Top Five Films from 2025 I've Seen in the First Four Months of 2026

 

Magellan (Lav Diaz)

Resurrection (Bi Gan)

Peter Hujar's Day (Ira Sachs)

Dracula (Radu Jude)

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

JPW

From Erlton Back Down to Mission

The necrotic pain in my feet that will most likely be with me the rest of my life, direct result of frostbite wounds, makes walking extremely painful and some days totally impossible altogether. Unfortunately, my fifteen-year-old German luxury sedan is also presently under the weather and incapacitated, such that if I planned on getting cigarettes today I was going to have to do it on foot, trekking from Erlton back down to Mission, limping in my Timberland boots and praying for God to strike me dead. It’s not that far a distance unless you’re in agony. Because it is warm out and smells like springtime, I popped by The Purple Perk and had my first iced Vietnamese coffee of the season. It was wonderful and I felt vindicated for walking through the pain and affirming both it and myself in so doing.

Butthole Surfers, "Goofy's Concern"

Turbo Boy: Zwieschlächtig

“Zwieschlächtig” is a German word designating a field of phenomena related to all phenomena in the field. It means communication goes in and comes out all at one and the same time, but also that semi-quantifiable information is spilling in and out at all times and from all angles (and maybe more than all). Master American essayist Fenton Johnson consciously, I think, acknowledges the brute mores of our moment when he confesses to his readers that it is perfectly feasible to call the great Impressionist Paul Cézanne “crazy” the way the local kids who once hurled rocks and abuses at him did, but that if we should be actually and actively seeking meaningful counsel it might make sense to pause and consider like the great solitary painter strolling “the psychology of the earth” with its “living, feeling, expressive self, made manifest in rivers and seas and mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes.” Maybe the Earth Creature becomes more and more like a thick sinewy heart pumping deep within the earth, perhaps even at its core, like in some ditzy old 1950s Technicolor sci-fi picture. We are collectively the Earth as a creature when the echolocation starts to go haywire. The Earth gets up on top of you like Robert Frost dreamed it would, but only after the Globe shuts down and drops with a loud, wet splat in the pig slop. After the Globe shuts down a weighted blanket awaits you, folded and laid out on the Phantom of the Opera’s side of the bed. You’re going to be okay. You are loved. There are always string instruments around and they’ve always been around more for the nerves and for ‘art therapy’ than they have been for anybody’s underlying sense of self, Wagner notwithstanding. In modifying my string instrument tunings ever so slightly I found hillbilly ragas waiting there for me like a natural spring. After I got COVID I spent some time with a physician friend at his retreat in the Rockies and we asked ourselves what it is to underly. Beneath us is simply the rot that makes it all possible...as the forest makes abundantly clear. We hacked this out spitballing and picking our respective axes next to a usually very-still lake. Some young friends came out and we made tapes. It all looks a bit like this: a canalization, directing flows across a physical topography that’s all blocked-up and/or used/abused but whose underside or flipside is the All Time 'Papa Don't Preach' Smooth Ride. Upon returning to Calgary, the ‘jimsonweed ragas’ I began making in earnest with my friends sought to canalize in, around, and through a city we almost completely could not outwardly navigate—the “surface streets” of Inherent Vice. All as it was and as it had to be, what should have been always having actually been during these highly vertiginous early 2020s, year of lockdown succeeded by whiplash like hellfire, but then of course also all the way back to the dawn of time it’s either love your fate or suffer it; all that slack rope is just your own squid-like intestines. You are responsible for cleaning up after yourself. As it was to be in the year of lockdown: we were to pass a raga shelter to shelter, helter skelter, in a manner that tech-wise could not have been done even five years earlier and I would joke with another good Doc entirely that we were the group of us building ourselves a particle accelerator in the city’s sewers.

