Rules Of Attraction: Faith

Presented without comment.


Expect an IX Tab version soon.

Abby / Mod Fuck Explosion

My ipod seems obsessed with trailers and radio spots for Exploitation movies at the moment, not even sure how they all got in there...

But you'd want to see this wouldn't you:



And, though it's bound to be badbad rather than goodbad, any film called Mod Fuck Explosion has to be fun, doesn't it?

The Believer

Just saw this last night... crept it's way onto the Film 4 schedules sometim last week and from there limped it's way onto my hard drive...



Wow. Very interesting. Troubling. Unsettling. I don't remember much fuss about this at the time but...

Wow. I spent the whole film oscillating between competing thoughts:

1) I have to show this film to my students because it's the best, most conflicted, most serious film about Neo-Nazism..

2) I can't show this film to my students because it's the best, most conflicted, most serious film about Neo-Nazism

3) "Not everyone can savour this bitter fruit with impunity"

4) Everyone should savour this bitter fruit with impunity.

I'm not even sure what I think. Maybe that's a good reason to:

a) show it

b) not show it

Colleen-ing

Keep hearing Colleen on soundtracks, through windows, in other people's lives... Missed her somehow in my life; an artist I think I feel I should know better. Who's to tell? All the stuff I hear sounds great, is that representative?


Even to me, this feels more like a Tweet. Mixed Mediatosis.

Colleen - Summer Water

Colleen - The Heart Harmonicon

Lost the will to separate. Perhaps temporary.

'Francis likes to talk' - Watson on Crick.

Maybe Colleen is here too, alongside Dawkins on Genius of Britain. She is getting everywhere.

Colleen - The Golden Morning Breaks

I can't write without italics. Not sure why. Or rather, think i know but would prefer to look away. Will return to this maybe. Always return.

Curse this rotten Wytch Machine.



From The Wytch Machine...

Law Abiding Citizen

I'm mentioned this before but I find it hard / don't find it hard / ought to but maybe don't always find it imprecise and/or difficile to understand the message (even the syntax) of Deleuze and Guattari - I try, page by page, line by line and I'll keep trying ("I must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." etc) but now I'm faced with an even bigger philosophical conundrum...

You see, I've just watched Law Abiding Citizen

and...

well...

I'm trying to understand the ethics...

I'm sure it's there: the 18 Certificate suggests it, the DVD extras imply it but....

I can't find which ethical system they might be using, or trying to use.

It's a brilliantly misconceived, potentially dangerous and destabilising film (in all the wrong ways). It twists in turns in ways you don't expect i.e. the plot doesn't twist, the plot is brutally obvious but the morality twists, in a way oddly more confusing and certainly more disturbing than any Haneke film. If there's a commentary implied here, it got lost in the edit.

You kind of want one person to win, then the other, then everyone....

Actually...

You want one person to lose, then the other, then everyone...

That might be the point.

It might be unintentionally brilliant but I'm pretty sure it's unintentionally shit. I could be wrong. I feel almost certain that i must be wrong. I can't be wrong. I'm wrong.

Pain Don't Hurt: RIP The Swayze

There's maybe 4 of his films that'd make my Top 50...

But Roadhouse is a classic.

May

Bought May on DVD for 75p* at a boot sale on Sunday. Liked it, especially the bit about necks. Sure I've seen this film before and then forgotten it but can't figure out how to test my memory in that way anymore. The mechanic / love interest guy in it looks like someone I knew at Uni who seemed to believe he might be Jim Morrison (or maybe he meant James Morrison) and ended up singing himself into a bout of gangrene. I think he might have played Jesus at some point.

The final scene works despite itself and the slowburnings of the first hour or so make this something a little more than you'd expect from a (sort of ) Zombie and Cheerleader flick.

Slightly disorientating to see Anna Faris in there too; like watching Dawson in The Rules of Attraction. Great stuff.

