A Few Sacrilegious Words

The ethically elected ego is both already obligated and never sufficiently obligated, and such is the very structure of time.

- Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other

The social world human beings think they know is set up and maintained by connivance, manipulation, and craven self-seeking. The mad are not bad because they are bad or because they are mad, but rather because there is no easeful entering into communion with highly abnormal people and so they may tend to get on the commoner’s nerves. “My temperament was not much suited to socialization,” confesses trans artist and writer Paul B. Preciado in their book Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, finding succour and filiation instead in books like those written by “Giordano Bruno or Galileo” that “put an end to geocentrism.” For Preciado the next horizon of sacred upheaval is the logical, heteronormative binary apparatus which saturates mainstream culture and psychoanalysis both; it also seems to make all kinds of decent everyday people impatient and hostile, often out of the blue, the words out of their mouths an oil slick of ick. When I started smoking cannabis as a young man I remember that that particularly amiable and agreeable psychoactive-psychedelic plant suddenly gave me the belief that I could explain myself clearly and as simply as possible instead of becoming hostile, belligerent, and reactionary. This method has worked in fits and starts and largely depends on set, setting, and sufficient cooperation from man, beast, and utmost higher power. Our problem is that communication is dead and it’s us who put it coldly to bed. That the dying thing is forever going to die while looking death in the eye and calling it all a crackpot conspiratorial lie. Why do people want to live forever? Inertia and dumb hope. A Hungarian philosophy professor I had back in the Carleton days would regularly remind us of Deleuze’s assertion that the only question the philosophical supplicant really needs to find a way to answer is what can I hope for? It’s true, but only if you are a bourgeoisie and only if you aren’t flung out of society for reasons that have never been properly explained to you. In the near future all of us are going to have to start acting a lot more like Japan has done after the total collapse of its economy, slow and ugly, throughout the 1990s. A few years ago I chatted at dinner with a business executive in the oil and natural gas sector, though energy diversification is the full-on mandate now, who had just returned from Japan and told me that he honestly thinks Western business interests need to look at Japan as the only salient model out there for zero-growth economic sustainability. (He didn’t say anything about the birthrate concerns.) I accepted this as exciting, even emboldening news. And I definitely hadn’t been expecting it. People surprise you.

Hopper

Dean

Though he was married five times and probably had lots of experiences none of us could even fathom, it seems to me that the person for whom actor, art collector, photographer, and filmmaker Dennis Hopper most pined was his friend James Dean, the meteoric movie star who died young in an automobile wreck which was something the rock musicians were doing a lot back then but not so much the movie people (R.I.P. Jayne Mansfield). From Dean’s death in 1955 to his own in 2010, Hopper spent a lot of time talking in interviews about Dean and their sordid goings-on. They ran with a crew, and there isn’t any doubt they were thugs every bit as much as they were actors/artists. I remember one interview where Hopper chuckles about how reckless and insane Dean’s Nietzsche phase became. There are implications of bisexuality and bondage play. I’m not sure James Dean figures here at all, but in a couple of interviews with Dennis Hopper I have heard him reminisce upon the discovery and influence of Saint Thomas—A.K.A. ‘Doubting’ Thomas—and especially of two core precepts: never tell a falsehood and never do anything you don’t want to do. If Dennis Hopper can live to seventy-four on that shit, saltines, and filtered water then you can too.

Pierre Guyotat

A core part of the legend of the queer French writer Pierre Guyotat, who died in 2020, is the beat-sheet or branlante, short pornographic writings Guyotat composed as a teenager in order to get himself off. Here we have yet another great instance where I have walked the same path as a great literary lion operating at the most refined frequency of existence even before I’d so much as heard of the piker. This will explain for some the title of the opening track off my album Yevgenia. You may not be surprised to hear that my beat-sheets tended at least a little toward sadism, gothic dungeons, and torn bodices, slashers with black gloves. I never wanted to do any harm to anybody but my heart craved dirty, salacious, freeform fun. Nothing causes me nearly so much displeasure and concern as the pain of a creature whose pain is immediate and the swell of which short-circuits my hardware and takes me out at the knees. The swoon of romantic love has nothing on the swoon of violence and premeditated terror. I had the advantage of seeing some very awful things when I was younger such that I, Self-Will-Run-Riot (the only teacher I’m taking on is me), crossed a whole bunch of things off the list early and never even had to try them. Beyond the zone of interest is the refugee camp you never thought you’d need. One of the last major works Pierre Guyotat completed before his death, Idiocy, brought to North America by New York Review Books last year, is an autofiction recounting the period of time Guyotat spent in Algeria with the military when he was still very young and inexperienced. A grim, absurdist fable with no small amount of dry deadpan humour: labelled a dissident shortly after arriving in Algeria, Guyotat was placed in prison soon thereafter, where he’d spend the bulk of his compulsory service. “I, who have dreamed since puberty of brothels overflowing with the seed of melancholy captive adolescents, of the adult patrons who delight in it,” muses the Pierre Guyotat of Idiocy, “and of the male-on-male couplings their seed excites and lubricates? Nothing, as of yet, and nothing for a long time still: at most, a few sacrilegious words, whose mere utterance to myself annuls their organic reality." 

