Exquisite Copse

Glitch/Fart/Flash

2012-02-09T06:38:00.000-08:00

It begins not with a bang, but with a parp: in their book On Bathos Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls trace the dawn of modern bathos to a farting corpse in Pope’s Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). Initially, bathos simply meant something like nadir. Only in Eighteenth century England does it start to acquire the sense of, as the OED has it, ‘a ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax’. As Crangle and Nicholls suggest, this descent or deflation often has to do with material things, and especially corporeal things, making themselves suddenly and shamingly obvious. In a flash - or with a flatulent toot - we switch from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I was reminded of this celebrated literary fart while playing Pippin Barr’s browser game All's Well that Ends Well. Barr presents players with a simple objective: they have to pilot their aircraft across the screen, avoiding salvos of oncoming missiles. The only problem is that there are far too many missiles, moving far too quickly, for the player to have the slightest chance of success. Eventually it becomes apparent that you can make it across, but only by dying repeatedly; each time the avatar ‘respawns’ it is, in accordance with time-honoured videogame convention, impervious for a second or so, and by exploiting this fact it's possible to inch across the screen. Do this, however, and you’re presented with another, almost identical scenario, pitting a star ship against an asteroid belt. Clear this screen (and, again, this can be done by holding down the ‘d’ key) and other, increasingly surreal versions of the same situation await - flying chair versus flying station wagons, flying station wagon versus flying giant broccoli stalks, missile versus Easter Island heads etc. When (through sheer persistence rather than skill) the player does clear a screen, their ‘success’ is qualified by the pile of wrecked avatars littering the landscape below.

As Barr notes, ‘[t]he idea is of repeated death and of memories of that death, like the corpses left behind in many other video games. But pushed to an extreme for a particular effect.’ That ‘particular effect’ is, of course, a bathos effect; the game’s overblown introductory text (‘You are the brave pilot of a high-tech spy plane... May God protect you’) is immediately undercut by the tinny pop that accompanies the plane’s first collision, which it doesn’t take much imagination to hear as a kind of fuzzy digital fart. His Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, a suite of unwinnable minigames based on the torments of Tantalus, Sisyphus, Prometheus et al (rapidly alternate between the ‘g’ and ‘h’ keys to dislodge the eagle eating your liver, to roll a boulder uphill etc.) follows a similar trajectory. If Barr’s games mock the way that videogames tend to handle death, then they also suggest how good they are at generating bathos.

In his introduction to Christie in Love (1970), playwright Howard Brenton suggests that the play’s police officers are essentially stock characters, and to be played as such. However, very occasionally ‘they have ‘sudden lights’, unpredictable speeches beyond the confines of pastiche. As if a cardboard black and white cut-out suddenly reaches out a fully fledged hand. It’s a bathos technique... It is very cruel’. Players of videogames will be more than familiar with situations like that which Brenton describes. There are moments when AI functions adequately, and there are even moments when it can seem to have ‘sudden lights’ but there are also all those moments at which the limitations of the code ‘behind’ the AI characters become glaringly apparent.

In Skyrim (which I recently had to review and which, despite my violent aversion to the Tolkeinesque, was pretty fun - nice skies) it’s not uncommon for the illusion of a coherent world to be undercut by the redployment of a speech sample you’ve heard a thousand times before, or a character’s sudden schizoid switch in demeanour (these moments, in fact, are weirdly evocative of Hedayat’s disquieting use of repeated phrases and gestures in Blind Owl).

Then there are the weirder glitches. Just how surreal these can be is suggested by a bullet point in the notes for the game’s first patch, which besides promising to remedy framerate issues and blurred textures also claims to have

Fixed occasional issue where a guest would arrive to the player's wedding dead

In attempting to talk about downright weirdness of some of Skyrim’s glitches I kept defaulting to the idea that it was almost as if the disc was dreaming or delirious, as if we were getting a glimpse into its subconscious – kind of like sharing a bed with someone who talks in their sleep (which I do). The term brainfart (for which the OED, alas, doesn’t have a definition, though wikipedia is pretty fascinating on the subject) springs - as it were - to mind.

