21st Century Inferno

 

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Motion in discontinuous lines. Everything is perfectly fine. 

The personal lived experience of the phantomic and physiognomic plentitude of simultaneity, uneasy and irreal, hairs perhaps standing up on the back of the neck, has found us in our sundry errant mysticisms demeaning of God direct revelation of God’s Being and Nature and then immediately apologizing to God on our knees for the unthinkably rude affront. What can we say? We’re antsy. Why are we here and what even is this place? Help! It is the Christians who have for a solid while been leading the pack in apologizing to God. But what we need to know about reality and the fundamental parts of which it consists will not desist in pestering us, demanding rigorous inquiry and meditation, the sort of scrutiny the very heartbeat itself would appear to be asking after, practically hounding us on days of heightened generalized agitation in the aether. Fairly late in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, a doper’s penny dreadful for the ages that haunts some of the author’s old haunts, scrounging for cigarette and reefer butts, Joaquin Phoenix’s Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello freezes suddenly whilst walking briskly down the street in the aftermath of a harrowing escape and near-miss at the hands of dope-peddling Aryan sadists. “Pssst. Doper's ESP, Doc,” warns Sortilège on the soundtrack, played and voiced as she is by the divine Joanna Newsom, her wry hard-nut commentary forever the antidote to all the dissonance and distortion frothing up off this intergalactically pretzeled, slightly droopy, and curiously disheveled lifeworld: “doper’s ESP... ohhhhh no.” If you get it, you get it. Consider yourself one of the minor oracles. This is what we mean, we brigands and flea-wranglers of the open road, as we slouch our way toward Bethlehem in Joan Didion’a sunglasses and our own cloaks and gowns, when we speak of uncanny simultaneity, prehension, and situated universal absurdity. Have you ever had a moment, for instance, where you saw a bird land on a branch in your peripheral vision and a chilling sensation shot through you that the exact timed and totally specific motion of the bird in apprehended space—space apprehended by you—corresponded directly and indeed cosmically, all hung and strung together, with other movements happening at the same time within your field of vision? Has something so stupid and absurd and strange ever happened to you that you thought: okay, reality isn’t even real at all?

Alive and absurd in defiance of popular disapproval. Simplify who you are so you can wear it like a medallion, a living invincible epitaph or epigraph underscoring bold tomorrows already sealed. Busy yourself about in the circuitry that has been arranged for you…and then quite badly tangled. When you speed up people and their machines and tools excessively, abandoning meaningful oversight and stewardship, you can expect heat, fires, and explosions in chain reaction.  For the connoisseur watching Monte Hellman’s 1971 Samuel-Beckett-piston-head automobile western Two-Lane Blacktop for the first time, the film’s ending, which features an optical effect which makes it appear that the film you are watching is burning up in the projector, not only underscores what happens to machines and machine-assemblages when they run too hot, but also obviously pays direct homage to Ingmar Bergman, about halfway through whose 1966 Persona the image stammers, wobbles, and glitches, suddenly appearing to ignite, melt, and burn itself out inside the projector gate. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, there have been more and more narratives, especially in the cinema, that ignore the convention of three acts with a pattern of rising action and resolution, cobbling together instead runaway stories that go faster than they can handle and rise and rise like Icarus unto glitched-out overkill. Death by solar proximity. I guess because of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s 2009 colossus of overkill Enter the Void is a ragtag serpentine spree that lurches forward with lurid abandon until the film itself bursts through some interstitial cosmic membrane and is reborn as a human child, screaming bloody murder. One of his best two or three movies no matter what folks may say, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the truncated version of which was part of 2007’s commercially-ill-advised Grindhouse along with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, has, like many of the best Hong Kong genre movies of the ’80s and ‘90s, a story outline you could scrawl on a cocktail napkin. All the better. The payoff is we get to hang out with a whole bunch of incredibly fun young women, in two distinct spatiotemporal frames, as they talk, kid one another, drink, smoke pot, and cavort. It is a movie that is actually like hanging out with your friends and going places and doing things in a more or less extemporaneous way, activities delineated in a kind of purely ludic time, these idylls and episodes broken up by bravura action sequences that are shocking, inventive, surprising, and sometimes funny, including the final one, which culminates in Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, and Zoë Bell going to town on Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, levelling him with roundhouse kicks and debilitating jabs, one after another, as the editing picks up speed, fragments, freezes, lurches, stammers, goes schizz-on-a-stick. The ending of Death Proof is the most Tarantino has ever resembled über-independent Japanese maverick Shinya Tsukamoto, whose quintessential cyberpunk urtext Tetsuo: The Iron Man builds to a climax that finds speed-freaking salaryman hero and metalloid demon villain merging in flesh, metal, and mindset, forming a single grotesque machinic entity and declaring, bound in newfound solidarity, that they shall turn the whole earth into metal, leaking fluids, and rust. Rust never sleeps.

