The Street Couch

Here is a film I directed back on November 9th and 10th, 2010 with a few drunk photo students after a long day in the lab. All of it was pulled together spontaneously with a generous dose of free association and mutual love of David Lynch.

The footage sat around a while, I had no idea how to edit a movie or any confidence my computer would even be able to handle the task. Recording some music for Vince McAley's “The Only Picture Of Us”, I felt inspired to throw our little movie together.

The theme, “Leah”, was a melody I would wail alone in my car at the time. On the third day of editing, I remembered the odd time signature I would originally sing the tune to. I didn't think anyone would want to hear my voice, so I whistled instead. Its much more weird and menacing now than longing and heartbroken, so I guess its perfect for this particular “romantic comedy”.

To ensure the highest quality viewing experience, I divided the film into four parts.

eBay Taxidermy

Dr. SEUSS Unorthodox Taxidermy, circa 1938

Do yourself a favor and look up taxidermy on eBay. For most insane results, list highest price first. There's a lot more of those Dr. Seuss trophies, by the way.



Where better to place half a coffee table than on the skinned husk of a majestic royal beast?



There's always money in the shark stand.





Come for the meat furniture, stay for the awkward racial politics.

I'll leave you with this. Vintage lifelike goat wiggles ear, shakes head. Eerily realistic. Taxidermy?

BEEOWEP!

If you did not know, a beeowep is when cartoon logic suddenly becomes manifest in the real world. This is sort of a national anthem/mating call for my best friends.

Last night, at 8:09 CST, Rachel Maddow beeowept.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Actually it was more of a doowip, but she's a California girl.

BEEOWOOP!

The Metaphysical Pictures of Wadsworth and White

I mentioned in an earlier post that I have been thinking a lot about the distortion of space in the imagination. Recently, I discovered a contemporary painter that seems to be dabbling in a few of the ideas I was writing about.

Eric White creates collages of remembered characters from old pictures, trapped in impossible rooms; sometimes impossible cars. I feel a little embarrassed to be so obsessed with someone so closely associated with the Lowbrow movement, but I think his good work is accomplishing very different goals than the cute plastic toys of his bicoastal friends.

White often talks about the "metaphysical" nature of his paintings, something I recognize in the works of De Chirico or Edward Wadsworth. I think Wadsworth's later surrealist landscapes are notable because they deal exclusively in matters of a kind of heightened awareness that makes ordinary objects inexplicably present and significant. It would be easy to dismiss his seashells if you've never had a lucid dream. What we see that isn't shown— the irrational, the metaphysical; is the true content of his paintings.

The misfits of veristic surrealism: De Chirico, Balthus, Magritte, Delvaux, Wadsworth (even Freud and Hopper); employ an innate grammar of paranoid recognition. First, there is psychologically potent content with little regard to the pretenses of automatic techniques. We are dealing with images of things; things that are irrational but understood. And secondly, maybe most importantly, we see a focus on the intimate experiences of paying attention. Metaphysical painting is about the excitement that comes with simple perception, and its habitual faults.

Eric White's best work has a similar fetish for lucidity, along with the waking daymare quality that seems to occupy the other side of the coin. The cropping and segmentation of space in his collages suggest the same logic that the mind employs to make sense of the chaos of dreams, or transcend the limitations of linear time. I suppose what he is doing could be called Pop Surrealism. I feel that he sometimes teeters on inspiration, falling back from time to time on the tired conventions of his hipster colleagues. But as far as his ability to successfully wield the subconscious toward serious surreal work is concerned, he is without peer in his time.

A Day In The Life of the Four Zen Emotions

I was driving in my car in a thunderstorm and was lucky enough to catch "A Day In The Life" on the radio. Something caught me this time listening to it; the unstuck-in-time quality of the song's structure. John Lennon sleepwalks through the news, with a kind of sadness whose clarity is only really grasped once someone close to you has died. In those weeks afterward when the line between life and not life is for a time, tangible.

This thought itself has me searching around the room for Paul Schrader's "Transcendental Style in Film", in a near panic that I might have sold it. Here it is! And with it a passage that I think of nearly everyday:

Where the mood of the moment is solitary and quiet it is called sabi. When the artist is feeling depressed or sad, and this particular feeling of emptiness catches a glimpse of something rather ordinary and unpretentious in its incredible "suchness," the mood is called wabi. When the moment evokes a much more intense, nostalgic sadness connected with autumn and the vanishing away of the world, it is called aware. And when the vision is hinting at an unknown never to be discovered, the mood is called yugen.

From Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen, p. 176.

Do you recognize these Zen emotions? This feels like a short summation of all the most profound moments of my life; minus the absurdist emotions that one finds exploring the Paranoid-Critical Method. Notice how strangely the definition of yugen matches that untranslatable German word sehnsucht. Sehnsucht being a word I tend to associate with C. S. Lewis, and the feeling one gets while reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and the children first hear the phrase, "Aslan is on the move." I remember that profound moment when the curtain was pulled back and, decades between us, feeling that unfathomable palpitation of the heart that comes with witnessing the miraculous world. Of course, C. S. Lewis and I have very different explanations for such experiences. This does not lessen the novelty of C. S. Lewis, Bruce Cockburn, and I wondering where the lion's are.

Let's step back one quantum leap from yugen and contemplate the aware of "A Day In The Life."

Let's imagine Lennon as the sleepwalker slowly treading his way through The Daily Mail, catching a glimpse of the transience of the world as it approaches the autumn of the late 60's, and above it all thinking, "I'd love to turn you on so you could see what I'm seeing." The feeling swells, becoming an apocalyptic cacophony.

Then suddenly, the alarm rings. And here we are waking to another day in the morass of conventional daily consciousness; the true sleepwalkers, imagining that our rat race has some prize of substance for us in the end. Leading to such a simple, beautiful line, "And somebody spoke and I went into a dream."

This does two things. It introduces to kids everywhere, in a tiny pop song, that "real life" is the fantasy. Every once and a while in this short life you will suddenly waken to the world; a deep wakefulness that will cast into doubt all previous notions of what consciousness really is. If you are lucky. It is a tragic realization, but one that has the potential of correcting you over and over again, and giving you the power to share that glimpse with others.

Secondly, it really nails why the cut-up, medley structure idiosyncratic of mature Beatles work is so powerful. It shows that the pop song, and all its conventions, can be a delivery system for sophisticated irony and a working language for the cinema of the mind. Of course, none of this is really surprising. Eisenstein's editing existed in Beethoven before the motion picture camera was ever invented. However, the Beatles seemed to use the cinematic power of music very self-consciously. Geoff Emerick's synesthetic engineering, the schizophrenic toggling between Lennon and McCartney's writing, George Martin's musique concrete contributions that he began while working with the Goon Show. "And somebody spoke and I went into a dream" is Bergman or Bunuel. So many of the psychedelic Beatles classics have this oneiric power. What is Revolution 9, if not an experimental film we can only see in our minds?

"A Day In The Life" has that Zen sense of aware that makes a person feel unstuck in time. That we are aware, in the English language sense, only sporadically. It is a wrinkle in time that connects us tenuously to the moments we are truly alive, when so often in time we are tossed about as if at sea. Lost in the woods. Sleepwalking.

Which is to say: The Beatles are fucking great.

Parajanov Biopic

Poking around the twitterverse and discovered there is a Parajanov biopic coming out by Armenian-French director Serge Avedikian. Hopefully, this will spread awareness of one of history's greatest directors. Can't wait!

Here is another link I found. Some short films by Parajanov. You can see him preparing for Sayat Nova, visually.

André Kertész, Satiric Dancer, 1929

There are so many disturbing things about this murky photograph. One, is that somehow her limbs do not look like her own. Her body twists into a swastika shape on a tina sofa, as viewed from somewhere in the air. Her porcelain contortions are mocked by no less than a statue, a framed portrait of the statue, possibly a scribbled drawing tacked to the wall. Is it a come on? The room is dark; bare but decrepit. She's wearing a silky black dress and an Elizabethan collar. The kind of cone around the neck dogs wear so as not to scratch, but black and covered in fur.

New Arcades

Over the last year, I have been investigating the warping of space in images. It began as an exercise in trying to understand the feeling of wide lenses vs. long lenses, and as a special curiosity toward the flatness of certain medium format photographs. I am still not entirely able to pin down what “it” is. It usually has something to do with the deep focus of the image, the composition in relationship to the eyes of the subject, and the apparent absence of barrel distortion.

