Fresh and Hot from Canadian International Pictures

 

When we speak of Canada’s two mythic solitudes, as consecrated by more-or-less-forgotten Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan, we must in kind speak of two distinct and awfully discrete national cinemas operating very often at cross-purposes with one another. While Anglo-Canadian cinema for the longest time mostly kept its hands to itself when in came to trespassing against Hollywood’s dominion over popular narrative cinema and its international dissemination, Québecois people had their hand forced from the beginning: they had to make Québecois movies for Québecois audiences because who the hell else was going to do it? They don’t call it distinct society status to sound snooty. If you didn’t hear it before I’m here to lay it to you: Québec is distinct as fuck. This is incidentally how most of the children in staunchly and repressively Catholic Québec of 1952 found themselves watching the savage ritualistic scalding of La petite Aurore l'enfant martyre. The movies and traumatized and/or demystified kids have always travelled in tandem. The province of Québec had a whole entire star system functional only within its own modest borders before English Canada could even find its own ass. The whole global culture entered a radical phase of tempestuous transition and peptic upset in the 1960s and Québec was not exempt, though the province’s hard lean into Marxist politics and open debauchery put unambiguously to shame anything going on in the Anglo Zone of Solitude, largely because those folks hadn’t previously been living under the thumb of the Catholic Church the way the Québecois had and so hadn’t nearly the steam to blow off. So...as it should happen...along with the FLQ/October Crisis in 1970…we have…Deux femmes en or, a raw and racy sex comedy by the husband and wife team of Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond, a huge hit in one province only, and the film many believe to be the lynchpin of the Maple Syrup Porno cycle, which lasted only as long as the counterculture did, from about ’68 to ’71, but definitely made some people a ton of money. More sets like this, pretty please! Feed my eyes, cruel demon! 

I’ve been in the company of Allan Moyle and Frank Vitale, who together with their friends made Montreal Main and The Rubber Gun in 1974 and 1977 respectively. Dope, drop-outs… transgressive poetics…gutter punk spunk. Having heard them tell stories, I’m confident that Allan and Frank got up to more mischief and into more trouble than should technically be survivable. Of their onscreen collaborators, present in both aforementioned films, the queer autodidact and painter Stephen Lack looms eternally largest. For example, it would definitely seem to be the case that Lack did prophesy AIDS years before it happened, and it is definitely true that he can rap wild and free like Bob Dylan on speed only with a gaze far, far, far more chilling. He would somehow go on to appear in films by David Cronenberg, Larry Cohen, and Jon Jost. Nobody else can boast that, fella. Allan Moyle would go on to direct cult Hollywood movies Pump Up the Volume (1990) and Empire Records (1995) as well as lovely lowkey Cape Breton classic New Waterford Girl (1999). Honk if you're in the process of invading Canada. There is a scene in Pump Up the Volume where Samantha Mathis and Christian Slater are fooling around and Mathis pulls her sweater off over the top of her head revealing that she has nothing on underneath. It’s a scene I once studied at some length. Amazingly, Allan told me that the studio felt uncomfortable with that scene and tried to compel him to cut it but he just kept saying he wouldn’t and so it stayed. Thank Christ for artistic integrity! I mean…the studio said whaaaaat? They’re over tits now, are they? Pfff. Go figure.   

Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975) 🇩🇪

The Rubber Gun (Allan Moyle, 1977) 🇨🇦

🇺🇸

Nome Noma: Québec Post-Punk et New Wave [Full Album]

First Date Poem

 

I asked her what she likes to do

for fun

and she said:

oh, I just throw on some fun music

and when I get tired of that

I’m liable to make faces in the mirror

for a spell.

She asked me if I was religious 

and I told her that I worship

Denthremenetos, the Risen One

Sewer of Ruination.

Yikes, she said, interested.

'60s: An Interregnum

Look out Joe, I'm fallin'
- Love, "Signed D.C."

It was just '66 and early '67. That's all there was.

- Peter Fonda in The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999)  

.

...

.....

