Physical Media Roundup

 

Anybody who has known me well, only slightly, or just by invidious word of mouth will know that since around the time I was preparing the release of my record Yevgenia, which was released almost exactly four years ago in August of 2022, I began to feverishly acquire vinyl like that shit was going out of style, having previously been an adamant dyed-in-the-wool compact disk man. My defence remains that I needed a really dope collection wherein my own record might feel at home, the proverbial new kid on the block. In actual fact, the only reason I bought a turntable was so I could listen to the test pressing of Yevgenia. My oh my, how these things can get away from us. I am no longer allowed to have physical possession of my credit card, and I’m afraid it’s definitely for the best. Heh heh.

Naturally, as a recovering film scholar and former film programmer for Calgary Cinematheque, it is more or less my responsibility to keep abreast of new and significant releases on Blu-ray, watching as much of that stuff as I can muster without passing out and drooling all over myself. Anybody who has given time and energy over to these matters for the last three years will have been watching while up-and-comer Radiance, supplying the goods to the UK and North America in kind, has quickly and definitively surpassed the Criterion crew, I would surmise most of all because they don't go in for any populist crowd-pleasers or catalogue filler. Radiance has definitely done a good job of bringing us important films by established masters: Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette, Luchino Visconti, Georges Franju. They even released Czech director Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way, which is the best American film of the 70s made in the 80s...if that makes any sense. I love that film enough that I already owned the Twilight Time Blu-ray. I din't feel like I needed to take on the expense. My favourite disk from Radiance so far contains the three-and-three-quarter hour extended cut of Rivette's Va savoir, one of the few films by this most beloved of masters that I got to see in a theatre first run (in the manageable/commercial shortened form), which over the past few years was the one thing I was most hoping to see come out on a home-viewing format of some kind. 🙏. Radiance's high def transfer of Bresson's gorgeous colour downer Une femme douce is so superior to any other version of that film I've ever seen that it made me weep. 

One area where Radiance most especially excels is in the field of gonzo out-of-bounds Japanese genre cinema. Have you ever noticed that fancy Japanese art movies are usually much more logical and easy to follow than the genre movies, which are very often convoluted and prone to sprees of mayhem? It's not unusual to see a fight involving ten or twelve people and I can't usually remember any of their names. For shame, Weird Bach! Well, sometimes that's exactly what I'm in the mood for. 1977's The Boxer by Shuji Terayama, released earlier this year, is the best boxing film since Robet Wise's 1949 gem The Set-Up. Scorsese and Paul Schrader should get on their knees and bow in shame-faced reverence. Terayama was a genuine artist of the underground who figured he'd tackle a genre picture as a madcapped lark. 

Anybody who knows about my semi-secret list of the top 69 movies of all time may recall having seen featured on it—in 47th place—Shōhei Imamura's 1966 first-phase-pinnacle-moment The Pornographers, which definitely is an art film no matter what that blowsy title may tend to indicate. Criterion put out a then-decent DVD of the film many years ago, but this summer Radiance released a sublime Blu-ray featuring a terrific, super lengthy, and deliciously thorough overview from A #1 Asian cinema Übermensch Tony Rayns. This disk is a must for anybody who is into any kind of cool shit whatsoever! 

Having released Takashi Miike's meandering, novelistic, and intermittently harrowing Agitator earlier this year, Radiance is set by all accounts to bring us this spry and indefatigable auteur's certified 2001 masterpiece/classic Visitor Q this forthcoming October. Visitor Q is a no-budget shot-on-video update of Pasolini's Teorema, which it surpasses a hundredfold and with illusory ease; I can assure you that you'll get your rocks off if you like your cinema of transgression smart as hell and transgressive as fuck. Cheers, baby.

While we're on a good run celebrating Japanese cineaction and some of its newly accessible fruits, from days more bygone or less so, and since I had the gall to take the wind out of the Criterion Collection sails when we all know that the Criterion Collection saves each of our lives two or three times a goldarn week, let me point out that a week from tomorrow, under the banner of their seriously rad Eclipse imprint, that entrenched New York-based institution is dropping on the broad general public what I suspect might very well prove to be the physical media release of 2026. In any medium. Ahem:

Cato Salsa Experience w/ The Thing & Joe McPhee
"Louie Louie"

     

The Inside Out Thirst Trap EP

 

The sharpest work of the last thirty years is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising, roundabout artists.

- Manny Farber, "Underground Films"

[Jean-Pierre] Léaud is an actor who goes all the way once you have suggested a direction to take. It was he who launched out down this track, somewhere between Balzac and Lewis Carroll.

- Jacques Rivette in the Autumn 1974 issue of Sight and Sound

All music on The Inside Out Thirst Trap EP has been manufactured and denatured by Jason Philip Wierzba. The two extended, slowed-way-down film clips provided as accompaniment in the YouTube video embedded below, and likewise denatured by Wierzba, come to us care of Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) [the shot appropriated was already in slo-mo so now it moves like tectonic plates...or glacially...in the manner of a glacier] and Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli Me Tangere. Which is precisely as it ought to be...

1. Inside (9:54)

2. Out (9:55)

The Sounds and Images

Jean-Pierre Léaud in

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere 

(Jacques Rivette, 1971)

Top Four EPs from My Vinyl Collection

 

As I'm currently working on yet another EP which won't be done until tomorrow at the earliest, I thought it would be fun to group together the four EPs from my record collection that I most fervidly esteem for a cool photograph you can look at, then also share my favourite Bikini Kill song, which obviously would have to be one of my favourite ever songs by any person or group because in the early days them riot grrrls was un-fuckin'-touchable. The EP on the bottom right is the Fuck Buttons "Brainfreeze" single plus a one-off original B-side called "Royal Flush." In 2009 and 2010 I drove all over Southern California in my BMW listening to the Fuck Buttons album Tarot Sport, Robyn's Body Talk, and the self-titled Fever Ray debut (when I wasn't playing avant-garde improvised shizzz). I had the enormous pleasure of attending a very loud Fuck Buttons performance at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, an experience I won't be forgetting anytime soon, I can promise you that. (Partially it was special because I was freshly clean and sober and realized that I'd enjoyed it way more than I would have had I been under the influence.) Oh, the Radio Video EP is of course by Royal Trux, the greatest rock band of all time, just in case you're new to them and cannot read Jennifer's hair. Thank you for your ongoing patronage and support!

