We: Expression/Impression

 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)

Paul Cézanne, Chateau Noir, 1904

Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

There is a direct linear development descending from the German Expressionism of the 1920s, the late silent era in cinema, to film noir in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, a fact which of course has much to do with historical contingencies, many a technician and film artist having fled Germany, Austria, and other parts of an increasingly compromised Europe in the lead-up to the Second World War. Many European Jews didn’t even feel comfortable in England. That’s part of how maverick, renegade philosopher Vilém Flusser found himself in São Paulo instead of London, changing the world for the better in Portuguese instead of English. Much of the discourse around Expressionism and its influence on Hollywood films from around 1929 until something like 1958, focuses on the prevalence of chiaroscuro lighting, unnatural sets and backdrops, plus the use of shadow to create a hyper-stylized and unnaturally oppressive visual atmosphere. These tendencies trace back to German films of the silent era and German visual art of the Weimar era more generally, though of course they also trace back to Edvard Munch and Europe’s carnivalesque fin de siècle, tiny absinthe-drunk Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec randomly firing off his pistols inside the Moulin Rouge and so forth. (We confess that we cannot confirm whether or not that actually happened.) Expressionism as a principle is meant above all to indicate the primacy of the arousal of and the dissection of aberrant mental states in opposition to a naturalistic and/or realistic depiction of things as they supposedly are. The crazy, distorted, sloping, jagged, and splattered urban landscape of Robert Wiene’s 1920 Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, along with all the harshly canted camera angles, seem like a topography touched by mental disquiet, paranoia, and hallucinatory evasiveness, though it would seem that the people placed within the topographical field, on the threshold of dissolution, are as touched as the landscape by strange and unfamiliar mental states and their seismic undulations. Welcome. We are all mad. If only to look for the counterpoint you can look after, consider that when we summon Impressionism on the heels of Expressionism we naturally summon Paul Cézanne, probably for us the greatest modern painter, an artist who in sieving the landscape and the things that have been set down upon it through his own systemic complexivity, first using sensory equipment and the faculties of apperception, then using the imagination, and finally transmitting gesturally with hands and brushes. The rendering that Cézanne invariably produces is completely transformed in the rendering and what we receive at the end is a landscape qualitatively different from the one we would have naturally gazed upon had we been with the painter when he was recoding it. In this sense at least, Impressionism is already Expressionism because it can give us a landscape that is like a poem and therefore like a mental state, an expression of and the simultaneous capture of a heightened mental state. Nous rendons. It is we who render from within the manifold because we are compelled to and have always been so. The art that we pull out of the world and alter in order to give back to the world passes through everybody and everything capable of processing it before it becomes the singular and intimate personal enunciation or gesture, such that everything with a nervous system extremely similar to the artist’s is also the de facto co-creator of the art. Everything does everything is the motto of bouncing overstimulated molecules. Everything that contains language or symbols we naturally collaborate on collectively, though copyright laws are not without their reasoning because nothing can be special without being particular. “Because black was the color of a gun, a dull black, a complete black,” writes crime fiction heavy-hitter David Goodis in his seedy 1947 classic Nightfall, “and through a whirl of all the colors coming together in a pool gone wild, the black gun came into his hand and he held it there for a time impossible to measure, and then he pointed the black gun and he pulled the trigger and he killed a man.” I killed him because I recognized I was holding a gun because it was black. This is the kind of experience we call Universal. What is most perverse, singular, and local is most Universal and all writers of fiction must come to be aware of it so as to make the specificities, micro-details, and credibly grounded locality the degree zero every time they sit themselves down to pick chicken seed off the keyboard with their august authorial beaks. The outline is an outline. That’s easy. Now you have to enflesh some acromegalic marionettes who kick you while you hold them dangling. “An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours,” insists Master of the Cinematograph Robert Bresson in his book Notes on the Cinematograph, “A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.” Bresson was a painter before he was a peerlessly exacting cineaste and from his point of view, as communicated in a 1983 interview with French critic Michel Ciment, shortly after the completion of his final film, figural painting had more or less reached the limits of that of which it was capable of in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “I don’t mean after Picasso, but after Cézanne. He went to the brink of what could not be done. Others may paint because they are of a different generation, but I felt very early on that I must not continue. When I stopped, it was horrible. At first, cinema was only a stop-gap, to occupy my mind.”  The superiority of the cinema quickly revealed itself to Bresson: “tomorrow’s writing or painting, with two kinds of ink, one for the eye, one for the ear.” Bresson would rather have the audience respond, feel, and intuit forms and their sundry movements rather than come up with handy formulae or stale templates. The artist must violently disabuse the viewer of their pet formulas and templates. The viewer much challenge their own prejudices every single day. You cannot help if you cannot feel. From Notes on Cinematography: “Nothing is durable but what is caught up in rhythms. Bend content to form and sense to rhythms.” 