When the film catches fire that is negation, when the film melts that is disillusion, and when it burns itself out that is inferno.

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, "Hold Tight"

The ending of Two-Lane Blacktop (Monto Hellman, 1971)

Méditation automnale

All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955)

Roma (Federico Fellini, 1972)

“In those days, many men and some women ventured here, hoping to awaken the dancing sleeper with whatever it took,” writes Robert Coover in the pocket-sized The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), “and others came to watch this happen, but all left chastened by the awareness that not only was she a princess who did not await a prince, she was, even in her doll-like nakedness, the very image of eternal innocence, eliciting not carnal desire but profound awe and affection and something, mysteriously, like hope."

What’s the fun of a phonograph if a phonograph can’t have friends? I suppose it depends on the phonograph itself in the end.

Sometimes I found myself lying down in bed in the middle of the day as a preventative measure against the possibility of accidentally finding myself drunk. The part of the mind that balks at everything that is going on or has ever gone on always flashes on those same three perennial options: 1) kill yourself; 2) get wasted; 3) fuck this, I’m going to bed. It should go without saying that the third option is almost always soundest. Sleep turns every waking into the afterlife.

The Songlines of Australian Aborigines, mental maps which attach replicable song and dance modalities onto and over navigable topographies in order to remember and to know them, are ecological, historical, and navigational systems of an inherently neurological nature. The mind diagrams topographies and remembers more than it ever customarily lets on. The mind is connected by pure chance to the toes. Let’s go that way. That route is my favourite song.

“Men of the I-Ching did not see indigo-violet,” asserts Antonin Artaud in “Notes on Oriental, Greek, and Indian Cultures,” adding of the I-Ching that it “deals with energetics, divination, cosmology down to the atom.” 

I-Ching = 64 sacred symbols

formed by permutations 8 Symbols of 3 lines

My homeboy Felisberto Hernández
who is as you can see
wispy and acerbic

#dollin' 

Goethe’s Faust:

I shall not cease to feel in all attires,

The pains of our narrow earthly day.

I am too old to be content to play,

Too young to be without desire.

🙏

Jim O'Rourke, "Fast Car"

The Dark Side of Nanotechnology: A Vignette

Did I ever tell you about the night your dear mother for the first time from a great yawning distance strafed me with her nanodrones? The hour was wicked and the air pressure haywire. They used to have that city built into the side of the mountain on the other side of the Great Plain before the succession of devastating rockslides kiboshed further communal misadventures there, and your mother would get in her little tan bonnet and grab her basket and head up from the city to the summit of the mountain, in all her mighty gumption, opening the top of the basket once arrived and letting the nanodrones go from the peak like doves of peace. How she collated her intel I’ll never know. I know what she was after, though. Political leverage. Your mother had a way of worming herself through the masonry and the carpentry. You understand? Out and about in a lighter-than-usual mood, wearing that eggshell-coloured shawl, she was like an airborne virus, a song of songs, except with frightening white teeth capable of temporarily blinding the abnormally sensitive. I never liked having to attempt stripping her of a weapon, I can tell you that. In the heavy times, we usually needed her armed anyway. While all the off-grid nanotechnology hanky-panky never really ate into our marriage or caused me much personal burden, it did sadly eat into her. Literally. I’m afraid you mother was eaten by nanobots, Jennifer. I know, I know. Believe me, it was a shock to me too. I was there. It was an appalling extravaganza of colour.

