The Author's Fancy

 

It is an all too common mistake to call any American crime movie that was shot in black and white a film noir when in fact the genre as such, named by French hipsters avant la lettre, occupies an altogether abbreviated window running largely parallel to the years of the Second World War, when the mood in general was, as it had been in the Depression, awfully downcast. Howard Hawks’s 1932 Scarface isn’t noir because there wasn’t any such thing yet and then on the other hand something like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) belongs to a whole other sociohistoric territoriality or even space-time…a world in which delusional loners believe they are shooting the President of the United States as an act of devotion to Jodie Foster à la John Hinckley Jr. Some of that incipient paranoia is already all over boss ‘paranoid’ crime and punishment screen sagas from the 1960s that we don’t have any business calling films noir on account of their having arrived too late. Samuel Fuller’s astonishing and ever-trenchant Underworld U.S.A. from ’61 is the tabloid auteur at his most inflammatory and disgusted, a real pulpit-pounder, telling the story of a young man hellbent on revenge against the criminal syndicates and thus the world of power politics in all its ransacking totality. When Sam Fuller makes a film about revenge he wants you to taste the revenge. From the following year comes Experiment in Terror, a seminal and forward-looking masterpiece from a Blake Edwards who had clearly not yet found his place in the world. Preceding the Zodiac killings by at least half a decade, Experiment in Terror features—for the most part as structuring absence—a cryptic and sadistic supervillain who puts poor Lee Remick through the wringer and the whole desolate chiaroscuro city of San Francisco along with her. The aging Glenn Ford seems testy and out of sorts but he could I think definitely still fuck you up good and proper, if you know what I’m saying. His looks haven’t totally gone, but the hatred in his eyes is pure. Say what you will about Experiment in Terror, it’s better than Dirty Harry (1971). Clint Eastwood I can fight, Glenn Ford maybe not.  

Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961)

Experiment in Terror (Blake Edwards, 1962)

The Line of Flight and How You Work It

 

“It is the machine that is primary in relation to the technical element,” insist Gillies Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their compact and controversial Nomadology: The War Machine, “not the technical machine, itself a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.” In once trying to describe what an artist does to a normal person of limited imagination, I came upon the fanciful framing operation that would have us situate the artist as cousin to the inventor, shopping their wares to financiers and independently wealthy cutthroats until somebody finally says: yup, that’s a thing alright. Like Nikola Tesla trying to pitch Thomas Edison on AC current. That’s how you survive as an artist with the basic amenities. Deleuze has stipulated elsewhere that the nomad would surely remain stationary and happily inert if only for the fact that the coiled, ouroboros world of cosmic planetarity doesn’t work that way…that is, perhaps, unless you are dead set on dying of hunger, dehydration, and/or exposure. “Assemblages are passional,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “they are compositions of desire,” further compounding and transassembling themselves in this specialized moment as two-men-as-teeming-multiplicity by casually incorporating into their organic Blob-like roaming additive plurality the uncommonly wise and sagacious Susan Sontag of Against Interpretation, who we should all be thanking every night in our prayers for prioritizing the erotics of the living, sensory encounter over having neat little ironclad opinions and beliefs you can trot out for literally every occasion, boring all in earshot to tears. “Holy Lord and God!,” exclaims Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March, “I know man’s labor must be one of those deals figured out by Providence that saves him by preserving him, or he would be hungry, he would freeze, or his brittle neck would be broke. But what curious and strange forms he ends up surviving in, becoming them in the process.” Is the rudderless man above all a succession of botched shapes?

