We #1

 

Francis Bacon, STUDY AFTER VELÁZQUEZ'S PORTRAIT OF POPE INNOCENT X, 1953

The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson, 2025

It had been our intention as sovereign individuals to greet all who crossed our path with the requisite kindness and consideration, but once that became altogether impossible we did our best to make a clean breast of sticky situations with as much speed and finesse as we could muster. Like the old hag once said: I used to want everybody to love me, now I just aspire to leave the room with a modicum of dignity. We are not in the first place inclined to want to impress anybody and, besides, nobody’s taught us how. You may want the person you are today consecrated in gold and bronze as the forever you but that’s not the way we’d have it. We’re not the person we were ten minutes ago when we took out the recycling and attempted to engage a small, brown rabbit in polite conversation. He said his name is Ezekiel. The end of times, the end of the road, it’s all putty on the cheeks. We don’t mess with perfection and if that means total annihilation then we’re all for it, friend. The ultimate crime of humanity is humanity itself and eventually somebody pays the piper, no? You don’t get a clean slate using stasis as your model. We advance and build until inexorably pulled back. If the tide is to go out fast while we’re in up to our waist, well, so be it. If that’s the situation in which we find ourself then it’s us who put us in peril. You don’t outmaneuver the moon and tides with clever parley. If you weren’t forced into the hot seat by orderlies or goons then it’s you who opted to plop down and see what’s what. We arrive wherever we arrive, whether the correct destination or the wrong one, by planning a journey, gathering materials, and attempting to execute live and lithe in space-time. In his 1955 seminar on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter,” Jacques Lacan famously for the first time declares that “a letter always arrives at its destination.” We like this line as much as does Slavoj ‘Mr. Sniffles’ Žižek, onetime Elvis of Critical Theory and heavyweight snoozer. To us it means plain as day that the letter you never received went to its real home instead. How do you like them apples? We’d be inclined to get stubborn and short-tempered, i.e. who needs you, impertinent letter? The letter went to its real home, you say? That sort of makes sense, its sufficiently probable. Go do your thing, sly fox. The great lens-crafter and, uh, materialist metaphysician Baruch Spinoza in his absolutely mandatory Ethics observes that most people are happy to settle for the first explanation that makes enough sense. This is the way critical faculties atrophy. I have to make a decision, I’m wondering if you could make it easy for me. An idiot good at providing simple explanations can conquer 95% of the motherfucking pie chart. You don’t really need us to tell you that. We knew an entrepreneur from Huston, Texas with a big white Stetson hat who used to say: nobody ever went poor underestimating the intelligence of the American public. What do we do? We broker deals for the spiders from Mars. We surge come Expo time. We hold your pecker while you pout and snivel. The art life is a hard row to hoe. Why do all the Alberta separatists look like the ugliest sea creatures from the deepest most unexplored of the oceanic zones and regions? Why do all the sloppily angling Alberta separatist punters make Danielle Smith look like a fucking Rhodes Scholar? This province has meatballs for brains, I tell you. Within the basically situated Calagry, Alberta situation, based you might say, we like the mountains and the prairie and the two rivers meeting, whereas the people we’d just as soon pawn off for beer money and bottle rockets. The other day we found ourselves out at Bragg Creek where in the coffee shop folks were discussing the news of the day—Alberta separatism and France’s meltdown of the social commons foremost in rotation—and we must honestly confess that we were pleased to find everybody more or less making sense and abstaining from bogus conspiratorial conjecture or what have you. It was kind of refreshing. Ordinary, decent people, merely trying to make sense of the blasted news. How much hypernormalization can Bridgette from Windermere even take? “This is difficult stuff,” offers Kevin Cline’s Mack in an offer to console his son in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1991 state-of-the-nation prestige pic Grand Canyon. “Making a left turn in L.A. is one of the harder things you'll learn in life.” Man, those sure were the glory days. Today we have to worry about being locked out of our bank account permanently because we used a different search engine. We don’t play games of chance because the house always wins and we, sir, are no house, sometimes finding it advisable to keep on the move and at the same time to break up and then reassemble later, under a more auspicious sign, as with the pack of wolves or the bustle and pump of the jazz ensemble in full swing. We’d go ahead and tip the waiter 20% no matter what horrible names he’s just called us. Fumbling through improbable eventuations it stings you to know are all too real, it might just so happen that you catch your reflection in the mirror ball as you hang upside down like a bat and you see that you’ve gone green as an eel, your hollow cheeks like lunar craters. Not just anybody is up for the challenge of loving the likes of us. We cannot set aside our explorations to consider them anew. That’s how people die out here. We know we’re best off finding a river and following it until we find people and their tools and machines and their speckled emblems of civilization. It is those who are lost who are liable to receive guidance.  