Barbara Loden and Wanda

 

Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

Barbara Loden promoting Wanda on The Dick Cavett Show (1971)

Wanda, the lone feature film starring and directed by New York stage actress Barbara Loden who was famous for being married to Elia Kazan but was herself a radiant source of pure golden light, was released in 1970 and somehow created a ripple in the fabric of space-time the implications of which are not yet at all clear. I had a friend a few decades my senior who originated from the Bronx and he once told me that when Loden starred in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall in 1964 nearly the whole city of New York was astonished and agog. Nobody had ever had what she appeared to have, whatever the blazes it was. Barbara Loden has impassively produced some acolytes whose devotion is like that of the great monumentalists of past centuries and of other cultures (their legacy nowhere more firmly established in modernity than in the cumulative cinematic-hermeneutic complexitive monument of Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi, whom none are likely to surpass). French writer Nathalie Léger has crafted a fine and fascinating document about potentially fatal arts and culture obsessions with her cult book Suite for Barbara Loden. The author is on a grand mission but any personal growth she undergoes is conducted in baby steps, micromillimeters. “What is it that attracts me so to Wanada?” poses Léger, before proceeding as one would were one so-to-speak flexing: “I have never been homeless, I have never abandoned my children, I have never given over my existence or even my financial affairs to any man, I don’t think I have ever entrusted even the most banal area of my life to anyone.” People with high standards seem always to be disproportionately blind to the personal side of their personal conundrums (and I myself stand guilty as charged, lest there be doubt). I know why I love the character Wanada much more and with greater burning intensity than I could ever love the actress and director Barbara Loden, who would doubtlessly leave me speechless in an encounter, and not only because she’s long dead. The reason for this is that using methods not entirely clear on the face of it, Wanada emerges for me as a close personal friend or member of the extended family. My favourite thing about the motion picture Wanda is for sure the character Wanda. I grin wide at her on my widescreen television as she makes her messy hair do funny stuff when she swings her neck and her eye(s). Loden was a sophisticated fellow traveler of the New York underground and avant-garde circles. She studied the ‘method’ with the best teachers then plying that trade—it’s why we suspect that Loden is just as much Wanda at the craft services table or when laying her head down on the pillow at night as when the camera is rolling and the magic has to happen—but she also learned all D.A. Pennebaker had to teach about light and cheap 16mm equipment and guerrilla shooting methodologies. Shot primarily in the bleakest blue-grey pockets of industrial Pennsylvania on newsreel-grade film stock, is it any wonder that Wanda feels like the only film ever made in which a performer-director has deprogrammed themselves in order to become a pure and elemental alternative self and then gone and made a fly-on-the-wall documentary about that person? Of the weirdly adorable and often energetic Wanda and the ease with which she merges with or signs immediate binding contracts with choices so bad most of us probably haven’t previously considered that such choices might even present themselves to a person in the natural course of things; this hellbent and thoroughly confused friend named Wanda who I met at the movies somehow reminds me of the often divinely surgical Hélène Cixous and her mythopoetic synopsis of Cervantes and Don Quixote in Death Shall Be Dethroned: “one sleepwalks through one’s life right to the day one wakes up dead.” When in grave doubt regarding things once taken for granted it is best to shut up and listen, whether you are at church or at home doing dishes...and contemplating the hum of the furnace... 

Black Lips, "Get It on Time" (Official Music Video)

Jelly Bean Dream Team Physical Media Roundup and Derby

I never wanted to be a film critic because it is a crass gig for the most part where arrogant poltroons say thumbs up or down to what the anonymous everyman ought(n’t) to spend his money on a ticket to go see this forthcoming weekend. I don’t have anything whatsoever invested in what movies anybody goes to see. I was angry, bitter, and misanthropic by the age of five; I think we can safely conclude that that ship has properly and definitively sailed. I grew over time to quite dislike notable/notorious Chicago-based film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, but on a couple occasions I have read him argue that the main job of a film critic is to give readers useful information they probably don’t have yet and that is a perspective I very much share. Thus and thusly, I am coming at you in this middling late-morning hour to drop hot intel on some choice cinema-related physical media objects of recent vintage and the very highest quality.

