Daddy at his core lacks any sort of self-confidence, Cowboy is pretty much self-confidence personified, and hence, has no need to go out of his way to demonstrate just how worthy he is.
Would you want to meet Cowboy in real life? I don’t think I would, knowing I’d probably fall under his spell just as easily as anyone else would. But watch him from afar? For as long as you’d let me be a fly on the wall, I guarantee I’d hover.
Thanks to last night’s viewing of The Connection, Shirley Clarke’s fantastic 1961 film adaptation of Jack Gelber’s play, I’m thinking about presence: the sort of magnetism a select few humans seem to possess.
The film-within-a-film is great in itself, with the bonus of Jackie McLean and Freddie Redd included as members of the jazz band that hangs out in the junkies’ den. But I’m willing to assert the key factor that made this movie more than just a clever or hip peek into a particular world wasn’t just the character of Cowboy, the junkies’ hookup, but more essentially, the actor who played him. How in the world Carl Lee didn’t completely blow the roof off of twentieth-century stage and film is beyond me—because once he enters the scene, everything changes.
It’s all there: fashion, cool, downright handsomeness, and then some essential nameless something that both sucks you in and makes you very aware you’re in the presence of grave danger—which in itself is irresistible. It’s because Lee’s Cowboy is so completely in control of himself—and not just because he’s everyone’s desperately needed supplier—that he holds the control and/or fate of the entire cast in his hands. Will he continue his courtesy to the clueless old missionary who’s inadvertently saved him and them all from the cops? Down to her last second on stage, we believe both in his decency toward her and his ability to let that decency drop if needed; while he’s in the room, there’s the best sort of edge that makes you keep your guard up, won’t let you relax. I hadn’t witnessed any film character so completely and evilly magnetic since Alan Arkin’s cruel hipster thug Roat in Wait Until Dark.
It’s no surprise to me that director Clarke fell for Lee during filming (I can’t imagine the entire cast not contracting some sort of obsessional crush on him)—but he was apparently equally attracted by her, since the two were together until Lee’s death in 1986. And I suppose it should be no surprise that Lee and Arkin are the only two actors I’ve been able to think of (and these the only two characters) who’ve brought such palpable presence to their roles. After all, were there more than a few individuals at a time able to swerve everyone’s last bit of attention onto themselves, the world just might come to a terrible stop, albeit a fascinating one.
I’ll continue to try and identify any other actors/characters who might as well be able to hypnotize audience, cast, crew, etc. and etc.—as well as just what it is that makes for this sort of allure. Thoughts are welcome!
The following is really just a potential path for future thought and exploration, but here goes. Nearing the end of Walt Whitman’s Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, I came across a chunk of short stories the author had written in his younger days. For the most part, they don’t stand out from other uplifting tales you might have found in any nineteenth-century newspaper: immoral actors getting their comeuppance, etc.—and my guess is, Whitman recognized early on that his talents lay less in the world of the short story and more in the realms of poetry and essay. But a couple of times, I found myself wondering what??!??—and whether old Walt could have veered off into some Poe-like universe, and really let his dark side have free rein.
I’m thinking in particular of “Death in the Schoolroom,” “Wild Frank’s Return,” and to some degree, “One Wicked Impulse!” It will spoil nothing to reveal that in the first, a cruel teacher ends up beating the newly-dead body of one of his young students; in the second, a prodigal son is killed after being dragged out of a nap by his loyal-yet-thunderstorm-frightened horse; and in the third, a murderer gets off scot-free, and all is still right with the world, without even the need for any Bible-reading-with-a-good-hearted-prostitute sort of thing that drove Nabokov nuts about Crime and Punishment.1
It’s not that Whitman so easily killed off characters viewed as both good and bad; doing so may even have been easier in a time and place when any number of accidents or ailments considered small today could lead to sepsis or tetanus or a killer case of pneumonia. Maybe it’s that these few tales, mainstream as they still are, contravene the expectations of simple morality, where easy resolution and right win out, even if some of the characters die undeservedly. Maybe, too, their near-cynicism is a surprising contrast to Whitman’s later “I accept everyone! Let’s loll in the grass!” poetic celebrations.
I do wonder, though, whether Whitman’s decision to focus on poetry and essays was a conscious one: whether he recognized that fiction wasn’t his forte, or whether no further short stories were produced just because that’s what ended up happening. What I’ve been more generally surprised by is how much I’ve enjoyed Specimen Days, a somewhat diaristic account of what he observes around him: an excellent look into daily life and doings in a time and national space that feels (to me) both alien and familiar somehow. The alien sensation makes sense; as for the familiarity, I can find no justification for it, other than a lifetime spent with many a book written and/or set in the century-place he describes.
