Ye Ole Horse and Rider Raid

If I had to I could drag you by the hair over hot coals in my bare feet. The depthless depths of pain and suffering I have experienced shouldn’t make any real sense to all that many people, only the most wretched and the most chronic, and when I show you your agony I want to show you mine also, my eagerness tripping on its lip as it tries to skip; the mangled, lately impaled tongue which is also that of earth’s wretched and the systemically crippled public estate of minced speech that binds us together at this dimly-lit table to eat odiferous coins shat by a giant avocado named Tyrannasorus Tex. Everybody, along with me: “Howdy, Tex!”

Le mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)

I was at my little out of the way table in the psych ward at the South Campus and a sweet young lady with all the hippie / back-to-earth vibrancy and vacuity came and sat down and we chatted amicably for a bit, until, upon my having told her that I am a writer, she encouraged me to try ChatGPT. It was amazing how decisive this actually was: the relationship ended unambiguously at this exact moment, nearly crystalline in its perfect celestial harmonics. Most relationships are cluttered and overwhelmed by peripheral business such that when decisive moments come they’re neither clear nor obvious. Consider just for the moment a comic scenario wherein a man hires a private investigator to find the one thing above all others that he the husband better not ever say within his wife’s earshot, for fear of God and womanhood, nasty and brassy and inured to sympathy. In Jean-Luc Godard’s immortal Le mépris—1963, CinemaScope and Capri!—in which Michel Piccoli plays a man most of whose day is spent daydreaming that he’s Dean Martin in Minelli’s Some Came Running (1958) until at some point he realizes that in the fairly recent past his wife Camille—played by Brigitte Bardot, who in the early-60s was stacked like a motherfucker—has stopped loving him for something specific he’s done but which he’s helpless to pinpoint and which she cannot or will not not communicate clearly.

The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, 1980)

Once when I was playing Minesweeper on the computer as a boy my maternal grandfather, who also used to stand in front of the garage and let me shoot tennis balls at him with my hockey stick and who was a mechanic and electrician who’d served in the Second World War and, because of his specializations, had in fact worked on some mine fields up close and personal...well, grandpa knew his business and he knew what he was saying when he said that the computer game I was playing was worse than stupid, irresponsible, a purely statistical business where the rat keeps punching the button, whereas in real life the distribution of mines is highly randomized and as soon as you set one off you’re dead. Or worse. Filmmaker and serviceman Samuel Fuller writes in his memoir A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking that most of the young men serving with him in North Africa and Italy were much more afraid of surviving having their genitals blown off by a mine than they were of being put out of commission by one permanentemente. I also saw a documentary once where French television was interviewing veterans of the First World War and somebody asked one of the old men if gas and chemical attacks were the worst part of the trench warfare experience and the veteran said, so chillingly a sparkly tingle ran through my whole body, that the chemical warfare was absolutely nothing compared to the flamethrowers.

