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.  

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"

 

Hate is a Strong Word

 

hate

Top Ten Novels of the 21st Century

Robert Coover, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut [2002]

Paul West, OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday [2000]

Alexander Theroux, Laura Warholic; or, The Sexual Intellectual [2007]

Péter Nádas, Parallel Stories [2005]

Javier Marías, The Infatuations [2011]

Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport [2019]

Vladimir Sorokin, Ice Trilogy [2006]

Thomas Berger, Best Friends [2003]

Anne F. Garréta, Not One Day [2002]

Yan Lianke, The Explosion Chronicles [2016]

Amor fati: Kabau

While I am not some unfeeling automaton and it does hurt to be shamed, ridiculed, and lambasted whenever I go off on adventures to your cities, nations, and provisional autonomous territories, or even when I merely venture out into my own terminally corrupted town with its clown car inferno of rubber-stamped octopus faces, I always nevertheless very much enjoy my ramblings and benign wayward information gathering schemes. Hurt and hate will not triumph so long as there is Daffy Duck, and you heard it here first, little gibbon. I am doing my thing and circumventing you and your crew because you are a colossal downer and the things I'm off after are as groovy as a dang phonograph record, dig? You know my favourite thing in the whole known cosmic canyon of human experience-qua-experience? Saying my bedtime prayer and then lying down and spreading out wide. I set out to do the mischief I set out to do because it's clearly going to be fun, though haters gonna hate, incorrigible and irate. I am doing my casual workaday thing and breaking time with my toys. It's my favourite job I ever had. When I return from these swashbuckling assignations on the other side of time's prismatic fold, not only do I not require a brief intermezzo of homebound R&R, but I feel revivified and ready to take on all comers, a poet's terrible tempest in my temples and a tantalizing tetrameter manning the nerve meter and rotating lower quarters. Consciousness, soul, spirit, and essence cannot be eaten by worms after we're kaput. We are insoluble in eternal dissolution the way rainwater is forever, within a margin of error.  Past a certain point all appearances are too porous to any longer countenance...let alone meaningfully consume. If you are eating appearances you are going to die. What it is at work frenzied and sordid in me is the good priest’s desperate, well-meaning-but-already-failing prayer not to leave the parishioners worse off than he found them. Don’t overthink it, buckeroo, ride your spiralling kayak upward unto God. If they give you an open casket spit right in their self-righteous eyes. What more is it you foul horde want of me, the perennial heel? I have endless anecdotes for all tastes, a mind that collates fun, tawdry, or revelatory facts with an alacrity none can match, and I possess additionally the crazy person’s much-mythologized zany and overwhelming magic in the field of lovemaking. 

The Red Light Bandit (Rogério Sganzerla, 1968)

 Ici et ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville, 1976)

Perceval le Gallois (Éric Rohmer, 1978)

Senyawa, "Kabau"

Red's on Fourth

Heavy Jennifer Herrema vibes at Red's Diner on 4th today! My mom took me for breakfast after my appointment with my psychiatric nurse Armando who is English and sort of reminiscent of one of the social workers or what have you in the early television films of Mike Leigh.

You know my girl in the New England Patriots bomber be reachin' for that hot sauce...

Royal Trux, "On My Mind"

Top Five Films from 2025 I've Seen in the First Four Months of 2026

 

Magellan (Lav Diaz)

Resurrection (Bi Gan)

Peter Hujar's Day (Ira Sachs)

Dracula (Radu Jude)

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

JPW

From Erlton Back Down to Mission

The necrotic pain in my feet that will most likely be with me the rest of my life, direct result of frostbite wounds, makes walking extremely painful and some days totally impossible altogether. Unfortunately, my fifteen-year-old German luxury sedan is also presently under the weather and incapacitated, such that if I planned on getting cigarettes today I was going to have to do it on foot, trekking from Erlton back down to Mission, limping in my Timberland boots and praying for God to strike me dead. It’s not that far a distance unless you’re in agony. Because it is warm out and smells like springtime, I popped by The Purple Perk and had my first iced Vietnamese coffee of the season. It was wonderful and I felt vindicated for walking through the pain and affirming both it and myself in so doing.

Butthole Surfers, "Goofy's Concern"