I have recently become a fan and collector of small boutique Blu-ray label Deaf Crocodile who specialize in films from Eastern Europe including collections of Soviet-era Russian animation and a sublime Soviet-era Russian western called White Sun of the Desert (Vladimir Motyl, 1969), which was a massive hit throughout the Soviet sphere of influence. The absolute treasure from among the standing Deaf Crocodile roster, however, is their gorgeous three-disk box of films by super obscure Finnish filmmaker Teuvo Tulio, a director who routinely combines deep, excoriating melodrama and a heightened pictorialism that in 1973’s rapturous Sensuela extends to work with primary colours that might even make the great Doug Sirk’s jaw drop, if only perhaps for a moment. Tulio is the traditional Scandinavian with respect to his frankness concerning the body and sexuality. The early films from the 1940s have some light playful nudity redolent of Harriet Andersson running around the beach in the buff for Ingmar Bergman in 1953’s Summer with Monica. I suspect a massive majority of people don’t know it anymore, but it may be helpful to have oneself reminded that the Swedes, in an age before the ubiquity of porn, actually singlehandedly produced a global market for soft-core erotic movies. You won’t really be surprised by that fact when you see Sensuela, which is less titillating than it is outright eye-popping. The provenance of blue movies may no longer seem so hazy or opaque. Sex frankness is public hygiene. Freud said so and so do the people and the landscapes of Finland…don’t ask me to explain it, it’s complicated. One person to whom Teuvo Tulio is in no way obscure is contemporary deadpan Finish formalist Aki Kaurismäki, who has long hailed his predecessor as the great master. To get a sense of what Tulio’s work is and what it does it might be helpful to think of the above-established masters Douglas Sirk and Aki Kaurismäki…and then add just a touch of Canada’s Guy Maddin…for the purple prose and green fogs, aye? 

It remains a bit of a challenge for me to comprehend, but somehow back in the early ‘00s my girlfriend Corinne had seen a few Takashi Miike films before I had seen even one such film. In part, Miike’s breakthrough with Western audiences and markets was hastened along by the extremely strong response a small package of his features elicited at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1999, that year’s infamous Audition included. A Pan-Asian film festival in Calgary screened Dead or Alive (also '99) at the Uptown Stage and Screen and even though she’d already seen it Corinne and I checked it out together. My immediate response to the film was that it was probably the most exciting and playfully transgressive genre movie I had ever seen and that it definitely had the best ending ever conceived for a Japanese yakuza movie. I remember asking Corinne why nobody else can make movies like that. As a frenetically active director, Miike takes on everything, working on children’s movies, popular manga adaptations, and shocking transgressive provocations (my highest recommendation extends to 2001’s Visitor Q). A polymath director is usually a puzzle player and a problem solver and Miike strikes me as an artist operating parallel to an arch modernist the likes of Georges Perec. 2001’s Agitator, a variegated yakuza epic recently released on Blu-ray  from Radiance (where this already long film is joined by an extended version split into two parts), is guerrilla cinema in the strictest sense because, as Miike points out in a recent interview, no official permits were obtained for any exterior shooting. Miike makes his movie encyclopedic by approaching each scene/sequence in terms of the logic, problematics, and formal considerations of the specific scene or sequence in question. How do you crowd as much of the world as you can into a scene? From a formal standpoint, the main concern is how does everything bind and cohere when it’s this radically elastic? I think what we will tend to find is—as in the films of Alain Resnais and Raúl Ruiz—that the roots and tubers running beneath us and throughout us, per Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, are in fact not a red thread but rather the labyrinth we ourselves run as long as it’s got us hooked and at its mercy.

Sensuela (Teuvo Tulio, 1973) 

Agitator (Takashi Miike, 2001) 

Young MC, "Know How"

Ye Ole Horse and Rider Raid

If I had to I could drag you by the hair over hot coals in my bare feet. The depthless depths of pain and suffering I have experienced shouldn’t make any real sense to all that many people, only the most wretched and the most chronic, and when I show you your agony I want to show you mine also, my eagerness tripping on its lip as it tries to skip; the mangled, lately impaled tongue which is also that of earth’s wretched and the systemically crippled public estate of minced speech that binds us together at this dimly-lit table to eat odiferous coins shat by a giant avocado named Tyrannasorus Tex. Everybody, along with me: “Howdy, Tex!”