Oh, I was thinking about you earlier and I thought I'd suggest you play this song when you are working out at the gym like an absolute legend 👍:

Shit and Shine, "Workin On My Fitness"

Holy Monstro

 

I would tell you in all earnestness that I’m sorry I hurt you but you are exceedingly lovely when you cry so I am of at least two minds. 

In 1816, when the sun barely shone for a year due to a volcanic winter triggered by the eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley was staying with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where to beat the doldrums Byron challenged each of the others to come up with a gangbusters ghost story for the ages. Drugs and alcohol were definitely involved, but it is worth noting that Percy Shelly liked hash and laudanum but did not drink. In short order, Mary had a vivid dream featuring a "pale student of unhallowed arts" kneeling beside a hideous, reassembled humanoid being as it emerges torpidly back into a cursed condition of sentient awareness. Byron’s prompt and Mary’s dream were to prove the kernel from which the classic novel Frankenstein was to emerge. Bleak times? “It was the year 1816,” Paul West has Dr. Polidori muse in his sublime 1989 historical novel Lord Byron’s Doctor: “My life began then, and all else.”

Long before the theme park et cetera, Universal Studios set up shop in Southern California in 1915 when it built a studio lot in Universal City on land bought with prophetic good sense and no small amount of temerity by company honcho Carl Laemmle the previous year. One thing that Universal quickly learned and that no small number of small or micro ‘indie’ studios know very well to this day is that good horror movies are essentially cash cows because they are relatively cheap to make and can reliably be expected to pull in audiences everywhere. Universal had huge financial successes with a spate of atmospheric Gothic horror classics starring Lon “Man of a Thousand Faces” Chaney and born of classy intellectual property like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both Universal properties from 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein are not only among the most remarkable and innovative films of the early sound era, they also more or less singlehandedly saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy. Carl Laemmle Jr. bought the rights to Dracula after he saw a version adapted for the stage on Broadway. Instead of picking an actor with an existing contract at Universal, Carl Laemmle Jr. chose Bella Lugosi, star of the Broadway production. The iconic appearance of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein came at a cost. Karloff endured up to four hours of make-up every morning, and because his costume was so heavy and the lighting rigs so hot…he started to lose a considerable amount of weight. The lighting rigs in Classical Hollywood were so hot they could start fires (and did). Bella Lugosi famously downplayed Karloff's work in Frankenstein, qualifying that he considered Karloff primarily a "make-up artist" rather than a genuine actor steeped in the craft. 

What’s my deal? None. I have no deal to offer a living soul. I’m just sitting here with the kid from Ju-On attacking the back half of a day-old box of assorted Hoopla donuts. What makes me believe myself such an expert that I can go ahead and speak on behalf of the monsters? I woke up knowing of the horrors to come but I could do nothing. Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, who was sentenced by Apollo to prophesy the truth and be believed by no one. “All our knowledge is derived from infidels,” Percy Shelly is declared to have boasted. 

The sea, the sea, the dark blue sea,

The bright, the pure, the ever free.

Edward John Trelawny on fair weather friend Percy Shelley: “barring drugs and accidents, he might have lived as long as his father—to ninety.” Trelawny believed that Shelley’s vessel was probably hijacked on the water and Shelley robbed and killed, or that it was a malicious ramming, an act of hot-headed caprice, the vessel’s occupant(s) in due course casualties of the sinking. What kind of monster was Percy Shelley? He was the best kind of spoiled, little brat. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too, turning the King’s England, all the while, into a foul open-air zoo. The angelic toddler who bangs on the table and proclaims its rancid epithets, servants running about in dismay and confusion. King baby and spoiled, little brat are not equivalent. King baby is all diapers, lung power, and demands, whereas spoiled, little brat will use intelligence and cunning to really and truly fuck shit up. When Percy Shelly wrote The Necessity of Atheism in 1811, not yet twenty, he knew what he was doing and he went ahead and did it, turning himself into a No-Go Zone for his whole family and all other members of polite society who’d formerly known him. 

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,

Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,

Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,

A mechanised automaton. 