Robyn, "Robotboy" 

 

Sleuthwerk: Videoskript

The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934)

Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)

When what you need is a mouth you go and find a mouth because a mouth knows a mouth’s work and knows it readily. It’s gross in there, puffy and moist and none of my business neither. The dentists went to great effort and expense to learn dentistry and open their own clinics so they obviously have some sort of mouth hang-up by which I have remained blissfully untouched over the whole of my life, both as a narcotics detective and then as a private dick specializing in divorce beefs and grey market hijinks, a complex planetary network connecting narcos to heads of state. I’m sorry. I know I led you astray mere moments ago. The truth is it’s really me who has the hang-up with mouths, all of them, sludgy words splashing out, septic odour, clumsy teeth, and the tongue like some Frank Herbert sand worm. I cringe and cower when I face my unconvincing smile in the mirror, toothbrush canted at a harsh upward angle, beard 45% grey, most of what was once me gradually melting away, a Spring thaw from which the mute gods gravely withdraw in cloaks and ornaments sent in by the Shah. Heh heh. As a detective I perfected seeing the misery and misfortunate in every effortful smile simply not up for the task of giving face, every missed giving-of-face like a beam of untempered truth transacted as unforced error. As my face thins and I age I start to feel like I ought to have been head of the C.I.A. I’d really have to be said to have aged into it. Sometimes when I look at strangers out and about in the course of daily life they see me and immediately check instinctually to see whether or not they are at that moment in the process of committing a visible offence. My son doesn’t talk to me anymore. He said I had a flair for standing in the door in such a fashion that he found himself unable to either remain in or leave the room. I love my son but I lack his language skills and competitive intensity and frankly he dances circles around me like Muhammad Ali when he’s being a bit of a prima donna, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Most people who I tried to love like I imagined you’d imagine loving the beloved, were not the right people just as I seldom am, although just good enough can be alright when you find some fetching North African textile worker with whom to spend one golden night…out of the reaches of informants and malingerers. I await the revolution with fervour and level steadiness. I was never a slave of the State Apparatus. I believe in a basic minimum income for all people, rapid transition to zero-growth economy, automation of as much of the labour force as humanly possible, Lol. I learned from studying the Old Testament that man’s destiny is crash and burn, spoils and consequences, mass mobilization and open graves. I don’t believe in Manichaeist binary hoodwink and I don’t like what it does to the groupthink. Play it as it lays on the window displays on every second page until the camera cuts away and you were only ever a rumour. I got into police work, law enforcement, and freelance sneakiness because I wanted to do the kind of work motivated by what daily life throws in our hapless faces. But if the beat cops goes looking for how it all went wrong you can bet he’s been whistling insidious nationalistic songs and deploying slurs in the so-called correction of wrongs. The meatheads will not inherit the earth, but geology will gradually burry them along with the rest of us. Today’s heavy metal poisoning is tomorrow’s newfangled gemstone. Once we lose consciousness totally they cram us in so tight together we become diamonds. On the streets of any major city I watch the parts that are order and the parts that are chaos coexist, for better or for worse and with wild swings in polarity forever upending the operational grid, the Hermeneutic Horizon. Let us even attempt to enumerate all the ticks and jerks and little mistakes we made today. Apperception is errant, it’s not your fault...

The closest simplified model the cosmos could resemble would be pure flux inside a translucent ball.

MONDO PROFONDO: SLEUTHWERK

 

True Crime Movie Easter Egg

 

German Blu-ray of Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994)

Top Ten True Crime Movies [in Chronological Order]

If I cannot have the most brilliant destiny, I want the most wretched, not for the purpose of a sterile solitude, but in order to achieve something new with such rare matter.
- Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)

Landru (Claude Chabrol, 1963)

In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967)

Vengeance is Mine (Shōhei Imamura, 1979)

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)

Bully (Larry Clark, 2001)

Memories of Murder (Bong Joon Ho, 2003)

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022)

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)

The Flesh Eaters, "We'll Never Die"