It is those who receive care who are most likely to communicate gratitude. We wouldn’t want much to do with someone who showed up unannounced in order to visibly disapprove of us. There is a brief interval at the start of a person’s reaction where they don’t have any control of the reaction. Is their body language open or guarded? Where do the eyes intuitively go? Which direction does the body lean? Does a hand suddenly go into a pocket or behind a back? That’s our criminal justice bonafides accounted for, we suppose. Hot dog. If Donald Trump can make a deal then so can we. We are as gay as the day is grey. Vengeance and terror are the bully’s heartening loot. Fuck with us and it’s on you. If you knew better you would do better. What happens if we go out there and we’re pounded into the dirt? Then God rest our souls, I guess. You can always tell a Nazi from his stupid-ass haircut but you can’t always stop him from doing you dirty. In his stately and razor-sharp 2023 masterpiece The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer builds a narrative passage or tunnel through an extremely complex interior and exterior topography built out of the posh home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family—the cramped kitchen and spaces adjoining it very much remind us somehow of the house in Jacques Rivette’s 1985 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (though the choice of lenses predictably harkens to Kubrick)—and extending in concentric waveform rings outward from the grounds of the estate and into the immediate surrounding area while the SS begin to set in motion the monstrous and diabolical Final Solution (Endlösung) on the unseen periphery. All is as it should be in the garden. Slightly aggrieved to have it be known to just anybody, we confess all the same that The French Dispatch (2021) and The Phoenician Scheme (2025) are at the present time our most highly esteemed Wes Anderson pictures. He and Benicio Del Toro are simply a match made in heaven. In Paul West’s 1980 historical novel about him, Claus von Stauffenberg, the tall, handsome Nazi who plotted the assassination of Adolph Hitler on July 20, 1944, denigrates the moody dictator as nothing more than a “wallpaper hanger.” Alexander Theroux called Paul West a “vital writer and man of irrepressible spirit” who is “able to analyze his every last dilemma.” “I believe that Paul West listens to music, earphoned for the night through which he writes,” gushes William H. Gass in a 2004 interview, “so that the rhythms will get into his blood, and for the energy he can draw from sounds that at the same time block out everything of the world but art.” We are melody, rhythm, and sound before we give you so much as our face. That’s the gospel according to Robert Bresson: “I’d rather people feel a film,” he insists, “before understanding it.” The eyes are directed whereas the ears roam. For the prisoner, auditory reach extends well beyond the cell and the canopy of night issues its own special hum. “One of the arts of being human, in whatever era,” writes Paul West in his 1995 reminiscence A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery, “has been to control ourselves and our lives even while having to live incoherently, as blank about tomorrow as about the purpose of life itself.” There is nothing left for a people who cannot generate kinship and support networks. We are after something that endures, encourages networks of care, and which encourages participation (especially if that participation is a little unorthodox). The Baby Boomers sit on a Money & Care time bomb and it’s still too early to prognosticate with respect to how that’s going to play in the near future. What happens when a hefty portion of the world’s wealth is held in the hands of the elderly and the dying? We can only hope that it might help to encourage better organized and more robust systems of care, supply following dutifully on the tail of demand. Atomized and divided communities impoverished in innumerable respects are not encouraged to care for one another and have never been provided with a healthy model of how to do so. In interfacing with the homeless community we find that what are even more ubiquitous than addiction and mental health disorders in the lives of these folks are bad communication skills and bad problem solving skills. That really oughtn’t surprise you. It isn’t any more their fault than who their parents are, who runs ExxonMobil, or…contracting pancreatic cancer. We do admit that the administration of education and healthcare are among the most confounding earthly conundrums we know of. People are resistant, people are stubborn, and it could not be more clear that God wanted it that way. How do we make everything better? I don’t know…pretend? There might actually be something to that. Fake it ’til you make it. We’ve been there and done that. The major downside is that it can get mighty Sisyphean. When we start to get anxious we on occasion find relief in the realization that nobody has dirt on us except for dumb shit. Sometimes in his work with Wes Anderson, it seems like right after Anderson has called action there is a brief moment where Benicio Del Toro discovers that he’s wearing unfamiliar clothes in a strange place he does not recognize before somehow recollecting nevertheless that he has scripted lines he must deliver. People don’t have to make sense. They’re basically burning with yearning, in several senses several. It is easier to understand cruel acts in the abstract than to bear witness to them directly. We can’t mourn everybody but we can definitely remember what we’d rather not. Lighten your load, it ain’t nothing but lampoon. Right? We do not advise occupying the seat of judgement. Put $100 in your tank and go buy some groceries. Take in the evening air. Just don’t come around here complaining about the gas prices. Kindly follow that there Yellow Brick Road.