The Cramps, "I Was a Teenage Werewolf"

Roky Erickson, "Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)"

Gwar, "Gor-Gor"

Top Five Con Artist Movies

What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is 'art.' Picasso himself said it. Art is a lie. A lie that makes us realize the truth.
- Orson Welles in F for Fake

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce my 52 assistants. Notice the contrast of style and character. They range from ingratiating simplicity to regal splendour. Some are passive and inert, others brazen and belligerent. Some suicidal, just like you and me. But card artistry, just like other theatrical forms, music and dance, has its own styles, its own classics, its own genres.
- Ricky Jay in Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (1996)

F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973) 

Rien ne va plus (Claude Chabrol, 1997)

Abus de faiblesse (Catherine Breillat, 2013)

House of Games (David Mamet, 1987)

The Fortune (Mike Nichols, 1975)

John Zorn, Spy vs Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman [Full Album] 

Two Sublime Eddie Cochran Covers from 1969

 

If you were a white rock and roll star in the 1950s the best way to demonstrate credibility and be a hardcore badass was to to die in an airplane or automobile crash. That’s what happened to Eddie Cochran in 1960 when the ascending earth angel entertainer died in a car accident at the age of twenty-one on the way to Heathrow Airport at the end of a successful UK tour. Witnesses to the accident describe Cochran throwing his body over his fiancée, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, to protect her during impact, perhaps in the process sealing his own fate. At the age of eighteen, in 1958, Sheeley wrote the hit “Poor Little Fool” for Ricky Nelson, which had the distinction of becoming the first number one hit on the inaugural Billboard Hot 100 chart. The sublime Eddie Cochran tune “Somethin' Else,” in all its pummelling sturm und drang commodity fetishism, peaked at #58 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959 and was written by Sharon Sheeley and Eddie’s older brother Bob. My goodness, now doesn’t that just look like a Freudian case study if anything ever did? I can see it on the billboards now: Kane and Abel Vs. the Kustom Kar Kommandos.    

Flamin' Groovies, "Somethin' Else"

NRBQ, "C'mon Everybody"

Kierkegaard for Twinks

 

Last of the Red Hot Lovers (Gene Saks, 1972)

Some people like to have a good time and avoid rustling up any form of discomfort or conflict. These folks finesse in order to forestall a mess. There are two kinds of oversexed people, good sports and bad sports, and the kind of people I’m addressing are for the most part oversexed and good sports about it or trying their Sunday damndest to be. There are hot and cold lovers and everybody for the most part prefers a hot one because they are dependably fun and high-energy…at least when all’s going good. Hot water bottle lover, buried beneath weighted blankets, please and appease me, lover dear. In order to be the kind of person a whole bunch of other people can justify sleeping with, however, you need two primary characteristics and fun ain’t one of them: 1) you have to be low maintenance for extended periods of time; 2) you have to be good at agreeing with people, or at least appearing to, even when you don’t. We are handcuffed in this world when we stand on principle because even having principles at all immediately condemns us. What the people-pleasers and placaters of this world really and truly want is to shake you hysterically and yell incomprehensibly until you lose consciousness or are dead. When I was much younger, quite dashing, and occasionally sleeping with a few people at a time, I learned the most cloyingly obvious lesson more than a handful of times (because stubborn and selfish): other people have feelings too; stop pretending the world is your oyster, you aren’t even a property owner. When you lie to somebody and then are subsequently pleased with yourself for tricking them…that’s when you know it’s time to seek some form of council higher than your own. 