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

I have for as long as I’ve loved movies almost, one hopes, loved them as they ought to be loved. Devotionally, worshipfully, manic making-of-the-rounds. For some reason very early only I took an immediate interest in the mysterious qualities of the visual style of Stanley Kubrick, originally a teen photographer for Look. The early black and white films struck me as being somehow the exemplar of what movies were supposed to be. The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). I have a sickly feeling in my gut that both that latter film and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are no longer held in high common esteem the way proper decency would appear to demand. Some people don’t like the control and sadism in Kubrick’s God’s-eye view. Some people don’t like the way he has treated people, legends persisting of actors and actresses being forced to do so many takes on a given scene that they fatigue and collapse totally, a near state of psychospiritual ruination that the director clearly went after occasionally with intention. 1980’s The Shining is probably Kubrick’s best and most brilliant film, but nearly everybody knows of the traumatic experience actress Shelley Duvall endured during that film’s protracted production. It’s scarcely all that hidden. The reason her performance is so much more intense and more real than Jack Nicholson’s is because she is actually hyperventilating and in hysterics. There is something definitely disgusting but also a little shrouded and opaque about the whole business of how Kubrick treated Duvall and why, but I also don’t seem to suffer too much vicarious cross-traumatization when when I watch The Shining, which I’ve always believed to be a masterpiece. I don’t feel the same way about erotic death-bloat saga Last Tango in Paris, the infamous and lamentable Bernardo Bertolucci picture in which Marlon Brandon goes every which way but loose and then some, to the the extent that actress Maria Schneider, in the film’s most notorious and even meme-like sequence, involving sex and butter on the kitchen floor, was much more improvised than it ever should have been allowed to be; it is not that Marlon Brando penetrated or sexually assaulted Maria Schneider but rather that because of the chaotic and scary nature of the production situation overall, Schneider was genuinely afraid he might actually go ahead and do that...while they were rolling. I will absolutely never watch Last Tango in Paris again as long as I live. Yet I will be screening The Shining with some regularity for my own edification as long as I’m up and able, and it isn’t because I don’t respect Shelley Duvall’s trauma (which I assuredly do). One thing I would like to make a special point of here is that I don’t think that Stanley Kubrick’s sadism and cruelty are especially misogynistic as such. I recently had the pleasure of procuring a copy of the Criterion Blu-ray set for the marvellous and ingeniously ironic Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and the second additional disk of supplementary features gives us a peek at Kubrick’s wife Christiane and their three daughters, as attractive, good-humoured, dogged, and witty a group of ladies as you could ever hope to meet…and the people Kubrick hung out with daily on that giant rotating film set in England where he lived the last good heap of his life. I’ll bet you a million bucks that those four women were the best thing God ever gave the wily shutterbug from the Bronx.  

Ten Underrated 21st Century Rock Albums [in Chronological Order]

 

Sunburned Hand of the Man, Headdress (2002)

Tivol, Early Teeth (2005)

Japanther, Skuffed Up My Huffy (2007)

Maserati, Inventions for the New Season (2007)

Religious Knives, Smokescreen (2007)

Magik Markers, Surrender to the Fantasy (2013)

Lightning Bolt, Fantasy Empire (2015)

Mekons, Existentialism (2016)

Black Lips, Sing in a World That's Falling Apart (2020)

Bully, Sugaregg (2020)

JPW

L-U-V

My Favourite Country and Western Record at the Present Time [Selfie]

In pressurized, fucked-up, max toxic zero-sum situations it does seem to me that this is where we can optimally obverse how women are more likely to help carry and support you comparative to men, especially in groups, as men are more liable to lead you terminally astray on half-baked campaigns and rabid consensus frenzy. Many have and shall come to find that William Golding's Lord of the Flies hasn't aged a damn bit (to the consolation of no one). 

Look, just cut a low, stained-glass groove into the nearest log with better-than-average acoustics and a copacetic shape...

Loretta Lynn, "How Great Thou Art"

Fun Snack

Hard Rain [Masked and Anonymous]

To the fisherman lost on the land

He stands alone at the door of his home,

With his long-legged heart in his hand.

- Dylan Thomas

Keith Richards has a personal preference for Open G Tunings. They fit his temperament and the requirements of his band's dynamic. Open G Tunings often differentiate in ultra-high-contrast the work of the bass and the work of the six-string (or sometimes modified five-string, with Richards at any rate); the idea from a purely acoustical perspective is that there will be less sloppy overlap and confusion in the low end of the string-instrument dynamic and the overall group dynamic. Though it comes out smack dab in the middle of his Christian phase, the Bob Dylan live album Hard Rain has clearly been engineered to on one hand channel The Band, no surprise, and on the other hand these cats go just about full Rolling Stone. At any rate, it's the Dylan album I play the most. Of that I am certain. 