As Skyrim proves, glitches can be fascinating - we get a glimpse of how the game, as an assemblage of interacting systems, works, and this is often more compelling than the illusion it’s trying to sustain (Noah Wardripp Fruin calls this ‘the TaleSpin effect’, after a venerable computerised story generator that produced narratives far less interesting than the processes it used to compose them). But glitches can also be strangely shaming, as can the experience of in-game death. Both can trigger the bathetic realisation that we’ve been fooled into responding to a game as if it were something more than a simulation. This is the sort of alienation Graeme Kirkpatrick describes in his account of Resident Evil 4’s QTE sections. For him the graphic button prompts that flash up on screen ‘and the sudden quickening of events seems to conspire to produce a sense of ridiculousness. In the midst of playing the game... we are suddenly offered the spectacle of our own activity as something childish. We see ourselves pressing a brightly colored plastic button on an infantile toy’. He reads this realisation of his own absurdity through Bergson’s theory of laughter, which suggests that we laugh in order to draw attention to and censure ‘the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living’.* For Bergson, laughter is supposed to jolt us awake when we fall into automatic or quasi-mechanical behaviours (like tapping buttons in front of a screen) - an idea that has obvious ties to Pope’s comedy, rooted as it is in his anxious fascination with the possibility that we’re just digestive tracts with delusion of grandeur.

The glitch, like the flash of ‘sudden light’ or the fart that brings us crashing back down to earth, entails a rapid but profound switch in tone/scale/register. In their ‘Notes on Glitch’ Manon and Temkin emphasise ‘the momentary or punctiform nature of the initiating impulse. A glitch is a “surge,” “a sudden short-lived irregularity in behavior” (OED), whose aftereffects are at once shocking and effusive. The garish appearance and obstreperous sound of glitch art betokens its origination in this way: a tiny variance has triggered major damage.’ Perhaps games can harness both the dramatic potential Brenton sees in bathos and the thought-provoking power of glitches and interruptions?

Arguably some already do. If Silent Hill 2’s AI-controlled Maria occasionally seems a little stiff or suspiciously dopey, for example, this only adds to the impression that - like Solaris’ simulacral wife-substitute Hari, who she in so many respects resembles – she’s something between a person and a piece of code, a machine and a memory.** Hari’s repeated deaths and resurrections mirror the logic of videogames, while the sequence where, panicked at having been separated from Kelvin, she tears through a metal door is, to the gamer, more than a little evocative of AI companions’ dodgy pathfinding routines.

While we might be expected to pity Hari, pathos keeps slipping into bathos - her immortality imbues her suicide attempts with something of the existential slapstick of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, and our emotional response is all the more complex for it.

Moreover, in Solaris as in Silent Hill 2 there is something ridiculous in the willingness of the heroes to believe they can have their wives back, despite the overwhelming proof that they are merely imperfect copies or self-induced delusions. And of course their suspension of disbelief mirrors that of the viewer/player, who as Kirkpatrick insists, is always vulnerable to having the ‘ridiculousness’ of their absorption in a fiction/simulation made bathetically clear to them.

There is then evidence that games might be uniquely suited to exploring bathos and immortality, that they could put a fresh twist on a set of tropes and figures – or, as Bogost might have it, ‘unit operations’ – that underpin everything from the myth of Sisyphus to Groundhog Day, and in so doing address their inflection by technology. There is also evidence – and this is something we mustn’t forget – that Alexander Pope was indirectly responsible for The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps.***

* He also links this revelatory flash to Walter Benjamin’s notion of jetzeit, the implications of which for animated gifs are explored in an intriguing piece by Daniel Rourke

** It might be worth noting that Alan Wake and Shadows of the Damned both borrow this ‘haunted by repeated visions of beloved dying’ trope, and for that matter that SotD lays luridly bare the strain of fetishistic misogyny it’s bound up with

*** Though as a mitigating factor this means he can claim to have had a hand in Nothing Really Matters – for me one of Janet’s finest hours