In the earlier and much more hefty A Thousand Pleateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari put a rhetorical question to us that we might well expect clinical mania itself the ask: “Why is the line of flight a war one risks coming back from defeated, destroyed, after having destroyed everything one could?” The line of flight is what works after for a very long time nothing at all did, and it is called a flight because it survives and indeed flourishes in opposition to and frantic discord with the dominant monoculture. The great agent of the line of flight in the popular cinema is Jennifer Jones as Cluny Brown in the 1946 Ernst Lubitsch masterpiece named for the spirited lass, aspirant lady plumber, unbelievably comely of looks but with the tenacity of a bulldog, who finds out sure and true even before escaping England in the arms of a mindful Lothario that just clearing blocked pipes is already a line of flight. The heave of oceans and the natural instability of gravity. Into the geology crockpot go the bones of everything. A Thousand Plateaus: “Unnatural participations or nuptials are the true Nature spanning the kingdoms of nature.” You will require a logic of multiplicities if you wish to observe how the earth is populated. Consider it a do-it-yourself model set and therefore a study in mechanics: plane of consistency, abstract machines, concrete assemblages, the three strata (physicochemical, organic, anthropomorphic). All beings and all becomings are molecular movement within the plural unity. The idea of an entirely personal journey of transformation is naturally anathema to a logic of multiplicities. This was already the point most crucial in Michel Foucault’s visionary essay “What Is an Author?” Art renders from within a collectivized experience and in its rendering comes back to the collective sense apparatus of persons with something noteworthy and significantly transformed. Nous rendons. Philosophy is jiu-jitsu waged against the enslavement and ultimate atrophy of mind itself. 

Another line of flight—brief, bleak, and decisive—can be found glaring as a bruise to the eye in the typically excellent Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by Susan Sontag-anointed Hungarian Master of the Apocalypse László Krasznahorkai. The most we might say for the Baron Wenckheim is that though he would appear to be suffering from at least mild dementia he does remain plenty able-bodied. He desires it would seem nothing more at the outset than to return to the Hungarian town of his youth so as to reconnect with his first love, Marika (or Marietta). The Baron in an emblematic revenant, spectral, uncanny, in some sense hardly there at all. He cannot stand to be touched, he presents as aphasic, borderline delusional. Oh, the ring of destiny’s severe bell: “when still in his forties the doctors had told him that this would happen, that he would become an idiot…” Finally arriving at her domicile, the Baron does not recognize Marika as herself, though he does fleetingly note a passing resemblance. She is flummoxed, assuredly, “was it possible something had really happened with the Baron’s mind?! because it just wasn’t possible for him to come here, to sit down in front of her, look at her, and not remember who she was, that simply wasn’t possible …” It proves a cataclysmic encounter. Marika is shattered. More calamity is on its way, all of it pooling together, this another big Krasznahorkai narrative shaped like a hurricane. The Baron himself escapes a diabolic meddler, walks into the forest and effectively, with a good third still left to go, out of the novel. It may be that one man walking off the precipice and into the abyss one single time could conceivably bring down all the carpet bombing and hellfire you’d ever need. Krasznahorkai: “The whole thing will go up in flames.” The revenant also represents the return of the repressed, of course, and accompanying the return of the repressed we expect unseemly psychic derivatives to rise to the surface of the big smelly drum in the big chilly warehouse. The panic of shame and denial, various kinds of variegated outcry. Another thing that rises to the surface is body bags. Krasznahorkai’s cosmology presents the universe and the human being as fielded within a constitutive condition of extreme molecular agitation, except most people in this world would prefer not to physically move if they don’t have to, I don’t think. Krasznahorkai is like Russian speculative fiction guru Viktor Pelevin a genuine student and adherent of Zen and transcendental meditation and he knows that sometimes your day’s job is to sit on a rock in the middle of a river and be silent in as busy and violent a way as silence itself can withstand. 

