Ten from the Popular American Counterculture (1966-1971)

First of all, I had no choice but to be independent in my life because I wasn’t happy with my life. I wanted to change it. And that carried over into everything: how I lived my life, how I found my jobs or education. When I came to making movies, there was this streak in me of being counter, being against. Not for, but against something. And I was against Hollywood.

- Bob Rafelson

Brewster McCloud (Robert Altman, 1971)

Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971)

Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971)

Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma, 1970)

Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970)

Taking Off (Miloš Forman, 1971)

Cult of the Damned (Robert Thom, 1969)

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)

Skidoo (Otto Preminger, 1968)

Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969)

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, "Dropout Boogie"

Erlton, Calgary, February 1, 2026

Navigable Space

 

Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, 1977)

Level Five (Chris Marker, 1997)

Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine, 2023)

Nobody rocks the cock like Cyndi Pinziki!

- Nora Dunn in Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006)

Crystallizing gradually into a human thing, stumbling like a bull in a china shop through the Anthropocene, we were first of all errant sense-perception inadvertently let loose on solid rock in tennis shoes and bright white socks. Early man is reported to have had consistent difficulty determining if something was moving toward him or he toward it. The big breakthrough in Analytical Philosophy is we're all playing war games as soon as we're able to imagine what's around the corner (and probably enraged).

If you start to think about it, immersive 3D virtual reality simulators are far less virtual than your own diaphanous consciousness, locked up somewhere tight and to detection impervious. My phenomenological method is: I don't know what that thing is, give me a minute. There are for sure going to be new topographies to navigate and we do not yet know the language for them. Thebes. Bathing in the blood of the lamb.  

From the standpoint of psychology and neuroscience, navigable space relates to the creature's mental representation of the environment while moving through it, wayfinding and locomotion. In relation to video games, navigable space relates to increasingly complex navigable topographies that are frequently non-Euclidean. Spinoza said that we do not yet know of what a body is capable and I would be inclined to argue that the same could be said for the fanciful places we might sequester that body. There is no hell and damnation for bodies. There are only the worms. And the teeming talkative flies of Maurice Blanchot's The Most High.  

Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018)

Jason Philip Wierzba, The Navigable Space EP

  

Twelve Facts About the Ailing Author

 

1. I am the rabbit.

2. If you are not friendly or kind to me or others in the vicinity it is probable I will lash out at you and I'm aware that's somewhat paradoxical.

3. The male actors I always related to most as a young man were Edward G. Robinson and Warren Oates, which even I know is extremely weird.

4. It is true that at about thirteen or fourteen I was starting goaltender for the team that won the Alberta Hockey Provincial Championship...in the bottom division. Did you know that in hockey the starting goaltender is roughly equivalent to the starting quarterback in American football? The first rule of goaltending is: keep your eye on the movement of the players in relation to the puck. When you start to look at the rest of the lifeworld that way you begin to see people for the dung beetles they truly are.

5. I must have some relatively mild variant of pica because as a kid I loved eating dirt, sand, and grass, enjoying frequently also the pleasures of a good sucking rock, like Beckett's Molloy in his exaggerated frenzy of directionlessness. When I started to get a little older I became much more likely to cut to the quick and just cut myself.

6. The best concert I ever attended was Charlie Haden's Quartet West at Calgary's Knox United Church back in the days when I was good and fucked up every damn day on the beleaguered calendar, though that did not serve in this instance to undermine my recollection. It was a divine performance and the acoustics were extrasensory. They did a super long version of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and I cried through most of it.          

7. I've been telling friends and gas station attendants that Quentin Tarantino's final film as a director of feature length theatrical movies should be about sex-workers in the Old West. His McCabe & Mrs. Miller, if you will. 

8. My highly innovative approach to guitar means that all-too-regularly douchebags insist I'm inept. Buddy, it takes supernatural groundedness and much study to hit it this inept. When Thomas Merton was asked what he learned from Buddhism, he replied: "How to be a better Christian." 

9. Gary Snyder has always been my favourite among the hallowed "Beat poets." The critic Richard Tillinghast wrote that Snyder possesses “a command of geology, anthropology and evolutionary biology unmatched among contemporary poets.” Exactly!

10. What I am right now today in my basement most excited about is Radiance's recent super sexy twin releases of Blu-rays for Luchino Visconti's Le notti bianche (1957) and Robert Bresson's Une femme douce (1969). Perfect for the ever-lurking Dostoevsky stan in your life.

