Navigable Space

 

Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, 1977)

Level Five (Chris Marker, 1997)

Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine, 2023)

Nobody rocks the cock like Cyndi Pinziki!

- Nora Dunn in Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006)

Crystallizing gradually into a human thing, stumbling like a bull in a china shop through the Anthropocene, we were first of all errant sense-perception inadvertently let loose on solid rock in tennis shoes and bright white socks. Early man is reported to have had consistent difficulty determining if something was moving toward him or he toward it. The big breakthrough in Analytical Philosophy is we're all playing war games as soon as we're able to imagine what's around the corner (and probably enraged).

If you start to think about it, immersive 3D virtual reality simulators are far less virtual than your own diaphanous consciousness, locked up somewhere tight and to detection impervious. My phenomenological method is: I don't know what that thing is, give me a minute. There are for sure going to be new topographies to navigate and we do not yet know the language for them. Thebes. Bathing in the blood of the lamb.  

From the standpoint of psychology and neuroscience, navigable space relates to the creature's mental representation of the environment while moving through it, wayfinding and locomotion. In relation to video games, navigable space relates to increasingly complex navigable topographies that are frequently non-Euclidean. Spinoza said that we do not yet know of what a body is capable and I would be inclined to argue that the same could be said for the fanciful places we might sequester that body. There is no hell and damnation for bodies. There are only the worms. And the teeming talkative flies of Maurice Blanchot's The Most High.  

Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018)

Jason Philip Wierzba, The Navigable Space EP

  

Twelve Facts About the Ailing Author

 

1. I am the rabbit.

2. If you are not friendly or kind to me or others in the vicinity it is probable I will lash out at you and I'm aware that's somewhat paradoxical.

3. The male actors I always related to most as a young man were Edward G. Robinson and Warren Oates, which even I know is extremely weird.

4. It is true that at about thirteen or fourteen I was starting goaltender for the team that won the Alberta Hockey Provincial Championship...in the bottom division. Did you know that in hockey the starting goaltender is roughly equivalent to the starting quarterback in American football? The first rule of goaltending is: keep your eye on the movement of the players in relation to the puck. When you start to look at the rest of the lifeworld that way you begin to see people for the dung beetles they truly are.

5. I must have some relatively mild variant of pica because as a kid I loved eating dirt, sand, and grass, enjoying frequently also the pleasures of a good sucking rock, like Beckett's Molloy in his exaggerated frenzy of directionlessness. When I started to get a little older I became much more likely to cut to the quick and just cut myself.

6. The best concert I ever attended was Charlie Haden's Quartet West at Calgary's Knox United Church back in the days when I was good and fucked up every damn day on the beleaguered calendar, though that did not serve in this instance to undermine my recollection. It was a divine performance and the acoustics were extrasensory. They did a super long version of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" and I cried through most of it.          

7. I've been telling friends and gas station attendants that Quentin Tarantino's final film as a director of feature length theatrical movies should be about sex-workers in the Old West. His McCabe & Mrs. Miller, if you will. 

8. My highly innovative approach to guitar means that all-too-regularly douchebags insist I'm inept. Buddy, it takes supernatural groundedness and much study to hit it this inept. When Thomas Merton was asked what he learned from Buddhism, he replied: "How to be a better Christian." 

9. Gary Snyder has always been my favourite among the hallowed "Beat poets." The critic Richard Tillinghast wrote that Snyder possesses “a command of geology, anthropology and evolutionary biology unmatched among contemporary poets.” Exactly!

10. What I am right now today in my basement most excited about is Radiance's recent super sexy twin releases of Blu-rays for Luchino Visconti's Le notti bianche (1957) and Robert Bresson's Une femme douce (1969). Perfect for the ever-lurking Dostoevsky stan in your life.

11. I love Jennifer Jason Leigh a lot and believe her to be one of the very finest screen actresses of all time, along with the likes of Greta Garbo and Simone Signoret, but I'll confess I got a little cross with her when on a accompanying special feature for a Blu-ray of the great and inexhaustible Miami Blues (1990), Leigh, female lead, asserts that the film in question was the director George Armitage's debut in that capacity. Actually, he had already directed four low-budget features by that point. Yowza.