On Influence

 

Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986)

I always loved the movies very much. That’s a Donald Rumsfeld-approved known known. At first movies often frightened me badly. Or they outright traumatized me, no foolin’. My favourite movie as a kid was 1984’s The Neverending Story, from the director who brought you Das Boot, and I always found it a punishing challenge to sit through, periodically clamping my hands over my eyes and whimpering. There is a force called the Nothing and there is no thing that can escape it. Maybe you ask why I kept coming back. I know I did. Ask. That’s part of why I chose the cinema as my academic specialty. Freudian sleuth wirken. I would actually tell other academics this at inter-departmental wine and cheeses. At the same time I always loved to laugh and make other people laugh and I always liked a long, winding adventure without a whole lot of orientation or direction, so when as a lad I started realizing that actual people make movies and presumably anybody of sense could do it, as a consequence beginning to consider what kind of movie I would make if the opportunity were to present itself, it seemed clear to me until transformed by puberty into a hideous leering golem that I would make something like the breezy but edgy 1985 John Cusack shaggy dog Better Off Dead or immortal John Hughes gallivant Ferris Bueller's Day Off from the following year. I still love John Hughes as much as I ever did. The Breakfast Club is the greatest exercise in the Kuleshov effect in all cinema. Think about it. He has to match and stabilize all those eyelines through all those extended group conversations. Hell, you know what? As a kiddo I would have been perfectly proud to have directed Michael Lehmann’s 1991 bomb Hudson Hawk, which I thought outrageously hilarious and unpredictable but which drew nothing but harsh vitriol from any critic drawing a pay check at the time. The seedy cosmopolitan villains are Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard. Can you understand how funny that is?! In my early teens, as I became increasingly interested in how life is movies and movies life, I started to realize that most of that which was exciting to me in narrative cinema derived to one extent or another from the spontaneity and freedom of documentary. It often seemed to me like it would be more interesting to film events than to tell stories. When Wim Wenders, his cast, and his very modest crew make a movie about a road trip called Kings of the Road in 1976, they actually have to go on that road trip. For his 1975 film Nashville, in order to film the big concerts and political events at the Grand Ole Opry and other locations, indoors and outdoors, including the big closing showstopper, Bob Altman, former car salesman, put out adds in all the Nashville papers promising free concerts with food and drink, a lure to production values in the form of persons. If you put Kings of the Road and Nashville together with Jean-Luc Godard’s runaway car Pierrot le fou from ’65 you have a pretty perfect picture of the contused character I was by the end of high school. (Worth noting parenthetically also that Linda Fiorentino’s performance as wiseass sex-kitten sociopath Bridget Gregory in 1994’s The Last Seduction is high on the lists, respectively, of most cherished and most fundamental ‘90s things.) The first Godard film I ever saw, which I rented from the Roger’s Video at the southernmost tip of Calgary, was Prénom Carmen, which I found astonishing and delightful although the sound design definitely threw me. Godard liked contrapuntal sound and he said repeatedly that he edited image with one hand and sound with the other. Sometimes it almost sounds like the movies are broken or something. I’ll bet that back in the heyday if you told Godard that his film sounded broken he’d have stoically replied, through a cloud of smoke, that all movies are broken. The trick is putting them back together, right? That’s why every ‘film’ worthy of bearing that name is made in the edit. Pierrot le fou was vastly more impressive to me than Prénom Carmen as a teenager, but today my preference has reversed. Prénom Carmen is about how what is elemental between us comes before language whereas Pierrot le fou uses a honey trap in order to draw you away from the crowd, relieve you of your billfold, and remind you that the real torrid love affair has always been with the cinema itself. 