11. I love Jennifer Jason Leigh a lot and believe her to be one of the very finest screen actresses of all time, along with the likes of Greta Garbo and Simone Signoret, but I'll confess I got a little cross with her when on a accompanying special feature for a Blu-ray of the great and inexhaustible Miami Blues (1990), Leigh, female lead, asserts that the film in question was the director George Armitage's debut in that capacity. Actually, he had already directed four low-budget features by that point. Yowza.

12. I was thirteen when I first got good and drunk. We were in the country and I was hanging out with some sixteen-year-old boys who had drivers' licences. One of the boys called the little general store in Priddis and said he was sending his son to grab some alcoholic spirits and would she please accommodate, after which another boy was dispatched to go grab the haul. We drank it down with panache. Shortly thereafter, the older boys started getting sick and throwing up while I went rifling inquisitively through my friend's parents' liquor cabinet. Following the underwhelming climax of our hella sloppy revelries, I returned home and quietly watched a little bit of Saturday Night Live...with my parents.   

Edward G. Robinson in The Whole Town's Talking (John Ford, 1935)

Warren Oates in Cockfighter (Monte Hellman, 1974)

    

  

At Rest, 2026

I think a person making a film should try not to control what it says, except on the level of dramatic pleasure. One should let things happen, through a kind of “écriture automatique.” A film is like a plant—you have to let it grow by itself, you have to respect that kind of biological rhythm.

- Alain Resnais

I had gone as far as Pennsylvania and Virginia to pitch my crazy dream. Yes, some people actually looked at me like that, a crazed artist with a lofty dream. A number of times, people would be whispering in giggles as I did video presentations in their homes or offices. Some even treated me like a beggar, giving me pocket money so that I would not bother them again. That was when I met Paul Tañedo, a Filipino photography artist in Alexandria, Virginia. He liked what he saw in the 16mm black and white footage and committed to support it. It was a simple talk over coffee very early in the morning. What hooked him were the black and white shots. Beautiful. Nothing beats 16mm black and white stock 7222. The grains and depths are fiercely powerful.

- Lav Diaz

Gambling, Gods and LSD (Peter Mettler, 2002)

Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008)

The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz, 2016)

Wierzba's Subterranean Calgary Screening Room

Bill Fay, "Who is the Sender?"

A Few Words on Substance Use Disorders

Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

The Blackout (Abel Ferrara, 1997)

Dear, Sir;

It is not uncommon even to this day that people will confront the addict-alcoholic with the accusation that addiction is a choice, sympathy therefore scarce. This misconception is based on a colossal error, although one does of course need to concede that the alcoholic does make a conscious choice of a kind every single time they pick up a drink or head out to score. Alas, this picture is starting to become indefensibly reduced (here's to you, silent majority). For first comes habit in due course and then comes toxic custom forcing body and mind into steep and nauseating decline, the whole central nervous system compromised by lies, distortion, and bad information. The two main symptoms of alcohol use disorders are mental obsession and physical craving...all of it leading inexorably to systems crash, pop-goes-the-weasel. When folks come to me with regard to a friend or family member whose drinking concerns them, I often recommend they ask the loved one what their first experience of getting drunk was like. For an astonishingly large number of alcoholics, myself included, the first time we got drunk was also the first time we ever felt 'okay in our own skin.' It is the position of myself and other care-motivated souls in the field that it is abominably evil to demonize those poor and broken souls constitutionally unable the escape the only thing that ever made them feel okay.          

 

Fun Signage [Sheldon Chumir]

 

Willie Dunn Vs. T.S. Eliot

The Duchess Ate Graham Crackers

When we were in Borneo climbing Mount Kinabalu, I sharply recall the duchess complaining that she'd been taught that vodka was all but odourless, which was plain fact up to a point, but when you were good and saturated in the stuff the truth was you couldn't help but reek potently and to the notice of all in range. You could argue that the three things the duchess loved most were cats, Japanese 'pinku' movies, and bottomless martinis, gin or vodka-based (per the daily vicissitudes of mood and fancy). When the great cocksman Koshimi of Azerbaijan lay just that one brief night with the duchess it is said that, as he looked down upon her on the bed he saw a look of challenge and reprisal so severe and scorching that he does not wish to ever summon it to mind again, may God and the angels stand proud and erect in their duck boots humming George Gershwin. When his friend Bruno Sanntario asks him what happened after satisfactory consummation of the copulation and discomfiting brinksmanship, Koshimi of Azerbaijan is quoted as saying: "The duchess ate graham crackers."

The duchess sat by the well in gentle mediation 

for aeons and aeons....

Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1989)

Happy Here and Now (Michael Almereyda, 2002)

24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami, 2017)