Wenders, Ozu...

Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939)

Alice in the Cities (Wim Wenders, 1974)

In the both widely and deeply loved 1974 film Alice in the Cities, a modestly-scaled black and white transnational classic with big heart, star Rüdiger Vogler plays author, journalist, and grifter-sleuth Philip Winter for the first but not the last time in a film by Wim Wenders, Vogler’s collaborator and buddy. The film commences with the stumblebum German factotum lost on some vague and probably vaporized assignment in the United States, playing around with his then-brand-new, highly-novel—and most of all affordable—commercial grade Polaroid camera, but mostly really just slouching and registering checked-out, nary a sense of the direction in which to point his toes. About ten minutes into Alice in the Cities, Philip Winter falls asleep in an anonymous hotel bed, appearing almost as though to drift peacefully and passively in and out of consciousness as the sounds of the hotel cathode-ray television tube transmit scenes from John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln, including one in which Henry Fonda, starring as young Illinois lawyer Abe Lincoln, plays a more than serviceable mouth harp. The scene does a sublime job of capturing the nebulous zone you enter when you fall asleep while watching a movie or playing a record. We might also pause to consider this nocturnal television event later, two years later, when Vogler, playing Bruno Winter in Kings of the Road, declares: “The Yanks have colonized our Unconscious.” Insofar as concerns the scene in the hotel room and the benevolent appropriation of the John Ford material, one might assume that material was selected in advance so as to be a basic precondition of the scene and its requirements. Wenders is a big outspoken fan of Ford and of Young Mr. Lincoln in particular. Writer Peter Handke, another regular Wenders collaborator and brother in jukeboxes / movie houses, wrote a novel called Short Letter, Long Farewell, published two years before Alice in the Cities came out, in which John Ford and Young Mr. Lincoln both figure prominently. Well, not so fast, hold your horses. On the commentary track for Alice in Cities contained on the Criterion Blu-ray, Wenders says the scene was shot in New Jersey and that he looked in the TV Guide earlier that day to see what was playing later, because there were always lots of movies running on American TV, and Young Mr. Lincoln merely presented itself as the most appropriate of the available options.    

To underscore what a major film Young Mr. Lincoln was for that firebrand generation of militant cinephiles who formed the French Nouvelle Vague and its bustling rats-with-plastic-forks Arrière-garde, allow me to treat you to a scrumptious historical footnote, remembered at this point no doubt by none save perhaps academics with a specialization in the vicinity and yours truly, in ill health and in worse: 1972, two years before Alice in the Cities and the same year as Handke’s Short Letter, Long Farewell, the illustrious Cahiers du Cinéma, shortly to turn over to Serge Deny and actively swinging Maoist and Lacanian simultaneous-like, did an entire issue of the magazine on Ford’s 1939 legal beagle oater and its lanky lead, with every last faintly glimmering semiotic detail covered by at least three autonomous voices. 

Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

Ohayô (Yasujirō Ozu, 1959)

I loved going to film history lectures in university because my mind would be blown thirty times before I was so much as properly seated and de-scarved. I mean it with total earnestness and extremely good recollection when I assert that one of the film history stories I first heard as an undergraduate that completely blew my mind is that of the great Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu who started making silent movies and worked constantly into the early 1960s and who additionally claimed that after he saw Victor Fleming’s 1939 Hollywood übersmash Gone with the Wind while stationed with the military in Singapore it became clear to him that the Americans were going to defeat the Japanese in the war due to the sheer superiority of their production capabilities. What a thing to sit with! The impact of Ozu’s work on the sensibility and taste of Wim Wenders is no mystery, and of course Wenders' intimate 1985 archive-artifact Tokyo-ga is explicitly about how the departed giant Ozu becomes threaded through Classical Japan and Speculative-Futurist Japan too. Had it not been for the fact that Ozu was championed by Wenders, I would not have bought a copy of the VHS tape of 1959’s Ohayô at the A&B Sound downtown when I was in high school. It’s a famously adorable comedy, on the light end of things for the director who conceals no part of life's variegated seasons, containing an awful lot of flatulence and essentially telling the story of two boys who attempt to pressure and cajole their father into providing them with a television set. If Michelangelo Antonioni pushed to the limits what he was capable of doing and capable of withstanding in forcing the colour systems of complete landscapes to bow to his regime in just one film, 1964’s Red Desert, judicious elder Yasujirō Ozu produces a sleeve-full of superior colour conjurings in each one of his final colour pictures (with special distinction due Ohayô and ’62’s An Autumn Afternoon), the whole while taking an occasional break here and there to dash off and star in a whisky advertisement on a yacht. Clearly the most fun part of building half a city block on a big empty lot is painting it all up. When people tell me that their favourite Ozu is one of the earlier black and white movies I’m almost a little confounded somehow, as though my personal value were in dispute, even should their choice happen to be ’49’s mercurial Late Spring, which is a note-perfect motion picture on every single level. 

