On Influence

 

Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard)

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986)

I always loved the movies very much. That’s a Donald Rumsfeld-approved known known. At first movies often frightened me badly. Or they outright traumatized me, no foolin’. My favourite movie as a kid was 1984’s The Neverending Story, from the director who brought you Das Boot, and I always found it a punishing challenge to sit through, periodically clamping my hands over my eyes and whimpering. There is a force called the Nothing and there is no thing that can escape it. Maybe you ask why I kept coming back. I know I did. Ask. That’s part of why I chose the cinema as my academic specialty. Freudian sleuth wirken. I would actually tell other academics this at inter-departmental wine and cheeses. At the same time I always loved to laugh and make other people laugh and I always liked a long, winding adventure without a whole lot of orientation or direction, so when as a lad I started realizing that actual people make movies and presumably anybody of sense could do it, as a consequence beginning to consider what kind of movie I would make if the opportunity were to present itself, it seemed clear to me until transformed by puberty into a hideous leering golem that I would make something like the breezy but edgy 1985 John Cusack shaggy dog Better Off Dead or immortal John Hughes gallivant Ferris Bueller's Day Off from the following year. I still love John Hughes as much as I ever did. The Breakfast Club is the greatest exercise in the Kuleshov effect in all cinema. Think about it. He has to match and stabilize all those eyelines through all those extended group conversations. Hell, you know what? As a kiddo I would have been perfectly proud to have directed Michael Lehmann’s 1991 bomb Hudson Hawk, which I thought outrageously hilarious and unpredictable but which drew nothing but harsh vitriol from any critic drawing a pay check at the time. The seedy cosmopolitan villains are Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard. Can you understand how funny that is?! In my early teens, as I became increasingly interested in how life is movies and movies life, I started to realize that most of that which was exciting to me in narrative cinema derived to one extent or another from the spontaneity and freedom of documentary. It often seemed to me like it would be more interesting to film events than to tell stories. When Wim Wenders, his cast, and his very modest crew make a movie about a road trip called Kings of the Road in 1976, they actually have to go on that road trip. For his 1975 film Nashville, in order to film the big concerts and political events at the Grand Ole Opry and other locations, indoors and outdoors, including the big closing showstopper, Bob Altman, former car salesman, put out adds in all the Nashville papers promising free concerts with food and drink, a lure to production values in the form of persons. If you put Kings of the Road and Nashville together with Jean-Luc Godard’s runaway car Pierrot le fou from ’65 you have a pretty perfect picture of the contused character I was by the end of high school. (Worth noting parenthetically also that Linda Fiorentino’s performance as wiseass sex-kitten sociopath Bridget Gregory in 1994’s The Last Seduction is high on the lists, respectively, of most cherished and most fundamental ‘90s things.) The first Godard film I ever saw, which I rented from the Roger’s Video at the southernmost tip of Calgary, was Prénom Carmen, which I found astonishing and delightful although the sound design definitely threw me. Godard liked contrapuntal sound and he said repeatedly that he edited image with one hand and sound with the other. Sometimes it almost sounds like the movies are broken or something. I’ll bet that back in the heyday if you told Godard that his film sounded broken he’d have stoically replied, through a cloud of smoke, that all movies are broken. The trick is putting them back together, right? That’s why every ‘film’ worthy of bearing that name is made in the edit. Pierrot le fou was vastly more impressive to me than Prénom Carmen as a teenager, but today my preference has reversed. Prénom Carmen is about how what is elemental between us comes before language whereas Pierrot le fou uses a honey trap in order to draw you away from the crowd, relieve you of your billfold, and remind you that the real torrid love affair has always been with the cinema itself. 

   

Lync, "Two Feet in Front"

Wavves, "Help is on the Way"

Infinity Pool Sonnet

 

Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg, 2023)

You see, if it’s sported by a duck that’s a daffy-ass deck, Doc

Girl got the boogie woogie fever and also sadly the scabies

Hiphop Quarantine, have you any wool? can you even talk?

Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full…of mongrel hentai polar babies 

The olive-coloured key shall not return, I was rude to it

We won’t survive long in this box but it’ll surely suck

Please do not attempt to make small talk or pit-a-pat

Go ahead, take me out at the knees, we’ll squeeze in a fuck

You use your magic wand like some lummox Irish cop 

Jiminy Christmas, are the meek ever out in droves

You would have thought there was a convention in town

I’d ask the maître d’ what’s up but I don’t think he knows—

Violence with you is less a legend than a lexicon 

What does your faith in this bestial covenant even rest upon?