12. I was thirteen when I first got good and drunk. We were in the country and I was hanging out with some sixteen-year-old boys who had drivers' licences. One of the boys called the little general store in Priddis and said he was sending his son to grab some alcoholic spirits and would she please accommodate, after which another boy was dispatched to go grab the haul. We drank it down with panache. Shortly thereafter, the older boys started getting sick and throwing up while I went rifling inquisitively through my friend's parents' liquor cabinet. Following the underwhelming climax of our hella sloppy revelries, I returned home and quietly watched a little bit of Saturday Night Live...with my parents.   

Edward G. Robinson in The Whole Town's Talking (John Ford, 1935)

Warren Oates in Cockfighter (Monte Hellman, 1974)

    

  

At Rest, 2026

I think a person making a film should try not to control what it says, except on the level of dramatic pleasure. One should let things happen, through a kind of “écriture automatique.” A film is like a plant—you have to let it grow by itself, you have to respect that kind of biological rhythm.

- Alain Resnais

I had gone as far as Pennsylvania and Virginia to pitch my crazy dream. Yes, some people actually looked at me like that, a crazed artist with a lofty dream. A number of times, people would be whispering in giggles as I did video presentations in their homes or offices. Some even treated me like a beggar, giving me pocket money so that I would not bother them again. That was when I met Paul Tañedo, a Filipino photography artist in Alexandria, Virginia. He liked what he saw in the 16mm black and white footage and committed to support it. It was a simple talk over coffee very early in the morning. What hooked him were the black and white shots. Beautiful. Nothing beats 16mm black and white stock 7222. The grains and depths are fiercely powerful.

- Lav Diaz

Gambling, Gods and LSD (Peter Mettler, 2002)

Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2008)

The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz, 2016)

Wierzba's Subterranean Calgary Screening Room

Bill Fay, "Who is the Sender?"

A Few Words on Substance Use Disorders

Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

The Blackout (Abel Ferrara, 1997)

Dear, Sir;

It is not uncommon even to this day that people will confront the addict-alcoholic with the accusation that addiction is a choice, sympathy therefore scarce. This misconception is based on a colossal error, although one does of course need to concede that the alcoholic does make a conscious choice of a kind every single time they pick up a drink or head out to score. Alas, this picture is starting to become indefensibly reduced (here's to you, silent majority). For first comes habit in due course and then comes toxic custom forcing body and mind into steep and nauseating decline, the whole central nervous system compromised by lies, distortion, and bad information. The two main symptoms of alcohol use disorders are mental obsession and physical craving...all of it leading inexorably to systems crash, pop-goes-the-weasel. When folks come to me with regard to a friend or family member whose drinking concerns them, I often recommend they ask the loved one what their first experience of getting drunk was like. For an astonishingly large number of alcoholics, myself included, the first time we got drunk was also the first time we ever felt 'okay in our own skin.' It is the position of myself and other care-motivated souls in the field that it is abominably evil to demonize those poor and broken souls constitutionally unable the escape the only thing that ever made them feel okay.          

 

Fun Signage [Sheldon Chumir]

 

Willie Dunn Vs. T.S. Eliot

The Duchess Ate Graham Crackers

When we were in Borneo climbing Mount Kinabalu, I sharply recall the duchess complaining that she'd been taught that vodka was all but odourless, which was plain fact up to a point, but when you were good and saturated in the stuff the truth was you couldn't help but reek potently and to the notice of all in range. You could argue that the three things the duchess loved most were cats, Japanese 'pinku' movies, and bottomless martinis, gin or vodka-based (per the daily vicissitudes of mood and fancy). When the great cocksman Koshimi of Azerbaijan lay just that one brief night with the duchess it is said that, as he looked down upon her on the bed he saw a look of challenge and reprisal so severe and scorching that he does not wish to ever summon it to mind again, may God and the angels stand proud and erect in their duck boots humming George Gershwin. When his friend Bruno Sanntario asks him what happened after satisfactory consummation of the copulation and discomfiting brinksmanship, Koshimi of Azerbaijan is quoted as saying: "The duchess ate graham crackers."

The duchess sat by the well in gentle mediation 

for aeons and aeons....

Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1989)

Happy Here and Now (Michael Almereyda, 2002)

24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami, 2017)

Seven Collages with Introduction

 A mask traversed the air, causing people of multiple and complex lives to disappear, and took human form at a café terrace. The silhouette of a man appeared in profile; so, simultaneously, did thousands. There really were thousands.

-Raymond Queneau, Witch Grass

It is the position of Gilles Deleuze in his profoundly useful Proust and Signs that "all signs converge upon art" and "all apprenticeships, by the most diverse paths, are already unconscious apprenticeships to art itself." Listen to Susan Sontag and learn to surf and skate the incoming incomprehensible array of finicky signs without succumbing to the delirium of interpretation. You're probably leaning psychotic if you think you can read the signs with any regularity. The artist moves and gathers and ideally the artist moves and gathers in fraternal accord with the opaque and inscrutable order of signs, which pop up out of the material world to conduct explicitly metaphysical business. For Jacques Lacan, mob boss of psychoanalysis, metaphor and metonymy create meaning by running into their own epistemological limit and the endless displacement of desire, and before that's what art already is, it's what a creature negotiating the surface of the earth always already was. I have provided seven new collages below as though I were a wee fortune cookie with nary a care in this badly had world, and I have dotingly named each collage as though it were a child. I promise that if you come after me with daffy interpretations you're going to get yourself mostly lost (and no doubt in a bit of a funk). Originally I thought I might do ten collages in homage to Abbas Kiarostami's pathbreaking 2002 video masterpiece Ten, which I first saw back in the day at the Calgary International Film Festival and for which I harbour a great abiding passion. We might call the production values of Ten "deceptively low." Kiarostami sets up the filming of ten conversations between a harried, stressed-out female motorist (Mania Akbari) and a series of passengers, not least her petulant and bossy son, all of it covered with two video cameras mounted on the dash, one trained on the driver and the other on the passenger. Formal constraints and mathematical formal parameters are enough to get the art life kicking again to the tune of "what the exact fuck be thee?" I stopped the collages at number seven instead of at ten because it was obvious number seven was the last one.

I would like to close out in stridently declaring that the Iranian-Persian people are beautiful and heroic and that they love poetry very, very much...but their state is absolute trash...so the Iranian citizenry can use whatever help it can get...

Meltdown!

   

Put a Tiger in Your Tank!

Contributions from South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan 

That Bitch is Crazy

One or Several Wolves?

Hexen Hour

Australian Open

Triptych Arithmetic

 Was it possible that 2027 was a prime number? He turned on his computer and checked quickly: true enough, 2027 was a prime. That struck him as monstrous and unnatural, but in a way that abnormality was typical of prime numbers. The distribution of prime numbers had driven quite a few people mad throughout Western history. 

- Michel Houellebecq, Annihilation

Trois couleurs: Blanc (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994) and Iguana (Monte Hellman, 1988)

La maman et la putain (Jean Eustache, 1973) and La Frontière de l'aube (Philippe Garrel, 2008)

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) and Fruit of Paradise (Vera Chytilová, 1970)

Michael Nyman, "Time Lapse"

Top Ten Hip Hop Albums

 

Boogie Down Productions, By All Means Necessary

Common, Can I Borrow a Dollar?

Bobby Digital, Digi Snacks

Ol' Dirty Bastard, N***a Please

Kool Keith, Sex Style

Kendrick Lamar, Damn.

Run-D.M.C., King of Rock

Antipop Consortium, Tragic Epilogue

Yo Majesty, Futuristically Speaking...Never Be Afraid

Dr. Dre, The Chronic

"Buy Love" by Yo Majesty

Transcript Superball

 

