Last Days in a Lonely Place


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Farewell my friends
Farewell my dear ones
If I was rude
Forgive my weakness
Goodbye my friends
Goodbye to evening parties
Remember me
In the spring
To work for your bread
Soon you must leave
Remember your families
And work for your children

I don't need much
and the older I become
I realize
My friendships
Will carry me over
any course of distance
any cause of sorrow
My friends that last
Will dance one more time
with me.
I don't need words
This, I need.

(Polly Jean Harvey Before Departure)

Solomon references Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) specifically the apocalyptic enactment inside the planetarium at Griffith Park Observatory, underlining cosmological mysteries in contrast to our relative human insignificance.
Solomon often matched unlikely sources, finding affinities and strange harmonics in these fluent combinations. The second piece of the In Memoriam trilogy joins the names of two very different films from different centuries to give the suggestion of a chronicle or an epitaph. The two titles couple as melancholy statements of fact to make a stronger pronouncement, implying finality if not fatality or a sentence served - Last Days In A Lonely Place.

Gus van Sant's Last Days (2005) evokes the wayward spirit of Kurt Cobain, a fugitive figure nearly a ghost, already entering an overture to the Bardo state during his waning time on earth.
Bogart in Nick Ray's In A Lonely Place (1950) appears as a turbulent screenwriter placed under suspicion. A man of violent outbursts, covert generosity and wounded tenderness. His troubled spirit and uncontrollable impulses assure true love will be vexed and vanish.
LaPore was haunted by each of these films as cinematic experiences and as premonitions. In Solomon's Last Days in A Lonely Place, LaPore's stoic spirit seems to unsettle the calm of familiar interiors and deserted streets. A charcoal world where the invisible resides and reigns. (Mark McElhatten)

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