We've met before, haven't we?
Click to view1981's 'Matte Kudasai' is, for better or for worse, just about the only King Crimson song that I know, but I love it. (Recommendations or warnings in relation to the rest of Fripp & Co's oeuvre would not be unwelcome). The vocals and lyrics foreshadow the recordings of Rufus Wainwright to an almost frightening degree. I just wish Mr Wainwright's last album could have turned out to be something that sounded more like this and less like a grey, grubby compromise with record company demands.
I was reminded of 'MK' while watching Richard Brooks's 1967 movie adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (a good alternative title for which would have been Discipline, the name of the King Crimson LP on which 'MK' features). There's a justly famous scene in the latter stages of the film where Perry Smith/Robert Blake is standing at the window of his prison cell, surveying the wreckage of his life with a mixture of horror and disbelief, while the rain that's pouring down outside is reflected on his face like ghostly tears, or like he is a ghost that's beginning to blur around the edges as the end approaches. 'Still by the window pane, pain like the rain that's falling...'
I was expecting to find that David Lynch had taken from this film more than just Robert Blake when he was making Lost Highway, and that does indeed seem to have been the case. A car parked at dead of night outside an isolated country house, its headlights illuminating a white signpost; the wind blowing desolately through the trees like there is now nothing on earth but nuclear wasteland and this one place; the sense of immense loneliness and of having found the Real within a dream as though you were always destined to find it ...
I get such a spark from discovering moments such as this, where the phantasmal leaks into life in the raw in sumptuous black and white, and from the hope of finding more of them. It is because of this that I am happy enough to subject myself to so many predominantly mediocre film noirs (not that In Cold Blood counts as one of those) in addition to the great ones. Some of Lynch's films treat such occurrences as portals and pass through them and into the deep beyond, but it's good sometimes just to have them there as things that rise, settle and dissipate like smoke in the air.