Jep Fowler's Easter Sermon

It's already been a year alright. What more could the year possibly want with us? What in tarnation are the folks out there zombie-walking through their routine with dead grey eyes actually pontificating at? Do they think? They are all driving 30 km/h on the 50 km/h roads. I continually holler obscenities and libels and can only hope the Good Sovereign Lord might forgive a feeble old amateur lost in a world whose condition is Maya, the infinite labyrinth with moving parts and the great many occluding veils also. A world where nothing is any longer set down where it once was. Dementia has no choice. It is called after and called for. Has the little organ in the brain that does critical thinking atrophied at the scale of civilization itself...incomprehensible though troubling is this notion of civilization because it is an abstract concept and anybody can do any damn ring-a-ding thing they want to with it, like the white nationalist eugenicist Europeans who went to South America believing they would be White Gods ruling over a Divine Kingdom and who would mainly just go mad and die in the jungles, sort of like the colony collapse syndrome depicted a little ways into Terrence Malick's unconscionably lengthy New World (2005). Does everybody here today remember the story of Job as related in the Bible? Job goes through unimaginable suffering, right? Why? God has to prove a point to a rogue angel. So what does that mean? It means Job has to go through the very worst suffering that God is able to visit upon him. It's the absolute summit of suffering. What is being tested? The insanity and stupidity of Job's faith in God. This is the ultimate point of the rogue angel. The people around him and the broader general public assumed that the unspeakably awful nature of the punishment inflicted upon him by God meant Job had to have done something of the very worst order, although we don't have much evidence of the conjectures that were floating about back then, clandestine as such matters have a grievous tendency to be. I believe God saw a transformation in Job and believed it had all been for the better, as this was a much-humbled spiritual supplicant who had become much better at discussing his feelings in detail and who could withstand the intense pressures of extended solitude with relative ease. Grist for the therapy mill. Hey, don't knock it until you've tried it. Everybody in a desperate condition of economic precarity, living paycheck to paycheck or much, much worse, is one catastrophic planetary event away from becoming a flesh-eating zombie of the genre movie variety. Also, it's naturally worth considering what the collapse of electrical grids will do to people and other organisms. Will it be like the decompression and disequilibrium of the zombie office-denizens with suits stumbling through hallways en masse late in Godard's Alphaville (1965)? Will it be like Don DeLillo's short and swift 2020 novel The Silence? All I can say is yikes. So much for majestic vistas, folks. My final thought for this year's Easter sermon: you want a conscientious rather than a sadistic and unseemly executioner because, for one thing, you want him to do the actual severing of the head smoothly and without issue...and you certainly don't want him drawing the thing out unnecessarily for his own aberrant amusement. 

ESG, "Dance"

[This is probably my most exciting used record find
so far this year.] 

High School Graduation, 1997

 

A Few Sacrilegious Words

The ethically elected ego is both already obligated and never sufficiently obligated, and such is the very structure of time.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other

The social world human beings think they know is set up and maintained by connivance, manipulation, and craven self-seeking. The mad are not bad because they are bad or because they are mad, but rather because there is no easeful entering into communion with highly abnormal people and so they may tend to get on the commoner’s nerves. “My temperament was not much suited to socialization,” confesses trans artist and writer Paul B. Preciado in their book Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, finding succour and filiation instead in books like those written by “Giordano Bruno or Galileo” that “put an end to geocentrism.” For Preciado the next horizon of sacred upheaval is the logical, heteronormative binary apparatus which saturates mainstream culture and psychoanalysis both; it also seems to make all kinds of decent everyday people impatient and hostile, often out of the blue, the words out of their mouths an oil slick of ick. When I started smoking cannabis as a young man I remember that that particularly amiable and agreeable psychoactive-psychedelic plant suddenly gave me the belief that I could explain myself clearly and as simply as possible instead of becoming hostile, belligerent, and reactionary. This method has worked in fits and starts and largely depends on set, setting, and sufficient cooperation from man, beast, and utmost higher power. Our problem is that communication is dead and it’s us who put it coldly to bed. That the dying thing is forever going to die while looking death in the eye and calling it all a crackpot conspiratorial lie. Why do people want to live forever? Inertia and dumb hope. A Hungarian philosophy professor I had back in the Carleton days would regularly remind us of Deleuze’s assertion that the only question the philosophical supplicant really needs to find a way to answer is what can I hope for? It’s true, but only if you are a bourgeoisie and only if you aren’t flung out of society for reasons that have never been properly explained to you. In the near future all of us are going to have to start acting a lot more like Japan has done after the total collapse of its economy, slow and ugly, throughout the 1990s. A few years ago I chatted at dinner with a business executive in the oil and natural gas sector, though energy diversification is the full-on mandate now, who had just returned from Japan and told me that he honestly thinks Western business interests need to look at Japan as the only salient model out there for zero-growth economic sustainability. (He didn’t say anything about the birthrate concerns.) I accepted this as exciting, even emboldening news. And I definitely hadn’t been expecting it. People surprise you.