Derek Bailey/Jamaaladeen Tacuma/Calvin Weston, Mirakle
[Full Album]

JPW at Forty-Seven
Arthur Rimbaud looking-ass motherfucker

* Mirakle is our favourite recording featuring Derek Bailey on guitar and we've probably heard over a hundred.

We: Soda Pop Joe

 

Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)

We’ve been throwing around a very basic concept we believe relates decisively back to the writings and mad, nomadic proselytizing of Philip K. Dick and which you can see demonstrated it would appear on purpose in Charlie Kaufman’s excellent 2020 Netflix movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The crux of the biscuit of whiskers here on display is that if at any time a higher intelligence could interfere in your mental and your sensory processes and put you back down afterward in a modified reality, doesn’t that mean that any time you so much as blink it’s conceivable you’re no longer in any proper sense you anymore and could in fact be existentially altered along with the phenomenal reality in which you are immersed and which seemingly contains you, territory of territories and illusion of illusions? What unites us above all is a biosphere we’ve all squatted down and shit inside of, breathing to a mortal soul the same bad fruity vape air. It would be mortifying to stand up and speak up only to get mowed down by a volley of flippant commentary, then get caught in abrasions in the tissue paper that separates us, raw little fetal-pig-pink us at the back of the incapacitants’ bus, like the little wieners they sell at the Petro-Canada, each wrapped in wax paper and placed on the bus seats pleasingly and neatly like in an uncommonly orderly nursery. It’s a big Ten-Four there, Pig Pen. George Gurdjieff addresses one of the more resilient human models or types, traceable back to antiquity, endlessly recycled in the form of living persons still among us even at this present moment: delusional, physically mechanical, overactive of imagination, eyes more than normally or even alarmingly wide in the patented style of noted barn owl impersonator Elizabeth Holmes. Gurdjieff believes that actors and German-speaking people are especially likely to be like this and very often at low points in their lives find themselves sitting scrunched up in a corner for an extended period of time, staring in terror at a door. Who is to say, Isaiah? Is Gurdjieff right? Being right wasn’t the point until thugs made it the point and we stepped discreetly back and let those indelicate and impatient thugs run this operation tits-up. “If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives,” chastens Gurdjieff, whirling dervish and intergalactic blunderbuss, “we should go mad with horror.” Mad with horror is definitely an option. Change isn’t something you opt into or out of. Change will have her work order filled, thank you very much. If you have to throw hands go ahead and throw ‘em. Now is the time for dukes up and come-what-may. We all owe our mothers a couple times over. Collectively we intuit this. The imago is the pedestal upon which all that which continues to stand continues to stand. When the whole world is a great big open field hospital, everybody is going to need their mother to hold them and say that they’ll be okay. Human beings have feelings even when others have decided that they are not human beings in the full and proper sense, whatever that could ever possibly mean. Most categories fail to do justice to life. The problem of supremacy is there is no real concrete people walking the earth today, but rather mathematical reductions and abstract transducers with terrain almost as foggy and broken up as the faculties of apperception testing