Out for a Slice of Beef & Mushroom

Dizzee Rascal, "Fix Up, Look Sharp"

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"

In Love is Care

 

Dinosaur bones, abundant here beneath us, were first discovered in my home province of Alberta, Canada in 1884 by a geologist named Joseph Burr Tyrrell, partial namesake of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller. What Tyrrell actually discovered on that happy accident of a dig was the skull of a large carnivorous dinosaur shortly to be named Albertosaurus. When I was a boy I would draw dinosaurs endlessly, in addition to hockey players and rock musicians. Though I am not a geologist like Joseph Burr Tyrrell, in the summer of 1998 I did work as a geological technician, which back then meant I spent lots of time at a funny little machine looking at geological logs, printing them out, splicing pages together at a kind of draughtsman’s board. My favourite parts about most paying jobs are the parts that involve gadgets and tech. 

CÉRÉMONIE D’AMOUR (Walerian Borowczyk, 1988)

Jacques Derrida can take the one word ‘aura’ and break it down to the exact right core elements: The oral, the aura, gold (or), hour (heure). In speaking about and then writing about his dear friend Hélène Cixous, like him a European Jew who spent her childhood and early adolescence in North Africa—or perhaps we should say French colonial North Africa—Derrida finds himself placing Cixous, over and over, on the side of life, mystical array, and endless poetic resurrections. We know that head-down sleek and speedy Jacques Derrida is himself death’s bagman, just as he himself knows it, never out of audible range of the clocks that count down tick tick tick until it’s your precise turn to lay down and take it, however bad it is. From Derrida’s point of view, the philosopher has to worry about this stuff and find some sense in it or who else is gonna? “These are lives of power, at great depths,” writes Hélène Cixous already ahead of the curve, "unsubjected to the clock.” Here is Derrida in H.C. for Life: That is to Say…, his book on his supremely distinguished friend Hélène: "What happens then, as far as belief and the impossible are concerned, when the song of the enchanting chant [chant de l’enchant] can no longer be dissociated from the whole body of words and from what still presents itself as the literality of literature? When literature becomes an enchanting chant?" Hélène Cixous: "We are bodies in minds fast as the radio."

My uncle George was in town for cancer treatments recently and crashed at my place for two nights and we had ourselves a hoot and a holler, let me tell you. Alas, that being said, it was from George that I heard about the recent death of feisty and funny leftist American folk singer Todd Snider. The details were a little hazy at the time, but I guess some folks were more than merely insinuating that Snider had been kicked out of the hospital for being mouthy and broke. I personally didn’t find that very likely. This is the official series of events: some sort of violent altercation involving Snider and others occurred outside his Salt Lake City hotel and he sustained head injuries; Snider sought medical help but was later arrested by police outside the hospital on disorderly conduct and other charges, with bodycam footage showing him pleading for help and complaining he couldn't breathe; days after returning to his home in Tennessee, Snider was hospitalized with walking pneumonia, which would prove to be the official cause of death. While we were out doing the rounds, etc cetera, one of the record shop proprietors fond of my uncle lent him his own personal copy of Snider’s book I Never Met a Story I Didn't Like. I’d be curious to take a gander at that one myself.