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

For Alfred Hitchcock, nothing is too ridiculous or far-fetched so long as the audience is kept rolling along with the connivance and trickery, excited to see where they're going. Margaret concedes that she may sometimes pose a danger to others when she goes without her psychiatric medications. Margaret should take the medication even if not taking the medication might make for a more interesting story. The Babylonian Empire was taken over and resolutely thumped by the Persian Empire in 539BCE. Angolans have a strong ethnic and national identity that is nevertheless striated by Portuguese influences. Legendary cowboy actor John Wayne smoked between five and seven packs of cigarettes per day, and yet he forbade his own sons from smoking. Tippi Hedren, with whom Alfred Hitchcock was pathologically obsessed, was tortured during the production of The Birds, spending five days with live birds thrown at her and attached to her person with elastic bands. Hedren additionally accuses Hitchcock of making aggressive advances toward her in the back of a limousine, which I for one am prepared to accept as more than probable. Not only do her wit, verve, and improvisational skills save her own ass, Scheherazade manages also to restore the wayward heart of the King. When the get-up-and-go outruns the buckle-down-and-do, what's there ultimately to do except fervently hump your barbed wire Australian canoe after having called in sick with the flu? Jasper used to pay $5.00 a month rent on a cold water Brooklyn flat and was boffing Sally Kirkland who was doing a little innocent Off-Broadway nudity at the time and was therefore all the town was talking about, as it were. The Celtic goddess Abnoba reins over Greater Germany's mythological black forest. The Danube owes its name to a Celtic goddess of tempestuous maternity. The supreme German proto-Romantic, Friedrich Hölderlin: "Isn't everything alive already in your blood?" I tucked my beloved in between discreet sheets of museum-grade glass. My lover is a pressed flower and I the harbinger owl. In fighting every single person every step of the way, Victor Hugo, transformed from royalist to raging Republican, became a national hero and figure of the French Republic. When a camera slowly tracks across a group of people in Hitchcock you start to wonder how many sick and perverted malefactors are secretly concealed by the crowd in all its superficial innocuousness. My favourite snacks are raspberries and mango. I like my steak nice and pink. Shakespeare's plays were staged during a time when there were still public executions, and vendors sold snack foods at both the plays and the executions. Jasper loves the part in The Strawberry Blonde where James Cagney goes: "that's the kind of a hairpin I am!" Gladys says her elderly mother believes the main reason so many renegade Nazis went to Argentina was because they believed the gates of hell to be concealed somewhere remote in the South American jungle. My dentist tells me in a low tone that there is something mysterious about the earth's core. Why does it seem like he thinks we're conspiring? We ain't doing no such thing. The drill rattles around my head like shockwaves of metallic applause. As a moody teenager, there were days Arlene could not bring herself to eat anything more substantial than chips and salsa or a couple slices of processed cheese. Don't press the the red button on the Abundance box. If everyone had to do better or die what do you think the numbers might look like? Stephen Geoffreys, the cute and dorky Evil Ed in mainstream 1985 horror flick Fright Night, went on immediately from there to become a star of hardcore gay porn. Harold says the best way to edit is to slowly transcribe it all over again, perhaps moving it in so doing from one place to another. I was getting loud and mouthy with my mouth full of egg and Canadian bacon across from Archer at the Denny's on Macleod and Archer raised his hand and quoted his infernal Socrates at me: "The best, when corrupted, become the worst." Archer isn't wrong if not exactly right and I plan to get out of my own way sometime approximately this very night. For me it's out of the frying pan and into the fire...except for the fact that I'm also a greasy, shimmering turd. As a teenager I learned how to drive standard transmission from a dream. The filmmaker Robert Bresson, who I have at times had the chutzpah to call the greatest artist of all time, could evidently be a real creep in his own right and would not appear to have treated Anne Wiazemski all that much better than Hitchcock did Tippi Hedren, though it is true that he did not fasten live birds to anybody. I do not have what it takes to be a film director because my stress-management is unusually poor. All your movie needs is a girl and a gun and some stupidly-grinning mark in a ten-gallon hat to bankroll the fiasco. Polish-Jewish writer and visual artist Bruno Schulz, migrant of somnolence, was shot dead in the streets by an S.S. officer who knew Schulz personally and was motivated at least in part by jealousy. For absence of miracles we go on producing our crude and clumsy monstrosities of division.  

