I've warned you repeatedly and now you look on helplessly as the great and indefatigable Bret Michaels is laid woefully low for the foreseeable: the power and authority of the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon are second to none and to find out the hard way is to get knocked about and positively dropped. Of what principal properties does the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon consist? Look at it this way, simplified but not excessively so: Fozzie Bear combines the early pre-Gracie teenage vaudevillean George Burns, doing pratfall comedy with roller skates and similar cockamamie business, with an irrepressible sui generis enthusiasm that your normative world-frame will never be able to either assimilate or suppress. It's a good thing Bret Michaels opted for the surgery because trying to pass those stones would have shredded his dick complètement. One of the laws of both African and Haitian voodoo is that whatever you do you definitely don't want to strip nude for your killer. When those heavy cosmogenic forces come down upon you, passing through astral bodies like X-ray, you want to be in good health, dressed to the nines, and wearing an easeful, frolicsome expression on your face. Alas, Fozzie may just fuck you up anyway. Give you the heavyweight treatment. It is okay to become psychotic, saturated in archetypal spirits, but when you do so your whole domestic set-up better look good from a distance or the bird's-eye view. Not nearly as many people are able to host the Fozzie Bear vodún/loa/daemon as was once the case, so props to Kayla from local gutter punk band Puppet Wipes who is the only person I know at all well who has the same Fozzie Bear knack that I do. Shalom.
Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou
The human race cannot be satisfied unless it is inundated each and ever day with far more music than any creatural intelligence could ever make sense of let alone catalogue. I would not be able to keep a straight face and tell you that this or that release was the best reissue or archival release of the year, on vinyl or otherwise, simply because I am not in a position to have gathered enough information and everybody reading this implicitly knows that. However, I think I can comfortably assert that the recent Analog Africa release of the collected works of Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou, originally recorded between 1977 and 1982, is the best archival release of 2026 with which I have found myself in, ahem, possession. Hailing from Benin, Antoine Dougbé was the son of a vodún priest and would go on to become one himself, ultimately dying of cirrhosis of the liver. He would often call himself the devil's prime minister. Whereas L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou consisted of a stacked lineup of top-shelf virtuosic musicians, many among them vodún initiates themselves, Dougbé learned to produce songs by singing and making complex rhythms slapping his hands on his legs. The sublime, upbeat party music Dougbé made with the Orchestre stands at the threshold of postmodernism and Pan-African globalization. Rhythms and percussion are influenced by Afro-Cuban traditions and Congolese rumba figures too. The presence of synthesizers in the arrangements serves also to emphasize the pathbreaking transglobal nature of this exciting and energetic music. Should you fail to procure for yourself a personal copy of this extremely fine double LP of West African sublimity, well, that's your funeral, dawg.
Antoine Dougbé et L'Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou
You want to know where you can get a hold of Mrs. Potter? I don't know, she's awfully ticklish. - Groucho Marx in Cocoanuts (1929)
Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
In my early teens, when I was already an avid and devout cinephile, I was quite comfortably a fan of the films of Woody Allen, from the early days of zany schtick to the more adult tragicomedies of later years. A kind of biologically programmed contrarian even then, I would have likely told you that though perfectly agreeable fare for the most part, both Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) were overrated, whereas Radio Days (1987) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) were profoundly undervalued. It never dawned on me that Woody Allen might be a creep or a sex pest, and the jury’s still out on that as far as I’m concerned. To me it always appeared that he had the whole field of adult experience more or less corned and that, if anything, he wrote women even better than he wrote men. He started out in standup comedy and as a very young jokester, more than a little wet behind the ears, he worked as a writer on Sid Caesar’s pioneering sketch comedy program Your Show of Shows (1950-1954), so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that Allen’s mature films are characterized above all by standalone gags and/or individual bits of business. As an often maudlin and even suicidal preteen, one short sequence from 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters made a huge and lasting impression on me (it’s one I imagine many stalwart fans of this shady and-at-least-a-little-problematic filmmaker esteem to the degree I once did and I suppose still do). Fresh off a failed suicide attempt, the gun having slipped off his sweaty forehead and the bullet having missed, Allen’s character wanders the New York City streets in a daze until he comes upon a movie theatre playing the classic 1933 Marx Brothers spoof Duck Soup, the brothers’ outrageous charade of geopolitics and martial fanaticism. Watching the Marx Brothers restores the faith of the Allen character, however fundamentally epistemologically atheistic he may be, as it reminds him that the chaos in God’s world is above all an expression of antic divinity. One may not be able to choose one’s first reaction to chaos, meanness, and randomness in the lived moment, but we do choose how we subsequently react to our initial reaction and to the greater presiding situation. Our freedom and control lie in consciously selecting how we look at what the world is doing right in front of us (in stereo). In Duck Soup itself, even total conflagration and the end of us all are an open question and invitation to militarized merriment without much need of rhyme or reason, no concessions made to folks without a sense of humour. A sense of humour will pull you through and if you haven’t figured that out then you can’t possible be terribly content with yourself, the world, or the God-sized missing puzzle piece you yell upward at with raised fist.