Boy Meets Girl (Leos Carax, 1984)

The bottom line of meditation and embodied mindfulness is that you slow yourself down biorhythmically and take deep breaths at the proper tempo, getting the circulatory and respiratory mechanisms in proper alignment with the earth system simply by letting the body open up its impossible roiling depths to feel the universe first and foremost, a haptics of the encounter in which the properties of the invisible feel sensorially at a scale that supersedes anything currently imaginable. It is also true that you can meditate by simply running your eyes over the ceiling for three hours while humming and sobbing to yourself. You can meditate on the sounds of urban automobile traffic. Sometimes when I was a teenager I would cut my arms with razors and tacks and that was a meditation too. It vacated my mind of all thought other than the colour black with fine specks of silver in it, which if you think about it is less a thought than it is a more artifact-like product of epiphenomenal intellection. If my left big toe gets sore in a very particular way then I absolutely must obtain an espresso-based beverage of some kind post haste. In a deep meditative state I am actually able to perform medical surgeries on myself using my own nervous system and carefully directed focus. I can feel everything that is happening to my body during surgery, but it is mostly kind of pleasant, a tingling tenderness vastly superior to the hollowed-out solitude that is my normal daily lot. When I feel my body doing magic for me I tell God that I am grateful and I do that because I am grateful, positioned maybe even at the extremities of lived gratitude, as it were. Like the birth of tragedy her insufficiently-coronated self. In the effervescence of transient light it is we who the frolicking Gods seek to excite. All Gods are equitable but we insist they all pay taxes, no matter how cunning and merciless their lawyers and/or heavies. 

In his book At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, author Fenton Johnson, who grew up both gay and Catholic in Northern Kentucky, bemoans the heteronormative state of things, arguing that “the stories we tell ourselves embody fantasies of idealized couples and families, even if in unconventional configurations, instead of the rich and rewarding solitary journeys more and more of us are living out.” Figures of distinction from recently history who Johnson praises for their bold and unwavering solitary industriousness include Henry David Thoreau, Paul Cézanne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Eudora Welty, Rabindranath Tagore, Zora Neale Hurston, Nina Simone, and Bill Cunningham. Here we have Johnson rhapsodizing himself dizzy on the great Impressionist painter Cézanne: “I can say he’s crazy—perceiving a soul in a sugar bowl?—or I can listen to what he’s telling me, in his letters and in his work, which is that the sacred exists in every particle and atom, the sacred is what is, and my job is to pay sufficient attention so that I too can perceive the psychology of the earth—its living, feeling, expressive self, made manifest in rivers and seas and mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes.” Whitman and Dickinson are both presented as appearing to have gradually embraced the solitary life over time, though for each this manifests in a rapturous giving, an impassioned loving enacted both through friendship and literary creation.

Flowers of St. Francis (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

St. Francis of Assisi had his first spiritual visions as a young prisoner of war and would later go on to purportedly make personal friends with all animals and literally preach sermons to birds. Inspired by Matthew 10:9, which instructs disciples to carry no money or extra clothes, Francis renounced his family's wealth, notoriously stripping naked in the town square to renounce his inheritance before the bishop. Francis referred to his cohort of monks as the "joculatores Domini,” and it was their mission to use joy, song, and poetry to spread the word of a loving God. Fyodor Dostoevsky, on the other hand, started having epileptic episodes complete with strange and disturbing visions in 1846 and the famous fake execution that messed him up for life happened three years later, in 1849. Dostoevsky was taken into a courtyard to be killed, only to be given a last minute reprieve when all hope seemed lost, the whole thing having not evidently amounted to much more than a sick joke. When you start to read about Dostoevsky’s life it starts to become clear why he shook uncontrollably and spoke of visions beyond the means of language to tackle; infernal winds that rip they sky and tear away at animal flesh, winds with a sizzling red rim around them. Sometimes God would put a man on the floor hard if only so he’ll stay still for a moment.