it, inconsistently and with however much self-deception, this not exactly being laboratory work with controlled variables. Statistics can’t predict the future but they will help you become obsessive and errantly analytical until you are feral as a gooned badger, some primordial gambling addict, or worse. If you aren’t a microfascist then most things, non-public things, aren’t any of your business…and it’s no small relief. Extreme or unnatural events, catastrophes human and natural, loss of a limb or a marriage, a pitcher’s highly irregular no-hitter streak, naturally drift back toward average performance over time, yet people constantly invent causal reasons to explain the swings and dips on the graph, narrativizing and personalizing. If you want to know the best way to predict the future, well, just listen to what the folks in the church basements of A.A. have to say: the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Specialists today do not yet know how to calculate the extent to which creatural perception is randomness and chance. Probably well over 90% of your life is randomness and chance, with you over in the corner, a little bashful, having a go at various, spurious shapes you may or may not have once assumed in previous incarnations or within the murky instruction of dreams. In the 1964 Czech parody western Soda Pop Joe (A.K.A. Lemonade Joe), directed by the always reliable Oldřich Lipský and set down in a stately if somewhat gaudy fantasy Old West full of lust and the profit motive, the fictional outpost of Stetson City, Arizona, Lemonade Joe ambles into town to aggressively pitch and extol the virtues of the magical carbonated beverage Kolaloka and, teaming up with temperance advocate Winnifred Goodman, to help set up a dry saloon and drive all the vice and banditry out of town for good, this bringing on the menacing predations of shape-shifting contract killer Hogofogo, hired by the saloonkeepers and racketeers to clear out and/or put down the clean living vermin. To our eye, Lemonade Joe looks more Norwegian or Swedish than he does Czech. He sort of comes off as conspicuously clean. All of Soda Pop Joe is shot through the full old-time array of colour gel filters so all the various scenes of topsy turvy Soviet Bloc Old West mayhem and bluster look like they are happening inside all the different various flavours of Gatorade. There is a little light minstrelsy and we confess that it does not much help matters that it looks like it is taking place inside of somebody’s urine sample. At the end of the picture, in order to appease the Soviet censors, the whole town becomes a labour co-op tasked with producing an alcoholic lemonade called Whiskola. It is a brisk and charming oats-and-a-six-gun genre movie squeezed like ectoplasmic paste through the Cold War looking glass and not unlike other better known Czech New Wave classics from the period, both in terms of temperament and basic approach. History wears our defects and is the theatre of our unceasing folly and there are times when the cinema flourishes and times when it flounders. We’ll leave you with this: one of the all time great boom years in Hollywood was, notoriously, 1939. Some people had especially good years that year. Irascible master Monument Valley pictorialist John Ford somehow made Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along the Mohawk, and portly character actor Thomas Mitchell, famous perhaps most especially for his skill at playing a loveable drunk in comedies like Howard Hawks’s 1934 gem Twentieth Century, appeared in the aforementioned Stagecoach as well as Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That’s not a year…that’s a technical knockout.