We had the opportunity to screen Duck Soup during my six year tenure as a Board Director and the Programming Chair for Calgary Cinematheque. A friend who attended and sat next to me—a Marx Brothers newbie—turned to me less than a third of the way into the film and with big, wide, astonished eyes said: “this is sooooooo silly.” Well, my friend was right. Yes, the laughs keep raining down like antiaircraft fire, and that’s why these brothers were paid the big bucks, first on the stage and then in the cinemas of the world, but our deeper reaction is awe at the absurdist inventiveness and the full-tilt boogie. The despots and war-drunk generals are not characterized as mendacious, calculating, corrupt, or evil in some overdetermined ideological sense, rather they are inept and buffoonish, Mussolini perhaps in mind and Donald J. Trump avant la lettre.
Always the straight man to his deliriously promenading clan, fourth brother Zeppo will appear for the final time in Duck Soup. Straight men and comedic foils can be brought in by the truckload from Central Casting. The three remaining brothers could be said to embody one each of pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce’s phenomenological categories of lived modality—firstness, secondness, and thirdness—as tackled by philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his two priceless Cinema books: Harpo is firstness on account of being both mute and maximally expressive, pure affection-image, pure mooning faciality and raw bodily affect; Chico is secondness because he is the action-image, the pugilist who can’t stop talking back, dumb naked fact laid bare, obfuscation plus confusion, resistance, struggle, impassioned reactivity…and hadsy with the ladies besides; Groucho is thirdness because he is the ultimate covert master of language and tongues, entering undefeated into combat with his broadsword all the while appearing to casually/benignly inspect the cleanliness of his fingernails, he is the Master of Ceremonies and as such the mediator of relations. While this may seem to place phallic mastery almost entirely in the, ahem, hands of Groucho, the best reoccurring gag that runs through the corpus of Marx Brothers films is the very real unfeigned virtuosity Harpo and Chico demonstrate on a wide variety of musical instruments (Harpo of course being associated foremost with the harp). Harpo is an overgrown baby and Chico a bullish preadolescent, but when unleashed on musical instruments the two of them play like the greatest concert hall specialists in all the land while pouring all the while the entirely of their individual personae and acumen with respect to subtle visual gags into each nondivisible increment of screen performance time. Is anything quite so sublime anywhere in screen comedy comparative to when Chico turns his index finger into a pistol and hits the exact right piano key at the exact right moment?
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
Rewind & Play (Alain Gomis, 2022)
For the YouTube version of my new album There's No Place Like Home, embedded directly below, I have gone to characteristically great lengths to make it so that it’s not just a boring inert cover image accompanying forty minutes of a raging brushfire of experimental music, providing each track a modified film clip that suits it. There’s also some little Easter eggs scattered here and there to make the whole thing even more fun, more gratifyingly variegated, and more ontologically colourful.