In another way, what gives an image a different sense of presence? What are our subconscious clues that we are looking at a photograph, and how is that separate from how we construct images in our minds?

Cropped images can eliminate barrel distortion, or sample a flatter range. I believe that the landscapes we see in our mind tend to be collages. When you look at a drawing or painting, space is affected by insertion of things that were not; subjects and objects paid attention to a moment at a time.

Scannography follows this same wandering mind. Distortion of objects is not a matter of space, but of time. There is a flatness discovered in the simplification of drawing. A broadness and evenness to lighting impossible to source. A dreamy shallow depth of field to mimic the vagueness of memory. And a bizarre extended technique of creating new nameless anatomical features by gestures of the body through time; Bellmeresque distortions of the body.

I’ve been looking back into Cezanne, the cubists, and the Weimar Republic painters for new insights. New to me, anyways. This added to my permanent fascinations with 8-bit video games, Meatyard, Fellini, and Parajanov.

This constant awareness of space has begun to affect my dreams. Last night I was lying about with random friends playing these large handheld arcade games. About the size and shape of the new Lite-Brites. Some strange version of Ducktails, I believe. In the bottom third of the screen, the characters raced in an alley in front of a picket fence. Behind, and so above, were suburban houses uphill with all manner of strange repeating structures and rolling obstacles tumbling down. All moved sidescreen, which in the heat of the action would become live. Short spiraling picket fences, up the side of the hill, with photographic brothers inside throwing stones as we ran in duck suits through the alley. In my lucid awareness, I rewound and reviewed the memory, again and again, until it became too unstable to be conclusive.

Meditation in life is merely practice for the dream world.

Flash/One Car Funeral

HOLY WAR

Flash/One Car Funeral (Instrumental)

Recorded August 2010

Flash by HOLY WAR

One Car Funeral by HOLY WAR

Allison/Bottle Rocket

HOLY WAR

Allison/Bottle Rocket (Instrumental)

Recorded June 2010

Allison by HOLY WAR

Bottle Rocket by HOLY WAR

We will never be free

New arrangement of an old track.

We will never be free by HOLY WAR

Bowed Piano and Universal Brotherhood

Scouring the internet for an example of a piano with a Turkish stop, to no avail, and discovered this video:

All those hands! It amazes me there are still new things, everywhere.

Reading Schiller's "Ode to Joy".

Freude, Freude, treibt den Raeder

In der grossen Weltenuhr.

When I think of universal brotherhood, I think about Whitman asking why are all the best poets are nationalist poets, alluding to Goethe. America and Germany both being sort of fabricated and disintegrated nations, respectively. Are these intense feelings of universal brotherhood really an expression of profound loneliness and awareness of the emptiness of national boundaries? The beginnings of capitalist atomization? Maybe this is why Hopper is always sited as the ultimate expression of the American national character. There's real empathy, and there are grand delusions. I had always associated these feelings with anti-nationalism, universal humanhood. Are loneliness, jingoism, and universal brotherhood the same emotion with different cognitive superficialities pasted on top? The difference in outcomes is not superficial.

Those who dwell in the great circle,

Pay homage to sympathy!

It leads to the stars,

Where the Unknown reigns.

Other thoughts: Looking for examples of turquerie in contemporary American culture. Appropriating for the purposes of colonization.

Bahram Bayzai

A year ago or more I was watching an Iranian documentary, "Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!" The film is very good, and I should talk about it at length, but one of the things that keeps me thinking back to it is a certain scene. There is a clip of two women walking down a street in Tehran as the tracking camera floats along with them, like in a Tarkovsky film.

The scene can be found at exactly 1:07:50




Haunting right? All this time later, I finally decided to just email the director Massoud Bakhshi and he wrote me back right away.

The film is "Kalagh" or The Raven, by a director named Bahram Bayzai. He is one of the auteurs of the pre-revolutionary Iranian New Wave, and judging from the few clips I've seen, a fellow disciple of the Tarkovsky/Parajanov cult of dream projection cinema. A lot of this comes down to a familiar use of "sculpting in time", or figures and ideas floating in and out of the frame as our gaze moves along with the tracking shot.

