He stands in the crooked desert that looks like an anthropomorphised cactus. A rectal cap rested on his gentle head. And then this creature passed through the sands with the same old wanderer of a tumbleweed that had been blowing for uncertain years with its own unknown mission. This Paris, Texas The vignette is the way Harry Dean Stanton is happily remembered — some almost human creature wandering from God knows where God knows what, but is always enticing and enticing with a sense of eternal mystery and an air of twisted fun.
This is not your typical movie star. And on his album Partial Fiction came in 2014, clearly he’s not your typical musician either. Once again, the album has the sound of something exploding from afar. The weathered journey made it dogeared and bent. Seemingly ugly at first, some dogrel-hollering lost the concept of keys and rhythm. However, in due course, the music settles down like a destructive neighborhood cat that you can’t completely get rid of in your garden until once you think, ‘There’s something about his music, you know’.
However, at this stage, it is worth considering the humble dive-bar musician who learned all the chords of ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ and kept their vocal pipes nice and clean in hopes of their styling. can be identified by a large wig. And it’s important to consider the handsome Hollywood hopeful confined to a hotel room reading all the manuals on conventional acting techniques and preparing for their role wandering the desert through dehydration and exposing themselves to harmful levels of UV until they look like prunes — a prune reserved. who pipped on Paris, Texas position of a star who apparently read the call to cast in the announcements while perched on a bar stool a moment ago.
This phenomenon is frustrating to a million hopefuls. In the film Coen brothers The Man Is Not There, there’s a scene where a pretentious French piano instructor relentlessly explains, in winding terms, ‘I don’t know what it is, but he didn’t get it’. Outwardly, the mysterious je ne sais quoi of this art may seem like some kind of elitist tripe that allowed trashcans to sell for millions at the Museum of Modern Art, but I would be damned if nothing more than a grain of truth here.
Often, that missing mystery that separates the great from the only capable is relegated to the soul or a kind of star quality. But in Stanton’s case, it’s even more confusing. His charisma goes beyond the usual required skill levels — it’s the kind where the French piano teacher would proclaim, ‘I don’t know what it is, but he didn’t get it, he had something completely different’. This is the potion of the Outsider artist.
You see, there’s a band called The Shaggs led by Frank Zappa as “better than The Beatles”. Actually, they are more like the lobotomised Beatles. And it’s not surprising — they have no interest in music, have hardly heard any conventional pop, and they can’t play it, but a palm reader told their father they were going to be stars so he assigned them to do rock ‘n ‘roll without being heard.
Naturally, the result was a mess, but it was a mess that their confused, confused and troubled producer finally said, after years of thinking what he was part of, “A lot of people try to reproduce anything even close to what Shaggs did, but nobody seems to be able to do it because no one can do it.”
The same can be said of Stanton. His evil ways in music and movies are unmatched. Not in the wow of Al Pacino’s controlled bravura, not in the amount of emotions at once that Francis McDormand can deal with you, but in some mysterious way that can only be summarized as charm. The term Outsider art is one that is often disputed, but its beauty helps explain what we mean here: The notion that there is a story beyond what you see or hear. Staying in the long shadow of Stanton’s walk on our screens and the imperfections of his acting thereafter, or his shambolic music studio, is the meaning of a story.
It gives the impression that Stanton, for no apparent reason, was roaming the Texan desert that day even though no camera was present, and that he planned to go through classic folk songs on his balcony, just by chance that the recording equipment. He is naturalistic and humane in this sense, but he is certainly an outsider, a one-man demimonde with a story to tell, and an unusual way of telling it, but he has traveled far so he will still try no matter how. abominable. it may seem to our primary ears at first… and it will be only partially fictional.
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