Santigold, "L.E.S. Artistes"
[Official Music Video]
2008

Battles, "The Yabba"
[Official Music Video]
2015

Horse Lords, "People's Park"
[Official Music Video]
2020

The Catbird Seat

I enjoy myself and get results I swear by with the writing these days when I keep the pieces compressed and digestible while allowing the language to remain maximalist and colourful. I'm more like a jeweller toiling in emerald lights than ever. When you are working in a single mode serially you find you can get each new piece rolling without a whole lot of extraneous funny business. Call it the grease of habit. The literary marksman in his greenery, among greenery too, parked on that fence like a sour warning and glowering at all thingness. Hiss at me, you thinglings...until I own and postpone thee...

Chat écoutant la musique (Chris Marker, 1988)

 

My Social Calendar

Making the scene with Hank and George...

When this your crew
you know you is a Alpha...

Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Pump it Up"
[Official Music Video]

Welcome back to Jazzin' with Jasmine, you jaundiced and froze-fisted heliocentric smut puppers!

Ron Carter Quartet, "Blue Monk"

* Piccolo by the Ron Carter Quartet is our favourite new classic jazz record discovery of the present moment. Bro, it has two basses.

 

We: Sardines and Marmalade

 

Merry-Go-Round (Jacques Rivette, 1980)

If any major debut novel by an American writer is crying out for resuscitation and rediscovery it is assuredly Alexander Theroux’s Three Wogs from 1972, in some respects probably still the most astute and exemplary work of fiction I have read by this great writer from a distinguished clan—a dashing fraternity pledge who punches everybody’s lights out sentence by sentence—whose digressive nonfictions are where most of the magic gathers and stalls in heavy shifts of pressure, this rake’s proclivity being above all to hold a thing in the palm of his hand on a blood moon and throw a thousand compound angles of action at it. A triptych of tales each involving blithe unchecked racism in the clueless and ruthless middle classes of England, a land where Mrs. Probys and Reverend Which Therefores finally get theres, thanks to the beneficent interventions of literature. "Mrs. Proby Gets Hers," "Childe Roland," and "The Wife of God.” Three Wogs is the most clever and blistering thing I have ever read about the sort of lazy everyday unchecked prejudice that we know we see around us far more often than we do outright eugenicist hatred/disgust. The author’s thesis would appear to largely be that gabby self-satisfied white folks won’t ever step out of their own footwear long enough for proper sense to at long last detain them. In the first place, the way to not be racist is to address a person as a person, but then for some it became as though you cannot risk open communication because there is always the possibility of a faux pas or humiliating gaffe. Thus in short order these sad souls began to saddle people of different ethnicities with identities those folks never claimed for themselves or even had a say in. It’s a person. That person cannot tell you what a Chinese person is or what a Mexican person is or how somebody’s ancestors are de facto who that person presently has to serve from the catbird seat. Fuck that jangly-ass racket. The idea is that the person right in front of you might be interesting to get to know so long as you can manage to get out of your own way. Sardines and marmalade shall be the forever serum in the Palladium of Perverse Nuptials. [Merry-Go-Round (Jacques Rivette, 1980).] The disgrace of the racist’s worldview is that the racist hasn’t a worldview nor much of a world neither. In the body the flight instinct wants out, but it doesn’t know where to go…or who to blame. It’s like everybody has a sports franchise they must cheer on from birth or something, contract writ in India ink. Get wriggly and get wiggly…this is a creature feature. When le grand patron Jean Renoir insinuates himself in the hulking, shifty flesh into his masterful 1939 film maudit La règle du jeu to remind the swirl of amorous combatants around him that everybody has their reasons, he holds back a moment so that we might realize for ourselves that the cities are now overrun with violent crimes running around with no more criminals to attach them to like tags because everybody had their reasons and so we let them go. In his novel of fragments Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, maximally eccentric Spanish exile Felipe Alfau, who could never really bring himself to believe that his own writings were readable or coherent even though they definitely were, surmises that people are reluctant to have their fingerprints taken because they seem to vaguely intuit that it might ultimately cause them to be unable to suppress the commission of hopelessly self-incriminating crimes. There is also the possibility that your fingerprints are off committing heinous acts unbeknownst to you. If you believe in fingerprints you must concede that the crimes yours have committed off on their own are your crimes for which to answer. The law’s pretty clear on that. “The narrow, crooked, torturous streets fled from him, denying his path, mocking, snarling, like snakes in a jungle of bizarre structures …” The willful stride is stymied by phenomenal reality her blanket self. Matter and memory, needless to say, get away from the literary conspirators, the author witnessing it all from afar, up on a hillock cross-legged, “in as state of utter impotence and indignation.” Locos was written in the late 1920s in New York in English and was published, somewhat curiously, two years before Flann O’Brien’s delirious and divine At Swim-Two-Birds, a novel in which the narrator gets up every single day and goes into battle in a direct and corporeal way with his characters. Not knowing how to let well enough alone is how fruitfulness and prosperity happen. There is no map. I’m afraid you’re going to have to feel your way around and echolocate. “The discovery in any domain of a plurality of coexisting operations,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, “is inseparable from a more profound discovery, that of difference, which denounces the negative and opposition itself as no more than appearances in relation to the problematic field of problematic multiplicity.”