Le corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

Late Winter

It’s a wintry day

I sit on a horse, frozen,

along with my shadow.

- Matsuo Bashō

Hazy Transmission from Southeast Calgary

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The Kinks, "I'll Remember"

Two Photos and Some Mississippi Delta Blues

 

Downtown Calgary 

at about 13:00 

on the First of April, 2026

Today I did some retail therapy

bought a new, perfectly simple but stylish/attractive ensemble

although the pants feel a bit like being inside a circus tent;

I think I look maybe a little like a combination of

Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love (2000)

and Ben Gazzara in Saint Jack (1979)

Charlie Patton, "Shake It and Break It"

No, fam, it ain't just your steam-powered imagination(s)

this 1929 platter by the great guitar-swallowing delta master

consists of Patton bragging for the entire duration of the song

about the strength and durability of his member 

Rock and Roll Bulletin

 

Today I was so happy and touched to receive the new, gorgeous reissue of the 1994 Versus album The Stars Are Insane from Teen Beat that I wept briefly and then performed a tobacco ceremony.  

Versus, The Stars Are Insane (Full Album)

Barbara Loden and Wanda

 

Wanda (Barbara Loden, 1970)

Barbara Loden promoting Wanda on The Dick Cavett Show (1971)

Wanda, the lone feature film starring and directed by New York stage actress Barbara Loden who was famous for being married to Elia Kazan but was herself a radiant source of pure golden light, was released in 1970 and somehow created a ripple in the fabric of space-time the implications of which are not yet at all clear. I had a friend a few decades my senior who originated from the Bronx and he once told me that when Loden starred in the Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall in 1964 nearly the whole city of New York was astonished and agog. Nobody had ever had what she appeared to have, whatever the blazes it was. Barbara Loden has impassively produced some acolytes whose devotion is like that of the great monumentalists of past centuries and of other cultures (their legacy nowhere more firmly established in modernity than in the cumulative cinematic-hermeneutic complexitive monument of Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi, whom none are likely to surpass). French writer Nathalie Léger has crafted a fine and fascinating document about potentially fatal arts and culture obsessions with her cult book Suite for Barbara Loden. The author is on a grand mission but any personal growth she undergoes is conducted in baby steps, micromillimeters. “What is it that attracts me so to Wanada?” poses Léger, before proceeding as one would were one so-to-speak flexing: “I have never been homeless, I have never abandoned my children, I have never given over my existence or even my financial affairs to any man, I don’t think I have ever entrusted even the most banal area of my life to anyone.” People with high standards seem always to be disproportionately blind to the personal side of their personal conundrums (and I myself stand guilty as charged, lest there be doubt). I know why I love the character Wanada much more and with greater burning intensity than I could ever love the actress and director Barbara Loden, who would doubtlessly leave me speechless in an encounter, and not only because she’s long dead. The reason for this is that using methods not entirely clear on the face of it, Wanada emerges for me as a close personal friend or member of the extended family. My favourite thing about the motion picture Wanda is for sure the character Wanda. I grin wide at her on my widescreen television as she makes her messy hair do funny stuff when she swings her neck and her eye(s). Loden was a sophisticated fellow traveler of the New York underground and avant-garde circles. She studied the ‘method’ with the best teachers then plying that trade—it’s why we suspect that Loden is just as much Wanda at the craft services table or when laying her head down on the pillow at night as when the camera is rolling and the magic has to happen—but she also learned all D.A. Pennebaker had to teach about light and cheap 16mm equipment and guerrilla shooting methodologies. Shot primarily in the bleakest blue-grey pockets of industrial Pennsylvania on newsreel-grade film stock, is it any wonder that Wanda feels like the only film ever made in which a performer-director has deprogrammed themselves in order to become a pure and elemental alternative self and then gone and made a fly-on-the-wall documentary about that person? Of the weirdly adorable and often energetic Wanda and the ease with which she merges with or signs immediate binding contracts with choices so bad most of us probably haven’t previously considered that such choices might even present themselves to a person in the natural course of things; this hellbent and thoroughly confused friend named Wanda who I met at the movies somehow reminds me of the often divinely surgical Hélène Cixous and her mythopoetic synopsis of Cervantes and Don Quixote in Death Shall Be Dethroned: “one sleepwalks through one’s life right to the day one wakes up dead.” When in grave doubt regarding things once taken for granted it is best to shut up and listen, whether you are at church or at home doing dishes...and contemplating the hum of the furnace... 