Queering the Pitch

2011-03-02T07:37:00.000-08:00

Been doing some film editing lately. Watching HDTV, too, which sometimes exposes editors’ having gambled on a long shot being long enough that no one – at least at standard def – would notice that the actors’ lip movements don’t in the least correspond to the words on the soundtrack. Michel Chion says we want to marry voices to their sources, to see mouths. In this respect the tricks of facial orientation filmmakers use so that any words can be synched to an image track are a bit like the rhetoric of Nuts magazine cover photography, whereby breasts are angled or draped so that the nipples remain just out of sight, as if they were something impossible and fantastic. These images are meant to inspire in viewers a desire to warp the image plane or rearrange the body so that the hidden secret would be visible - a desire that, as Linda Williams notes, porn panders to by contorting performers according not to comfort or verisimilitude but a logic of ‘maximum visibility’ (Hardcore 48).

Increasingly, cheesecake photos employ Photoshop not merely to smooth over blemishes or reproportion bodies but to combine, Zeuxis-style, elements from multiple photos, a process that is often taken to the point of defying conventional anatomy. Synthetic cubism is one reference point, but I was also reminded of these bodies in the Tate’s recent Gaugin show. One of the nice thinks about showing his carvings and ceramics alongside the paintings is that you realise the latter look not merely spatially ‘off’ but as if pictorial space was a sort of resistant material with its own obstinate grain or torque, only partially malleable into the forms Gaugin wants it to assume.

As the earliest artist yet to be exhibited at Tate II, part of the show’s remit was to argue for Gaugin’s importance to later, modern-er art. Certainly, the extent to which he allows desire to deform virtual space marks him as an ancestor of recent painters (Kilimnick, Joffe, Peyton et al) who’ve sought to reproduce the dissipated or decadent styles of attention characteristic of fan art – in which ‘good bits’ might be larger or more worked up while blurrings or disconnections, lapses in concentration and spots of boredom, sully other parts of the image/experience.

Those works (that is, both the fans’ stuff and that of the painters reflexively cribbing their style) tend, of course, to be based on prior images that, translated through fans’ desiring, variably co-ordinated or skilled bodies, come out distorted, sometimes unrecognizably. At the same moment as Gaugin was sailing to the tropics Michael Field (the alias of ‘poets & lovers’ Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) was working on Sight & Song, a poetic ‘translation’ of some of the pair’s favourite paintings. According to Ana Parejo Vadillo the collection operates according to a ‘two-phased aesthetic’ (Passengers of Modernity 192): the poems offer ‘objective’ descriptions of the images before submitting them to subjective, often sexualized re-readings. What Vadillo doesn’t comment on is the frequency with which these re-readings involve recalibrating the spatial relationships between the bodies that the pictures represent.

Often these shifts seem dictated by the poets’ own ‘orientation’ in gender/sexuality terms: a couple of the poems (including one on Boticelli’s Prima, of which Gaugin’s Nave Nave Mahana migh be read as a softcore remake) position us within the pictorial space occupied by female models, so that left and right are reversed (or ‘inverted’ – as Victorians said of homosexuals). Others trace sightlines that put female bodies squarely in the way of female eyes – eyes that, cued by Field, it is easy to read as harbouring an other-than-Platonic intent.

Of course, I’m probably doing unto Field what they’ve done unto Tintoretto, Giorgione et al: warping the original in the hope of teasing out a latent sexual secret. Nonetheless, their ‘two-phase’ translations of 2D canvases into space of utopian possbility remains intriguing as an instance of viewers interacting with and realigning images and bodies in order to realise multiple, competing storylines.

It might seem fanciful or trite to compare this to the process of playing a videogame, but I think its legitimate – especially in the case of games like Fez or Paper Mario, where progress often entails a form of perceptual ‘frame-shifting’, a switch between reading forms as 2D or 3D – just as, by imagining the males in Tintoretto's The Rescue occupy a different picture plane, we can choose to see the newly-liberated female captive gazing not at her (male) emancipator but at the body of the woman in the centre of the boat.

