Thursday, April 28, 2005

 

we just named the mouse 'mitt romney'

i totally saw some dude pulling a marty-mcfly-in-back-to-the-future-2 today; hitching a ride by grabbing onto the back of a moving vehicle! except he was on a bike instead of a hoverboard. oh well. he had massive space-age headphones at least.

i probably won't be posting again for awhile; 3 papers due in the space of two days! in honor of brendan i will give them suitably elaborate titles. "aspectual identification and narrative coercion" anyone?

in the meantime, check out this syllabus for a class on exploitation cinema! fucking awesome! (via jahsonic, how predictable [on my part, not his])

ps. someone bought shares in the blog.

Saturday, April 23, 2005

 

that word 'broadminded' is spelled 'S-I-N'

i finished the mix i've been working on. download here. now you all must endure the horrible fury of my penchant for novelty songs and bizarre vocals! it will only be up for a week, so get it now. drop a comment if you missed it.

i had a great post all typed up--twice, TWICE i had it finished and ready to post. but no. no. first i was thwarted by blogger, and then by safari. so unfortunately all i can offer is a tracklist, because further attempts to provide happy explanations and informative links will inevitably result in failure and a subsequent murderous rampage. sorry.

all covered in wire and bits of old tire
1. the soft pink truth - "lookin' back (carol channing)"
2. peter l. batsin - "how to make a tape recorder"
3. levy lorenzo - "hamster midi" (webpage)
4. DAT politics - "yha hoo tuning"
5. TRS-80 - "phantom power"
6. steve beresford - "vaio-id14"
7. karera musication - "ten" from ichi the killer (original soundtrack)
8. dave douglas - "the mystic lamb"
9. pancho sings - "i left my heart in san francisco"
10. rosa yemen - "herpes simplex"
11. public image, ltd. - "no birds"
12. boye - "mikrosvet" (via orbis quintus)
13. les georges leningrad - "lollipop lady"
14. dr. octagon - "intro"
15. dosh - "building a strange child"
16. meadow house - "tit for tat" (more info here and here)
17, laurie anderson - "o superman" (top 20 hit in the UK!)

Thursday, April 21, 2005

 

not for those afflicted with epilepsy

i can't believe i missed this.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

 

adult kindergarden

+++ the little mini-interview pitchfork did with devendra banhart about his forthcoming album is hilarious. he's a lot easier to appreciate if you enjoy gibberish. don't know what that says about his music, but whatever...

and this feature on finnish free folk is making me go insane in about four different directions at once (not the least of them being that marvelous alliteration).

+++ famous redheads! amazing stuff in there, especially the historical redheads--napoleon bonaparte, lizzie borden, cleopatra, columbus, general custer, judas, nero, stalin's daughter (no implications are implied in regards to redheads i know, many of them are quite wonderful people when not trying to maim me in some fashion).

+++ jahsonic has been killing it lately... roger corman, folk is not a four letter word, henri-georges clouzot's la prisonniere, and sophia loren (click on that picture, there's more). and this fascinating tidbit:

Female ejaculation and the British film censors
In the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Classification denies the existence of the phenomenon of female ejaculation, regarding it instead as urination during sex, thus banning its depiction under its rules that ban the depiction of urolagnia. --wikipedia link [Apr 2005]


that site is a vortex i get hopelessly sucked into nearly every day... via clicking on the word misappropriation in an entry about garage music i went from an entry about (correct) appropriation in which the example used titian's venus of urbino to thinking about the mark rappaport films (in which he appropriates that painting amongst others--like peter greenaway but in his own way) to searching jahsonic for mark rappaport which led me to a huge-ass essay by dr. harry m. benshoff which i shall probably read in some distant future but nonetheless looks interesting.

+++ jess! tell us about prague!

Saturday, April 16, 2005

 

s/he is her/e

genesis p-orridge's website is very kickass--an infrequently updated but still excellent blog, tons of writing, and a very cool shop (i totally love this t-shirt). i recommend checking out the "to be ex dream" bio.

in other news: been seeing a ton of great films lately. ichi the killer is fantastic; zach, check it out! intensely gory and way over-the-top, and the boredoms did the soundtrack! caught a selection of ed emshwiller stuff at balangan on thursday: lifelines (1960), film with three dancers (1970), thanatopsis (1962), totem (1963), and relativity (1966), which is justifiably a classic. i remember reading that jaroslav kucera, vera chytilova's husband and the cinematographer for daisies, visited the states and said he enjoyed emshwiller's stuff a lot; there's definitely a connection there. i also caught heaven's gate at the brattle, and a bu cinematheque screening of a documentary about the film, which is perhaps the archetypical example of a giant hollywood film gone out of control (read about it here). i don't think it's quite as bad as the press made it out to be--bullshit like titanic or the godfather is just as bad, if not worse, in my opinion, and the film is actually a rather strong indictment of the government/landowner exploitation of immigrants in the american west, so that's cool. it's still fairly bloated though, and lacking in real artistic value, as you might expect (by the way, my vote for worst place to see a movie in boston goes to the brattle--the projectionist fucked up every single reel change, leaving us sitting in the dark for about five minutes during the final battle sequence, the sound was garbagecantastic, and the fucking screen has big seams down the middle of it--totally lame, especially for a big lush epic like heaven's gate).

i've also been watching jess's documentaries: hell house (fundamentalists are so fucking creepy!), nico: icon, and superstar: the life and times of andy warhol, which is actually a crap documentary but the mere fact that it's about warhol saves it. i don't really think the man's life could ever be uninteresting....

tonight nicole and i are going to see some resnais films at harvard. one is a short he did with chris marker. fucking awesome. tomorrow night: animal collective! and no school on monday because some crazy people are gonna run in the streets!

on tuesday night i caught angels of light and akron/family at great scott (not an altogether terrible place to see a show, for what it's worth; small, and bad views of the stage, but if it's not crowded it'll do). they were fantastic, michael gira is awesome, and i was really impressed with akron/family. i bought a t-shirt, it has geese on it. hooray. visit young god records. read michael gira's latest newsletter (box on the right). recall the piece he did for the wire's "epiphanies" section in the mf doom issue. zach, they're playing in chicago tonight! go!

finally, i should say that i didn't get into teach for america. oh well.