*no idea why you have to know how much I paid for this but I'm working on it and i'll get back to you... I'm pretty sure I've done this kind of thing before

Martyrs Review Mix: Sunday's Glastonberries

Eyes closing; the drugs don't work; no verve... Racing away from everything... Somewhere, midway through the day I discover Bacon Rolls are my Spirit Food, the only thing I can now chew, own lips excepted, others lips excepted... May as well be skinned, eyes curled into the head, staring at your own neuranatomy... the NDE tunnel, flipping into a Reindeer piss-stained Shangri La taxi rank... It's relentless; hits the ground running... amphetamine fuelled at first and then gradually succumbing to a Ketamine (Special K) dissociative state before heading towards, but never quite getting to, an ecstatic, endorphin-soaked bliss...

Before that there's desert rumblings and electronics from Tinawaren and Tuung; melodies slipping between the 2 bands like a Roman priest reading entrails...

Tinariwen - Toumast

Tinariwen - Mano Dayak

...girls covered in dirt... and, yes, Eat Static playing out into familiar territory in The Glade...

Eat Static - Pharoh

Eat Static - Gulf Breeze

we're just a walk away now from Glasvegas who more or less blow it because the dialogue gets mumbled and the messages missed... there's freakery and feedback but on a Sunday night, with the light fading, words are needed...

Glasvegas - Geraldine


...Blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.... Black Eyed Peas (I'm with a girl): shift pace, a giant green, skinned head looks right at us... knees are busted open at the seams... 14 year old girls going torture porn apeshit behind me as every bassline kicks in... their arms and legs going in all directions (even the ones you can't point to)... we are pummelled...gasp..pummelled again...you'd expect Martyrs to go out with a bang but it's not that bang... there's not the eye-pop scene you might expect from such spawn...but it does end in words; Martyr - from the Latin martyr < Ancient Greek μάρτυρ (martyr), later form of μάρτυς (martys) "witness".

Fire Walk With Me

Tricky - Smoking Beagles

- forgot how much I loved this, the B-Side to the Tricky Kid single. Actually, I think PMT period Tricky is a lot better than I imagined at the time.

Tricky - Tricky Kid

Anyway, I watched Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on ITV4 last night and the Roadhouse nightclub scene had subtitles, an additional which utterly wrecked the atmosphere of what has to be my favourite scene in any film....not being able to hear the dialogue gave a stuffed-ear, wasted authenticity that is just lost when you know what they're saying. Ridiculous.

Boxes

Belle de Jour has the enigmatic, never explained, Chinese box... which seems to contain the essence of eroticism for Belle de Jour, or else the buzzing that emanates from the box is indicative of neurochemical snapping or some figurative / literal spin on insect aphropdisiacs...

But, anyway, in its place in that film it surely...



...is a precursor of the suitcase trick of arch-thief Tarantino - the idea of both boxes containing souls is not entirely misguided as a reading of both films, even if it's not the correct reading...



...and a similar reading, tapping into the masochism of the first film and the soul-tearing of the second is the puzzle box from Hellraiser... which performs more or less the same function as the Chinese Box in Belle de Jour... the look on Catherine Deneuve's face after the box has been activated mirrors the pain/pleasure of Hellraiser, albeit via Yves Saint Laurent rather than Giger imitations...



(and this in turn reminded me that Richard Kelly's new film is a variation on the Button, Button short story which features a mysterious box and which numbed my limbs as a child...)

Coil - Box Theme

Tom Waits - Black Box Theme

Belle De Jour

Still ploughing through the Bunuel box-set. I'd seen this a long long time ago and I only have a few comments:

1) Lacan apparently showed this instead of a prepared lecture on female masochism.

2) I think I might have seen this first at a critical period in my psychosexual development.

Cabaret Voltaire - Sensoria (The Bloody Beetroots vs SirBilly Experience Remix

That Obscure Object Of Desire

Got the Luis Bunuel DVD box-set for Christmas and have only just got around to watching it. First up, That Obscure Object Of Desire - think I might go backwards, see if they get unwatchable, in the same way someone once recommended to a friends they approach Swans albums..."Start from White Light...Keep going backwards until your soul crushes..."

There's something somehow resistant to criticism about this film but...

