I have two records each by Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, songwriters who I estimate influenced me about equal from my early teens onward. Leonard Cohen's apocalypse is a cruel romance and Tom Waits' apocalypse in a carnivalesque junkyard. A balanced person really needs a little of both those modalities circulating through the greater constellation of systems.
Leonard Cohen, "Famous Blue Raincoat"
Tom Waits, "Hold On"
Mule Variations is the best all-around long-player from Mr. Waits. It were as though what used to be only the dwarf and the bearded lady on their lonesome is now the whole dang circus. Franks Wild Years came close, but Mule Variations, right on time for Y2K, sealed the deal consummate. For a string-mangler like me, however, Rain Dogs is the mandatory Waits disk 'cause it features the legendary Marc Ribot's most fearsome and adventurous playing just about ever and in a context where it serves to help transform popular forms and garland Tom Waits' patent medicines and colourful symbolist poetry. My favourite song by Tom Waits, "Kentucky Avenue," is not, however, on either of the albums I own on vinyl, but rather 1978's Blue Valentine. It's the most sublime imagistic inventory you could ever ask for. It's like a psychedelic grocery list.
Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte ('Brawny' Bob Aldrich, 1964)
If you think it is bad form to offend people then it follows that you cannot so much as set a foot down anywhere in this wobbly world. People will make a garbled hodgepodge of the most crystalline of statements. 99.9% of the time we offend people by accident. It’s not so much that you are expected to police yourself as it is that you are supposed to police your own policing until it’s an infinite regress and you’re face down in your meat pie come suppertime, fixin’ to die. Our superego does not have room for the excess cargo of every last Timothy or Tallulah because we need it to guide ourself with and not get splattered all over the statuary while we’re at it. If God wanted you to please people he would not have had you go around erect on two feet like an absolute twat. And now you know that you know it. You’re welcome. In 1964’s Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, his droll and macabre followup to smash camp success What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? from ’62, Robert Aldrich replaces Joan Crawford with two Bette Davis foils—as he’d pretty much have to do—in the form of cold and controlled Olivia de Havilland, far more selfish and insensitive than she’d ever want to let on, and desiccated wood nymph Agnes Moorehead who would appear to be playing her character from The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) after twenty years more worth of all-paid visits to the Funny Farm with its psychoactive drugs and limp, disinterested hugs. “You're a vile, sorry little bitch!,” yells Bette Davis all caked-up in fright makeup and with impossibly wide eyes aghast at all earthly impertinence, and though everything seems to set her off and stress management will never be one of her registered/marketable skills, all dressed up for Halloween as Wounded Spiralling Arrested Adolescence as she forever is, it seems like it would be easier to be bat shit crazy like Bette Davis than criminally conniving and soulless like Olivia de Havilland…at least insofar as Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte presents a case for being either. In interviews, de Havilland always said that Bette Davis was the greatest actress of all time by far and that she was also invariably the most intimidating person in any room that could hold her. Being around Davis made de Havilland feel like her head might explode. That’s interesting, isn’t it? You see, it finds its way decisively into the scene work. Onscreen and visibly, Olivia de Havilland walks on eggshells around Bette Davis. Not because Olivia de Havilland is afraid of Bette Davis. No. She is afraid of not measuring up or, even worse, tripping herself up. Because of how ridiculous Bette Davis’s behaviour is, de Havilland is always and understandably a little annoyed, concerned, and confused all at once, at the same time hoping to retain the poker face that is her first and final leverage. Actresses very often have to pretend to have their feelings hurt, but when Olivia de Havilland’s feelings get hurt so do yours. She has watery eyes that seem forever on the verge of unabashed weeping and just looking at her eyes on a movie screen is almost enough sometimes to get a person going themselves. Occasionally we remember that tears can be ejaculatory. Little Olivia had to know as much as any man about worldly things in order to pull the wool over the eyes of Bette Davis and to earn the grande dame’s respect in the process…and earn it she sure did. As smart and in command as a business executive walking her beat, Olivia de Havilland further played the part by always having some hilarious off-colour jokes on hand to share with the boys. Crews adored her. There are lots of good blooper clips of her on set saying things like “goddamn!” and “son of a bitch!” It is because of how stately and composed she always is that we adore seeing that surface ruffled, if only for a moment. Sometimes the moment of truth is a cuss word. It’s like the amusement and delight you feel when you push the mean, sadistic school teacher past their breaking point and they suddenly go physically slack and say fuck my life.
