Hidden Flick: Money, Love & Strange Pt. 2

What is the key note of the film is its scene sequencing. Welles’ chose to shuffle the action in such a way that the film enfolds in non-linear pacing with imagery joined by random story links that fit the flow of the film rather than any notions of ‘this happened, and then this happened…’ It is that idea of a story occupying a floating place in space, a recurring theme of the shifting definition of ‘time-and-space’ that I am, personally, obsessed with in storytelling, and it runs throughout most of my Hidden Flick columns.

Welles’ film resembles Julio Cortazar’s novel, Hopscotch about an Argentinean writer, living in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, and surrounded by Birds of a Feather, otherwise known as friends who call themselves “the Club.” Inevitably, the stories in both Mr. Arkadin and Hopscotch can be experienced in any random order as one returns time-and-time again to get a different artistic presentation each time. It is also a technique I worked on in great detail for my first novel—a beast still waiting to see the light of published day—and even joked that I was going to include scissors with each copy of the book so the reader can cut-up the pages ala William Burroughs, and read the chapters in any order as long as the last chapter remains the same in the grand order of things.

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That sort of improvisational spirit, on my part, came from years of listening to the Grateful Dead and Phish, with a nod towards story-as-onion landmarks like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in which the order of things is not always in a straight linear line to the finish. Phish, specifically, always seemed to find a weird and wonderful way to present a live show, and as I segued from the beautiful Providence Bowie from 12/29/94 into the Providence Birds of a Feather>2001>Brother, Brother 4/4/98 sequence, I also noticed the Phab Phour’s ability to rip their own history apart and place pages in a new order, which could produce absolutely sublime results—the first truly jammed out BOAF that, ultimately, fed into mind-frying readings of Ghost, Lizards, and back into the pool where it all began: Bowie, resembling a 39-month (and some change) musical sandwich. A triumphant Harry Hood closed that epic show as one is left with a question Welles also pondered: “Where do you go when the lights go out?”

That idea…this is where we’ve been and this is where we’re going in the dark…we think…you look back…all of you ‘birds of a feather’ and decide who we were and what we meant and don’t forget to include the sordid Phish-y details…it is, after all, who we are, as well. And as I move forward and listen to Phish swim through the languid Simple waters of a fine 2/20/03 performance, I recognize that continued allegiance to improvisation and random moments of feedback blending with hooks to tell an interesting tale. I also hear Orson Welles chuckling in the distance about his own timeless narrative victory. He gave not only filmmakers, but artists in many fields, a new way to ‘show-boat & tale-spin’. And whether it was in the slipstream dance with magic in F for Fake—the film covered in Part I of this little adventure of time-and-space with Welles and Phish—or the branches sliced off one’s past from the oak tree of their family history in the exotic and brilliant Mr. Arkadin, one feels a bit of futuristic empowerment in which what was was and what could be is so much more than imagined—a simple little breakdown in a song called Simple, evolving into a mutated form of music never played before as if the boundaries between this dimension and whatever is next were truly broken down forever…no more clocks, just space to play.

And now that we’re all clean, and now that we’re all sober, and now that we’re all healthy, and now that we’ve all got kids, and now that we’ve all learned how to play chess, and now that we’ve all got questions that need answers, let’s do it all over AGAIN. Ahhh…if life were only that simple, right? Was it just a unique cultural moment in time like Phish god-head Trey said as he picked up his Lifetime Achievement Award? And how does one revisit a moment in time? Get out your scissors and create your own book.

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