Desire is everything; the title is as literal as it gets, could almost be one of those mistranslated titles you see in China, where Face/Off becomes "Who Is Face Belonging To? I Kill You Again, Harder!" and Pretty Woman becomes "I Will Marry a Prostitute to Save Money" (a personal favourite off mine) - The Object of Desire is always Obscure...

In particular, the film seems to be about the desire to desire and the desire to be desired (Imagine a gently surrealist, French-Spanish take on Duncan Norvelle's "Chase Me!" routine... and then wipe it from your memory like a bad uncle).

Both characters are locked in a groove of their own making, doomed to circulate; matter and anti-matter, Moon and Earth - gravity pulls each of them together and forces the embrace that neither of them wants to make... an indesctructible object (the shape of her back might be a colourized Man Ray photo) versus an unstoppable force...

Neither character can exist on their own, their concept of wholeness simply a mirror of what the other can give. On the surface, he's dealing with his middle age in typical crisis fashion; wants jouissance and sees it in her.. while at the same time she's wrestling with a desire for objects (houses, clothes) when really she feels nothing for anything - even as she gives herself to a younger man to taunt her older suitor, she convinces herself it's fakery and pretence - a Jenny Haniver Orgasm.

There's a hefty dose of Lacan of course: the attempt to transcend the pleasure principle, to embrace life despite the constant urge to embrace as little as possible, to give in to the pull of unsatisfied desire...

And all this human sexual political wrangling is echoed by the constant hum of terrorism in the streets below them; another indication of the impossibility of
desire - it's never clear what the terrorists want; they break into factions and come together again under the mantle of the Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus - the key words being revolution (circular reasoning, ouroroborous, the need for a counter to every culture) and infant (Lacan again; the infant looking into the mirror and wanting).

Peverelist and Appleblim - Circling

2562 - Moog Dub

60s Counterculture - the musical (continued)

... Timothy Leary hiding from the Merry Pranksters at Millbrook to the strains of Betty Davis funk... Gordon Wasson's mushroom hunting trip with everyone miming the chorus to The Dead Kennedys Pull My Strings... a Black Panther meeting with everyone throwing shapes to Nurse With Wound's Strang Play of the Mouth... the Human Be In with the whole crowd wearing duck masks and swaying to KRS-One's My Philosophy... The May 68 Paris Riots with everyone playing human statues and humming Ricardo Villalobos's Chants... MC5 seguing from Kick Out The James into the Cocteau Twins Violaine, with the crowd singing along...

The Dead Kennedys - Pull My Strings

Cocteau Twins - Violaine

KRS-One - My Philosophy

Across The Universe

Watched this by accident... it amounts to a Beatles musical, in the same way as Mamma Mia is an Abba one, with a side salad of counter cultural issues (nasty little Janis Joplin rip off sings in bar; everyone smiles through dope smoke and tussles with political change - I didn't even like the original Janis Joplin)...

...emotional signifiers and shorthands abound (some of them work, I'm not a robot yet, still get caught occasionally, against my while with a rousing chorus of All You Need Is Love), people hang around on rooftops, belting out Beatles songs.... timelines are stretched and truncated... psychedelicatessen's emerge at places in time and space that don't seem to fit any established lines of reasoning... characters are, distressingly, called Jude and Sadie and Lucy which has the effect of making you tensely await their song at every given plot turn...

...the idea might have worked but with the Beatles the music can't lend itself to the story, it's too well known to integrate, too lost in it's own cultural baggage to mean anything other... it simply can't be combined with the imagery in a way that makes any difference; there's no jarring, no Max Ernst style loplopping (another film might yet make use of Ernst's surrealistic collage novels as a way out of the mix, making the music Brass rub up against the action in a way that reveals something hidden)

Across The Universe (I thought it was about Laibach, which would have been brilliant; those guys should've been consulted and then insulted) has nothing that doesn't make sense or changes the way you might have thought about the songs...

If only someone attempted this with different music: gangs of anti-war protesters belting out Hanson records podcasts; a bar singalong with Keiji Haino; a bicycle ride through the Detroit riots with The Chap or Gang Gang Dance; the shooting of Martin Luther King to The Ting Tings; grooving in the Cavern to Raglani...