Le mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

I was at my little out of the way table in the psych ward at the South Campus and a sweet young lady with all the hippie / back-to-earth vibrancy and vacuity came and sat down and we chatted amicably for a bit, until, upon my having told her that I am a writer, she encouraged me to try ChatGPT. It was amazing how decisive this actually was: the relationship ended unambiguously at this exact moment, nearly crystalline in its perfect celestial harmonics. Most relationships are cluttered and overwhelmed by peripheral business such that when decisive moments come they’re neither clear nor obvious. Consider just for the moment a comic scenario wherein a man hires a private investigator to find the one thing above all others that he the husband better not ever say within his wife’s earshot, for fear of God and womanhood, nasty and brassy and inured to sympathy. In Jean-Luc Godard’s immortal Le mépris—1963, CinemaScope and Capri!—in which Michel Piccoli plays a man most of whose day is spent daydreaming that he’s Dean Martin in Minelli’s Some Came Running (1958) until at some point he realizes that in the fairly recent past his wife Camille—played by Brigitte Bardot, who in the early-60s was stacked like a motherfucker—has stopped loving him for something specific he’s done but which he’s helpless to pinpoint and which she cannot or will not not communicate clearly.

The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, 1980)

Once when I was playing Minesweeper on the computer as a boy my maternal grandfather, who also used to stand in front of the garage and let me shoot tennis balls at him with my hockey stick and who was a mechanic and electrician who’d served in the Second World War and, because of his specializations, had in fact worked on some mine fields up close and personal...well, grandpa knew his business and he knew what he was saying when he said that the computer game I was playing was worse than stupid, irresponsible, a purely statistical business where the rat keeps punching the button, whereas in real life the distribution of mines is highly randomized and as soon as you set one off you’re dead. Or worse. Filmmaker and serviceman Samuel Fuller writes in his memoir A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking that most of the young men serving with him in North Africa and Italy were much more afraid of surviving having their genitals blown off by a mine than they were of being put out of commission by one permanentemente. I also saw a documentary once where French television was interviewing veterans of the First World War and somebody asked one of the old men if gas and chemical attacks were the worst part of the trench warfare experience and the veteran said, so chillingly a sparkly tingle ran through my whole body, that the chemical warfare was absolutely nothing compared to the flamethrowers.

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

I have for as long as I’ve loved movies almost, one hopes, loved them as they ought to be loved. Devotionally, worshipfully, manic making-of-the-rounds. For some reason very early on I took an immediate interest in the mysterious qualities of the visual style of Stanley Kubrick, originally a teen photographer for Look. The early black and white films struck me as being somehow the exemplar of what movies were supposed to be. The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). I have a sickly feeling in my gut that both that latter film and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are no longer held in high common esteem the way proper decency would appear to demand. Some people don’t like the control and sadism in Kubrick’s God’s-eye view. Some people don’t like the way he has treated people, legends persisting of actors and actresses being forced to do so many takes on a given scene that they fatigue and collapse totally, a near state of psychospiritual ruination that the director clearly went after occasionally with intention. 1980’s The Shining is probably Kubrick’s best and most brilliant film, but nearly everybody knows of the traumatic experience actress Shelley Duvall endured during that film’s protracted production. It’s scarcely all that hidden. The reason her performance is so much more intense and more real than Jack Nicholson’s is because she is actually hyperventilating and in hysterics. There is something definitely disgusting but also a little shrouded and opaque about the whole business of how Kubrick treated Duvall and why, but I also don’t seem to suffer too much vicarious cross-traumatization when I watch The Shining, which I’ve always believed to be a masterpiece. I don’t feel the same way about erotic death-bloat saga Last Tango in Paris, the infamous and lamentable Bernardo Bertolucci picture in which Marlon Brandon goes every which way but loose and then some, to the the extent that actress Maria Schneider, in the film’s most notorious and even meme-like sequence, involving sex and butter on the kitchen floor, a sequence much more improvised than it ever should have been allowed to be, was terrified and did not think there was anybody she could turn to, Bertolucci included. It is not that Marlon Brando penetrated or sexually assaulted Maria Schneider but rather that because of the chaotic and scary nature of the production situation overall, Schneider was genuinely afraid he might actually go ahead and do that...while they were rolling. I will absolutely never watch Last Tango in Paris again as long as I live. Yet I will be screening The Shining with some regularity for my own edification as long as I’m up and able, and it isn’t because I don’t respect Shelley Duvall’s trauma (which I assuredly do). One thing I would like to make a special point of here is that I don’t think that Stanley Kubrick’s sadism and cruelty are especially misogynistic as such. I recently had the pleasure of procuring a copy of the Criterion Blu-ray set for the marvellous and ingeniously ironic Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and the second additional disk of supplementary features gives us a peek at Kubrick’s wife Christiane and their three daughters, as attractive, good-humoured, dogged, and witty a group of ladies as you could ever hope to meet…and the people Kubrick hung out with daily on that giant rotating film set in England where he lived the last good heap of his life. I’ll bet you a million bucks that those four women were the best thing God ever gave the wily shutterbug from the Bronx.  