Here is an example from Bashu, The Little Stranger:




Excuse the vaguely Scandinavian incoherence here, but note the atmospheric similarities to Tarkovsky's "Sacrifice". Move past the credits and look at these mirror shots at 01:23.




Apparently, he is best known for his absurdist plays and his 1971 film Ragbar (Downpour), which I should be looking for soon.

As a final thought, there should be a better name for the uncharted emotional territory that Absurdism as a genre encompasses. It is bigger than the irrational. Surrealism of its kind speaks directly to a super-cognitive area of the brain, and is wordlessly understood. This is different than fish on bicycles, or randomness for its own sake. It is parallel communication of some kind, and deserves its own consideration as an artistic technique.

Fuckist no. 1

Bruegel

Settling into a new apartment in Logan Square. Must have watched "The Conformist" three times this weekend. Coincidentally, there was a de Chirico painting hung at the Gallery Cabaret. Also rediscovering Bruegel. His "Hunters in the Snow" was featured in Solaris, of course. His tower of Babel has always been a favorite. I have always tried convincing Vincent to use it as his logo for Let It Build.

This website is amazing! I have always been expert at crossing my eyes.

http://www.jim3dlong.com/renaissance-28.html

Why was she reading Baudrillard?

Thought of the Day.

"Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true..."

-Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulations)

Reading this sentence silenced me for a long time.

I have often had the feeling that I don't really need to know what's not on Wikipedia. There you usually find the universe of common knowledge or reasons for popular interest. You can trace the geneology of a reference, from an interview or movie, to the fan-FAQ's, to the blogs of obsure pop-study, to the continually churning reference-iconography of what we consider the universe of everything possible or knowable, or worth name-dropping. All this is transparent enough to make most conversation nauseating but also easily avoidable with a little research. Fugazi, Miyazaki, Alakazaam!

Science is one thing, however any topic is only as useful as it can discussed with others. Real truth deduced from common knowledge and common sense. The cognitive dissonance of a lie, or a loaded word, can often be easily spotted, if not immediately understood. You have to smash icons together, forever. Take any frame of reference to its natural apocalyptic conclusion. But how many people are as interested in really discovering something personally revealing as they are interested in arguing a point and winning?

My point is: You have to keep bombing Italy.

All this has reminded me of our failed attempt last night to come up of a list of things that we fear. There was only one answer, and from me. "That I should have been more materialistic..."

New Year's Dream

At the library again, I am looking for an illustrated book with naturalistic looking animals as fairy tale creatures. I take the book to the riverbank. The sky is at half night and the water runs with mud.

Waist deep in the river is a father in his coat and hat with his son. They stand with the bowed trees holding at branches against the current. Calculating stillness as a white spotted owl negotiates branch after branch stretching out its wings just outside the defence of its nest. It seems indifferent to their presence despite its size and close proximity. The river silt is poisoned by heavy metals and radiation and countless industrial disasters. The father lifts a branch and his son passes under to poke his finger into the owl's nest. There is a smudge of black grease as he wipes off his cheek.

Nausea overcomes the boy white as a ghost against the pale night. And the quiet roar coaxes him shyly into the deeper water as his father sobs. Gravity and the strength of his legs give slowly into the current. Below, the soft stones are felt again and again by the kiss of every passing scale and fin.

Along comes a woman on a raft reading Baudrillard who sees the crying father and offers to give him a lift. She tells him there is a barn down river that can grant wishes. There his son can be given back to him. He follows along beside her wading though the cursed sands of the muddy river. Even the raft is smashed to pieces. Her violet dress spreads open all around her carried by the current. The bottom reveals itself wordlessly: a rock, a trout, a patch of weeds. Ahead they reach a clearing where they can see the building standing on shore. They lift their heavy legs through the sand into the dark end of the day.

I follow them from the river bank up the path to the barn. Inside the large dark gray room are the smells of straw and cobwebs. Leaning against the back corner is a very tall painting in yellow of the Virgin. We dissapear behind it into a passage. The next room has a open wall on the other side, a winding que for horses or some other animal, a kind of arcade. [or a stage?] The presence in the room is obvious at once. I try not to think about money. Only wishing for the return of this man's son would be appropriate. The three of us are hushed in delirious cyclical prayer. Just then at the sound of a wooden gate the boy crosses the arcade in the darkness from stage-left, exiting stage right beyond the black curtain. Its him. He crosses lightly again and his father rushes to meet him, opening the front wooden gate to the winding arcade. He grabs his boy tearfully, overjoyed to see him.

