Big Daddy Blues [Selfie]

 

Carbon Ideologies

 

Don Quixote (G.W. Pabst, 1933)

Harlan County U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976)

The Human Surge (Eduardo Williams, 2016)

In No Immediate Danger, the first of William T. Vollmann’s twin Carbon Ideologies door-stoppers, much time is given sheepishly over to straight-up science and a whole heap-load of British Thermal Units and parts-per-billion number crunching, only to then move on to Vollmann's adventures in post-Fukushima Japan with his dosimeter, pancake frisker, kindliness, and razor wit. The second volume, No Good Alternative, consists almost entirely of reportage and essayistic asides. While Vollmann can be biting and sarcastic, he is always a man on the ground in good faith; he is interested in people, even sometimes declaring that he likes very much people that you or I might find it very difficult to like indeed; the sarcasm and gallows humour are counterpoint to what must be a genuine streak of folksy ingenuousness. Many people probably don’t know that for however long a period in the early ‘90s the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation considered Vollmann a serious suspect in the Unabomber case. Long fascinated by and concerned with the plight of sex workers, in the early ‘80s Vollmann once rescued and secured the freedom of a young Thai girl confined to a rural brothel while in Thailand on assignment for Spin magazine. Vollmann is also a notorious, publicly open cross-dresser and his alter personality is named Dolores. You may or may not wish to drop in on or check up on The Book of Dolores, a 2013 collection of photographs and essays. A driven dragoon who will go considerable distance to get his story, Vollmann never seems to stop. Hence the glut. He is reported to have extremely bad carpal tunnel from constantly writing. At one point in No Good Alternative he tells us he revised the chapter we are in the process of reading on a bullet train to Tokyo. Carbon Ideologies in its split form is addressed with a certain teetering folksy ingenuousness to the residents of a "hot dark future” that is definitely our fault but which is also extremely hard to defend or explain. In No Good Alternative, Vollmann has done a better job than anybody I’m aware of who has preceded him at demonstrating the legacy and profound value of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Not glib, this is rather a writer who wants a literary language that does not unnecessarily alienate. Wen Stephenson's lightly chastising "Carbon Ironies," which curious readers can go espy over at The Baffler’s website, argues that Vollmann is a marvellous writer who has written a pair of volumes people ought to read, but that his position as a kind of defeated fatalist means he seems not to acknowledge that democracy and good citizenship require us to take action when it may only make a piddling difference…or maybe even none at all. Stephenson says it is too late for anything other than planetary calamity, but that we should be working on engineering very bad scenarios that are slightly less bad than the worst case scenarios. I think Vollmann would take this criticism seriously. I think he flirts with saying the same himself. A short chapter near the end of the second book entitled "What We Should Have Done" is a real tour de force and there isn’t anything at all that’s glib or facile about it. Vollmann’s preferred character type is I think the solitary scrounger tilting at windmills. The villains are the "regulated community," the bottom line business interests with their loathsome political bedfellows, utterly affronted by any obstacle that would presume to impede their spree. Vollmann would like nothing more than to see a way out of the chokehold and to his dismay he cannot. This is a sad story, a jug band blues. What essayist, activist, and tiresome public scold Rebecca Solnit wants from us solitary, impotent, and paralyzed loser inhabitants of unliveable reality when she calls us “lazy cynics” like there had ever been anything we could have done to appease this awful lady except to overturn the state of things like it were a dinner table…what she wants I surely do not know, but she always seems to look like the cat that swallowed the canary.

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

Neil Young, "Vampire Blues"

 

Ace of Jase: My Annual Russian Officer's Cut

The Ukrainian women working out of Mission Barbershop always give me the ace Russian officer's cut with that little flourish up top (a wee whisper of hulking action humanoid Dolph Lundgren, famous for a moment in the late 80s and early 90s). These Ukrainian hair clippers are charming and ironic as well as efficient and economic in their movements...like, if you have to do a job don't add anything extra to the job if you can help it. I love these ladies. But that's not love. No. That's sentiment. Which is at least better than infatuation. What is most precious in fleeting encounters is a momentary look of uncannily deep recognition. Do you feel me? A spiritual being cannot run and operate without networks. And never could. You can run and operate just fine without a shovel full of coal in your hands. The 'sons' and 'daughters' of Silicon Valley are hardly our enemies...

Freddie Hubbard, "Sky Dive"

JPW Industrial-Grade Film Criticism

 

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

At times Martin Scorsese’s fascinating The Last Temptation of Christ [from 1988, year of the Calgary Winter Olympics], feels like an Off-Broadway Easter production that has decided to both play up the gritty New York City accents and to transport both cast and crew to the Middle East in order to stage the decisive one-night-only production where boorish middle class attendees complain of an ambient quality of displaced distaste and a heavy green fog of dismay like you’d expect to experience should the actual blessed Christ peer your way.

Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

I thought Seth Rogan was hilarious when he first appeared riffing in those early breakout (blunderingly heteronormative) Judd Apatow pictures, but largely I think on account of the repetitive and one-note nature of Rogan’s essential schtick I came before long to find the man enormously irritating and no longer my cup of tea. However, in Mr. Rogan’s favour, it must always be remembered the he wrote groundswell classic Superbad with his childhood friend Evan—about their own experiences, naturally—and they named the two principal characters after themselves. Now, you can’t tell me that’s not a solid dude. 

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

I have been forced in the recent past to face the fact that I no longer like Terrence Malick’s way iffy scattershot epic The New World even a little. Colin Farrell definitely gives the sloppiest and greasiest performance of his spotty career but what's even more concerning and dispiriting to my thinking is that despite the contributions and advisory interventions of members of the Chickahominy and Patawomeck tribes, documented nowhere more amply than on the special features accompanying the Criterion Blu-ray of Malick’s 1607-scale gambit, the gaze of the camera here is unambiguously that of a stentorian white man with mutton chops and a conquistador kink. (If you would like more information on the politics of the gaze, I refer you to Laura Mulvey’s film studies mainstay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.)

Little Murders (Alan Arkin, 1971)

In a number of interviews including one on the region-B Indicator Blu-ray for Alan Arkin’s epochal Little Murders, adapted from the caustic and quicksilver play by Jules Feiffer, star and co-producer Elliot Gould explains how they originally had nouvelle vague maverick and Jules Feiffer fan Jean-Luc Godard attached to direct, believe it or not, but it was not to be and the final straw came when Gould tried to explain to Godard that he, the grande Swiss cineaste, was going to have to be much more agreeable with studio brass if he truly wished to direct the film. Godard purportedly responded (as quoted by Gould): “When my wife or child ask me to tell them I love them I tell them to go fuck themselves.”

Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984)

In his hysterically funny warts-and-all memoir Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother, cinematographer-turned-director Sonnenfeld recounts a macabre and side-splitting anecdote concerning the production of Blood Simple, the first of three Coen brothers films he would lens. One night Sonnenfeld found himself filming while Joel Coen buried his little brother Ethan in an open grave in the backyard of Sonnenfeld’s “starter home” in East Hampton in order to get some guy-being-buried-alive second unit pickup stuff for the Coens' mostly Texas-shot narrative feature debut (and what a debut). Ethan gradually became completely covered in dirt and though he kept his composure for a good long while before raising a fuss, he eventually felt compelled to point out politely to the two silhouettes above him in the dark that he probably didn’t actually need to be under all that dirt at the point where the character would surely be unconscious. All three men shared a nervous chuckle. 

Orpheus Looks Back [Drawing]

 

Ten Perfect Rock Songs Pt. 2

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what’s more than enough. 
- Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues

They're an odd bunch at the BBC.

- Mark E. Smith, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

Roky Erickson, "Don't Slander Me" [1986]

The Make-Up, "They Live by Night" [1996]

Small Faces, "Here Comes the Nice" [1968]

Delta 5, "Mind Your Own Business" [1979]

Mekons, "Millionaire" [1993]

Melvins, "Honey Bucket" [1993]

Love, "No Matter What You Do" [1966]

Bells Of..., "Strange Pair" [1993]

PJ Harvey, "The Last Living Rose" [2011]

The Super Friendz, "10 Lbs" [1995] 🇨🇦

Greetings from Calgary '88! 🤠

What is the Greatest Book Ever About Cinema and/or Filmmaking?

The answer for me is for certain Sirk on Sirk with Dorothy Malone stroking that trophy derrick on its superlative cover, a gem long out of print and maximally rife for rediscovery. New York Review Books, can you hear me?! Sirk was what the European male was meant to become if not for two preposterous World Wars and the invention of mass media. Is Sirk on Sirk better than Robert Bresson's mandatory but ascetic, severe, and Pascal-derived Notes on the Cinematograph? Well, let me just say that in comparison to Bresson, if only on the surface of things where I am forever lacing and re-lacing my shoes inert in the moon dirt, Sirk is much more clearly an earth creature who dines and loves, checks receipts to make sure he hasn't been overcharged, and sleeps (he was doubtlessly a snorer)...things like that...   

Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956)

The Tarnished Angels (Douglas Sirk, 1957)

Silkworm, "Written on the Wind"

Silkworm, "Tarnished Angel"