The beast is loose

Least is best

Pee-pee-maw-maw

Pee-pee-maw-maw

- Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

THE 'BOB' IS A PALINDROME AND THEREFORE THE 'BOB' HAS OCCULT RITUAL APPLICATIONS. 

Renaldo and Clara (Bob Dylan, 1978)

Backtrack (Dennis Hopper, 1990)

Masked and Anonymous (Larry Charles, 2003) 

[A seamless recreation of the final scene of The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967)] 

Bob Dylan and His Accompanists, "Shelter from the Storm" 

1976

 

Anarchist Kissing Booth: A Sǝven Point Plan

Éloge de l'amour (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001)

Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000)

1. Anarchism like all great things is an Announcement! The most vital right is the right to love and be loved and to obey no fixed definition of love, certainly nobody else’s, its also being critical that we curb/chasten those whose current settings find them exploiting and managing loving and being loved like they were the general manager of a sports franchise. 

2. In a letter to the anarchist Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, Eugene O’Neill, the great dipsomaniac American playwright of Irish descent, writes the following: "As for my fame and your infame, I would be willing to exchange a good deal of mine for a bit of yours. It is not hard to write what one feels as truth. It is damned hard to live it.” The Universal Anarchist returns like Nietzsche to Heraclitus, the greatest of the Pre-Socratic literalists, and to his two preeminent images of what the universe is like: the river you cannot step into twice because of its constant busy motion and the outdoor fire that embodies the elemental flux of all that which is. That’s practically already a post-industrial quantum model and we sure don’t find anything like that in either Plato or Aristotle, though just over three hundred years before Christ, the Greek philosopher Democritus came up with the concept of atoms, an accomplishment I believe deserves a good deal more open discussion and public celebration than us moderns are inclined to extend it. We’re busy. With what? We’re watching Desperate Housewives. We’ve got our feet up...we're watching other people worn down and humiliated for a change...

3. Antonin Artaud, “Cinema and Reality” [1927]: “A cinema which is studded with dreams, and which gives you the physical sensation of pure life, finds its triumph in the most excessive sort of humour. A certain excitement of objects, forms, and expressions can only be translated into the convulsions and the surprises of a reality that seems to destroy itself with an irony in which you can hear a scream from the extremities of the mind.”

4. Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord [1993]: “Rather than create entirely new forms, the Letterists wanted to take already existing elements and rearrange them. To this appropriative technique, derived in part from Dadaist collage, in part from a kind of distorted quotation favoured by both Marx and Lautréamont, they gave the name of ‘détournement.’ Détournement involves a quotation, or more generally a re-use, that ‘adapts’ the original element to a new context. It is also a way of transcending the bourgeois cult of originality and the private ownership of thought. In some cases the products of bourgeois civilization, even the most insignificant ones, such as advertisements, may be reemployed in such a way as to modify their meaning; in other cases, the effect may be to reinforce the real meaning of an original element—a sentence of Marx’s, say—by changing its form.”

    

5. There is a truly delightful near-throwaway moment in Chris Marker’s sublime The Owl’s Legacy, a 1989 documentary series about the legacy of Greek philosophy and culture. Marker has his camera trained discreetly for a moment on five or six men in animated discussion on an Athens street corner and the voice over observes dryly that the men on the streets of Athens are still acting the same way they did in Plato’s dialogues. 

6. In a conventional and tired scenario the anarchist will find themselves interrogated by newbies and simpletons. Voices shrill and blood vessels bursting, your hopeless and adrift peers will get angry at you because they assume you must believe there should not be any laws to govern the citizens of nation states. “Far from it,” you are encouraged to rapidly counter, “law and the criminal justice system are the best proof we have of actively existing anarchy on a daily basis. Law exists in the first place to do its best to mitigate against all the ambient anarchy kicking up dust devils down the corridors of power and doing it all remote while enjoying a whisky sour in a bar by the Eiffel Tower. I’m quite fond of James Gray’s imperfect 2008 family crime opera We Own the Night which tells the story of two brothers in New York, sons of Robert Duvall’s stentorian and distant cop father, who split down opposing lines in early adulthood, one pursing the police work like pa and the other angling in the direction of the underworld, increasingly diabolic in his descent. The basic social set-up is one I like to imagine we all instinctively know—and it’s definitely operative in a number of Michael Mann films—cops and robbers have spent so long looking into one another’s business, their social circles increasingly circulating together, that it is now time to state outright that cops and robbers are married and somebody needs to intervene. 

