JPW 2026 Guitar Video Trilogy

 

Rainy Day Appaloosa: Late Night Edition

As Human as the Next Guy

Monkgasm 3

Physical Media + Swag

Demo Lickin' Man 😎

from The Big Store (Charles Reisner, 1941)

There's No Place Like Home [Full Album + Swag]

 

When the going gets weird

Here comes the Hat and Beard—

The Mad Monk (Johnnie To, 1993)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives 
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Rewind & Play (Alain Gomis, 2022)

For the YouTube version of my new album There's No Place Like Home, embedded directly below, I have gone to characteristically great lengths to make it so that it’s not just a boring inert cover image accompanying forty minutes of a raging brushfire of experimental music, providing each track a modified film clip that suits it. There’s also some little Easter eggs scattered here and there to make the whole thing even more fun, more gratifyingly variegated, and more ontologically colourful.

The Images and Sounds

Table of Contents

1. Foie Gras Poutine (00:04-5:53)

[Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder, 1950]

2. Reincarnated as a Carp (5:53-11:50)

[The Pornographers, Shōhei Imamura, 1966]   

3. Synthetic Antiseptic (11:50-15:43)

[Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman, 1975]

4. Billy the Skid (Likes ‘Em Thicc) (15:43-19:54)

[The Man from Laramie, Anthony Mann, 1955]

5. Monkgasm 1 (19:54-29:47)

[The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011]

6. Monkgasm 2 (29:47-39:40)

[Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004]

Ever,

JPW

My Thursday Thus Far

 
Reading poetry, she had marvelled as layers of inhibition fell away one by one until all that remained was her pulse, attuned to everything but sundered by it. Surely what happened to her today had not been an act of poetry; it had skinned her alive, an initiation raw and curt. All she was certain of was that what had happened was important.
- Paul West, The Tent of Orange Mist

Yesterday I worked industriously on a new full-length album, my first since getting out of the hospital in July, and I managed get the first half of it wrapped up. The two halves of this one are definitely going to be demonstrably separate entities though the music is throughout a kind of attempt to bridge noise music, electronic dance music, and the legacy of the Mississippi Delta blues, which has been the case as well with my recent EPs and some of my recent standalone tracks. I went to bed close to midnight, which would not have been an especially late hour when I was a younger man, but assuredly is now. I dreamt a recurring dream about the young lady in the pink Miata, which left me queasy but ambivalent. I got up around 7:00AM and started work on the second half of my new album. The first few hours of the day are when my feet are at their worst as though shocked and bitter at having to carry my body weight around. I spent a good part of the morning grinding away at producing all manner of heinous and unprecedented string instrument noise, and then at 10:40 I went and had blood work done so that my family doctor and my psychiatrist can assess my Lithium levels (they were near toxic at the time of my hospitalization, likely because I kept taking my meds in the preceding period but almost completely stopped eating). While I was at the doctor’s office I inquired about a pair of referrals my doctor was supposed to make on my behalf, one to the Calgary Foot Care Nurses to help with the necrotic tissue pain and corns, the lingering repercussions of very bad frostbite, and the other to a urologist on account of my phimosis (tightening of the foreskin, for those not in the know). Today I was given the number for the urologist and the likelihood is that they will need to operate. There is only one operation for this condition: circumcision. I’m certainly not jazzed at the prospect of having that operation, and few uncircumcised men would be, but at this point in my life it does seem pretty minor next to all the other wretched and heartbreaking stuff that has brought me to where I am. I am inspired by the fortitude my uncle George has demonstrated these past few years, first losing an eye to cancer and then very recently surviving brain surgery with a smile on his face and a sunny outlook overall. After leaving the doctor’s office and taking everything into consideration, I decided I’d go ahead and treat myself to eggs Benedict at OEB in Mission. Goddammit, sometimes you need to spoil yourself…  

John Fahey, "City of Refuge 1"

