Not Who We Are

John Travolta in John Carpenter's "Blow Out." Personal Effects is the name of his video company.
John Travolta in John Carpenter’s “Blow Out.” Personal Effects is the name of his video company.

We worked our way through three Criterion Collections of Noir movies and we just dove into one called “NeoNoir.” We started with Brian DePalma’s “Obsession” (thumbs down) and then “Blow Out.” We had seen this one in the theater. Bob Martin had just joined our band, formerly the Hi-Techs, and we were looking for a band name. Bob was with us in the theater and we all looked at each other when John Travolta opened the door to his film studio. Travolta’s character witnesses the assassination of a governor who is running for president and enters a tangled web of conspiracy.

The activities of a bullied Pennsylvania kid with his dad’s firearm and the many articles on Shelley Duval that we’ve read in the last week put Robert Altman’s “Nashville” on our “Up Next” list. We saw that in Toronto when it first came out. Interesting watching it with a theater full of Canadians. I remember people smoking cigarettes all around us. We saw “3 Women” in NYC and left the theater feeling as if we had had an out-of-body experience.

Don’t you hate it when politicians tell us, “This is not who we are?”

1 Comment

One Reply to “Not Who We Are”

  1. I remember that band naming story. I had seen the movie a few days before so when you told me what you had chosen, I knew right where it came from

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