Vashti Bunyon, "Come Wind Come Rain"

Black Lips, "Crystal Night"
[Official Video]

21st Century Inferno

 

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Motion in discontinuous lines. Everything is perfectly fine. 

The personal lived experience of the phantomic and physiognomic plentitude of simultaneity, uneasy and irreal, hairs perhaps standing up on the back of the neck, has found us in our sundry errant mysticisms demeaning of God direct revelation of God’s Being and Nature and then immediately apologizing to God on our knees for the unthinkably rude affront. What can we say? We’re antsy. Why are we here and what even is this place? Help! It is the Christians who have for a solid while been leading the pack in apologizing to God. But what we need to know about reality and the fundamental parts of which it consists will not desist in pestering us, demanding rigorous inquiry and meditation, the sort of scrutiny the very heartbeat itself would appear to be asking after, practically hounding us on days of heightened generalized agitation in the aether. Fairly late in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, a doper’s penny dreadful for the ages that haunts some of the author’s old haunts, scrounging for cigarette and reefer butts, Joaquin Phoenix’s Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello freezes suddenly whilst walking briskly down the street in the aftermath of a harrowing escape and near-miss at the hands of dope-peddling Aryan sadists. “Pssst. Doper's ESP, Doc,” warns Sortilège on the soundtrack, played and voiced as she is by the divine Joanna Newsom, her wry hard-nut commentary forever the antidote to all the dissonance and distortion frothing up off this intergalactically pretzeled, slightly droopy, and curiously disheveled lifeworld: “doper’s ESP... ohhhhh no.” If you get it, you get it. Consider yourself one of the minor oracles. This is what we mean, we brigands and flea-wranglers of the open road, as we slouch our way toward Bethlehem in Joan Didion’a sunglasses and our own cloaks and gowns, when we speak of uncanny simultaneity, prehension, and situated universal absurdity. Have you ever had a moment, for instance, where you saw a bird land on a branch in your peripheral vision and a chilling sensation shot through you that the exact timed and totally specific motion of the bird in apprehended space—space apprehended by you—corresponded directly and indeed cosmically, all hung and strung together, with other movements happening at the same time within your field of vision? Has something so stupid and absurd and strange ever happened to you that you thought: okay, reality isn’t even real at all?

Alive and absurd in defiance of popular disapproval. Simplify who you are so you can wear it like a medallion, a living invincible epitaph or epigraph underscoring bold tomorrows already sealed. Busy yourself about in the circuitry that has been arranged for you…and then quite badly tangled. When you speed up people and their machines and tools excessively, abandoning meaningful oversight and stewardship, you can expect heat, fires, and explosions in chain reaction.  For the connoisseur watching Monte Hellman’s 1971 Samuel-Beckett-piston-head automobile western Two-Lane Blacktop for the first time, the film’s ending, which features an optical effect which makes it appear that the film you are watching is burning up in the projector, not only underscores what happens to machines and machine-assemblages when they run too hot, but also obviously pays direct homage to Ingmar Bergman, about halfway through whose 1966 Persona the image stammers, wobbles, and glitches, suddenly appearing to ignite, melt, and burn itself out inside the projector gate. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, there have been more and more narratives, especially in the cinema, that ignore the convention of three acts with a pattern of rising action and resolution, cobbling together instead runaway stories that go faster than they can handle and rise and rise like Icarus unto glitched-out overkill. Death by solar proximity. I guess because of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s 2009 colossus of overkill Enter the Void is a ragtag serpentine spree that lurches forward with lurid abandon until the film itself bursts through some interstitial cosmic membrane and is reborn as a human child, screaming bloody murder. One of his best two or three movies no matter what folks may say, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the truncated version of which was part of 2007’s commercially-ill-advised Grindhouse along with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, has, like many of the best Hong Kong genre movies of the ’80s and ‘90s, a story outline you could scrawl on a cocktail napkin. All the better. The payoff is we get to hang out with a whole bunch of incredibly fun young women, in two distinct spatiotemporal frames, as they talk, kid one another, drink, smoke pot, and cavort. It is a movie that is actually like hanging out with your friends and going places and doing things in a more or less extemporaneous way, activities delineated in a kind of purely ludic time, these idylls and episodes broken up by bravura action sequences that are shocking, inventive, surprising, and sometimes funny, including the final one, which culminates in Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, and Zoë Bell going to town on Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, levelling him with roundhouse kicks and debilitating jabs, one after another, as the editing picks up speed, fragments, freezes, lurches, stammers, goes schizz-on-a-stick. The ending of Death Proof is the most Tarantino has ever resembled über-independent Japanese maverick Shinya Tsukamoto, whose quintessential cyberpunk urtext Tetsuo: The Iron Man builds to a climax that finds speed-freaking salaryman hero and metalloid demon villain merging in flesh, metal, and mindset, forming a single grotesque machinic entity and declaring, bound in newfound solidarity, that they shall turn the whole earth into metal, leaking fluids, and rust. Rust never sleeps.