Ten Underrated 21st Century Rock Albums [in Chronological Order]

 

Sunburned Hand of the Man, Headdress (2002)

Tivol, Early Teeth (2005)

Japanther, Skuffed Up My Huffy (2007)

Maserati, Inventions for the New Season (2007)

Religious Knives, Smokescreen (2007)

Magik Markers, Surrender to the Fantasy (2013)

Lightning Bolt, Fantasy Empire (2015)

Mekons, Existentialism (2016)

Black Lips, Sing in a World That's Falling Apart (2020)

Bully, Sugaregg (2020)

JPW

L-U-V

My Favourite Country and Western Record at the Present Time [Selfie]

In pressurized, fucked-up, max toxic zero-sum situations it does seem to me that this is where we can optimally obverse how women are more likely to help carry and support you comparative to men, especially in groups, as men are more liable to lead you terminally astray on half-baked campaigns and rabid consensus frenzy. Many have and shall come to find that William Golding's Lord of the Flies hasn't aged a damn bit (to the consolation of no one). 

Look, just cut a low, stained-glass groove into the nearest log with better-than-average acoustics and a copacetic shape...

Loretta Lynn, "How Great Thou Art"

Fun Snack

Hard Rain [Masked and Anonymous]

To the fisherman lost on the land

He stands alone at the door of his home,

With his long-legged heart in his hand.

- Dylan Thomas

Keith Richards has a personal preference for Open G Tunings. They fit his temperament and the requirements of his band's dynamic. Open G Tunings often differentiate in ultra-high-contrast the work of the bass and the work of the six-string (or sometimes modified five-string, with Richards at any rate); the idea from a purely acoustical perspective is that there will be less sloppy overlap and confusion in the low end of the string-instrument dynamic and the overall group dynamic. Though it comes out smack dab in the middle of his Christian phase, the Bob Dylan live album Hard Rain has clearly been engineered to on one hand channel The Band, no surprise, and on the other hand these cats go just about full Rolling Stone. At any rate, it's the Dylan album I play the most. Of that I am certain. 

The beast is loose

Least is best

Pee-pee-maw-maw

Pee-pee-maw-maw

- Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

THE 'BOB' IS A PALINDROME AND THEREFORE THE 'BOB' HAS OCCULT RITUAL APPLICATIONS. 

Renaldo and Clara (Bob Dylan, 1978)

Backtrack (Dennis Hopper, 1990)

Masked and Anonymous (Larry Charles, 2003) 

[A seamless recreation of the final scene of The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)] 

Bob Dylan and His Accompanists, "Shelter from the Storm" 

1976

 

Anarchist Kissing Booth: A Sǝven Point Plan

Éloge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001)

Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000)

1. Anarchism like all great things is an Announcement! The most vital right is the right to love and be loved and to obey no fixed definition of love, certainly nobody else’s, its also being critical that we curb/chasten those whose current settings find them exploiting and managing loving and being loved like they were the general manager of a sports franchise. 