And although I’m not quite a hundred pages away from the end, what I think has become most interesting is just how clear is Whitman’s influence on the Beats; although they themselves acknowledged and celebrated that fact, I never saw to just what a recognizable degree that was the case. With that comes the recognition that the span of years between Whitman’s death and Kerouac’s et al’s own writing is pretty much the same as the death of the Beats and my own appearance in the adult world. Hence a partial explanation of the familiar/not feeling I’m getting? It’s something to ponder, and I suppose I’ll keep on doing it. If any answers present themselves in the next hundred pages of reading, I’ll duly report them here.
My recent dive into Walt Whitman got me thinking today about the film I finally managed to see this past week. More specifically, about whether Triangle of Sadness could have benefitted, not necessarily by killing some of its scene-darlings, but by saving them for something like bonus footage or outtakes able to provide more texture or back story to any viewer who thought they really needed it.
Because here’s the thing: I so desperately wanted to love the film; how couldn’t I, when the Palme d’Or winner was touted as a dark comedy that eviscerated, like nothing that had come before, the super-rich and the culture that encourages and values their assumptions and shenanigans? But when something clocks in at just under 2.5 hours, every bit of what’s included during that time had better be essential—and with Triangle, that just wasn’t the case. The brilliant opening scene, for example, with its campy interviewer revealing the world of fashion for the shallow game it is, could have stood on its own as a short, something included in Da Ali G Show. Much of the arguing and romance that occur between the main couple? Overkill; it’s not hard to understand the fragile or self-serving foundations of many a relationship. Prolonged bouts of vomiting by elderly dames in evening gowns? Instead of a scene any fifteen-year-old boy would love, one person could’ve puked onscreen while we hear the sounds of other intestines being emptied in various ways, along with the idiotic appeals of the waitstaff trying to balance servility and helpfulness at the same time. Hah hah: people in formal wear losing their lunch: never been done before!
I’d love to see a shortened version of Triangle, in which the really powerful moments and scenes shine, quite capable of getting the message across, and much more effectively, without what winds up being heavy-handed examples of the privileged exercising their admittedly disgusting privilege. And I can only assume that in a slimmed-down version, the fantastically terrifying-and-wonderful ending, which I’ll not reveal, would have been even more potent.
But what’s that got to do with Whitman? I’ve so far come across two entries in his Specimen Days—“Cedar-Plums Like” and “Samples of My Common-Place Book”—in which the author provides a footnote that includes options he’d considered, but didn’t end up using. In the first entry, it’s a list of titles for his collection; in the second, it’s just some quotations he’d written down in a notebook, on display in case we’re interested in what sorts of things he scribbles when he’s out and about. If in either case we don’t care about what’s remained private before this point, we don’t have to veer out of the running text to be enlightened. A classic use, in other words, of the good old footnote, and one I wish were possible for movies.
Of course, film is an entirely different animal, dependent on linear movement through the reel or stream, even if the content of what you’re seeing is not itself linearly scripted motion. (Maybe Memento is a good example of the limits of successful nonchronological cinema.) Something like Sliding Doors worked as film, I think, because each of the two possible scenarios moved along the same linear path. But I’ve no idea how you could successfully put on screen David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, with all its necessary (as opposed to optional) bouncing between text and footnotes, or even Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, with its requirement that you read the novel fully through in both of the recommended manners in order for the project’s full brilliance to emerge. What’s left, then, for film except really good, really disciplined editing that recognizes, yeah, I’ve got some great blocks of commentary—but much as I’d love to keep them, I’m going to have to kill these darlings and either use them somewhere else, or let the world in on something like a Whitmanesque offering of things that might have been? (The best example I can summon at the moment of another would-be good movie in sore need of editing was The Lighthouse, which could have ended at three or four points before it finally came to a close—but it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and unlike Triangle, I can’t think of any scenes great enough to be pulled and watched outside of the main flow of the film.)
As I continue to ponder the potential of filmic footnotes, I’ll also have to wonder whether said phenomenon would even have been possible before the advent of the VCR or similar technologies—or whether, after the thrill of early cinema days, in which viewers sat fascinated by the briefest of clips of people doing everyday things in silence on the screen before them, you could have drawn a crowd with scenes cut from the main feature, somewhat à la the reel of censored kisses in Cinema Paradiso.
The Expositrix 