Paracelsus [Doublet]

 
They live in the four elements: the Nymphse in the element of water, the Sylphes in that of the air, the Pigmies in the earth, and the Salamanders in fire. They are also called Undinse, Sylvestres, Gnomi, Vulcani, etc. Each species moves only in the element to which it belongs, and neither of them can go out of its appropriate element, which is to them as the air is to us, or the water to fishes, and none of them can live in the element belonging to another class. To each elemental being the element in which it lives is transparent, invisible, and respirable, as the atmosphere is to ourselves.
- Paracelsus

The Age of the Medici (Roberto Rossellini, 1973)

The Idiots (Lars von Trier, 1998)

Founded in 1995 by Lars von Trier (an intermittently great film director) and Thomas Vinterberg (a consummately poor one), the Dogme 95 movement began as a thought experiment and rapidly became an oddly serious and even Calvinistic attempt to bring filmmaking back to its basics in an era when even the festival circuit seemed to be inundated with fatuous, overblown productions with multimillion-dollar budgets. The movement as such was announced publicly on March 13, 1995 at a Paris conference celebrating cinema’s centenary, when the sometimes flamboyant and ever-troubled von Trier threw conspicuously red Dogme pamphlets into the audience. At the heart of the Dogme 95 movement were ten commandments or “vows of chastity,” primarily relating to total renunciation of specialized lighting rigs, fake sets, props introduced to and therefore not found at locations as they naturally existed, tripods and dollies, or non-diagetic sound/music of any kind. As far as breaking the vows of chastity or transgressing against them, von Trier would go on to say that neither he, with his sublime The Idiots (which the great Jean-Luc Godard at the time said was the only good von Trier film), nor any of the other directors who made or attempted to make actual Dogme 95 films had been able to avoid breaching the basic prohibitions periodically. “We must conclude,” he went on to aver, “that the genuine Dogme film has not been made.” Well, authenticity is a Heideggerian concept and it’s as overrated as champagne or caviar. The only American to attempt to make a Dogme 95 film, in the form of Julien Donkey-Boy, Harmony Korine flagrantly broke the rules throughout the production of that estimable work of rough-and-tumble renegade videography. Korine would later defend himself by saying that though the exercise helped him to discover a more elemental or even religious idea of cinema’s properties and capabilities, “as when I was a child, the temptation to sin was always a romantic option.”   

Portrait of a Gentleman in His Study
Lorenzo Lotto 
1527
[Late Renaissance and the Birth of Mannerism] 

A Few Words More on Recovery

 

The Author Poses in Front of His Small Garden

Because still in 2026 it is not anything like commonplace knowledge to anybody other than the long-suffering or the recovering-in-practice alcoholic and/or addict, I thought I would take a moment before casually deplatforming myself for a spell so that I might delve deeper into personal inventory and spend less time worried about making some kind of small ongoing public splash, to fill you in on what I believe to be far and away the two most important lines in the colloquially-designated Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (the cover of which has always just said Alcoholics Anonymous). While in a very real way the concept of anonymity was of foremost importance to Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob, and early adopters of the program, I don’t at all myself believe anonymity to have the same cultural value or cachet it had in the 1930s here where we find ourselves now in the world of TikTok and Twitter. (That being said, it remains good form for the recovering alcoholic to abstain from telling others, especially normies, who they have seen in attendance at this or that meeting.) The key principle to my mind is the whole one day at a time precept, which is something most people who have a cursory knowledge of twelve-step recovery will be in some sense aware of but may not have seen explicated in the flawless language of the Big Book (page 85): “What we really have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.” Suffice it then to say that it’s not a matter of there being no future to worry about and every sequential day another frivolous day at the beach. The alcoholic is physically, emotionally, and spiritually sick and had better do their damndest to work on that third piece with at least as much vigilance and they do the first two. A spiritually sick person will go all wrong and the spiritually sick alcoholic/addict will pick up the drug of choice or the next best destructive thing. A simple and useful way to describe spirituality is as cosmic and worldly connectedness, but there isn’t any prosaic language that can lay it out for the neophyte in a manner that won’t sound fuzzy and incorporeal. The individual person must feel their way into and through spiritual awareness like somebody trying not to bump into anything in pitch dark. Alas, possible nightmares await all who kid themselves…and we all kid ourselves betimes. Addiction can be horrifying even with many years clean and/or sober and life going along famously when we capture a sharp, devastating flicker of awareness of how close we might in fact be to going too far off course…perhaps irretrievably so. The second most important line in the Big Book (page 43) is the most terrifying fact I know about alcoholism and the most terrifying fact of any kind that I have had validated by personal experience: “The alcoholic at certain times has no effective mental defence against the first drink. Except in a few rare cases, neither he nor any other human being can provide such a defence. His defence must come from a Higher Power.” Wait a second, does this mean that the alcoholic and/or addict can relapse as though directed by a domineering inner daemon or malevolent supernatural force? Yes, that is what it means and that is exactly what it feels like. The alcoholic a couple years sober may find themself walking to the liquor store and asking “what the fuck is happening?” as they march forward like infantry, all but unstoppable. In actual fact, it happens all the time. That is why the recovering alcoholic and/or addict must do daily personal inventory, clean their side of the street (wherever possible), and work on their relationship with the bigger picture. Recovery is there to forestall future horrors more than it is there for any other practicable reason. Philip Seymour Hoffman, for example, with his twenty-plus years sober in the program, knew that perfectly, and yet he’s dead. It’s usually trial by fire. When you get sober your old friends vacate the premises almost totally. A certain person in a certain position won’t have too much trouble conceding: well, I guess it’s just me and God now. I’ve been working at recovery since 2009 and I still only have a slipshod notion of how to go about it (and all of two months clean and sober as of yesterday). At the very least, I can say I take recovery extremely seriously and insist it defines me more than gender, ethnicity, or nationality. Obviously I’m not trying to win any popularity contests. The other day as I left my house in the midst of brutal dental pain and a searing existential crisis, I closed my door and prepared to lock it; for a moment I was dumbstruck with fear that I might buy liquor while I was out. Looking down I saw my old recovery key chain, of which I almost never take conscious notice these days, procured in 2013 on Vancouver Island. A pair of shoes on the front and an inscription on the back: “STAY IN YOUR SHOES.” Instantly I knew that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I was getting loaded that night. That’s not a Higher Power. No. That’s evidence of a Higher Power. In that moment it was more than enough.