   

Lync, "Two Feet in Front"

Wavves, "Help is on the Way"

Infinity Pool Sonnet

 

Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg, 2023)

You see, if it’s sported by a duck that’s a daffy-ass deck, Doc

Girl got the boogie woogie fever and also sadly the scabies

Hiphop Quarantine, have you any wool? can you even talk?

Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full…of mongrel hentai polar babies 

The olive-coloured key shall not return, I was rude to it

We won’t survive long in this box but it’ll surely suck

Please do not attempt to make small talk or pit-a-pat

Go ahead, take me out at the knees, we’ll squeeze in a fuck

You use your magic wand like some lummox Irish cop 

Jiminy Christmas, are the meek ever out in droves

You would have thought there was a convention in town

I’d ask the maître d’ what’s up but I don’t think he knows—

Violence with you is less a legend than a lexicon 

What does your faith in this bestial covenant even rest upon?

Speed Walking in the Fiction of Samuel Beckett

 
The only necessity I know, said Mercier, is to get away from that hell as fast and as far as possible.
- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier  

The road, hard and white, seared the tender pastures, rose and fell at the whims of hills and hollows. The town was not far.
- Samuel Beckett, Molloy

He is twenty-four years old. Proust has just died. I should have said fallen. Straightaway Beckett picks him up, the giant and his uneven cobble.
- Hélène Cixous, Zero's Neighbour: Sam Beckett

Both psychiatric disorders themselves and antipsychotic medications frequently cause akathisia, a movement disorder that triggers an intense, internal feeling of physical restlessness. People coping with akathisia often feel an overwhelming urge to move, rock, or pace. Pacing serves as a physical outlet or a way to try to escape a threatening or overwhelming environment (flight instinct). Sometimes the unwell person no longer knows what they are fleeing or where they might be heading without this is any way dampening the intense compulsion to nevertheless flee. Some people have a disorienting moving target of squiggly malignant shadows for a world. Walking, briskly or otherwise, can be a self-soothing behaviour to help one concentrate, organize thoughts, or manage pain/distress. In art, that which truly embraces the New must also decompose the self or dissolves it like an Alka-Seltzer®. For the Deleuze and Guattari who in their 1972 benchmark Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia adopt Samuel Beckett as a schizo lodestar in the early going and especially Molloy’s magic trick whereby in the novel named for him he turns himself into a walking “stone-sucking machine,” thus maximizing what Sterling Hayden’s Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper would call his purity of essence, the “sober truth that resides in delirium [is] that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation, and the recording process and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself.” A quiet walk cannot help but descend into one or another clamour of cacophony and commotion. Even with only my clothes, my keys, my wallet, and a disposable lighter, I am a studio production house. You know, just a little love story about an ambulatory boy and his machine. “One should never be too lackadaisical and fear a few hundred steps,” writes longterm Swiss mental patient Robert Walser in “Little Snow Landscape,” “get out of your lazybones bed early, stand up on your pins and walk out just a little way so the eye can gaze its fill and the heart, craving freedom, can breathe.”

Film (Samuel Beckett, Alan Schneider, 1965)

Speed Walking in the Fiction of Samuel Beckett
[the Sights and Sounds]

The clips that appear in my new video assemblage piece, which surfaces in the harbour in the wee moonlit hours as customary with musical accompaniment from myself (except as a band), come in order of first appearance from the following motion pictures of record:

FILM (Samuel Beckett, Alan Schneider, 1965)

ERASERHEAD (David Lynch, 1977)

SIMON OF THE DESERT (Luis Buñuel, 1965)

DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (Jan Němec, 1964)

LE FOND DE L’AIR EST ROUGE (Chris Marker, 1977)