Once when I was a young man a slightly older woman put on fancy lingerie in an effort to startle and, you know, stimulate me, throwing me off pretty good as I entered the bedroom a touch tipsy and genuinely surprised. I figured I had better stand there and take it in as throughly as I could manage because I was absolutely certain that nobody else was ever going to do such a wonderful and harebrained thing for me again. Did I break that woman’s heart? Well, no, not then and there. As for what ultimately happened: I know for a fact that we both know that we were each culpable. Communication could bulldoze a better, less thorny path if people would stop putting themselves in the way of everything that isn’t them or their adopted lifestyle politic. Not even you are who you think you are. It’s a large part of why you dream. At no point or node along the fabled political spectrum is anybody practicing pattern recognition at all effectively. Not every synthesis is a solution and not every fool is worthy of a say in the matter. Convictions, stipulates Robert Anton Wilson, create convicts. When I defended my master’s thesis back in 2004, one of the auditing professors asked me what we are supposed to do if ‘politics’ is just another word for ‘division’ and there is no foreseeable stabilization in sight, and my answer was that we should interrogate our own presuppositions daily. In the town where nobody talks about anything, people get their feelings hurt all the time for no good goddamn reason. Or worse. That's part of how offenders become serial offenders. Sometimes I’m far too principled and I really lord it over people, but sometimes I’m pleasurable to be around, and that is largely because I tend to find new information much more exciting than I do threatening. This is another thing I share in common with ace French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. What’s got me most hooked in Art and Life is the capital-N New.

The sun is both the furnace and the forge. We are here on its leniency. We cannot understand the scale of the sun, which fuses in the neighbourhood of 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second. You can damage your eyes by looking directly at the sun but your imagination cannot do anything with the fusion of 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second or four million tons of solid matter being turned into pure energy every second. “The image of consolatory gestures,” writes Antoine Volodine in Radiant Terminus (a book whose title very much is an unsubtle reference to orgasm), “was overlaid with wanton images and sensations of skin, of flesh, of pawing, of masculine gropes, of possibly shared breaths, of tumbles on the bed, and urgent penetrations. The physical nostalgia of coupling, handed down over two hundred million animal years. He suppressed all this as best he could, this surge of salacious filth. But, in his consciousness and beyond it, the filth overflowed.” Maybe down there in the depths of the human orgasm is a little, flaming window into hell that doesn’t even really give you much of a picture of hell the same way we don’t currently have much of a mental picture of the sun. Is a mushroom cloud a cartoon parody of human orgasm? Is the joke at long last on us? This is of course the of age of porn stars with direct knowledge comparing the penis of the President of the United States of America to a mushroom. It sometimes really blows my mind how much online life today seems like an old J.G. Ballard story in living colour! 

One of my favourite lines from 21st century literary fiction comes to us care of the 2017 Javier Marías novel Berta Isla: “we never really know if someone has been harmed until their story is complete, and that takes time.” When the motion and commotion cease for a moment perhaps there’s a chance we’ll breathe. Life is a moving target and that’s how it sneaks up behind you and knifes you. With the right practice you’ll learn to stare at a dangling hood ornament for hours at a time. “This book owes its life to death,” concedes the great Hélène Cixous in 2016’s Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal. The name Los connects both to loss and the Spanish definitive masculine article, but it also harkens back to William Blake for whom Los was the fallen or earthly form of Urthona, suggesting the inauguration of an archetypal trans identity, though one should be careful to grant to the prefix trans its full capabilities with respect to combination and passage, including but extending far beyond mere considerations of gender and sexuation. Cixous: “One doesn’t die. One comes and goes between two absences of memory.” In his book on his friend Hélène Cixous, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, Jacques Derrida ruminates on the eternal made available to mortal beings by cycles and substitutions, resorting even to biblical metaphor (both he and Cixous were/are Jewish), musing on the list of sequential Jonahs, one Jonah ever replacing another Johah in the forward march of time. Of course, if the triumph of life over death rests in the suspension of the centrality of the individual then the individual Jonah is no longer a thing of all that much cosmic significance or relevance, presumably, from even a research standpoint. 

The heavens. At long last. Unmade in spite of our gaze, the parallax of perspective stomach-churning. Bound notebooks, lockboxes, apartments, cities, the individual languages colloquially called tongues. Our arms protecting our chests like family crests. Everything is clutching itself in and fastening itself up in wait of whatever stage of entropy it is, as depicted in The Wizard of Oz, whereby that which was fastened steadily to the earth is fastened there no longer and anything of inconsiderable mass, such as yourself or your loved ones, goes flying off into the wild blue yonder with hardly a first whisper of complaint. 

The Soft Pink Truth, "Is It Gonna Get Any Deeper Than This? (Dark Room Mix)"