Hecate: Photoportrait

Little Blue House on the Prairie 

 

Tyvek, "Origin of What"

Catfish Dudes and Doggone Bros: An Appreciation

It’s impossible to predict the fate of my film; people go to the movies to forget about themselves, and a sunset leans exactly in the opposite direction, it’s the moment when, perhaps, we see ourselves a little more naked, that happens to me in any case, and it’s painful and useful; maybe others can make use of it too, you never know.

- Julio Cortázar, A Certain Lucas

Five Star Final (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931)

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

Crime Wave (André De Toth, 1953)

Private Property (Leslie Stevens, 1960)

Fail Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964)

In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks, 1967)

The Pick-Up (Lee Frost, 1968)

Shadows and Fog (Woody Allen, 1991)

Discount Family Bundle Pack

Tortoise, "Djed"

Baby Beluga 

Dawn freshens. Her climb is done.

Down towards Glasgow she descends,

Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes,

Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces

Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.

All Scotland waits for her:

In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs,

Men long for news. 

- W. H. Auden, "Night Mail" 

Operator's Manual

A Fold-Up Sophia was the blockbuster supreme between June and July of 1983. To make use of the Sophia it is advised you back up fast like a horse to win perspective, letting dark clouds gather ominously over your intended, and then deflect or disperse the rebar coming at you, drunk on that damned Slivovitz and not sure what’s happening. Did we sign up for this? I don’t believe so. Or maybe it was a matter of legalistic jargon having been employed to hoodwink us. The Fold-Up Sophia in the billiard room heaves a great air pocket sigh and the floorboards groan like lecherous old crones. To the hacienda, Banquo! Do you have any more Percocets?! It’s said that when a Fold-Up Sophia goes berserk in your yard it’d be up to you to disperse the crowds and have Sophia removed before random sections of that crowd are mowed down. I tangle and shake my measuring tape in defiance of all unwanted ordinance and it can safely be said that I usually give an above average performance. Travesty is as vital to me as salt and, yes, that plainly is a sort of religious thinking. I kindly beg your pardon.

 

The Triple Echo (Michael Apted, 1972)

The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978)

Vain but Not Shallow and Narcissus is Just a Greek Person

Buzzcocks, "Operators Manuel"

What Was Once All Threaded Together is No Longer So

Roma (Federico Fellini, 1972)

The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Cohen, 1998)

When I first got sober they told me I’d have to start working on my defects of character and that was easy because they were glaring. This work is aided by persistently reminding yourself, like the voice of a little bird perched on your own shoulder, that you are powerless over people, places, and things not engineered to satisfy your needs, however modest. Most who believe steadfastly in domination and control have no power or control. They have a control problem like the recidivist drunkard has a drink problem, though it is also true of course that what the drunkard really wants is to control how he feels…before ultimately becoming controlled  by the bottle. Control uproots and finds no intelligible network or system. We cannot speak or spell and it’s why we’re going to hell. We failed to grab the baton and make a material futurity sufficient to frame our destiny as material reality. Not only are we powerless over people, places, and things, very often we are completely powerless also over our first reaction to something surprising or unexpected, but, with that being said, as the seconds continue to count down and everybody’s sort of standing there uncomfortably, you really do have to get your vessel stable pronto and yourself situationally reoriented such that the error or errors can be honoured with the proper (spiritual) interest. Other alcoholics do this work and I get along pretty good with most of them. We are testy and irritable as a rule, as you notice in big, loud colour if you ever attend an Alcoholics Anonymous convention. I know that a guy who runs his mouth can sink the whole fleet and I’m working on that but not perhaps all that successfully. I am scared only at this point of being buried alive or entombed by the lechery, populist authoritarianism, and willful ignorance all around me. I shouldn’t take it personally, though, because who the fuck am I in the greater scheme of things? Well, some of the winos call me Dirty Jake and I like that very much. That's actual righteous status. In the war of needs and wants there shall remain very little compassion and even less sense. Those who get defensive immediately are almost certainly never going to reorient, though I guess there are surprises. I run my life like a delinquent military operation and always have. It’s situational, scattershot, improvisatory, and fuelled in large part by the collection of actionable intelligence. I make sloppy mistakes and astonishing discoveries and that’s how it goes. As China Miéville observes in October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, the big powerful men in wars and revolutions very often find themselves in a cramped room with an excessive number of colleagues for weeks at a time with absolutely nothing happening. Even though that's a blatant index of an industrialized warfare mentality from which nobody will ever gain, I can see clearly that I need to work on battening down the hatchets...and probably swing a tad Bolshevik as well. Why not? Forever perched up in the cliffs and ready to throw down with the harbinger cry of the early morning owl.

The Dead (John Huston, 1987)

The Young One and Martha

Eroticism is a diabolic pleasure that is related to death and rotting flesh.

- Luis Buñuel

I detest the idea that love between two persons can lead to salvation. All my life I have fought against this oppressive type of relationship. Instead, I believe in searching for a kind of love that somehow involves all of humanity.

- Rainer Werner Fassbinder

The Young One (Luis Buñuel, 1960)

Martha (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974)

A theme often implicit in Buñuel becomes overt in Fassbinder, for whom it is the principle consideration of all his major work (as a queer artist with a big public profile and also just as a particular individual person): the power politics of human relationships obey no hard and fast rules, and no matter what your sexuation/gender or race/ethnicity, you will find people for yourself to oppress and you will likewise find people eager to hurt, belittle, and diminish you, sometimes almost as though they are doing these things out of custom and decorum. If you watch Martha with special attention to details of actorly business, it can very quickly begin to seem like Margit Carstensen's Martha is unconsciously courting abuse from Karlheinz Böhm's Helmut, who may actually believe that he is supplying her with the kind of love she requires.      

See you at the top, gumdrop.

- Bernie Hamilton in The Young One

Philippe Garrel Redux

If 'proceeding toward the external is nothing but a fabrication,' one can only stop here and erode it from within. I learned that from Philippe Garrel.

- Jean-Luc Godard

In films, what is important is the point where the film no longer has an auteur, where it has no more actors, no more story even, no more subject, nothing but the film itself speaking and saying something that can’t be translated: the point where it becomes the discourse of someone or something else, which cannot be said, precisely because it is beyond expression.

- Jacques Rivette

Les hautes solitudes (Phillipe Garrel, 1974)

Liberté, la nuit (Philippe Garrel, 1984)

Les baisers de secours (Philippe Garrel, 1989)

I went to the sit-in

And there was nobody there

But there I alas sat

And as I sat I began to see that

The tide pulls out 

The rubbish along with;

Dear darling inkling of an inchworm

Soon it shall be my bless'd turn.

Merely because it is our duty to adhere to the governing protocols and precautions which are what they are and is what they is, upon admission we did politely ask the little black bat (seen in the photograph directly above)—chipper and cooperative, it must be said—if he has or has come into contact with anyone, ahem, who has or might have the emergent novel coronavirus that's got folks freaked out, at which point the bat became even more animated, shouting declaratively that he never drinks Mexican beer and that he cannot stand that stuff.

10th Ave SW

La cicatrice intérieure (Phillipe Garrel, 1972)

Nico, "Janitor of Lunacy"

   

Everything is Trending Excellent: Personal Sunday Playlist [Philosophizing with a Hammer]

You call him Friedrich Nietzsche. I call him Jolly St. Nitch. We are not the same.

 

The Creation, "If I Stay Too Long"