Reading poetry, she had marvelled as layers of inhibition fell away one by one until all that remained was her pulse, attuned to everything but sundered by it. Surely what happened to her today had not been an act of poetry; it had skinned her alive, an initiation raw and curt. All she was certain of was that what had happened was important. - Paul West, The Tent of Orange Mist
Yesterday I worked industriously on a new full-length album, my first since getting out of the hospital in July, and I managed get the first half of it wrapped up. The two halves of this one are definitely going to be demonstrably separate entities though the music is throughout a kind of attempt to bridge noise music, electronic dance music, and the legacy of the Mississippi Delta blues, which has been the case as well with my recent EPs and some of my recent standalone tracks. I went to bed close to midnight, which would not have been an especially late hour when I was a younger man, but assuredly is now. I dreamt a recurring dream about the young lady in the pink Miata, which left me queasy but ambivalent. I got up around 7:00AM and started work on the second half of my new album. The first few hours of the day are when my feet are at their worst as though shocked and bitter at having to carry my body weight around. I spent a good part of the morning grinding away at producing all manner of heinous and unprecedented string instrument noise, and then at 10:40 I went and had blood work done so that my family doctor and my psychiatrist can assess my Lithium levels (they were near toxic at the time of my hospitalization, likely because I kept taking my meds in the preceding period but almost completely stopped eating). While I was at the doctor’s office I inquired about a pair of referrals my doctor was supposed to make on my behalf, one to the Calgary Foot Care Nurses to help with the necrotic tissue pain and corns, the lingering repercussions of very bad frostbite, and the other to a urologist on account of my phimosis (tightening of the foreskin, for those not in the know). Today I was given the number for the urologist and the likelihood is that they will need to operate. There is only one operation for this condition: circumcision. I’m certainly not jazzed at the prospect of having that operation, and few uncircumcised men would be, but at this point in my life it does seem pretty minor next to all the other wretched and heartbreaking stuff that has brought me to where I am. I am inspired by the fortitude my uncle George has demonstrated these past few years, first losing an eye to cancer and then very recently surviving brain surgery with a smile on his face and a sunny outlook overall. After leaving the doctor’s office and taking everything into consideration, I decided I’d go ahead and treat myself to eggs Benedict at OEB in Mission. Goddammit, sometimes you need to spoil yourself…
The Suspended Step of the Stork (Theo Angelopoulos, 1991)
This October is going to somehow mark the twentieth wedding anniversary of Bronwyn and myself, though at this point we’re almost like two people who just met and aren’t sure they like the cut of the other’s jib. We got married a few days short of Halloween 2006 and there is no ambiguity around the fact that Bronwyn wanted a spooky wedding and an even spookier marriage. Well, she’s a plenty spooky character alright. Has ever been and so shall be. Twenty years later and I’m still asking myself: what in the hell have you gotten yourself into, bud? The twins, Anton and Dani, are going to be sixteen in short order and aside from bringing in the only paycheck around here I’ve also been commanded with teaching the kids to drive. I’m teaching them on a standard transmission so they’ll be as prepared as humanly possible for the capricious and dangerous roads of this fallen and blighted land. I learned on a stick shift because my father believed it would cause me to be ever-and-actively-attentive to the mechanics of operating a motor vehicle whenever I was actively operating a motor vehicle. Anton is doing pretty good with the stick shift but Dani routinely breaks out in tears and that’s something I’ve never had the knack for countermanding effectively. There, there, girl, I say, and she stares daggers at me. It is then that she most resembles her mother.
My life got cozier and more agreeable starting with 2020 and the COVID-19 protocols, but it also got sloppier and moribund. The city sent all of us home to work remotely. A third of the office—the busybodies and workaday cops I very much won’t mind never seeing again—were heartbroken to leave behind their knickknack-covered desks and officious persecution of congenial slackers the likes of myself. I couldn’t gather my shit and get out of there fast enough. I am fortunate to continue my well-compensated work for the municipal government from home, but back in 2020 it very quickly became clear that I wasn’t going to pull it off for terribly long if I didn’t cut out alcohol altogether. I realized I probably would have been drinking heavily at work the whole while if there hadn’t been people around observing me. Perhaps the workaday cops have their function after all. Luckily for everybody, Bronwyn upped her game and started drinking enough for the both of us. Since we were now very often in the house together for the entire day, things periodically got grisly. I normally walk on eggshells around her when she’s good and soused, but the twins have grown to despise her outright and do not feel compelled to hide it from her. Does that sometimes wound her? Ha! Nothing a drink won’t fix.