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

WHITE OF THE EYE (Donald Cammell, 1987)

SOUTHLAND TALES (Richard Kelly, 2006)

SPETTERS (Paul Verhoeven, 1980)

Yo La Tengo, "Demons"

Bataille

 

Vincent & Theo (Robert Altman, 1990)

Georges Bataille was a librarian and anthropologist who never held any professorial position of any kind. When he was severely ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and in serious financial distress at the beginning of the 1960s, a large group of artists and public intellectuals—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró—joined forces to raise a considerable sum of money that would see to it that Bataille lived out his final days in comfort, which is indeed how it would come to pass. In his theoretical work, Bataille pulls heavily from anthropology and aberrations of history so as to unearth insights relating to eroticism, mysticism, sacrifice, and political economy within a context where excess (the “accursed share,” etc.) remains central, and his fiction has a general tendency to depict an erotic interiority characterized by the tempestuous play of sensory-motor intensities (the experience of excess, of too much, arousing and frightening). In his own preface to the short vignette called “Madame Edwarda,” a piece originally published under the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Pierre Angélique, Bataille writes of “a certain lacerating consciousness of distress” and an “unbearable surpassing of being” in relation to sexual arousal and climax. This is indeed at the heart of Bataille’s fiction, a body of work that may be the best we have on the diabolic power of sensory-motor excitation, with the possible exception of Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas who has never found a profound metaphysical concept that he was not able to place in the human nervous system, along with the hormones and the gristle, and have it take…like a compatible organ transplant. In “Madame Edwarda,” the narrator pursues the eponymous prostitute (who declares herself GOD), has a dalliance with her, is beaten and wildly excoriated by her, and finally watches her fuck the driver from the back seat of his cab, all three parties somehow achieving a sufficient level of frenzied excitation that they…completely lose consciousness. Lights out. The narrator rhapsodizes on how “the pungent odor of her flesh and mine commingled flung us both into the same heart’s utter exhaustion.” The same heart. A heart that now incorporates two people. Then later, as Madame Edwarda, organ of GOD, fucks the cabdriver: “little by little that embrace strained to the final pitch of excess at which the heart fails.” The heart fails. The shared heart fails. The French sometimes call the moments after orgasm a petite mort. Have they taken the time to think through the possible implications? The reason I loved Bataille’s short novel Blue of Noon so much in my early twenties was because it was the only place in literature where I’d seen a genuine equivalent for my own anxiety, disgust, and terror…my own viscerally alienated mood. (I’m proud to report that I did not share any of the necrophiliac fantasies.) I didn’t know these parts of myself could be captured because I only faintly knew then that they were there to begin with. That’s what William S. Burroughs said we were here for: to find out and know what we already know but don’t know that we know. In the 1930s, the interwar circus, the young Bataille believed that time and spirit were Heraclitian flux and the heart—or Nuclear Reactor Core—of Nietzschean Tragedy, inherently "horror-spreading." He believed in “agitation on the scale of irreducible needs,” and the idea that humanity seems “able to subsist only at the limits of horror.” That would be the anthropologist speaking. Bataille is definitely not the kind of guy to lose sleep over reports of a nasty bloodbath. "The Practice of Joy Before Death." Bataille had become a devout Catholic as a teenager, converting at the age of sixteen, and his ultimate violent rejection of God becomes a violent rejection of the head as well as its own kind of display of orgasmic celestial fireworks exclusively for the head, as the head is seen as “the conscious authority of God” keeping one subservient to form, function, and programming. The living mandate of the flaming creature: myth, heterogeneous intensity, excretion, combustion, heated passion, sacrifice, the sacred, the wretched of the earth. Georges Bataille looks at the sunflowers of Vincent van Gogh and sees much more clearly than most people that the sunflowers are screaming in pain. You know, there’s a thin line between paranoid psychosis and overstimulation.  

Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)

Jack Smith & Co., "The Great Moldy Triumph"