The Chap - They Have A Name (Atlas Sound Remix)

The Chap - I am Oozing Emotion

The Curse Of Reality (Or A Post That Wasn't)

Here's a post that never was. I was flicking through some old posts on the blogger dashboard and found some that I never published, due to forgetfulness or loss of heart or whatever... since this blog has recently re-animated I figured I might air a few of these (and there are others that I swear I've never written - anyone own up? That piece on Nico?) in their original, unfinished, unvarnished form...

This one comes from three years ago when the world was very different. I think I still believe what I was saying but some of the phrasintg and the spelling is just... well, maybe something told me back then that this shouldn't be out there, not without thought and research and rigour but, I dunno, research and thought and rigour is never what this has been about and won't be. It's about half-remembered events and theories and ideas and songs, it's about knowledge as it's actually used; half-arsed, semi-thought, attenuated:

So, several things coincided.

I was re-watching Children Of The Stones with 8 year old middle Loki, sorta discussing the pagan/christian war (add in delusion and minus proud Dadness here for detail; his grasp on pre-Christian theology isn't as good as it could be...) and then I came upon this post from the ever-synchronous Kek and everything started to slide together...

When did film-makers, producers, directors etc start demanding that people needed TV and films that were about something? When did they suddenly feel the need to explain everything? Nowadays it's like we're slowly retreating, returning to midperiod Hitchcockian values where every little psychological detail is neatly tossed off at the end, just in case we missed it...

Actually, that is more or less true in Hitchcock except from The Birds. They don't explain about the birds do they? Wonder why? The film is very explicit about there being no apparent rationale behind the attacks - I seem to remember the characters discussing that vrey issue - which perhaps suggests that Hitchcock regarded the Freudian motifs sufficiently out there to render further explanation uneccessary. Certainly, my experience in A Level teaching suggests that Freud is best experienced intuitively and that the understanding can be clouded slightly by looking too closely... but that might be just because I'm shite at explaining things...actually, this is probably a post in itself: Freudian Themes of Goddess-baiting, Oedipal blindings and the immanent chaos of femininity in The Birds...

(to follow)

(perhaps - but it sounds like something that has already happened)

Anyway... I don't want reality to start intruding too far into my entertainment; the nasty pull of the real has a terrible, analgesic effect on viewing; I can happily spoil an hour and a half's senseless fun with a badly placed "but they'd never do that" or "can the Doctor be so lonely when he simply has to go back before The Time War began..." etc and I can't see how this can be good.

I want to shake Rationality off a little but people keep insisting I need it because I'm human.

Rationality, the need to know, to understand (I can hear colleagues whining Verstehen behind me, even as I type) is a terrible addiction because it gets you gripped so deep that it's only very rarely that you even think to surface. Before you know it, you're watching Donnie Darko and you're thinking: Is this internally consistent? Can I find the flaw? Where is it? and then, too late, you remember it's a film, an entertainment, a kind of brain-stretch that doesn't require an answer.

Rationalisty is a form of Schizophrenia. A nagging auditory hallucination that doesn't seem to want to go away.

Who is it that wants us to have all these answers? Why does the guy in Life on Mars have to be in a coma? Why can't he just fart around in the 1970s having the time of his life? I mean, the least mysterious sections of the whole series so far is the mystery is-he-isn't-he elements, the ghost sections, the spooked-out Testcard girl... you wanted to skip those bits too didn't you?

The end of Life on Mars lets us come full circle. We always knew it would. The story circle, not the character arc is all in film and TV. Or maybe the arc is a rainbow...

The curse of reality permeates through everything, even football matches have to be endlessly explained, as if they could somehow be controlled or manipulated by the ultra-expensive software tactical mapping packages that the major teams seem to use. Reality clings to a game when chance can take everything away because the blandness of USA style batting averages is eating away at the pleasant misunderstanding of belief. We know that Chelsea will win. It is all over.

And yet, there is still the lure of the dionysian, the abyss of the FA cup, the beautifully empty myth of the impossible underdog - a myth that every fan clings too as if it were a Pagan Goddess... "it's only 11 vs 11. Anything can happen...."