Speed Walking in the Fiction of Samuel Beckett

 
The only necessity I know, said Mercier, is to get away from that hell as fast and as far as possible.
- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier  

The road, hard and white, seared the tender pastures, rose and fell at the whims of hills and hollows. The town was not far.
- Samuel Beckett, Molloy

He is twenty-four years old. Proust has just died. I should have said fallen. Straightaway Beckett picks him up, the giant and his uneven cobble.
- Hélène Cixous, Zero's Neighbour: Sam Beckett

Both psychiatric disorders themselves and antipsychotic medications frequently cause akathisia, a movement disorder that triggers an intense, internal feeling of physical restlessness. People coping with akathisia often feel an overwhelming urge to move, rock, or pace. Pacing serves as a physical outlet or a way to try to escape a threatening or overwhelming environment (flight instinct). Sometimes the unwell person no longer knows what they are fleeing or where they might be heading without this is any way dampening the intense compulsion to nevertheless flee. Some people have a disorienting moving target of squiggly malignant shadows for a world. Walking, briskly or otherwise, can be a self-soothing behaviour to help one concentrate, organize thoughts, or manage pain/distress. In art, that which truly embraces the New must also decompose the self or dissolves it like an Alka-Seltzer®. For the Deleuze and Guattari who in their 1972 benchmark Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia adopt Samuel Beckett as a schizo lodestar in the early going and especially Molloy’s magic trick whereby in the novel named for him he turns himself into a walking “stone-sucking machine,” thus maximizing what Sterling Hayden’s Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper would call his purity of essence, the “sober truth that resides in delirium [is] that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself.” A quiet walk cannot help but descend into one or another clamour of cacophony and commotion. Even with only my clothes, my keys, my wallet, and a disposable lighter, I am a studio production house. You know, just a little love story about an ambulatory boy and his machine. “One should never be too lackadaisical and fear a few hundred steps,” writes longterm Swiss mental patient Robert Walser in “Little Snow Landscape,” “get out of your lazybones bed early, stand up on your pins and walk out just a little way so the eye can gaze its fill and the heart, craving freedom, can breathe.”

Film (Samuel Beckett, Alan Schneider, 1965)

Speed Walking in the Fiction of Samuel Beckett
[the Sights and Sounds]

The clips that appear in my new video assemblage piece, which surfaces in the harbour in the wee moonlit hours as customary with musical accompaniment from myself (except as a band), come in order of first appearance from the following motion pictures of record:

FILM (Samuel Beckett, Alan Schneider, 1965)

ERASERHEAD (David Lynch, 1977)

SIMON OF THE DESERT (Luis Buñuel, 1965)

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (Jan Němec, 1964)

LE FOND DE L’AIR EST ROUGE (Chris Marker, 1977)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

WHITE OF THE EYE (Donald Cammell, 1987)

SOUTHLAND TALES (Richard Kelly, 2006)

SPETTERS (Paul Verhoeven, 1980)

Yo La Tengo, "Demons"

Bataille

 

Vincent & Theo (Robert Altman, 1990)

Georges Bataille was a librarian and anthropologist who never held any professorial position of any kind. When he was severely ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and in serious financial distress at the beginning of the 1960s, a large group of artists and public intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró—joined forces to raise a considerable sum of money that would see to it that Bataille lived out his final days in comfort, which is indeed how it would come to pass. In his theoretical work, Bataille pulls heavily from anthropology and aberrations of history so as to unearth insights relating to eroticism, mysticism, sacrifice, and political economy within a context where excess (the “accursed share,” etc.) remains central, and his fiction has a general tendency to depict an erotic interiority characterized by the tempestuous play of sensory-motor intensities (the experience of excess, of too much, arousing and frightening). In his own preface to the short vignette called “Madame Edwarda,” a piece originally published under the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Pierre Angélique, Bataille writes of “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress” and an “unbearable surpassing of being” in relation to sexual arousal and climax. This is indeed at the heart of Bataille’s fiction, a body of work that may be the best we have on the diabolic power of sensory-motor excitation, with the possible exception of Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas who has never found a profound metaphysical concept that he was not able to place in the human nervous system, along with the hormones and the gristle, and have it take…like a compatible organ transplant. In “Madame Edwarda,” the narrator pursues the eponymous prostitute (who declares herself GOD), has a dalliance with her, is beaten and wildly excoriated by her, and finally watches her fuck the driver from the back seat of his cab, all three parties somehow achieving a sufficient level of frenzied excitation that they…completely lose consciousness. Lights out. The narrator rhapsodizes on how “the pungent odor of her flesh and mine commingled flung us both into the same heart’s utter exhaustion.” The same heart. A heart that now incorporates two people. Then later, as Madame Edwarda, organ of GOD, fucks the cabdriver: “little by little that embrace strained to the final pitch of excess at which the heart fails.” The heart fails. The shared heart fails. The French sometimes call the moments after orgasm a petite mort. Have they taken the time to think through the possible implications? The reason I loved Bataille’s short novel Blue of Noon so much in my early twenties was because it was the only place in literature where I’d seen a genuine equivalent for my own anxiety, disgust, and terror…my own viscerally alienated mood. (I’m proud to report that I did not share any of the necrophiliac fantasies.) I didn’t know these parts of myself could be captured because I only faintly knew then that they were there to begin with. That’s what William S. Burroughs said we were here for: to find out and know what we already know but don’t know that we know. In the 1930s, the interwar circus, the young Bataille believed that time and spirit were Heraclitian flux and the heart—or Nuclear Reactor Core—of Nietzschean Tragedy, inherently "horror-spreading." He believed in “agitation on the scale of irreducible needs,” and the idea that humanity seems “able to subsist only at the limits of horror.” That would be the anthropologist speaking. Bataille is definitely not the kind of guy to lose sleep over reports of a nasty bloodbath. "The Practice of Joy Before Death." Bataille had become a devout Catholic as a teenager, converting at the age of sixteen, and his ultimate violent rejection of God becomes a violent rejection of the head as well as its own kind of display of orgasmic celestial fireworks exclusively for the head, as the head is seen as “the conscious authority of God” keeping one subservient to form, function, and programming. The living mandate of the flaming creature: myth, heterogeneous intensity, excretion, combustion, heated passion, sacrifice, the sacred, the wretched of the earth. Georges Bataille looks at the sunflowers of Vincent van Gogh and sees much more clearly than most people that the sunflowers are screaming in pain. You know, there’s a thin line between paranoid psychosis and overstimulation.  

Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)

Jack Smith & Co., "The Great Moldy Triumph"

Best New Music Video of 2026

 

Tove Lo, "des fleurs x stromae"
[Official Music Video] 

🇸🇪

Meanwhile in the DVD Annex

 

Afrirampo, "Track 6" [Live in Sydney]

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Jucifer, "Ни шагу назад!: Not a Step Back"

* Afrirampo are the best live music act of any kind that I have ever seen.

Antichrist: Owl

 

The world is not there because it cannot be found in the world. Nobody in the world can get out of the world and then locate the world from that position. There are infinite domains and these domains exist within various fields of sense. Logic and sense are proper, grounded, highly adaptive/corrective, intentionally oriented enterprises whereas reason is a hoodwink every time, a game of three-card monte the man lays on you over and over, day in day out, until they finally take you out to the back alley with the trash and unto your final humble place of rest: the goddamn dump. Be reasonable, they say. And when they do...trust me, you’re already fucked.

Many people who are dying eventually die and will continue to do so in the early morning hours, for both cardiac and respiratory reasons, circadian rhythms and all that jazz, and this is also the time when owls are audibly out there hunting. In Persia, Southeast Asia, and among many indigenous tribes of the Americas, the owl is considered an ill omen and harbinger of death. On the other hand, an image of Athena's owl that was stamped onto fifth-century BCE Athenian coins made the bird a recognized symbol of the city-state's wealth, culture, and bonhomie. The Roman goddess Minerva adopted the owl, reducing it to the category of mascot and carrying that mascot forward as a bequest to Western literature and folklore, where the trope of the "wise old owl" became a thing and is known to basically everybody, at least as a principle, especially in German-speaking parts of the world and eventually, in January of 1871, the Nation State of Germany, Home Sweet Home, Fritzy. If Freemasons and Nazis think owls are wise—we can concede that owls are for sure like impossibly sophisticated machines built to hunt in the dark from the sky—well, that just mightn’t be all that great a look, you feeling me? For the rest of us practical folks uninterested in the scholastic standings of our fine feathered friends, we’re just expecting to hear the owls call our name right around the time we up and check out of here, angry and hoping to speak to management. We expect that in that crucial hour our schedule and that of the owl will coincide, if only briefly and maybe just from nodding distance. Let us pray that we might keep it collegial! 🙏 

I cannot think of fields of sense without thinking of Einstein and the theory of relativity, precisely because of the fact that any given field of sense requires the appearance of the domain or the field, which Einstein would call its frame of reference. The frame allows us to make meaningful calculations germane to the elements within the field, domain, or frame. A truck is moving at a certain speed…oh, yeah, and it’s on the surface of the earth…you definitely don’t want to forget that part. Sometimes people ask me if I think God exists and I say to them that we both think "God" exists because we are using the word naturally, without any difficulty. We know what we mean when we mean "God." God exists, gods exist, but in a particular field of sense. There is a historical persistence of fields of sense where God and the functions God performs are conducted above all to serve errant and clumsy beings of sense called people who are flung randomly into circumscribed existence within the context of an infinite that cannot be actively experienced by any living being or currently live-and-operational hyperintelligent machine. Maybe the next really big breakthrough in technology is…oops the sky falls down. Henny Penny warned us. 

Silkworm, "Scruffy"