Though it is an old cliché it is also perfectly true that Bronwyn will with some regularity tell us all that she’s going out briefly under some flimsy pretext only to return days or weeks later, not even the least bit sheepish respective of her truancy and/or any worry she may have caused. In a way I have myself grown to be sanguine and even a little grateful for these protracted absences, brief spells when the house is calm and comparatively navigable. I tear through my workload with harmonious ease and sometimes literally kick up my feet on my desk, a mild indulgence Bronwyn would never countenance were she around to make note of it and sneer. A few days had passed—not that I’d counted them!—when my longtime partner in corkscrew misadventure came in last night and sat on the edge of the bed grumbling to herself long enough to indicate that she wished to exchange words with me. Alright, I said, I’ll bite. What happened this time? Evidently grateful for the accommodating prompt, she began to tell the story of the severe but friendly German woman from Cologne with whom she had spent the past few days and nights and who she had initially met in some sordid online forum. The woman from Cologne had a thick accent, wore stylish and professional-looking pantsuits, worked in corporate finance, and was into BDSM and role-play. Bronwyn said she’d found herself for the first time in her life got up in leather bondage gear and wielding a cat o' nine tails like she’d been at it since adolescence, which was fun at first but ultimately grew fatiguing and confusing. How many variations can there possibly be to this stuff? Just this very evening she and the woman from Cologne had taken a break from kink and Netflix to go get a bite to eat in a nearby tavern. No matter how sick from overindulgence in the hooch, Bronwyn has always had a unique capacity to wolf down bar food. Apparently, the woman from Cologne had been totally sober during all the sex shenanigans but got tipsy over dinner and became emotional, crying audibly enough that everybody in the tavern could hear her. What was evidently getting at her was the culpability of all German people in the genocidal horrors perpetrated by the crazed, eugenicist Nazis, for which she herself, having not even been born back then, felt no small amount of personal responsibly for whatever reason. She cried even louder then, admitting that she had never been able even once to look her grandparents in the eyes. Bronwyn excused herself from the table saying that she needed to make use of the facilities and then slipped out a side door, commencing to embark upon the long, inebriated trek homeward. Why are people such simpering losers? she asked, probably rhetorically, having recounted the story as coherently as she could manage. My God, I thought, what the fuck is wrong with this person? What am I even doing with my life?
The Worlds of Love (Cinnie Cole, David Garland, Ikue Mori) "One of Two"
Anybody who has known me well, only slightly, or just by invidious word of mouth will know that since around the time I was preparing the release of my record Yevgenia, which was released almost exactly four years ago in August of 2022, I began to feverishly acquire vinyl like that shit was going out of style, having previously been an adamant dyed-in-the-wool compact disk man. My defence remains that I needed a really dope collection wherein my own record might feel at home, the proverbial new kid on the block. In actual fact, the only reason I bought a turntable was so I could listen to the test pressing of Yevgenia. My oh my, how these things can get away from us. I am no longer allowed to have physical possession of my credit card, and I’m afraid it’s definitely for the best. Heh heh.
Naturally, as a recovering film scholar and former film programmer for Calgary Cinematheque, it is more or less my responsibility to keep abreast of new and significant releases on Blu-ray, watching as much of that stuff as I can muster without passing out and drooling all over myself. Anybody who has given time and energy over to these matters for the last three years will have been watching while up-and-comer Radiance, supplying the goods to the UK and North America in kind, has quickly and definitively surpassed the Criterion crew, I would surmise most of all because they don't go in for any populist crowd-pleasers or catalogue filler. Radiance has definitely done a good job of bringing us important films by established masters: Robert Bresson, Jacques Rivette, Luchino Visconti, Georges Franju. They even released Czech director Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way, which is the best American film of the 70s made in the 80s...if that makes any sense. I love that film enough that I already owned the Twilight Time Blu-ray. I din't feel like I needed to take on the expense. My favourite disk from Radiance so far contains the three-and-three-quarter hour extended cut of Rivette's Va savoir, one of the few films by this most beloved of masters that I got to see in a theatre first run (in the manageable/commercial shortened form), which over the past few years was the one thing I was most hoping to see come out on a home-viewing format of some kind. 🙏. Radiance's high def transfer of Bresson's gorgeous colour downer Une femme douce is so superior to any other version of that film I've ever seen that it made me weep.