Turbo Boy: Zwieschlächtig

“Zwieschlächtig” is a German word designating a field of phenomena related to all phenomena in the field. It means communication goes in and comes out all at one and the same time, but also that semi-quantifiable information is spilling in and out at all times and from all angles (and maybe more than all). Master American essayist Fenton Johnson consciously, I think, acknowledges the brute mores of our moment when he confesses to his readers that it is perfectly feasible to call the great Impressionist Paul Cézanne “crazy” the way the local kids who once hurled rocks and abuses at him did, but that if we should be actually and actively seeking meaningful counsel it might make sense to pause and consider like the great solitary painter strolling “the psychology of the earth” with its “living, feeling, expressive self, made manifest in rivers and seas and mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes.” Maybe the Earth Creature becomes more and more like a thick sinewy heart pumping deep within the earth, perhaps even at its core, like in some ditzy old 1950s Technicolor sci-fi picture. We are collectively the Earth as a creature when the echolocation starts to go haywire. The Earth gets up on top of you like Robert Frost dreamed it would, but only after the Globe shuts down and drops with a loud, wet splat in the pig slop. After the Globe shuts down a weighted blanket awaits you, folded and laid out on the Phantom of the Opera’s side of the bed. You’re going to be okay. You are loved. There are always string instruments around and they’ve always been around more for the nerves and for ‘art therapy’ than they have been for anybody’s underlying sense of self, Wagner notwithstanding. In modifying my string instrument tunings ever so slightly I found hillbilly ragas waiting there for me like a natural spring. After I got COVID I spent some time with a physician friend at his retreat in the Rockies and we asked ourselves what it is to underly. Beneath us is simply the rot that makes it all possible...as the forest makes abundantly clear. We hacked this out spitballing and picking our respective axes next to a usually very-still lake. Some young friends came out and we made tapes. It all looks a bit like this: a canalization, directing flows across a physical topography that’s all blocked-up and/or used/abused but whose underside or flipside is the All Time 'Papa Don't Preach' Smooth Ride. Upon returning to Calgary, the ‘jimsonweed ragas’ I began making in earnest with my friends sought to canalize in, around, and through a city we almost completely could not outwardly navigate—the “surface streets” of Inherent Vice. All as it was and as it had to be, what should have been always having actually been during these highly vertiginous early 2020s, year of lockdown succeeded by whiplash like hellfire, but then of course also all the way back to the dawn of time it’s either love your fate or suffer it; all that slack rope is just your own squid-like intestines. You are responsible for cleaning up after yourself. As it was to be in the year of lockdown: we were to pass a raga shelter to shelter, helter skelter, in a manner that tech-wise could not have been done even five years earlier and I would joke with another good Doc entirely that we were the group of us building ourselves a particle accelerator in the city’s sewers.

Robyn, "Robotboy" 

 

Sleuthwerk: Videoskript

The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934)

Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)

When what you need is a mouth you go and find a mouth because a mouth knows a mouth’s work and knows it readily. It’s gross in there, puffy and moist and none of my business neither. The dentists went to great effort and expense to learn dentistry and open their own clinics so they obviously have some sort of mouth hang-up by which I have remained blissfully untouched over the whole of my life, both as a narcotics detective and then as a private dick specializing in divorce beefs and grey market hijinks, a complex planetary network connecting narcos to heads of state. I’m sorry. I know I led you astray mere moments ago. The truth is it’s really me who has the hang-up with mouths, all of them, sludgy words splashing out, septic odour, clumsy teeth, and the tongue like some Frank Herbert sand worm. I cringe and cower when I face my unconvincing smile in the mirror, toothbrush canted at a harsh upward angle, beard 45% grey, most of what was once me gradually melting away, a Spring thaw from which the mute gods gravely withdraw in cloaks and ornaments sent in by the Shah. Heh heh. As a detective I perfected seeing the misery and misfortunate in every effortful smile simply not up for the task of giving face, every missed giving-of-face like a beam of untempered truth transacted as unforced error. As my face thins and I age I start to feel like I ought to have been head of the C.I.A. I’d really have to be said to have aged into it. Sometimes when I look at strangers out and about in the course of daily life they see me and immediately check instinctually to see whether or not they are at that moment in the process of committing a visible offence. My son doesn’t talk to me anymore. He said I had a flair for standing in the door in such a fashion that he found himself unable to either remain in or leave the room. I love my son but I lack his language skills and competitive intensity and frankly he dances circles around me like Muhammad Ali when he’s being a bit of a prima donna, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Most people who I tried to love like I imagined you’d imagine loving the beloved, were not the right people just as I seldom am, although just good enough can be alright when you find some fetching North African textile worker with whom to spend one golden night…out of the reaches of informants and malingerers. I await the revolution with fervour and level steadiness. I was never a slave of the State Apparatus. I believe in a basic minimum income for all people, rapid transition to zero-growth economy, automation of as much of the labour force as humanly possible, Lol. I learned from studying the Old Testament that man’s destiny is crash and burn, spoils and consequences, mass mobilization and open graves. I don’t believe in Manichaeist binary hoodwink and I don’t like what it does to the groupthink. Play it as it lays on the window displays on every second page until the camera cuts away and you were only ever a rumour. I got into police work, law enforcement, and freelance sneakiness because I wanted to do the kind of work motivated by what daily life throws in our hapless faces. But if the beat cops goes looking for how it all went wrong you can bet he’s been whistling insidious nationalistic songs and deploying slurs in the so-called correction of wrongs. The meatheads will not inherit the earth, but geology will gradually burry them along with the rest of us. Today’s heavy metal poisoning is tomorrow’s newfangled gemstone. Once we lose consciousness totally they cram us in so tight together we become diamonds. On the streets of any major city I watch the parts that are order and the parts that are chaos coexist, for better or for worse and with wild swings in polarity forever upending the operational grid, the Hermeneutic Horizon. Let us even attempt to enumerate all the ticks and jerks and little mistakes we made today. Apperception is errant, it’s not your fault...

The closest simplified model the cosmos could resemble would be pure flux inside a translucent ball.

MONDO PROFONDO: SLEUTHWERK