Sin City – Noisy Film Night #3

On a night like this everybody’s looking for somebody stranger.

It was probably the coldest night of the year. ‘I’m sorry there’s no one here’ confessed the beautiful bartenderess with hair that used to be blue and is now just a touch pliable pink.

‘I’m sorry too, but unfortunately someone may show up’. I provide no consolation. In the meantime, won’t you drown me in a paper cup of mango tea and put the Waterboys on?

I handed her the CD I’ve been saving her for the past 3 months – that’s how far away Brooklyn can be sometimes.. – and unrolled a tinkertoy or two: pod, bass, throb, octave and delay unit. ‘someone said to me hey what are you waving at? I said what have I got to lose, somebody might wave back’

What did I have to lose? The drummer was as late as only really good drummers can be, the brand new minidisk recorder didn’t work but I put my faith tonight in neither man nor overpriced gadget, expecting everything from none but the music.

I was triggering and squeezing the levels up on a Boomerang, a delay effect I rarely use because it distorts sound so badly – today it sounded like  the bass was being downloaded to analogue tape and back up to digital. Sinner’s Heaven! Fred’s Midi guitar was wasting no time in pretending to be an accordion accompanied by two vibraphones and the place was already packed with our strange acquaintances and even stranger friends.

As Hardigan was gearing up to rescue Nancy the first time around, the senator was in the back room practicing his hospital bed intimidation speech and the world kept spinning its course in the ancient pattern of stand and deliver: The poor stay poor, the rich get rich, That’s how it goes, everybody knows. Fred and I anchored the screen facing starboard and gently spun the room around it.

At some point as the bar began buzzing Chris hopped on the carousel. I’m not exactly sure when this happened since time was frolicking back and forth so violently, but all of a sudden you could hear his prepared drums wrinkling time into nine foldable layers, Sin City was situated right at the heart of a deadly jungle. It had always given autonomy to naked Amazon prostitutes, but even the densest jungles narrate one book you had better know by heart: moonlight doesn’t permeate through the rain soaked leaves very often, and besides your reading glasses were smashed to bits when your backpack saved you from certain poisoned-dart death. We’ll have to see Dr. C about a new prescription if we ever get out of here.

A new and sweetly bizarre whistle is breathed from a banjo bearing an uncanny resemblance to an iMac. A lemur calling perhaps? Maybe the last of them. I ask the Yang Tze dolphins to call back by Tube echo, they comply immediately in reverse chorus. The melody takes an even stranger twist when Jack realizes the jungle book is about to be recycled into pulp fiction. Nancy’s innocent stripper smile reverberates over an open D string and the slaughter begins: Marshes are sticky this time of year, but thank god or Frank Miller for Miho’s arrows – they never fail to hit home. Banjo bullets are fast and furious, though they tend to dance around their target for a while before getting his feet wet. Breakneck Tango erupts over a Salsa bass line alternating between Pi and octave fuzz as Paula grabs the microphone and glorious victory hymns shout their gratitude for mercy. When the man who rules the universe is about to expire, even the deadliest of sins bears redemption in its wallet next to the photo of the wife and kids.

An old man dies, a little girl lives.

Fair trade.

~Cordelia.