In the self-explanatory-of-title Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death], Simeon Wade writes with energy and good humour about dropping acid with philosopher and leather aficionado Michel Foucault in California’s Death Valley in 1975, five years after Michelangelo Antonioni shot memorably druggy footage there for his counterculture classic Zabriskie Point. To protect him against the intense desert light, Foucault is provided a pair of reflector sunglasses and is told by Simeon that they make him “look like the son of Kojak and Elton John.” The philosopher is reported to be “delighted.” Deep in the desert the lysergic potion—the Philosopher’s Stone—is ingested. It is Foucault’s first experience with psychedelics, a deferment of the basic sacramental rite to which he attributes his current lover’s skittishness respective of such drugs. The potion is taken, cannabis smoked, and Grand Marnier quaffed. Wade’s partner Michael plays his tape recorder. “Charles Ives swept through us into the salt flats glistening like icing on a wedding cake.” Properly high, the men relocate to Zabriskie Point. Richard Strauss and Stockhausen are played. Asked about a possible decisive moment in his intellectual development, Foucault recalls revealing his homosexuality to the headmaster of the École normale and facing more than mere censure as a result, causing him to thereafter understand the “fundamental impulse of our society: normalization.” Later Foucault will say that though the initiatory psychedelic experience was perhaps the greatest experience of his life he did not waste his time thinking about concepts whilst tripping. He says that the psychedelic experience “affords an experience of the Truth” not entirely dissimilar to sex with a stranger. If he articulates anything like a revelation it would appear to be by way of his passing repetition of a gnomic mantra: “We must go home again.” The men retreat to their lodgings for the remainder of the night, returning to Zabriskie Point in daylight for photographs and then for a final look out from Dante’s View. Later, at a small improvised symposium, Foucault tells a young student that “the young very much should feel lost, that there are no solutions, no answers.”  

 

Scorch Trio, "Kjøle Høle"

Thumbscrew, "Survival Fetish"

The Ol’ Chompin’ Range Sandusky: Anne Carson

 

It was at the Foothills Hospital earlier today, where I was accompanying my mother who was to receive minor foot surgery, that I first noted that the time was 11:11, my mother’s most beloved and cherished numerological synchronicity, and then the two of us discovered together that poet and classicist Anne Carson, who is my favourite living Canadian writer, has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Fresh on the heels of Alice Munro in 2013. My response to the announcement of Carson’s receipt of this esteemed but also bizarre prize was so extreme I think we’d have to call it giddy or gleeful. I supposed you’d have to ask my mom. In my home I have a deeply cherished portrait of Carson by Mecca Normal vocalist and one-woman portrait industry Jean Smith. What would A.C. do? I often pause to consider. Upon bumping into her by accident in the dark I may have occasion to find myself softly moaning. Pleadingly, you might say.

LEAFY ORTHOPEDIC 

One of my favourite quips in 70s cinema comes from Thomas McGuane’s adaptation of his own novel 92 in the Shade (1975). During a scene that finds Peter Fonda in the bathtub with Canadian Margot Kidder, who was at that time married to Thomas McGuane, Fonda asks her why they make soap on a rope and Kidder quickly and caustically replies that it’s so you can retrieve it in case you sallow it.

Sonny Rollins, "Way Out West" 
[Official Visualizer]

The Fall, "Big New Prinz"
[Live on the Telly]

The Toy Piano Kaiju Lyric Sheet

 

Pulse

We needn’t go any further if you’d prefer to stop and rest

If hypothermia kills you it’s probably for the best 

Gargantua and Pantagruel make a feast of sermons 

You’ve got a flask of bourbon tucked inside your vest

Will you turn it over freely or do I need to further inspect?

Submit to me not your complaints, dear sir

Swirling in infernal ashes it were not me what stirred.

Impulses and compulsions pulse with the beat of the heart

Several totalities compartmentalized in your back yard

I think you’ve been tampering 

With the numbers on the score card

Doing wheelies with your golf cart

In the apple orchard 

Silver Surfer Adonis in steel-toe boots

Went to university so he could shoot hoops.

Bernie Esposito was a Uruguayan pimp

Carved up the face of a man who called him ‘simp’

Neither Great Ape nor even Prize Chimp 

They dissolved Bernie Esposito in acid

His last words were bitterly sarcastic 

They filmed the whole thing.