What is the Creative Act?

Gilles Deleuze

Half Japanese, "Firecracker" (1993)

We: Two Hands

Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975)

 

In a 1983 interview with Gideon Bachmann, Jean-Luc Godard brags more than confesses that he’s cut all of his films from 1980’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) onward with two solitary mixing tracks, the idea being that “I have only two hands to manipulate them…if I had only one arm, maybe I’d only have a single sound track. All this business of having the various sounds marching up in front of you like soldiers is called mixing and I can only control it with the two hands I have.” The sound for each scene and sequence needs to be exhumed and reanimated by way of one “important sound of the moment” after another. In keeping things spare and acetic we turn our attention into a laser and there cannot either be any denying that the working methodology Godard elucidates is perfectly analogous to that of the DJ, who samples and scratches and tries to keep the rhythm, even when it’s allowed to skip or stammer, using two hands…unless one is at any given time holding a drink. One who can sample and scratch and also skip and stammer is the true Svengali of post-history, this a lived balletic process where the negation of the given is additive and doesn’t negate shit because Deleuze and Guattari’s perverse nuptials are the only law here in post-history, where the centre did not hold and the ground beneath us crumbled. Late in the 20th century, Silicon Valley optimists of the Whole Earth Catalog school and other commentators of one stripe or another were surmising that in the near future we’d all be DJs…and they weren’t wrong I don’t think, not really. The haptic self abandons all nerve endings so as to enter the Palace of Disposable Plastics. The body without organs conceived by Antonin Artaud and exhaustively theorized—and sliced and diced—by Deleuze and Guattari is the yogic initiate who has not yet ever felt the organic body for real, knowing that in dreams you can sustain injuries that are erased like an Etch A Sketch whereas in meatspace they stick, even if you can’t properly feel yourself feeling anything, as though drugged or numb. When one loses contact with the body one loses contact with the earth and this is largely what we mean when we say bio-politics. Power and the System of Controls can use you as kindling if you have not fortified your immortal soul in physical practice. If you are going to attain true mastery you are going to do it with a passion counterbalanced by humility. There is no other path that is not false, praying on vanities, prejudices, and will-to-judgement. Fail on your own and in good faith. Answer for yourself when you should but not when you shouldn’t. It is you who has to make those determinations on your own. Kierkegaard argued that we do not need a robust philosophy of ethics because we almost always know it consciously when we have erred or offended. In feeling and living with healthy amounts of prophylactic shame we learn not to be shameless and should in time have better luck not going rogue nine or ten times a day, humility somehow even making us grateful in the process. Who would have ever dared imagine? “Unlike Godard, who revolutionized sound tracks, rhythmically punctuating stretches of silence, street sounds, spoken voices, cafe noises, all used as music” writes the great American painter and film critic Manny Farber of Robert Altman and his brutal and brilliant 1975 state-of-the-nation Nashville, “Atman is saying that the media has corrupted and dulled Americans with a sound track that is one continuous flow of noises.” Specificity and discernment may be the ultimate flotation device for unsteady citizens of hovering post-history. Good programming provides shape and meaning to dreary, scatterbrained life. Let your own two hands mould your destiny and your heart and lungs find amusement in the body’s baffling terrestrial travails. We might also take a look at the image on the cover of the City Lights edition of Silvina Ocampo's short posthumously published novel The Promise, featuring the hands of the author arrayed aggressively in an attempt to obscure the unseen photographer’s unobstructed access to her face. Silvina did not have a thirst for attention remotely like that of her wheeling and dealing sister Victoria. It is a fact commonly acknowledged that Silvina did not like to have her photograph taken. When they won’t take no for an answer, well, the way out is the way through…give ‘em the hands…  

Christian Marclay and Okkyung Lee, "Rubbings"

2x2 Vinyl Perfumery

 

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.

Tom Waits, "Kentucky Avenue"

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More 1990s Rock and Roll Bliss

The Clean, "Do Your Thing" (1993)