We need more of this ridiculous belief. I know that Yeovil Town will be destroyed by pretty much whoever they play but that doesn't stop the almost certain knowledge that will rise within me, a Warp Spasm that nevertheless makes me believe despite everything.

It's as if there's an unknown seat of consciousness, just beyond our measuring devices, an electrical

Machine Girl

O-kay...



Machine Girl

Could happen, I suppose.

Revolver / David Foster Wallace

It won't be a popular opinion, i'm sure but I don't think Guy Ritchie's Revolver is as bad as everyone says it is.

yeah, it overreaches, loses the plot(s), tries too hard to tie everything together at the end but i watched it for the first time the other night and it was... interesting, I thought.

Hard work and probably not worth the effort* but...

I'd avoided it when it came out because it got such terrible reviews - everyone hated it and you can kind of see where they were coming from (the ending is telegraphed, yeah, but somehow I don't think it's supposed to be a twist as such) but, I dunno, there's something in me that likes the fact that he tried something a little out of his comfort zone (I liked Lock Stock in the same way I liked Only Fools and Horses), even if it kind of went a little awry... There's worse out there, stuff that doesn't even attempt to try, stuff that's content to rest on laurels and genre conventions until they can be regarded as Pop art and homage and irony.

RockNRolla is already getting on my tits thought and I've only seen the trailer... It's the spelling, I think.

*As I wrote this I noticed that David Foster Wallace is dead. His books were flawed in the same way as Revolver. They often didn't work, always seemed like way too much effort (way too long) but somehow I always managed to struggle through them. They were hard work like people say Calcutta is hard work. All those footnotes and literary spirals, all that language to plough through... all for tiny little moments of inspiration. I didn't read all his books but I always imagined that one day I might (In a way that I never imagined I would with Umberto Eco, for instance, who seems too far gone to worry with after Foucault's Pendulum). David Foster Wallace books seemed like they might give up something, somewhere, somehow... in the same way that I still think I might understand some of Deleuze and Guattari. I'm not sure if it's, to paraphrase Beckett on Burroughs, 'plumbing not writing' and I'm not sure if all the acclaim was ever really justified but now that he's dead I guess there may be some retrospective or other that'll start to illuminate. I sort of hope not.

Blue Velvet

...just rewatched Blue Velvet after about 20 years, this time in a state of semi-consciousness, hypnagogic jumping allover the place and



drifting in and out of sleep seems the ideal way to engage with this film - possibly all his films - for someone who professes to be a painterly director, the visual element is only part of the fun... it's the sound that really disturbs...



Close-miked Chris Watson beatles, fighting for food... match-point flashes... the crackle of osmosis in a rose stem...



Bobby Vinton - Blue Velvet

--- singalonga here ---

Blue Velvet is an imaginary soundtrack, a lost Barry Adamson record (I might be guessing but didn't Lynch eventually give in and let Barry have a thrash at the sound design?)



- the film is incidental, can be reduced to the music, the miking, the chemical roar of old car engines, the tyres on the midnight freeway, the footsteps on staircases, the soundbite obscenities of Dennis Hopper...



--- these are samples in search of a song; Hopper makes much more intuitive sense if we see him in this way, if we precog him at the start of a junglist breakdown, a gnarled Fuck in the middle of an old New Beat track ---

Jodorowsky's Dune That Never Was

I love David Lynch, Dali-like repetitions aside, but his Dune is the only film I've ever walked out of.

Still liked it better than the books, though. Walked out of all of them.

I've had a few Dune moments, in the backwoods, at the reservoir, where things got out of hand with Eon (the car doors sealed, mist descended, everything slowed to Om pace, highhhhhhhhhhats fizzed in the distance) but the spice was the only thing I ever got from it; I've never managed to like the kind of science fiction with silly names... the use of medical record Post-It names (Talbot, Travis, Vaughan, Blake, M-Arkham etc) by Ballard always seemed more alien...

But, I've always been fascinated by what Jodorowsky's Dune might have been like, especially since it was to have had little relation to the book...