Impulses and compulsions frozen in amber

What once did nobly pulse now utterly engulfed 

Whatever genuinely attracts the eye and the mind  

Can be expected to draw funding every time.

Submit to me not your complaints, dear sir

Swirling in infernal ashes it were not me what stirred.

Can We Siamese In-Between?

Me, I work for my Do Re Mi

Down at Woody Guthrie Heavy Industry 

A lifetime supply of gruelling mayhem 

Spread out over a thin slice of ham

A thin slice of ham for the everyman 

Whether he’s spreading his bunk

Or locked in a trunk, Podunk

Cut off at the only angle

He had not thunk 

Broken ribs and eyes sunk.

Can we Siamese in-between?

Baby, mine is a perfectly good spleen

Here for a good time, not a long one, dig?

Love is like uranium poising

Love is like the six-pack ring 

That strangles the Canada goose 

While vultures eat scraps of carrion

Off the rails of the caboose. 

A Constant Irrigation of the Nerves 

Of interest to you in your earthly subsistence 

All who might perk up their ears and have a good listen 

Yes, a song that belongs to every ear

As I believe the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Makes clear.

Exclaim your mad silent exclamation,

Zipper Lips.

I was smiling ear to ear, got up in Safari gear 

In Douglas Sirk autumn colours

You were the rust on the mind’s prone behind

In outraged impudence I rewind

Here! Have yourself a good gander, Jezebel 

The gold in the autumn landscape 

Was stolen from your teeth 

Doing the rounds wearing a Christmas wreath.

Onward, club-footed Christian solider

Scowering the slums for ‘strange’

Over by the koi pond tryin’ to get laid

Onward to Turkmenistan and death 

How many cyanide capsules do you guys

Think that you’ve got left?

We don’t have enough gasoline 

To power a treble clef.   

  

A constant irrigation of the nerves 

Is where my pelvis swerves 

Elvis the Pelvis, bitches 

Swingin’ away from crass aspersions

Cast by petulant nerds

Who can only eat their food

Once they’ve covered it in adverbs.

For shame, dilettante

Did they not have any better fonts?

I’m in the jacuzzi with my ukulele

And my best lady 

Don’t you know? 

The mattress may be foam

But mamma, this sure feels like home. 

Jason Philip Wierzba, The Toy Piano Kaiju EP [Full Album]

Low Kick and Hard Bop [Matador Records Reissue]

 

Les raquetteurs (Michel Brault, Gilles Groulx, 1958) 
🇨🇦

Winter Light (Ingmar Berman, 1963)

The Hot Spot (Dennis Hopper, 1990)

High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)

Solex, "Mere Imposters,"
[Official Reissue Video] 

Les raquetteurs (Michel Brault, Gilles Groulx, 1958) 
[Complete Short Film] 🍁🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦🍁

Entering the Home Stretch: Top Ten Films of the Year

 

The Samurai and the Prisoner (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2026)

Magellan (Lav Diaz, 2025)

Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2026)

Peter Hujar's Day (Ira Sachs, 2025)

Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep (Rakan Mayasi, 2026)

Resurrection (Bi Gan, 2025)

Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong, 2026)

Tender Loving Care (Mike Leigh, 2026)

Diary of a Mad Old Man (Wayne Wang, 2026)

Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025)

Ennio Morricone, Orca 

[Original Film Score]

My Favourite Jazz Album These Days and Five Experimental Records for the Adventurous

 

The Third World, Underground [Full Album]

...

Five Proven Phonograph Records of Experimental Music to Set Your Watch By:

Tony Conrad/Arnold Dreyblatt/Jim O’Rourke, 
Tonic 19-01-2001

La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela/Theatre of Eternal Music, 
Dream House 78′ 17″

Pauline Oliveros, The Well & The Gentle

Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel / For Frank O’Hara

Alvin Lucier, Works for the Ever Present Orchestra    

Alvin Lucier, Work for the Ever Present Orchestra [Full Album]