7. Our three main obstacles to growth, cooperation, care, and sustainability have been our main problems since at least the French Revolution. The problems, intractable-seeming because they probably are: Education, Political Economy, and Law. I don’t have even the slightest idea how we as a species are going to find ourselves negotiating all the trouble extensive of there being so many people and a great many of them squashed together in alienating urban conditions. If you want to try to start having hope again somehow, from here on the ground in Western Canada in early March of 2026, I'm telling you straight-up that intelligent machines are the only sensible game in town. 

Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)

Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet, "Eureka"

Did You See the Latest Bresson Meme?

I was introducing the films of Robert Bresson, the greatest master of form and rhythm the cinema has ever known, to Wendall who mostly paints houses and sells used records, for which he has a genuine knack. He got me my copy of Ornette Coleman'a Science Fiction. I made a very funny joke, I thought: I told him that because Bresson's art is both austere and clinically severe it is expected of all true adherents and acolytes alike that when pausing the movie to get snacks or go to the toilet we only do so when one or another of the characters in whichever film we're watching is in the process of passing through a doorway. After we finished watching Procès de Jeanne d'Arc from '62, Wendall immediately commented with big, wide eyes that there sure were a lot of doors and boy did they clank and such. Wendell added that the film was a "stone-cold death trip" and wondered what caused me to pick that one in particular in order to introduce him to Monsieur Bresson. I told him I just got the BFI Blu-ray and hadn't watched it yet but also it's the optimal place to begin because it is the most spare, rigorous, and precise of the director's early black and white films. You have established camp in the higher altitudes; tomorrow we reach for the summit, L'argent, Bresson's final film once and for all but also the last of those sublime colour ventures, often Dostoevsky-minded, though L'argent adapts a Tolstoy story. The rhythm and tone have been finessed to a point of peerless vision and control and in L'argent there are no longer relics or revenants of European cinema or commercial cinema, there is only the handsome ace formalist Bobby Bresson, down for whatever as long as it's classy, and when his art is in his own hands rather than those of some chump front office clerk, he uses it to say that it's a hell of a lot worse out there than anybody's telling you now but it's buttered fucking scones compared to what's incoming. Anyway, if we wanted to be really severe we could easily argue that L'argent is the only true Bresson film. 

Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (Robert Bresson, 1962)

       

L'argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

The Jacques Rivette Sǝven Point Plan

Or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.

- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

You are the music

Don't let no one tell you

That you got a job to do

Can't you hear it?

- Royal Trux, "Call Out the Lions"

Secret défense (Jacques Rivette, 1998)

1. When I defended my master’s thesis way back in 2004, I recall that the professor Mark Langer, who was not my advisor but was on my defence committee—and who I knew well and had studied with—asked, before the interrogation proper could commence, in affable M. Langer fashion, if I had seen anything good recently, so I raved enthusiastically and at length about Jacques Rivette’s 1998 slow-burn/unheimlich crime & conspiracy caper Secret défense, which I had just watched with my girlfriend on DVD, our having rented it from Canadian Netflix- equivalent mail rental service Zip.ca. My verdict that day, overheard by my entire defence committee, was that Secret défense had one of the most mind-blowing sequences I had ever seen, involving travel between multiple train stations in a semi-randomized fashion, and that Rivette has gone some length to make the viewer recollect and meditate upon both Hitchcock's Vertigo and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. I for one accept the challenge in the best of humours. You can't really be a film scholar I don't think if you gush so unabashedly over all the movies.