When the film catches fire that is negation, when the film melts that is disillusion, and when it burns itself out that is inferno.

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, "Hold Tight"

The ending of Two-Lane Blacktop (Monto Hellman, 1971)

Méditation automnale

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)

Roma (Federico Fellini, 1972)

“In those days, many men and some women ventured here, hoping to awaken the dancing sleeper with whatever it took,” writes Robert Coover in the pocket-sized The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), “and others came to watch this happen, but all left chastened by the awareness that not only was she a princess who did not await a prince, she was, even in her doll-like nakedness, the very image of eternal innocence, eliciting not carnal desire but profound awe and affection and something, mysteriously, like hope."

What’s the fun of a phonograph if a phonograph can’t have friends? I suppose it depends on the phonograph itself in the end.

Sometimes I found myself lying down in bed in the middle of the day as a preventative measure against the possibility of accidentally finding myself drunk. The part of the mind that balks at everything that is going on or has ever gone on always flashes on those same three perennial options: 1) kill yourself; 2) get wasted; 3) fuck this, I’m going to bed. It should go without saying that the third option is almost always soundest. Sleep turns every waking into the afterlife.

The Songlines of Australian Aborigines, mental maps which attach replicable song and dance modalities onto and over navigable topographies in order to remember and to know them, are ecological, historical, and navigational systems of an inherently neurological nature. The mind diagrams topographies and remembers more than it ever customarily lets on. The mind is connected by pure chance to the toes. Let’s go that way. That route is my favourite song.

“Men of the I-Ching did not see indigo-violet,” asserts Antonin Artaud in “Notes on Oriental, Greek, and Indian Cultures,” adding of the I-Ching that it “deals with energetics, divination, cosmology down to the atom.” 

I-Ching = 64 sacred symbols

formed by permutations 8 Symbols of 3 lines

My homeboy Felisberto Hernández
who is as you can see
wispy and acerbic

#dollin' 

Goethe’s Faust:

I shall not cease to feel in all attires,

The pains of our narrow earthly day.

I am too old to be content to play,

Too young to be without desire.

🙏

Jim O'Rourke, "Fast Car"

The Dark Side of Nanotechnology: A Vignette

Did I ever tell you about the night your dear mother for the first time from a great yawning distance strafed me with her nanodrones? The hour was wicked and the air pressure haywire. They used to have that city built into the side of the mountain on the other side of the Great Plain before the succession of devastating rockslides kiboshed further communal misadventures there, and your mother would get in her little tan bonnet and grab her basket and head up from the city to the summit of the mountain, in all her mighty gumption, opening the top of the basket once arrived and letting the nanodrones go from the peak like doves of peace. How she collated her intel I’ll never know. I know what she was after, though. Political leverage. Your mother had a way of worming herself through the masonry and the carpentry. You understand? Out and about in a lighter-than-usual mood, wearing that eggshell-coloured shawl, she was like an airborne virus, a song of songs, except with frightening white teeth capable of temporarily blinding the abnormally sensitive. I never liked having to attempt stripping her of a weapon, I can tell you that. In the heavy times, we usually needed her armed anyway. While all the off-grid nanotechnology hanky-panky never really ate into our marriage or caused me much personal burden, it did sadly eat into her. Literally. I’m afraid you mother was eaten by nanobots, Jennifer. I know, I know. Believe me, it was a shock to me too. I was there. It was an appalling extravaganza of colour.

On Influence

 

Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

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"