half smiles of the downloaded

after seven decades there was, finally, a check beside the taxi driver soundtrack torrent. the score by bernard herrmann was the earliest thing about taxi driver i liked. earliest: didn't get the movie the first time i saw it. high school, surrounded by people, you know, typical happy life. always liked violent movies - kaye and i had this fascination with the silence of the lambs. we would do scenes in what i would now call camp, erm, a campy manner. (the lambsh, they were shhcreaming/quid pro quo docter/good eeveneeng clareeeese). taxi driver has a different kind of violence, though. that kind that goes beyond the physical. of course the only way to show that violence is through physical images and symbols, but this movie transcends even that. there's john hinckley and jodie foster and the reagan assassination attempt.

the twelfth track has the travis bickle diary entries monologues. he talks about the rain washing the streets clean of dirt and blood and that same rain cleaning the earth of all its scum. the first meeting with the angelic woman seems to be a feature in scorsese films; cate blanchett glows when she and howard hughes are first introduced (now i'm mixing names, and the aviator is really a non-scorsese film directed by martin scorsese). betsy has that same radiance when travis first sees her.

there's a similar obsession to john hinckley's and it's the best (not the superlative of good) story in tennis i've known. steffi graf won the golden slam in 1988 (all the majors plus the olympic gold) and was queen of the world. a few years later some teenage girl started beating her. monica seles became world number one. then günter parche, obsessed fan, stabbed seles and steffi was number one again. seles would win only one major after that. whatever, i still love steffi.

this is a piece of crappy writing one does to keep one's thoughts away from the real crappy things that're happening. by one of course i mean me (or is it i, i mean i?).