L'amour fou (Jacques Rivette, 1969)

2. In her book on Rivette for University of Illinois Press, Mary M. Wiles assesses the two main things that are bound to characterize most any Rivette film one might encounter in its natural habitat: “it becomes evident that Rivette’s authorial signature is not merely discernible in the way in which theatricality inflects his films, but also in the manner in which women’s lives are portrayed.” Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), the director's most widely beloved film, couldn't exist in anything like the form it takes if Rivette had neglected to get his actresses to help him write it. Wiles avers that the fact Rivette preferred the credit “mise-en-scène” instead of “director” to designate his role in the lived execution of his cinema reflects “his deeply held conviction that film is a collective, rather than a solitary, endeavour.” The aesthetic of early films like Paris nous appartient (1961) and L'amour fou (1969) has things positioned just so such that we can see how Rivette and his collaborators have in uncomplicated and endlessly exciting ways turned documentary cinema methodology on their own acts of experimental theatre.  More than any other directors who we'd consider his contemporaries, with the possible exception of Polish pop-saturated theatre of cruelty monger Andrzej Żuławski, Rivette believed with the blazing intensity of the devout in performance as a polyvalent subject in and of itself.

Out 1 (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

3. Things Rivette said terrified him: “the State, Money, the Police, the Party…” The emancipatory [praxis] is collaborative and expressive, it disrupts productively and is characterized by rituals in which women attain self-possession through the ongoing pursuit of destabilizing performative rapture and of the ecstatic loss at the heart of creation. Female agency and female solidarity are celebrated precisely for their power to subvert presiding heteronormative/patriarchal constraints. Literature, theatre, music, painting, and sculpture are the stuff of which sharing and caring are made.

La belle noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)

4. Rivette: “The work is always much more interesting to show than the result. I can watch a coppersmith in a Roquier film for three hours. A caldron, even if it is the most beautiful in the world, I will have viewed from all angles in three minutes.”

La bête humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)

Jaguar (Jean Rouch, 1967)

5. Rivette first became passionate about the idea of making films because of the influence of Jean Cocteau and especially after having read the diaries Cocteau kept detailing the making of 1946’s La Belle et la Bête. Rivette came in short order to be inspired by Jean Renoir and Jean Rouch in both of whom he saw profound evidence that “realism” springs from “chance” and excels when it can make use of it.  Rivette changed course after interviewing Renoir for Jean Renoir la patron in 1966. Through Renoir and his work, Rivette saw unveiled, feat of majestic prestidigitation,  “a cinema which does not impose anything, where one tries to suggest things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue at every level, with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet, where the act of filming is part of the film itself.” 

Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)

6. In Duelle (1976) and Noroît (1976), the first two parts of an aborted trilogy on Celtic myth and ritual transplanted to Paris and Brittany respectively, Jacques Rivette wades way perilously out into the dodgy depths of magical rites, duels, “phantom goddesses” (of Sun and Moon), and the festival inter-realm interval of the quarantaine [annual period where phantom goddesses freely walk the earth and interact with mortals]. The 2003 masterpiece Histoire de Marie et Julien actually had its original genesis as a component of the mid-seventies quarantaine cycle, but Rivette, hospitalized for nervous exhaustion, had to abort pre-production for the third one and rest up per doctor's orders. That the film that finally emerged in 2003 deals with a revenante [spirit doomed to return] played by Emmanuelle Béart, who recites the geis, a magical incantation derived from druidism, and performs the geste interdit [gesture of prohibition], may cause one to muse that sinister occult forces may have interceded somewhere along the line and that this wily Jacques Rivette gentleman may well be truly malign. A truly Rivettian supposition, at any rate!

7. Paris is the eternal face of the supine Sphinx. I think she needs a lice treatment. Sadness is appeased and serenity restored.

 

Royal Trux, "Call Out the Lions"