The recognition in the boy's face fades, however. Something sinister has replaced it, maybe knowing, maybe just someone else. The father begins to strangle the boy. It occurs to us we may have gotten more than the boy, a demonic trick. The barn door opens to the daylight and the farm hand storms in with his gun, the stable boy's father behind, old and terrified. The stagehand takes fire at the father, but is taken by the woman. She struggles for the gun and wrestling with his arms he shoots himself in the face. Father grabs the old man and strings him up by the neck, woman grabbing the rope and hoisting him up to the death. He swings like a pendulum to the woman's pulling, smashing into the stage-wall over and over, until his body dangles crushed and lifeless. An entire family murdered by reckless strangers from off the river.

We used to dream of oceans.

MILK

An Existential Thursday for the history books. MILK was an exceptional movie! Emile Hirsh doing sit-ups was absolutely awesome. Everybody was awesome. Sean Penn and James Franco making out? Kind of creepy (especially that wig Penn was wearing), but still awesome.

The story was told in a pretty conventional way, predictable I should say, but the acting was top notch. Even Franco was not bad. The photography was dark and grainy and if you absolutely love 35mm film, it was mesmerizing to watch. The scene outside Milk's birthday party with the wallpaper? Flourescent light mashing up the color temperatures and casting a flicker over the kitchen in Harvey's apartment? Realistic lighting. Large format. Super-wide lenses. Film cannot die. Gus Van Sant is a true believer.

Watching this film was a very emotional experience. The victory over Prop. 6 in the movie felt extremely bittersweet given the current political climate. But, I can't imagine better timing for a film like this. I think it will stand a monument for better gay political films to come. Brokeback Mountain was an important film as far as creating empathy for closeted gay men in the hearts of a larger straight audience. MILK celebrates victory, tenacity, and hope. Its not just about staying alive. Its about kicking some fucking ass. Its about coming out and acting out despite how society may retaliate. There's no sense of victimization. There is a clear sense that victory comes to the bold, hard-won as it may be. That is the kind of film we need.

I am interested in what films can be considered as real predecessors to a film like MILK. Was it just a conventional protest film repackaged for the GLBT movement? Is it really any kind of first in gay film? It is certainly one of the best of its kind, but these are the natural questions that come to mind after seeing MILK. There must be others like it, if not already out there, soon to come in the future.

On that note, I am off to write some really disturbing letters to Emile Hirsh.

RACHEL MADDOW

Listen. We all know that Rachel Maddow is the smartest person on TV, but let's be serious for a second.

It she not also the hottest person on TV?

Perhaps I have already said too much. Regardless, she is back from vacation tonight on MSNBC, 8PM Central time. I feel like brownies just taken from the oven. Love brownies.

PAST THE MISSION?

Well, its Tuesday. And what better to do on a Tuesday than trace the Spanish roots of the Legend of Zelda?



The Symbolist themes seem clear enough. Zelda, our girlfriend in a coma, is the classic pale Ophelia of Knopff and Millais. These artists were not so much a part of an art movement as part of a mystic underground influenced by the same ancient Greek and Norse myths that would influence Tolkein or Harryhausen's monsters in Jason and the Argonauts.

Adventure of Link takes the Zelda aesthetic in a decidedly "Iberian" direction. Listen to the Phrygian scales in the musical introduction. I can hear it a little in the first Zelda, but they make it pretty obvious here when they go straight into the flamenco chords for those willing to wait past the first seconds of echoing notes. The towns are very flat and sandy, with a wild west main drag and flat rooftops. The harbor town of Mido even has a mission. The women look like they are about to break into a tango. Maybe it is not so much Spanish as it is Latin American. Or Mexican. Maybe we are to believe its a Western?

Did I mention that I am completely serious?

The Thunderbird itself, the final boss, comes from North American mythology. One was apparently shot out of the sky by cowboys and was described to look much like a pterodactyl.

I am not saying that this is hard to believe. I am just asking, did you ever notice it? So much for Tuesday.