Marriage

 

Black Cat, White Cat (Emir Kusturica, 1998)

The Suspended Step of the Stork (Theo Angelopoulos, 1991)

This October is going to somehow mark the twentieth wedding anniversary of Bronwyn and myself, though at this point we’re almost like two people who just met and aren’t sure they like the cut of the other’s jib. We got married a few days short of Halloween 2006 and there is no ambiguity around the fact that Bronwyn wanted a spooky wedding and an even spookier marriage. Well, she’s a plenty spooky character alright. Has ever been and so shall be. Twenty years later and I’m still asking myself: what in the hell have you gotten yourself into, bud? The twins, Anton and Dani, are going to be sixteen in short order and aside from bringing in the only paycheck around here I’ve also been commanded with teaching the kids to drive. I’m teaching them on a standard transmission so they’ll be as prepared as humanly possible for the capricious and dangerous roads of this fallen and blighted land. I learned on a stick shift because my father believed it would cause me to be ever-and-actively-attentive to the mechanics of operating a motor vehicle whenever I was actively operating a motor vehicle. Anton is doing pretty good with the stick shift but Dani routinely breaks out in tears and that’s something I’ve never had the knack for countermanding effectively. There, there, girl, I say, and she stares daggers at me. It is then that she most resembles her mother.

My life got cozier and more agreeable starting with 2020 and the COVID-19 protocols, but it also got sloppier and moribund. The city sent all of us home to work remotely. A third of the office—the busybodies and workaday cops I very much won’t mind never seeing again—were heartbroken to leave behind their knickknack-covered desks and officious persecution of congenial slackers the likes of myself. I couldn’t gather my shit and get out of there fast enough. I am fortunate to continue my well-compensated work for the municipal government from home, but back in 2020 it very quickly became clear that I wasn’t going to pull it off for terribly long if I didn’t cut out alcohol altogether. I realized I probably would have been drinking heavily at work the whole while if there hadn’t been people around observing me. Perhaps the workaday cops have their function after all. Luckily for everybody, Bronwyn upped her game and started drinking enough for the both of us. Since we were now very often in the house together for the entire day, things periodically got grisly. I normally walk on eggshells around her when she’s good and soused, but the twins have grown to despise her outright and do not feel compelled to hide it from her. Does that sometimes wound her? Ha! Nothing a drink won’t fix.

Though it is an old cliché it is also perfectly true that Bronwyn will with some regularity tell us all that she’s going out briefly under some flimsy pretext only to return days or weeks later, not even the least bit sheepish respective of her truancy and/or any worry she may have caused. In a way I have myself grown to be sanguine and even a little grateful for these protracted absences, brief spells when the house is calm and comparatively navigable. I tear through my workload with harmonious ease and sometimes literally kick up my feet on my desk, a mild indulgence Bronwyn would never countenance were she around to make note of it and sneer. A few days had passed—not that I’d counted them!—when my longtime partner in corkscrew misadventure came in last night and sat on the edge of the bed grumbling to herself long enough to indicate that she wished to exchange words with me. Alright, I said, I’ll bite. What happened this time? Evidently grateful for the accommodating prompt, she began to tell the story of the severe but friendly German woman from Cologne with whom she had spent the past few days and nights and who she had initially met in some sordid online forum. The woman from Cologne had a thick accent, wore stylish and professional-looking pantsuits, worked in corporate finance, and was into BDSM and role-play. Bronwyn said she’d found herself for the first time in her life got up in leather bondage gear and wielding a cat o' nine tails like she’d been at it since adolescence, which was fun at first but ultimately grew fatiguing and confusing. How many variations can there possibly be to this stuff? Just this very evening she and the woman from Cologne had taken a break from kink and Netflix to go get a bite to eat in a nearby tavern. No matter how sick from overindulgence in the hooch, Bronwyn has always had a unique capacity to wolf down bar food. Apparently, the woman from Cologne had been totally sober during all the sex shenanigans but got tipsy over dinner and became emotional, crying audibly enough that everybody in the tavern could hear her. What was evidently getting at her was the culpability of all German people in the genocidal horrors perpetrated by the crazed, eugenicist Nazis, for which she herself, having not even been born back then, felt no small amount of personal responsibly for whatever reason. She cried even louder then, admitting that she had never been able even once to look her grandparents in the eyes. Bronwyn excused herself from the table saying that she needed to make use of the facilities and then slipped out a side door, commencing to embark upon the long, inebriated trek homeward. Why are people such simpering losers? she asked, probably rhetorically, having recounted the story as coherently as she could manage. My God, I thought, what the fuck is wrong with this person? What am I even doing with my life?   