Philip Guston, COUPLE IN BED, 1977

“Why do we imagine solid matter exists?,” poses Aldous Huxley in his 1936 masterpiece Eyeless in Gaza. The answer (the 'why' of it): “Because of the grossness of our sense organs. And why do we imagine that we have coherent experiences and personality? Because our minds work slowly and have very feeble powers of analysis. Our world and we who live in it are creations of stupidity and bad sight.” Look, a case could certainly be made. In his book Spinal Catastrophism, philosopher Thomas Moynihan argues that the work the human spine has done to keep us on two legs is stupid, awkward, and bizarre, such that inevitably we’re uniquely bad at everything even though our brains are phenomenal in theory and we have created all the cities on the surface of the earth, et cetera. We are also proud and pitiful. Where an individual will easily enough identify people making errors, behaving badly, or acting in a devious manner in ordinary life, should you so happen as to point out concrete errors these people have themselves made, unseemly things they’ve done in public, lies of commission or omission, well, you can expect this incidental theoretical person to sulk, pout, and play the victim like the victim were the damn fiddle. That is a large part of why it is tremendously hard to get people to openly and honestly discuss anything in which the emotions can or will figure. Talking about stuff you don’t want to talk about usually helps a little. It’s true. If we all intend to grow it will be necessary that we fess up from time to time. You, for example, you bashful little vamp. You gone and you went away a long time ago and yet I still remember how mean you were, more than just nervy and pugnacious in the usual way...ugly mean. I remember how we ate that great big piece of chocolate cake with two forks and it was almost like being on a date...but you’re too mean for me...you’re mean and you like it that way...

Los olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950)

Kelvin

 

Panic in Needle Park (Jerry Schatzberg, 1971)

The Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992)

I have known Kelvin now for a little over a decade. We went to the same Monday night A.A. meeting for a number of years and originally he had two more years sober than me, not that my own track record has been all that squeaky clean (after a healthy stretch of seven straight years, one day at a time, don't ask me to elaborate). Neither Kelvin nor I handled COVID great, ultimately, and neither of us regained his proper footing in the immediate aftermath. The condition is groundlessness. I didn’t see Kelvin much during the last half of this past year and knowing what that would tend to indicate I could not help but fear the worst. I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody this, but once Kelvin came into the homeless shelter were I was assistant supervisor back in the day, deep into an obviously gruelling crack binge, and he acted contemptuous of me when I offered him my own sandwich, subsequently acting contemptuous of the very idea of his wife and daughter and their existence when I brought them up, trying to assess the scale of the calamity right in front of me. It was the nastiest show you could ever want to see some loathsome, disreputable creep stage publicly. This is the man who taught me the fundamentals of fly fishing and gushed openly and often of his wife and daughter who I saw very clearly as people Kelvin loved with the deep and simple devotion of a normal, decent man. To fuck it all up monumentally? Simply throw in a Ziplock full of crack rock. Kelvin was at the meeting last night for the first time in ages, definitely still in post-acute withdrawal though I was very pleased to see him counted still among us the sour and cantankerous living, here as we are to nurture, however boorish and bothersome we may at times be in our untimely ministrations. Kelvin had gone out on crack and booze agin and was couch surfing currently. I took him and bought him a sausage roll at a place I know and put the screws to him real blunt-like. Okay, fess up, kid, what the fuck happened this time? Are you not yet already sufficiently smeared across the tarmac? In answer to this question, Kelvin, nobody’s idea of an intellectual, said as wise and true a thing as has ever been said on the subject of relapse, brevity being one of the statement's main selling points. He said: “the obsession came back.” A blue bolt shot downward through my spine. Then Kelvin told me a story about how just before Christmas he was driving in his car with a drug dealer to whom he owed a considerable amount of money. Stopped at a freshly-red light at 17th Ave. and 14th St. SW, Kelvin had turned his keys and pink slips over to the dealer and just started walking directionless through the snow in a hoodie and beat-up sneakers. I was of several minds respective of the fact that Kelvin told this story in a cheerful and upbeat manner that obviously couldn't do much to eclipse how nightmarish the actual experience would have had to have been (and I’ve had similar, alas). These impossible goddamn addicts, am I right? They’d snort and chortle at the fucking gallows.

Top Ten Rock Albums in Chronological Order

Rock 'n' roll music, any old way you chose it, is one of the things I know I will miss when I'm on my way out. I love it, and have from the beginning, even its attractive imbecilities.

- Alexander Theroux, The Grammar of Rock

Bo Diddley, Have Guitar Will Travel (1960)

Kinks, The Kink Kontroversy (1965)

Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bayou Country (1969)

X, Wild Gift (1981)

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Re·ac·tor (1981)

Meat Puppets, Meat Puppets II (1984)

Royal Trux, Twin Infinitives (1990)

The Dead C, Harsh 70s Reality (1992)

Jim O'Rourke, Insignificance (2001)

Lambchop, FLOTUS (2016)

Royal Trux, "Ice Cream"

Xs and Os to all of my hoes! 💪💫