Digging a little, there's a 1000 page storyboard out there somewhere, drawn by Jean MOBIUS Giraud and I can only imagine the slow burning mania of Jodorowsky might have suited the self-styled grandeur of the books better than the introverted little tics and tocks and match-burnings of Lynch, a director of small things, done slightly (Frank Booth notwithstanding)

Not sure that Pink Floyd should have been allowed to do the music though...

Here's a few character sketches for the Jodorowsky version:

A Perfect Sphere

...a perfect sphere, unknown in the Forest... the shattering quiet/weird moment from Merchant Ivory's Savages... spins through the air like an electron, lands in the world of the Mud People, savages waiting for a Pop Group cover, waiting for old (not classic) Nike trainers, Puma tops...

Mark Stewart And The Maffia - Welcome To Liberty City



^^^^^^^^^^ lots more on the Pop Group, MP3s etc, here ^^^^^^^^^^

not the one with PSH and laura linney, not this one...

this one...

the one with all the Danielle Dax lookalikes...



The New Age Steppers came too late, The Slits came too late...

The New Age Steppers - Fade Away

But although the tribal tremblings of those two are perhaps the most obvious signifiers, I keep hearing CocoRosie in my head while it's playing...

CocoRosie - Promise

Bunuel is invoked of course - The Exterminating Angel quoted (I can't remember much about that film, having seen it only once, years ago but I think I can tell how this kind of thing might have lingered in the memory, since watching a series of Bunuel films on telly all that time ago I still retain some residue of what I've seen, to the extent that occasionally, when I'm tired, the world does start to look like a Bunuel film)

And there's the inevitably Freudian riff on returning to the primal...

imagine Arthur Janov, watching both these films and rubbing with glee at the prospect of the middle classes tumbling into his soft-walled centres, eager to dispel myths, eager to let it out, emotional honesty being the holy grail, emotional intelligence being the final link in the chain...

let it out, just so you can prove it was in there in the first place, let it out, just to show that all that education and cultural capital hasn't entirely muffled their spirit, their we-moon, their inner Wolf Child...

scream if you want to go faster...

The use of the croquet ball in Savages is inspired; in black and white we could be watching a wguilt wracked (but, importantly, curious) Oppenheimer uttering his now famous grammatical glitch: "...now I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds..." or else it tries to elaborate on a theme that would come much later in the form of



Rogue Traders - Voodoo Child

where humankind were reduced to their essence - chuckling balls of steel, time-racists --- I think the Here Come The Drums refrain throughout those two episodes is an unconscious echo... the drums are all through The Savages, turning to jazzy skitters as the primitives turn to chattering middle classes (which echoes my stepping out of Jungle and Drum N Bass - once the jazzy fills started to take over and 'intelligence' and LTJ Bukem crept into the scene, I walked away and never looked at another Drum N Bass record again...)

another story...

((((((((((( (we are all time racists) - The Pop Group song that never was, the one were the ethnological forgery really took wind and Psychic TV's Themes records were shoved into songforms that pulled society apart at the primal level, alongside bursting samples from old Batman shows and snatches of Keith Levene guitar... The Pop Group never really did it for me, no matter how many times I've come back to them and tried...I want to love them but the earnestness and hectoring and lack of humour (in everything apart from their name) always put me on the back foot, quietly whispering: Yes, I know that... even Crass didn't always preach to the converted in such an obvious way... I'll probably try again, really do want to see what others seem to see )))))))))))))

The Savages uses various forms to tell it's simple tale: mock anthropology film (which is in fact uncannily similar to the real thing - i had a brief anthropology fetish in my teens), drawing room play, surrealism, silent film... and if form and pace (we languish until we love it) dictate over content then that's only because the content isn't there and shouldn't be...

Still got the drag queens (gloriously unexplained) to work out - I guess it could be just ugly women...

Here Come The Drums...

Sacrifice, primitivism, Murderous Rage, Return to the Woods - the ending ought to be the still taken from the latest Sig Ros album cover or maybe from Von Trier's The Idiots, where idiocy is paralled with creativity in the calmest, coldest way possible - though reality TV trumps all, as always....

Like the young Martin Amis during the Oxbridge Interview in The Rachel Papers, I'm not even sure if I liked The Savages.