Thursday, April 07, 2005

 

official todd solondz report

so instead of paying some ridiculous amount of money and wading through the crowds at harvard tomorrow night, i decided to skip my poetry class and catch the screening of solondz's new film 'palindromes' at the mfa this afternoon. unfortunately it was a pretty disappointing experience--the film wasn't very good and solondz wasn't the most captivating speaker.

so the most notable thing about 'palindromes' is that it's the story of one girl in her early teens, but the character is played by eight different actresses of varying ages, races, etc. sounds cool, except that in execution it's pretty dumb. according to solondz the idea comes from noticing that a lot of people identified with some of his characters, even though they might not be entirely sympathetic.

quote from the notes handed out at the screening: "The curious thing is how sex, age, race, etc. play so limited a part in determining the degree to which a character is sympathetic. Perhaps this is why a sympathetic character is one that all types of people can relate to... So I wondered what would happen if I cast a number of different types of peopel as one character, a character who is wholly sympathetic. My fear was that it would come across as too much of an intellectual exercise, a show-offy but pointless trick, and alienate the audience. But my hope was that there would be a cumulative effect that would be more emotionally affecting than had there been just one actor: more magic, and less sleight of hand."

so basically he's just trying to cast a wider net--include more actresses of various shapes, sizes, and colors, get more people to identify. of course, this doesn't really make any fucking sense when they all play the same fucking character. jeez. just because the sullen little girl(s) we've seen throughout the film suddenly becomes a fat black woman playing a sullen little girl doesn't mean i'm going to identify any more with a sullen little girl.

of course, i had other problems with the film--i just didn't find it that funny, and solondz also seems to be pushing this idea of the palindrome "as a kind of loose metaphor for the ways in which we DON'T change. Like a palindrome that, instead of developing in different directions, folds back on itself, the self is a part-static thing. It is our 'palindromic' nature that the film explores, that part of ourselves that does NOT change, and that serves as one of the film's central themes: change vs. stasis." unfortunately this comes off in the film as just plain not being able to change, being stuck with your lot in life, because it's shoddy philosophy both conceptually and in execution. if you're going to talk about the 'static' part of the self, then you need to point out how that is not necessarily a defeatist viewpoint, otherwise you're just being morbidly depressing. i'm not some optimist who thinks 'anything is possible if you just try! even unicorns!' but by making the film itself palindromic (this isn't a spoiler, it's the title of the film for fuck's sake...) you're implying that change is impossible. and, if i may be blunt, fuck that.

ok, so i'll talk about what nicole and jess REALLY want to hear about, mr. solondz himself. i should start by saying that he's not as evil or even as stupid as i'm making him out to be here; it was pretty obvious that his heart is in the right place and his ideas for what 'palindromes' was supposed to be weren't so bad (unfortunately his sloppy filmmaking didn't get it across very well). as for his demeanor: imagine a slightly more nervous/awkward woody allen with a very soft, almost feminine voice. he seemed pretty uncomfortable and he stutters a lot, but he actually fielded the questions pretty well once he got into it a bit more, and he had a nice deadpan sense of humor. pretty unexciting, overall. like a jumpy uncle who has to deal with speaking to crowds fairly often but still can't get used to it. he almost fits that "you'd never expect this normal-looking man would make such crazy movies" cliche, which, now that i think about it, is also used in reference to pedophiles and rapists. go figure.

if you have more specific questions, hit dat comment box.

[ps. this would have been up sooner but blogger was pretending it didn't love me anymore.]

Monday, April 04, 2005

 

sesame roads

one highlight of a weekend in which i did hardly a damn thing: pat o'neill.

hfa was showing one recent work, "the decay of fiction" (2003), and an older one, "water and power" (1990). totally amazing. read this "decay of fiction" review, it's pretty good. the film has evidently been made into an interactive exhibit, which seems just as good as the film itself (that site also has a good bio)

and zach, you'll be pleased to know that he was the the founding assistant dean of film and video at calarts.

&&&

today i tried to make myself feel better by buying things. it pretty much worked, i must admit. i picked up the april issue of the wire, two new albums (m.i.a.'s arular and akron/family self-titled), a brand-new DVD of takashi miike's ichi the killer (based mostly on the picture nicole posted awhile back but also because this cheesy bravo 'top 100 scariest movie moments' thing--see, my weekend really was that exciting--had a section on another miike film called "audition" that looks quite intense. i need to find more films by the guy who made 'go, go second time virgin'. hello, tokyo... END DIGRESSION). the music is pretty damn good, the wire has an invisible jukebox with ira cohen and primer on the lovely grime i've been so into lately (thanks internet!), and i just found out akron/family is touring as michael gira's (aka. angels of light, aka ex-swans frontman, aka head of young god records) backup band and will be visiting great scott on the twelfth!

so, yeah... buy things? you'll feel better?

^^^^..
------- look a stegosaurus!!!

i really shouldn't post when i'm stoned.

ps. oh fuck, those renaissance palace guard dudes guarding that pile of robes and bones make me crack up. so gangsta. you know if jay-z or p.diddy or some other rich rap mogul had their funeral all planned out they'd have made provisons for that kind of shit. every time someone says "the pope" they should be required to stomp their feet and bang those scepters. "THE POPE!"

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