2. In a letter to the anarchist Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, Eugene O’Neill, the great dipsomaniac American playwright of Irish descent, writes the following: "As for my fame and your infame, I would be willing to exchange a good deal of mine for a bit of yours. It is not hard to write what one feels as truth. It is damned hard to live it.” The Universal Anarchist returns like Nietzsche to Heraclitus, the greatest of the Pre-Socratic literalists, and to his two preeminent images of what the universe is like: the river you cannot step into twice because of its constant busy motion and the outdoor fire that embodies the elemental flux of all that which is. That’s practically already a post-industrial quantum model and we sure don’t find anything like that in either Plato or Aristotle, though just over three hundred years before Christ, the Greek philosopher Democritus came up with the concept of atoms, an accomplishment I believe deserves a good deal more open discussion and public celebration than us moderns are inclined to extend it. We’re busy. With what? We’re watching Desperate Housewives. We’ve got our feet up...we're watching other people worn down and humiliated for a change...

3. Antonin Artaud, “Cinema and Reality” [1927]: “A cinema which is studded with dreams, and which gives you the physical sensation of pure life, finds its triumph in the most excessive sort of humour. A certain excitement of objects, forms, and expressions can only be translated into the convulsions and the surprises of a reality that seems to destroy itself with an irony in which you can hear a scream from the extremities of the mind.”

4. Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord [1993]: “Rather than create entirely new forms, the Letterists wanted to take already existing elements and rearrange them. To this appropriative technique, derived in part from Dadaist collage, in part from a kind of distorted quotation favoured by both Marx and Lautréamont, they gave the name of ‘détournement.’ Détournement involves a quotation, or more generally a re-use, that ‘adapts’ the original element to a new context. It is also a way of transcending the bourgeois cult of originality and the private ownership of thought. In some cases the products of bourgeois civilization, even the most insignificant ones, such as advertisements, may be reemployed in such a way as to modify their meaning; in other cases, the effect may be to reinforce the real meaning of an original element—a sentence of Marx’s, say—by changing its form.”

    

5. There is a truly delightful near-throwaway moment in Chris Marker’s sublime The Owl’s Legacy, a 1989 documentary series about the legacy of Greek philosophy and culture. Marker has his camera trained discreetly for a moment on five or six men in animated discussion on an Athens street corner and the voice over observes dryly that the men on the streets of Athens are still acting the same way they did in Plato’s dialogues. 

6. In a conventional and tired scenario the anarchist will find themselves interrogated by newbies and simpletons. Voices shrill and blood vessels bursting, your hopeless and adrift peers will get angry at you because they assume you must believe there should not be any laws to govern the citizens of nation states. “Far from it,” you are encouraged to rapidly counter, “law and the criminal justice system are the best proof we have of actively existing anarchy on a daily basis. Law exists in the first place to do its best to mitigate against all the ambient anarchy kicking up dust devils down the corridors of power and doing it all remote while enjoying a whisky sour in a bar by the Eiffel Tower. I’m quite fond of James Gray’s imperfect 2008 family crime opera We Own the Night which tells the story of two brothers in New York, sons of Robert Duvall’s stentorian and distant cop father, who split down opposing lines in early adulthood, one pursing the police work like pa and the other angling in the direction of the underworld, increasingly diabolic in his descent. The basic social set-up is one I like to imagine we all instinctively know—and it’s definitely operative in a number of Michael Mann films—cops and robbers have spent so long looking into one another’s business, their social circles increasingly circulating together, that it is now time to state outright that cops and robbers are married and somebody needs to intervene. 

7. Our three main obstacles to growth, cooperation, care, and sustainability have been our main problems since at least the French Revolution. The problems, intractable-seeming because they probably are: Education, Political Economy, and Law. I don’t have even the slightest idea how we as a species are going to find ourselves negotiating all the trouble extensive of there being so many people and a great many of them squashed together in alienating urban conditions. If you want to try to start having hope again somehow, from here on the ground in Western Canada in early March of 2026, I'm telling you straight-up that intelligent machines are the only sensible game in town. 

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet, "Eureka"