Hopper

Dean

Though he was married five times and probably had lots of experiences none of us could even fathom, it seems to me that the person for whom actor, art collector, photographer, and filmmaker Dennis Hopper most pined was his friend James Dean, the meteoric movie star who died young in an automobile wreck which was something the rock musicians were doing a lot back then but not so much the movie people (R.I.P. Jayne Mansfield). From Dean’s death in 1955 to his own in 2010, Hopper spent a lot of time talking in interviews about Dean and their sordid goings-on. They ran with a crew, and there isn’t any doubt they were thugs every bit as much as they were actors/artists. I remember one interview where Hopper chuckles about how reckless and insane Dean’s Nietzsche phase became. There are implications of bisexuality and bondage play. I’m not sure James Dean figures here at all, but in a couple of interviews with Dennis Hopper I have heard him reminisce upon the discovery and influence of Saint Thomas—A.K.A. ‘Doubting’ Thomas—and especially of two core precepts: never tell a falsehood and never do anything you don’t want to do. If Dennis Hopper can live to seventy-four on that shit, saltines, and filtered water then you can too.

Pierre Guyotat

A core part of the legend of the queer French writer Pierre Guyotat, who died in 2020, is the beat-sheet or branlante, short pornographic writings Guyotat composed as a teenager in order to get himself off. Here we have yet another great instance where I have walked the same path as a great literary lion operating at the most refined frequency of existence even before I’d so much as heard of the piker. This will explain for some the title of the opening track off my album Yevgenia. You may not be surprised to hear that my beat-sheets tended at least a little toward sadism, gothic dungeons, and torn bodices, slashers with black gloves. I never wanted to do any harm to anybody but my heart craved dirty, salacious, freeform fun. Nothing causes me nearly so much displeasure and concern as the pain of a creature whose pain is immediate and the swell of which short-circuits my hardware and takes me out at the knees. The swoon of romantic love has nothing on the swoon of violence and premeditated terror. I had the advantage of seeing some very awful things when I was younger such that I, Self-Will-Run-Riot (the only teacher I’m taking on is me), crossed a whole bunch of things off the list early and never even had to try them. Beyond the zone of interest is the refugee camp you never thought you’d need. One of the last major works Pierre Guyotat completed before his death, Idiocy, brought to North America by New York Review Books last year, is an autofiction recounting the period of time Guyotat spent in Algeria with the military when he was still very young and inexperienced. A grim, absurdist fable with no small amount of dry deadpan humour: labelled a dissident shortly after arriving in Algeria, Guyotat was placed in prison soon thereafter, where he’d spend the bulk of his compulsory service. “I, who have dreamed since puberty of brothels overflowing with the seed of melancholy captive adolescents, of the adult patrons who delight in it,” muses the Pierre Guyotat of Idiocy, “and of the male-on-male couplings their seed excites and lubricates? Nothing, as of yet, and nothing for a long time still: at most, a few sacrilegious words, whose mere utterance to myself annuls their organic reality." 

Le corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

Late Winter

It’s a wintry day

I sit on a horse, frozen,

along with my shadow.

- Matsuo Bashō

Hazy Transmission from Southeast Calgary

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The Kinks, "I'll Remember"

Two Photos and Some Mississippi Delta Blues

 

Downtown Calgary 

at about 13:00 

on the First of April, 2026

Today I did some retail therapy

bought a new, perfectly simple but stylish/attractive ensemble

although the pants feel a bit like being inside a circus tent;

I think I look maybe a little like a combination of

Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love (2000)

and Ben Gazzara in Saint Jack (1979)

Charlie Patton, "Shake It and Break It"

No, fam, it ain't just your steam-powered imagination(s)

this 1929 platter by the great guitar-swallowing delta master

consists of Patton bragging for the entire duration of the song

about the strength and durability of his member