Monsters Never Die

Process (C.S. Leigh, 2004)

Colloque de chiens (Raúl Ruiz, 1977)

I remembered my father's bitter phrase, "Monsters never die," and I shuddered. I drank a mug of wine without pausing.

- Manuel Mujica Lainez, Bomarzo

There was never no love

No kind of

Any kind of love

Love was there for certain

Never, never ever.

Instead there was

Flotsam and

Cosmic abandonment’s 

Drifts, how uneasily 

All gracelessness shifts

Shuffling in nullity;

Cleaved notions

The Pacific Ocean.

There never was no

Fellowship also

Friends were

Abstract projections 

Oblivious to oblivions

In naught and ingratiation

Whatever breathes so fickle

Never touches;

Things and their 

Moats of atomic buffer.

Time as we simplify 

And compartmentalize

No there wasn’t

It was not

Not until we arrived

To impose and clove it

Encoded and cloak’d

Meaning Kant was

Errant as Newton

In nude foreboding.

The seas remain

Forever barely explored

The Pacific Ocean

And its impossible Luciferian force

Could power the enlightenment 

Of eternity's creatures 

Whom God will not 

Allow to arrive besides

No, certainly not

On account of 

There never was no love.

The most infernal creatures

Deep in blank witholding sea

Where light cannot reach;

Monsters never die

They just lay down in the garden

Toppled by red wine

And in their loveless state

They petrify.

Morton Feldman, "For Samuel Beckett"

Top Ten Jazz Bassists

 

Charles Mingus

Jimmy Garrison 

Charlie Haden

Ron Carter

William Parker

Barre Phillips

Henry Grimes

Malachi Favors Maghostut

Ronnie Boykins

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten

Charles Mingus Sextet 
Oslo, 1964

News of the World (Vodún Edition)

Strip Nude for Your Killer (Andrea Bianchi, 1975)

The Great Muppet Caper (Jim Henson, 1981)

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

"Vile De Nan Gni Noude"

The Marx Brothers

 

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?     

from The Big Store (1941)

from A Night at the Opera (1935)

JPW 2026 Guitar Video Trilogy

 

Rainy Day Appaloosa: Late Night Edition

As Human as the Next Guy

Monkgasm 3

Physical Media + Swag

Demo Lickin' Man 😎

My Thursday Thus Far

 
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…  

John Fahey, "City of Refuge 1"

The Inside Out Thirst Trap EP

 

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 The Inside 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...

1. Inside (9:54)

2. Out (9:55)

The Sounds and Images

Jean-Pierre Léaud in

Out 1: Noli Me Tangere 

(Jacques Rivette, 1971)

Renovating the Temple of the Golden Pavilion

 

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.    

...

    

Top Four Grunge Albums

Nirvana, "Negative Creep"