The Worlds of Love
(Cinnie Cole, David Garland, Ikue Mori)
"One of Two"

Physical Media Roundup

 

Anybody who has known me well, only slightly, or just by invidious word of mouth will know that since around the time I was preparing the release of my record Yevgenia, which was released almost exactly four years ago in August of 2022, I began to feverishly acquire vinyl like that shit was going out of style, having previously been an adamant dyed-in-the-wool compact disk man. My defence remains that I needed a really dope collection wherein my own record might feel at home, the proverbial new kid on the block. In actual fact, the only reason I bought a turntable was so I could listen to the test pressing of Yevgenia. My oh my, how these things can get away from us. I am no longer allowed to have physical possession of my credit card, and I’m afraid it’s definitely for the best. Heh heh.

Naturally, as a recovering film scholar and former film programmer for Calgary Cinematheque, it is more or less my responsibility to keep abreast of new and significant releases on Blu-ray, watching as much of that stuff as I can muster without passing out and drooling all over myself. Anybody who has given time and energy over to these matters for the last three years will have been watching while up-and-comer Radiance, supplying the goods to the UK and North America in kind, has quickly and definitively surpassed the Criterion crew, I would surmise most of all because they don't go in for any populist crowd-pleasers or catalogue filler. Radiance has definitely done a good job of bringing us important films by established masters: Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette, Luchino Visconti, Georges Franju. They even released Czech director Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way, which is the best American film of the 70s made in the 80s...if that makes any sense. I love that film enough that I already owned the Twilight Time Blu-ray. I din't feel like I needed to take on the expense. My favourite disk from Radiance so far contains the three-and-three-quarter hour extended cut of Rivette's Va savoir, one of the few films by this most beloved of masters that I got to see in a theatre first run (in the manageable/commercial shortened form), which over the past few years was the one thing I was most hoping to see come out on a home-viewing format of some kind. 🙏. Radiance's high def transfer of Bresson's gorgeous colour downer Une femme douce is so superior to any other version of that film I've ever seen that it made me weep. 

One area where Radiance most especially excels is in the field of gonzo out-of-bounds Japanese genre cinema. Have you ever noticed that fancy Japanese art movies are usually much more logical and easy to follow than the genre movies, which are very often convoluted and prone to sprees of mayhem? It's not unusual to see a fight involving ten or twelve people and I can't usually remember any of their names. For shame, Weird Bach! Well, sometimes that's exactly what I'm in the mood for. 1977's The Boxer by Shuji Terayama, released earlier this year, is the best boxing film since Robet Wise's 1949 gem The Set-Up. Scorsese and Paul Schrader should get on their knees and bow in shame-faced reverence. Terayama was a genuine artist of the underground who figured he'd tackle a genre picture as a madcapped lark. 

Anybody who knows about my semi-secret list of the top 69 movies of all time may recall having seen featured on it—in 47th place—Shōhei Imamura's 1966 first-phase-pinnacle-moment The Pornographers, which definitely is an art film no matter what that blowsy title may tend to indicate. Criterion put out a then-decent DVD of the film many years ago, but this summer Radiance released a sublime Blu-ray featuring a terrific, super lengthy, and deliciously thorough overview from A #1 Asian cinema Übermensch Tony Rayns. This disk is a must for anybody who is into any kind of cool shit whatsoever! 