One area where Radiance most especially excels is in the field of gonzo out-of-bounds Japanese genre cinema. Have you ever noticed that fancy Japanese art movies are usually much more logical and easy to follow than the genre movies, which are very often convoluted and prone to sprees of mayhem? It's not unusual to see a fight involving ten or twelve people and I can't usually remember any of their names. For shame, Weird Bach! Well, sometimes that's exactly what I'm in the mood for. 1977's The Boxer by Shuji Terayama, released earlier this year, is the best boxing film since Robet Wise's 1949 gem The Set-Up. Scorsese and Paul Schrader should get on their knees and bow in shame-faced reverence. Terayama was a genuine artist of the underground who figured he'd tackle a genre picture as a madcapped lark.
Anybody who knows about my semi-secret list of the top 69 movies of all time may recall having seen featured on it—in 47th place—Shōhei Imamura's 1966 first-phase-pinnacle-moment The Pornographers, which definitely is an art film no matter what that blowsy title may tend to indicate. Criterion put out a then-decent DVD of the film many years ago, but this summer Radiance released a sublime Blu-ray featuring a terrific, super lengthy, and deliciously thorough overview from A #1 Asian cinema Übermensch Tony Rayns. This disk is a must for anybody who is into any kind of cool shit whatsoever!
Having released Takashi Miike's meandering, novelistic, and intermittently harrowing Agitator earlier this year, Radiance is set by all accounts to bring us this spry and indefatigable auteur's certified 2001 masterpiece/classic Visitor Q this forthcoming October. Visitor Q is a no-budget shot-on-video update of Pasolini's Teorema, which it surpasses a hundredfold and with illusory ease; I can assure you that you'll get your rocks off if you like your cinema of transgressionsmart as hell and transgressive as fuck. Cheers, baby.
While we're on a good run celebrating Japanese cineaction and some of its newly accessible fruits, from days more bygone or less so, and since I had the gall to take the wind out of the Criterion Collection sails when we all know that the Criterion Collection saves each of our lives two or three times a goldarn week, let me point out that a week from tomorrow, under the banner of their seriously rad Eclipse imprint, that entrenched New York-based institution is dropping on the broad general public what I suspect might very well prove to be the physical media release of 2026. In any medium. Ahem:
Cato Salsa Experience w/ The Thing & Joe McPhee "Louie Louie"
The sharpest work of the last thirty years is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising, roundabout artists.
- Manny Farber, "Underground Films"
[Jean-Pierre] Léaud is an actor who goes all the way once you have suggested a direction to take. It was he who launched out down this track, somewhere between Balzac and Lewis Carroll.
- Jacques Rivette in the Autumn 1974 issue of Sight and Sound
All music on TheInside Out Thirst Trap EP has been manufactured and denatured by Jason Philip Wierzba. The two extended, slowed-way-down film clips provided as accompaniment in the YouTube video embedded below, and likewise denatured by Wierzba, come to us care of Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) [the shot appropriated was already in slo-mo so now it moves like tectonic plates...or glacially...in the manner of a glacier] and Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli Me Tangere. Which is precisely as it ought to be...
As I'm currently working on yet another EP which won't be done until tomorrow at the earliest, I thought it would be fun to group together the four EPs from my record collection that I most fervidly esteem for a cool photograph you can look at, then also share my favourite Bikini Kill song, which obviously would have to be one of my favourite ever songs by any person or group because in the early days them riot grrrls was un-fuckin'-touchable. The EP on the bottom right is the Fuck Buttons "Brainfreeze" single plus a one-off original B-side called "Royal Flush." In 2009 and 2010 I drove all over Southern California in my BMW listening to the Fuck Buttons album Tarot Sport, Robyn's Body Talk, and the self-titled Fever Ray debut (when I wasn't playing avant-garde improvised shizzz). I had the enormous pleasure of attending a very loud Fuck Buttons performance at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, an experience I won't be forgetting anytime soon, I can promise you that. (Partially it was special because I was freshly clean and sober and realized that I'd enjoyed it way more than I would have had I been under the influence.) Oh, the Radio Video EP is of course by Royal Trux, the greatest rock band of all time, just in case you're new to them and cannot read Jennifer's hair. Thank you for your ongoing patronage and support!
