Categorical Aperitif

I'm delighted to find that somebody put this up on YouTube:

This is from Millennium, that dark, depressing, short-lived Fox show from the 90s that starred a marvelously grim Lance Henriksen as haunted crimefighter Frank Black, whose uncanny (and possibly supernatural) ability to get inside the mind of a killer is both his gift and his curse. I've recently been rediscovering this series with the help of Netflix, and I've been pleasantly surprised to find that, though it has its faults, the show holds up rather well a decade later. Whether it was better originally than it seemed, or whether its darkness just fits better in the Bush years, I cannot say. I still remember being floored by this sequence when I first saw it. It's from the finale of Millennium's second season: as an apocalyptic virus begins to wreak havoc upon the land, Frank Black's equally haunted colleague Lara Means (Kristen Cloke) holes up in a lonely motel room and has her own apocalyptic breakdown—set to the searing, elemental accompaniment of the "Land" triptych from Patti Smith's Horses. I had never seen anything quite like this on television before. Nor had I paid sufficient attention to Patti Smith.

Come to think of it, it was a year ago yesterday that my friend jules sent me an email noting that Patti Smith had a new song inspired by the Israeli attack on Qana during last summer's war: go here and scroll down to "Qana." Listening to it, I couldn't help but be reminded of Lara Means going eloquently mad as her world descended into nightmare. Water to wine, wine to blood.

Go over to Patti Smith's news page now and you'll find an unspeakably gorgeous poem for the 70th anniversary of the Guernica bombing—Patti Smith doing in her way what Pablo Picasso so famously did in his. Part:

Through the rubble she crawled
with one shoe the other foot gone
a trail sticky and warm

She crept into the belly of a fallen horse
drawing its life into her mouth
covering her doll with kisses
she knelt entreating her god
an immense crucifix swathed
in telegraph wire that spun
like a bottle in the center of a circle

She made a sign over her breast
and stuffed her mouth with biscuits

Body of Christ...Body of Christ

Horses wept jewels the size of fists
swept by scholars with a mind
to twist and level facets
of each plane to be raffled
when the bombing ceased

// posted by nash @ 3:52 PM