Having released Takashi Miike's meandering, novelistic, and intermittently harrowing Agitator earlier this year, Radiance is set by all accounts to bring us this spry and indefatigable auteur's certified 2001 masterpiece/classic Visitor Q this forthcoming October. Visitor Q is a no-budget shot-on-video update of Pasolini's Teorema, which it surpasses a hundredfold and with illusory ease; I can assure you that you'll get your rocks off if you like your cinema of transgression smart as hell and transgressive as fuck. Cheers, baby.

While we're on a good run celebrating Japanese cineaction and some of its newly accessible fruits, from days more bygone or less so, and since I had the gall to take the wind out of the Criterion Collection sails when we all know that the Criterion Collection saves each of our lives two or three times a goldarn week, let me point out that a week from tomorrow, under the banner of their seriously rad Eclipse imprint, that entrenched New York-based institution is dropping on the broad general public what I suspect might very well prove to be the physical media release of 2026. In any medium. Ahem:

Cato Salsa Experience w/ The Thing & Joe McPhee
"Louie Louie"

     

The Inside Out Thirst Trap EP

 

The sharpest work of the last thirty years is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising, roundabout artists.

- Manny Farber, "Underground Films"

[Jean-Pierre] Léaud is an actor who goes all the way once you have suggested a direction to take. It was he who launched out down this track, somewhere between Balzac and Lewis Carroll.

- Jacques Rivette in the Autumn 1974 issue of Sight and Sound

All music on The Inside Out Thirst Trap EP has been manufactured and denatured by Jason Philip Wierzba. The two extended, slowed-way-down film clips provided as accompaniment in the YouTube video embedded below, and likewise denatured by Wierzba, come to us care of Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) [the shot appropriated was already in slo-mo so now it moves like tectonic plates...or glacially...in the manner of a glacier] and Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli Me Tangere. Which is precisely as it ought to be...

1. Inside (9:54)

2. Out (9:55)

The Sounds and Images

Jean-Pierre Léaud in

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere 

(Jacques Rivette, 1971)

Top Four EPs from My Vinyl Collection

 

As I'm currently working on yet another EP which won't be done until tomorrow at the earliest, I thought it would be fun to group together the four EPs from my record collection that I most fervidly esteem for a cool photograph you can look at, then also share my favourite Bikini Kill song, which obviously would have to be one of my favourite ever songs by any person or group because in the early days them riot grrrls was un-fuckin'-touchable. The EP on the bottom right is the Fuck Buttons "Brainfreeze" single plus a one-off original B-side called "Royal Flush." In 2009 and 2010 I drove all over Southern California in my BMW listening to the Fuck Buttons album Tarot Sport, Robyn's Body Talk, and the self-titled Fever Ray debut (when I wasn't playing avant-garde improvised shizzz). I had the enormous pleasure of attending a very loud Fuck Buttons performance at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, an experience I won't be forgetting anytime soon, I can promise you that. (Partially it was special because I was freshly clean and sober and realized that I'd enjoyed it way more than I would have had I been under the influence.) Oh, the Radio Video EP is of course by Royal Trux, the greatest rock band of all time, just in case you're new to them and cannot read Jennifer's hair. Thank you for your ongoing patronage and support!

Bikini Kill, "Carnival"

* I saw Royal Trux at a punk bar called the Dominion in Ottawa's ByWard Market in late 1999, when they were touring Veterans of Disorder, and, boy oh boy, was that ever epic! Ubiquitous and highly respected underground music rag The Wire would go on to list the set the Trux played in London on that tour as one of the top concerts of all time! Also, I saw Fever Ray at Coachella in 2010 (it was half laser show and half Tobe Hooper movie).