Black Lips, "Get It on Time" (Official Music Video)

Jelly Bean Dream Team Physical Media Roundup and Derby

I never wanted to be a film critic because it is a crass gig for the most part where arrogant poltroons say thumbs up or down to what the anonymous everyman ought(n’t) to spend his money on a ticket to go see this forthcoming weekend. I don’t have anything whatsoever invested in what movies anybody goes to see. I was angry, bitter, and misanthropic by the age of five; I think we can safely conclude that that ship has properly and definitively sailed. I grew over time to quite dislike notable/notorious Chicago-based film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, but on a couple occasions I have read him argue that the main job of a film critic is to give readers useful information they probably don’t have yet and that is a perspective I very much share. Thus and thusly, I am coming at you in this middling late-morning hour to drop hot intel on some choice cinema-related physical media objects of recent vintage and the very highest quality.

I have recently become a fan and collector of small boutique Blu-ray label Deaf Crocodile who specialize in films from Eastern Europe including collections of Soviet-era Russian animation and a sublime Soviet-era Russian western called White Sun of the Desert (Vladimir Motyl, 1969), which was a massive hit throughout the Soviet sphere of influence. The absolute treasure from among the standing Deaf Crocodile roster, however, is their gorgeous three-disk box of films by super obscure Finnish filmmaker Teuvo Tulio, a director who routinely combines deep, excoriating melodrama and a heightened pictorialism that in 1973’s rapturous Sensuela extends to work with primary colours that might even make the great Doug Sirk’s jaw drop, if only perhaps for a moment. Tulio is the traditional Scandinavian with respect to his frankness concerning the body and sexuality. The early films from the 1940s have some light playful nudity redolent of Harriet Andersson running around the beach in the buff for Ingmar Bergman in 1953’s Summer with Monica. I suspect a massive majority of people don’t know it anymore, but it may be helpful to have oneself reminded that the Swedes, in an age before the ubiquity of porn, actually singlehandedly produced a global market for soft-core erotic movies. You won’t really be surprised by that fact when you see Sensuela, which is less titillating than it is outright eye-popping. The provenance of blue movies may no longer seem so hazy or opaque. Sex frankness is public hygiene. Freud said so and so do the people and the landscapes of Finland…don’t ask me to explain it, it’s complicated. One person to whom Teuvo Tulio is in no way obscure is contemporary deadpan Finish formalist Aki Kaurismäki, who has long hailed his predecessor as the great master. To get a sense of what Tulio’s work is and what it does it might be helpful to think of the above-established masters Douglas Sirk and Aki Kaurismäki…and then add just a touch of Canada’s Guy Maddin…for the purple prose and green fogs, aye? 

It remains a bit of a challenge for me to comprehend, but somehow back in the early ‘00s my girlfriend Corinne had seen a few Takashi Miike films before I had seen even one such film. In part, Miike’s breakthrough with Western audiences and markets was hastened along by the extremely strong response a small package of his features elicited at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1999, that year’s infamous Audition included. A Pan-Asian film festival in Calgary screened Dead or Alive (also '99) at the Uptown Stage and Screen and even though she’d already seen it Corinne and I checked it out together. My immediate response to the film was that it was probably the most exciting and playfully transgressive genre movie I had ever seen and that it definitely had the best ending ever conceived for a Japanese yakuza movie. I remember asking Corinne why nobody else can make movies like that. As a frenetically active director, Miike takes on everything, working on children’s movies, popular manga adaptations, and shocking transgressive provocations (my highest recommendation extends to 2001’s Visitor Q). A polymath director is usually a puzzle player and a problem solver and Miike strikes me as an artist operating parallel to an arch modernist the likes of Georges Perec. 2001’s Agitator, a variegated yakuza epic recently released on Blu-ray  from Radiance (where this already long film is joined by an extended version split into two parts), is guerrilla cinema in the strictest sense because, as Miike points out in a recent interview, no official permits were obtained for any exterior shooting. Miike makes his movie encyclopedic by approaching each scene/sequence in terms of the logic, problematics, and formal considerations of the specific scene or sequence in question. How do you crowd as much of the world as you can into a scene? From a formal standpoint, the main concern is how does everything bind and cohere when it’s this radically elastic? I think what we will tend to find is—as in the films of Alain Resnais and Raúl Ruiz—that the roots and tubers running beneath us and throughout us, per Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, are in fact not a red thread but rather the labyrinth we ourselves run as long as it’s got us hooked and at its mercy.

Sensuela (Teuvo Tulio, 1973) 

Agitator (Takashi Miike, 2001) 

Young MC, "Know How"

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 on 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 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, a sequence much more improvised than it ever should have been allowed to be, was terrified and did not think there was anybody she could turn to, Bertolucci included. 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.