I wanted deliverance, the loss of myself. The capacity to be inside that music. It was the same power and sensation you feel when a wave takes you up and pushes you somewhere else. - Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band
Jason Philip Wierzba turned twenty in November of 1999 and was thirteen when Teenage Fanclub's album Thirteen was released to much bubblegum-chewin' fanfare among the sneaker set and out across the soda fountain circuit. Love Tara by Eric's Trip came out on his fourteenth birthday 🇨🇦. He's the same age as Robyn, Natasha Lyonne, and Pete Doherty and came by his Royal Trux Veterans of Disorder tour t-shirt honestly. (He saw them at the Dominion in Ottawa and they played Veterans of Disorder straight through, front to back, except that they opened with "I'm Ready," which they'd practically have to when you think about it). Consider also Wierzba's pedigree as a scholar of the cinema and the image culture more broadly. It's like the wizard who neeeeeds to win the war against God and who in his steadfastness and commitment believes only pure informational mass and inundation will cut the mustard.We can happily insist that we are of one shared mind on this one: ain't nobody better situated or equipped to give you both the lowdown and the dish when it comes to the people's secret American cinema of the 1990s or any other secret or less-secret cinemas. Information is like a secret kept by the secret from the secret indefinitely.
Scientists today agree that this really is a problem that we do indeed have with information.
Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1992)
Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)
Frameup (Jon Jost, 1993)
Menace II Society (Albert and Allen Hughes, 1993)
The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994)
The New Age (Michael Tolkin, 1994)
Roadracers (Robert Rodriguez, 1994)
Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle, 1994)
Full Body Massage (Nicolas Roeg, 1995)
The Wife (Tom Noonan, 1995)
A Couch in New York (Chantal Akerman, 1996)
Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996)
Kansas City (Robert Altman, 1996)
Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997)
Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997)
Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)
Two Girls and a Guy (James Toback, 1997) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Claire Dolan (Lodge Kerrigan, 1998)
Luminous Motion (Bette Gordon, 1998)
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999)
Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1992)
[Short excerpt]
My mother and I did tricks, prestidigitation, and sleight-of-hand
in order to entertain the bewitching female staff
over lunch at the Earls in Mission this afternoon. 🎶 That's me in the corner/
that's me on the wine list / losing my religion 🎶
Butthole Surfers
"Who Was in My Room Last Night?"
Eric's Trip
"Stove"
🇨🇦
* The Last Seduction and Freeway were indies picked up and originally broadcast by HBO, though both did have modest theatrical runs. Both Roadracers and Full Body Massage were made for cable network Showtime, who for a brief period of time were bold and experimental in their approach, hoping to carve out a niche in the market. Hal Hartley's sublime Survivng Desire, the Long Island master's exceedingly dear third feature in which a refreshed connection is established with simplicity and universality, was produced by and for PBS's American Playhouse.