Bikini Kill, "Carnival"

* I saw Royal Trux at a punk bar called the Dominion in Ottawa's ByWard Market in late 1999, when they were touring Veterans of Disorder, and, boy oh boy, was the ever epic! Ubiquitous and highly respected underground music rag The Wire would go on to list the set the Trux played in London on that tour as one of the top concerts of all time! Also, I saw Fever Ray at Coachella in 2010 (it was half laser show and half Tobe Hooper movie).

Renovating the Temple of the Golden Pavilion

 

When a phonograph record crackles and pops it sounds just like when there's seeds in the shitty shwag you're smoking.
- Jason Philip Wierzba

Wendy Marriott's Bright Boy with Dark Shadows
is No Longer Any Kind of a Boy

Creepy, Before We Vanish, To the Ends of the Earth, Wife of a Spy, Cloud...The Samurai and the Prisoner. It is now time for me to officially insist after having seen this new one focusing as it does on consciousness raising and the warrior mindset—tipping its hat a little to the other Kurosawa and his ongoing dalliance with Samurai Shakespeare—that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the best and most consistent director working anywhere in the world today. His formal control clearly extends to mastery of every facet of production and postproduction. Hearing his sound designs in a theatre is always a true delight, as it very much was at the Globe last night. The Arioka Castle set is highly reminiscent of the main set from Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 masterpiece A Story from Chikamatsu. In terms of manner and aesthetic, I would in general tend to associate Kiyoshi Kurosawa more with the presiding philosophy and strategies of Mizoguchi than with those of Akira Kurosawa, as both Mizoguchi and Kiyoshi Kurosawa are Japanese monumentalists, closer to architects or sculptors than to painters, concerned as they are with scale, geometry, and durability.

During the brief and dizzying period in 2016 when Pokémon Go took off and mobilized roaming distracted multitudes all over the planet, I very much thought I was getting a glimpse into the future of the human species. It will become easier to organize and direct people remotely, for better and for worse. When collectivized far-right edgelords stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021, some of them would go on to say in their defence that they didn't really know why they were getting on a plane and going to Washington, it having been a matter in the end of their simply following their social media and connected devises like automotons. In his previous film, 2024's Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa was the first artist in any field that I'm aware of to roll up his sleeves and deal with the omnipresent connective/vaporous cloud, the organizing metaphor that extends in historical order from the web and the net and indicates like Pokémon Go that the lives of groups can become a kind of treasure hunt that doesn't lead to any specific or determinable destination. Already in films like Creepy and Before We Vanish, we bear witness to characters whose motivations are so deeply unconscious and opaque that it becomes increasingly unclear whether those motivations originate with them in any proper sense. Set in feudal Japan during the Sengoku period and at the end of what a title card calls the age of warfare, The Samurai and the Prisoner could be said to be about a presiding historical spirit (akin to Hegel's Geist) that encompasses entire communities or nations and delineates for individuals their nebulous role in an inchoate living apparatus. When the world war is always intimate and local, always at his doorstep, it is impossible for the war-maker or demigod to thrive or to possess a proper world-frame. Araki Murashige, the titular samurai, is unable to determine if the calamity happening around him is divine punishment, internal sabotage, or manipulation by outside forces. The prisoner, Kuroda Kanbei, becomes an Iago whose basic threat must be set aside so that a workable course of action may be forged. Whatever is a Warrior King to do? Salvation lies not in hunkering down and watching the material world fall in on you as the role in which you are imprisoned becomes instantaneously and permanently outmoded. Salvation is there for the powerful one who disconnects and walks away. To know the moment is to read the signs.    

...

    

Top Four Grunge Albums

Nirvana, "Negative Creep"

  

Strange Circus: Cheeky Little Monkey

 

Strange Circus (Sion Sono, 2005)

Guilty of Romance (Sion Sono, 2011)

Public Image Ltd., "This is Not a Love Song" 
[Official Video]

Jason Does Peaches 

🇨🇦

Sonnet

 

One never wears out the welcome of the Heathen 

With all the goods one gathers in prepossession

For they’re shaded here beneath the Heathen sun 

We take hardily to hoarding as pirates take to rum 

In all the indexes of the Heathen glossolalia

Something heavenly portends in the shape of a labia

Heaving downward to swallow up what ails you

Amidst the brick and mortar of ailing Astoria 

The old hag pushes thirty cats hither and yon

In a Safeway cart with four wheels minus one

On her bomber jacket the insignia emblazoned

Off t’ward the town where her ghost's now stationed;

Suppressed somnolent in the biology of madness

Is a crescent wrench and set of phosphorus matches.

Five Adult Movie Performers of Whom I Am Especially Fond

 

Cadey Mercury 

[all flexibility and fireworks,

definitely gets off for real]

Audrey Holiday 

[a discerning, cerebral goddess who's clearly a fan of 

William Wyler's Roman Holiday]

Violet Starr 

[unbelievably filthy and merciless]

Lena Anderson 

[doe-eyed wonder]

Evelin Stone 

[indisputably the Asia Argento of porn]

Salt-N-Pepa, "Push It" [Official Video]