   

           

   

Calgarians

 

A few years back a friend and I, both residents of the city of Calgary, went to Chicago to give the town a proper once over and check out a bunch of live music in a number of historic or quasi-historic venues. I can assure readers that the citizenry of Musicland Chic-a-go-go can be relied upon to provide the very best advise respective of good places to eat windy city treats. Frankly, my friend and I dined like potentates. When one Chicago musician heard me use the word "Calgarians," he said it sounded like some ferocious tribe from the series Game of Thrones. The next night my friend and I checked out some black metal at the Empty Bottle and at some point an oddly leering man in a black suit came up to me and asked if I was enjoying my trip to Chicago, then, turning wistfully toward the stage, declaiming, but somehow cheerfully: "I hate this music!" Momentarily perplexed, I quickly deduced that the stranger, harmless and even amiable, was a follower of my friend and fellow Calgarian on this or that or however many social media (harvesters of) organs. Always remember, Mizzz 5th of November, that when you tell the whole world where you're going you increase the likelihood of being intercepted a hundredfold.

I went to the last show at the Black Lounge in the University of Calgary's MacEwan Hall, back for the summer, I believe, from my first year of undergraduate studies out East, and my girlfriend and I got so stoned it was ridiculous. We spent at least as much time tripping out in the racket ball courts as we did checking out the bands (including headliners Chixdiggit). On the way home from the show, I became disoriented in a construction zone and found myself facing oncoming traffic on Sarcee such that I had no choice but to hit the ditch and get back to the correct side. Which I did just fine. It's the country in me. Nor was my girlfriend especially phased. This is the lass for whom I fell hard on the occasion of her having gotten out of my car at a red light to go and ask the man three cars ahead of us if she could have his cigar.

Calgary was a sensible place to build a fledgling city for the not-uncommon reason that two major rivers meet here. Those who pioneered this dicey in-between territory assured that their own progeny would themselves breed multitudes of crust and steam punks. Calgary does assuredly get mighty cold, but the overall dryness of its climate is no small mercy. Not to mention the warm mountain winds that take a bit of the sting out of winter. There are about 1.5 million Calgarians, but they cannot possibly be up to all that much or I'd have surely caught wind of it by now.

      

The Knack

 

El ángel exterminador (Luis Buñuel, 1962)

The Knack...and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965)

I told the ladies that it was not impossible to behold in the beloved both a new constellation in the heavens and a loser with no spine, all the brunt of it, and that I felt as though in the past year I had won an enormous battle over a vast kingdom only to attain for my troubles the right to die of exposure or dehydration under a terrible tangerine sky with the flesh slowly bubbling and gassing. Patricia was sitting right across from me and looked upon me with grave concern. She told me I should avoid getting myself isolated in remote places and advised me to be suspicious of Google Maps. Aida said also to never forget you are trapped in samsara, a learning hell meant to transform you into some much more satisfactory thing, not unlike the butterfly, newly suited for a better cosmic set-up. Reality is mystical, shimmering, and chimerical and it's chasing its own tail.

Rose is angry with the "big, bad bossy people." Cassie hates cruel and treacherous friends of the altogether false variety. Lorraine hates "stupid, noxious parasites." She is once purported to have stated outright that ethnic people smell funny because of the weird food they eat. She can't get away with that shit around here. Lol. She once bragged to me that she's better at deceit than I am. Go for it, girl. Heh heh. I'd rather have the free time and undisturbed slumber.

Aida now addresses the whole table. "When your government pitches some new 'stimulus' package as though infinite economic growth were a foreordained given, remember that in Latin 'stimulus' means a goad, prick, sting, spur, or incitement and that the plural, 'stimuli,' comes from a root related to sharp points. We are each of us born into brutal and insensate servitude." Jo agrees and extends her pint glass in salute, not forgetting to add that neither Casanova nor Lord Byron were attractive nor was either man even remotely competent as a lover, not that they failed to mount many, as legend dutifully tells. "History," she insists, "is written by the spoilage."

I told the ladies about a poem I wrote as a teenager in which there was this very lofty line about how I had set off to make love to every single person because nobody had taken the time to tell me I could not. Most of the ladies chuckled. I dated multiple people at a time until I was nineteen or twenty. I hit a wall or I hit burn-out or both. I only really needed one pretty pony with two or three tricks. Fattened on greed, the human animal pukes its own miserable, godforsaken guts out. Patricia got a little sullen and accused me of preferring to retreat from the field of battle altogether rather than potentially contribute to unnecessary or excessive carnage. Well, I mean, Christ on crutches, Patricia! Wtf? Where is it you've gone got yourself zoned? Jo, tipsy, proposes just then a toast:

"To Wayfaring—"