Though some strain of noble perversity in the gene pool made legendary British film director Alfred Hitchcock a showman and cult of personality by sheer insistence of nature herself, the art and craft of cinema he had to study first as an apprentice so that he might know what he was doing. In point of fact, though his greatest and most important silent film, 1927’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, was made for English enterprise Gainsborough Pictures, Hitchcock undertook his apprenticeship in Germany, first at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam and eventually UFA and Emelka Studios also. Alfred Hitchcock relocated to Hollywood and the patronage/protection of David O. Selznick in 1939, the year the Second World War officially broke out. Thus it would come to pass that Hitchcock showed up in Los Angeles County at more or less the same time as a healthy number of German and Austrian directors who had determined relatively early that Hitler was an existential threat to them and a great many others: Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, et cetera. Jean Renoir—gourmand, Master of Ceremonies, son of the painter Pierre-Auguste—made five narrative features in Hollywood between 1941 and 1947, all more or less forgotten but each individually excellent and worth checking out should an opportunity arise. (Swamp Water, The Southerner, and The Woman on the Beach remain perennial favourites around these parts.) Transcontinental German-born sophisticate Max Ophüls made four Hollywood films in the 1940s, including 1948’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, which we believe may well be the finest Hollywood film of that whole august decade. Running from 1955 until 1962, Hitchcok’s ingenious television tentpole Alfred Hithcock Presents indisputably made ol’ Hitch the most publicly recognizable film director in the United States, but what is not nearly as well remembered today is that Jewish-Austrian maverick and promotional genius Otto Preminger was right there, hot on his heels. Born in Vienna to a position of privilege and status, reified strata, Preminger’s father was a noteworthy lawman and had in fact served for a time as the Austro-Hungarian attorney general. It was dad who insisted that young Otto get a degree in law so Otto, hedging his bets, secured that law degree in 1928…and then proceeded to pursue a career in the theatre, which is what he had intended to do all along. Somebody who makes it in the theatre in Vienna in the late-20s/early-30s has made it in theatre period. A person like that could practically write their own ticket…or dance card. Both Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger were known widely as temperamental men capable of tremendous cruelty. An Otto Preminger set could often devolve rapidly into a toxic workspace, and yet the lavish attention and worshipful ardour he demonstrates toward his actors, especially with respect to the time and space he gives them, means that his work with actors has a keenness, sensitivity, and generosity that you simply do not see in the work of any of his contemporaries, no matter how respected. Preminger is a director who loves watching actors act and that’s no small thing. Certainly we cannot make similar claims respective of Hitchcock. Somebody once made a joke that goes a little like this (I believe it’s in the 2015 Kent Jones Hitchcock/Truffaut doc):
Actor: What’s my motivation in this scene?
Hitchcock: I need you to stand perfectly still for thirty-to-forty seconds with a nervous look in your eyes.
Four years before Hitchcock’s wry and amiably sadistic TV show hit the air, Otto Preminger, ace hustler and man on a mission, had finally managed to start his own production company with its own channels to distribution and exhibition. The first film he made under his own umbrella was 1953’s The Moon is Blue, which, though it is extremely tame by the standards of any period unless you are a neurotic church lady, was partially made to pick a fight with the Production Code Administration, who refused to allow the film to be shown unless the words virgin and pregnant, plus a few others, similar in their innocuousness, were to be removed. Preminger is a provocateur and dandy who believes than even the most idiotic controversies are money in the bank, tout court. There is an amusing episode of the long-running sitcom version of M*A*S*H where Alan Alda’s Hawkeye campaigns to secure a print of The Moon is Blue for the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital Camp movie night, expecting salacious filth of a transcendental nature and thus leaving the climactic screening moribund and crestfallen when that doesn’t turn out to be what it is at all. I was at the very least expecting to see somebody’s moon. If the words virgin and pregnant were hot button issues in 1953, by the time of 1959 and Anatomy of a Murder, probably the most ambitious and impressive film Preminger ever made and the greatest courtroom drama of them all, the words rape and panties are used with such self-conscious regularity that a person’s head can sort of start to spin. The judge and two attorneys even have a considered discussion about how often they are using the word panties and whether or not there’s a better alternative. Many audience members at the time were dutifully outraged, of course. We have a brief and beautiful moment with Jimmy Stewart’s decent-but-perhaps-slightly-pervy former-D.A. currently slumming as a defence attorney when not out fishing, as he shares ever-so-evanescent a piano bench with the one and only Duke Ellington, who finds himself in these remote parts for God knows what reason. Additionally, in a choice bit of stunt casting that may never be equalled in the annals of realpolitik, the presiding judge in Anatomy of a Murder is played by Joseph N. Welch, who was not an actor by trade but definitely was the man who, in the summer of 1954 and in his position as special counsel to the U.S. Army, rhetorically asked red-baiting pig-fucker Joe McCarthy on live television: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Duke Ellington, Anatomy of a Murder [Official Motion Picture Score]
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