Music for the Weekend: The Morning by The Weeknd.
In the spirit of my deluge of year-end listmaking, I’d thought I’d cap the week by giving you my choice for Best Song of the Year, The Morning by The Weeknd. Talk about a song with fucking swag coming out of its ears. Sexy as hell, catchy as fuck RnB beats, and baller lyrics like “Got the walls kickin’ like they six months pregnant.” Awesome.
I love it when a song paints a picture in my head. If I had to direct a music video of this track - with no boundaries of censorship - I’d tell the story of a young gay man who is in love with a woman.
This man, an artist, hustles his own body in Times Square for male companionship. He is fascinated by BDSM and fetish. This hustle is juxtaposed against him making love to his girlfriend - a sweet and tender moment, one of true love and intimacy.
This is not fiction, but rather the true story of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, which was so beautifully rendered in Smith’s autobiography Just Kids. Theirs is a tale of identities and star-crossed love, and I feel this song encapsulates it perfectly.
Partners in love and life - Mapplethorpe and Smith.
It plays in my head: the hard gangsta lyrics set up against the sensuality of RnB, with a deft sensitivity underlying it all. It would be a beautiful film, the cold, blistering lights of Times Square as the backdrop of the young man’s search for both money and identity, and the juxtaposition of him finding his comfort in the arms of true love - the woman he adores and who loves him back, with all the explicit lovemaking shot in a gauzy haze of filters and layered images. It would be gorgeous. Who knows, I might even shoot it someday because it’s so fully realized in my head.
It also gives me inclination to set up my next few rounds of blog posts. I’ve been taking in the Republican debates and it occurred to me that there is a real undercurrent of puritanism boiling in our society. As I write my Paul Pope script -which is turning out to be extremely violent and oozing with sex - I realize that there are some very taboo subjects in the film, which the same can be said for Lilith, which deals with, among other things, the dark worlds of incest and Elektra complexes.
Yes, I know. Call me the king of warm and fuzzy.
So in the new year, with the writing of my new film and the release of Lilith, I want to fight the undercurrent of puritanism - which is right-wing religious code for censorship - by frankly and openly discussing what we consider taboo, particularly in the realm of human sexuality and how we express it through art. A tentative warning to longtime readers, as this blog will tend to veer into NSFW territory, but hey, this is Tumblr, right? I can’t go two minutes scrolling on the dashboard without seeing a blowjob gif. But it’ll be fun, because that’s what it is supposed to be.
Have a great weekend!