Bikini Kill, "Carnival"
* I saw Royal Trux at a punk bar called the Dominion in Ottawa's ByWard Market in late 1999, when they were touring Veterans of Disorder, and, boy oh boy, was that ever epic! Ubiquitous and highly respected underground music rag The Wire would go on to list the set the Trux played in London on that tour as one of the top concerts of all time! Also, I saw Fever Ray at Coachella in 2010 (it was half laser show and half Tobe Hooper movie).
When a phonograph record crackles and pops it sounds just like when there's seeds in the shitty shwag you're smoking. - Jason Philip Wierzba
Wendy Marriott's Bright Boy with Dark Shadows is No Longer Any Kind of a Boy
Creepy, Before We Vanish, To the Ends of the Earth, Wife of a Spy, Cloud...The Samurai and the Prisoner. It is now time for me to officially insist after having seen this new one focusing as it does on consciousness raising and the warrior mindset—tipping its hat a little to the other Kurosawa and his ongoing dalliance with Samurai Shakespeare—that Kiyoshi Kurosawa is the best and most consistent director working anywhere in the world today. His formal control clearly extends to mastery of every facet of production and postproduction. Hearing his sound designs in a theatre is always a true delight, as it very much was at the Globe last night. The Arioka Castle set is highly reminiscent of the main set from Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 masterpiece A Story from Chikamatsu. In terms of manner and aesthetic, I would in general tend to associate Kiyoshi Kurosawa more with the presiding philosophy and strategies of Mizoguchi than with those of Akira Kurosawa, as both Mizoguchi and Kiyoshi Kurosawa are Japanese monumentalists, closer to architects or sculptors than to painters, concerned as they are with scale, geometry, and durability.
During the brief and dizzying period in 2016 when Pokémon Go took off and mobilized roaming distracted multitudes all over the planet, I very much thought I was getting a glimpse into the future of the human species. It will become easier to organize and direct people remotely, for better and for worse. When collectivized far-right edgelords stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021, some of them would go on to say in their defence that they didn't really know why they were getting on a plane and going to Washington, it having been a matter in the end of their simply following their social media and connected devises like automotons. In his previous film, 2024's Cloud, Kiyoshi Kurosawa was the first artist in any field that I'm aware of to roll up his sleeves and deal with the omnipresent connective/vaporous cloud, the organizing metaphor that extends in historical order from the web and the net and indicates like Pokémon Go that the lives of groups can become a kind of treasure hunt that doesn't lead to any specific or determinable destination. Already in films like Creepy and Before We Vanish, we bear witness to characters whose motivations are so deeply unconscious and opaque that it becomes increasingly unclear whether those motivations originate with them in any proper sense. Set in feudal Japan during the Sengoku period and at the end of what a title card calls the age of warfare, The Samurai and the Prisoner could be said to be about a presiding historical spirit (akin to Hegel's Geist) that encompasses entire communities or nations and delineates for individuals their nebulous role in an inchoate living apparatus. When the world war is always intimate and local, always at his doorstep, it is impossible for the war-maker or demigod to thrive or to possess a proper world-frame. Araki Murashige, the titular samurai, is unable to determine if the calamity happening around him is divine punishment, internal sabotage, or manipulation by outside forces. The prisoner, Kuroda Kanbei, becomes an Iago whose basic threat must be set aside so that a workable course of action may be forged. Whatever is a Warrior King to do? Salvation lies not in hunkering down and watching the material world fall in on you as the role in which you are imprisoned becomes instantaneously and permanently outmoded. Salvation is there for the powerful one who disconnects and walks away. To know the moment is to read the signs.
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