This game is a bit like looking at the duckrabbit, the famous emblem of epistemological relativism that can be seen either as a quacking duck or a windblown bunny, but not as both simultaneously (see also those images of preening coquetttes who turn into beshawled and decrepit crones). Re-reading the bit in Proust where Charlus is introduced for an upcoming book group, I was struck by the idea that there might be readers who wouldn’t yet know about the character’s (or, for that matter, the author’s) sexual orientation. Could you read (what now seemed to be) such an absurdly innuendo-saturated account of the character and come out of it blithely convinced he was straight?

Both Fez and Paper Mario have cartoony visual styles that riff on the videogame's transition from sprites to polygons, speaking to an audience old enough to have had to use their imaginations to ‘fill out’ games’ pixel-flat worlds. But there’s no reason games with similar mechanics couldn’t adopt entirely different aesthetics or communicate other messages.

The photographer Matt Stuart takes pictures that (a bit like the Elstir paintings Proust describes, also in vol. II) are angled so as to produce bizarre trompe l’oeil conjunctions. While I don’t really like his images (I’m turned of by the way they render the world wondrous and then knowable, dazzling their viewers by transforming ‘everyday’ London into a spectacular space rich with human variety, romance and humour and then flattering them by allowing them to decode and master this initially puzzling plurality) they are, in a way, games and suggestive as such of the potential for forms of visual play based on opening contingent arrangements of forms and bodies onto new meanings.

Voices Off

2010-11-23T14:04:00.000-08:00

So my recourse, in spells of emotional turmoil, is to media occupying two opposed registers: on the one hand, macho or machinic music that denies the possibility of emotion/affect (excepting aggression, obvs); on the other, stately, hyperbolically tragical stuff – chansons, melodrama, Veronika Voss. Basically I’ve been listening to a lot of D Double E and a lot of Cale-era Nico lately. As a consequence I’ve been thinking a lot about how voices affect me.

Michel Chion differentiates three modes of listening: causal, semantic and reduced. Causal listening is the level at which we class sounds as (coming from) machines, larynxes, birds, middle-aged Latina females, grime MCs etc. (our hypotheses can be wrong, of course). Taking D Double, the level on which I ‘get’ “think you’re a big boy cos you’ve got a beard/ bullets’ll make your face look weird” is semantic, but the line works musically because of his bizarre torsion of the vowels – perceptible at the level of reduced listening. D Double E gets away with his signature line being ‘it’s me’ because no one else says me like him; he seems to have total control over the production of the sorts of sounds you’d usually associate with vexed inarticulacy. Of course, the three aren’t really separable; what I’ve deduced or supposed about a voice will inflect my interpretation of what it says. I can find this girl’s ‘R’ sounds* fascinating as the residue of a Notts accent’s all-but-totally successful erasure (with that erasure’s attendant class connotations) but also gorgeous all on their dull, frictive own. Nico’s arcane, obstructively mispronounced lyrics kind of don’t matter because they’re the occasion for her to make sounds, though their gamey magniloquence also adds something to the experience.**

Barthes’ term for the irrefutable je ne sais quoi certain singers/vocal artefacts possess is ‘grain’ (which, given my general preference for trebly and sobbing voices over husky and raspy ones, I’ve never much liked as a descriptor). Naomi Schor suggests that we can find the co-ordinates for a Barthesian aesthetics in those aspects of each medium which seem, for Barthes, to represent its irreducible – and irrecuperable – essence: the ‘punctum’ in photography, the obtuse in film, the haiku-esque mode of textual statement that ‘instead of insisting ‘we are the real’... merely announces ‘so’’ (Schor 89). ‘Grain’ – which Schor doesn’t, incidentally, mention - would seem to be the sonic equivalent.

But are these qualities always contingent and/or irrecuperable? Barthes says yes: escaping/exceeding intention and meaning, they can’t be synthesised or produced (Joss Stone signifies without possessing the granular quality proper to proper soul?). Nevertheless, once they’ve happened they command our attention – which is a very valuable commodity. In an essay I recently read (which has transformed my experience of looking at go-see polaroids – something that, as a consequence of my guilty fascination with the fashion industry, is something I actually do a fair bit of), Elizabeth Wissinger talks about fashion models’ role as amplifiers or transducers of affect.

Challenging the traditional supposition that fashion photography is about embodying culturally valorized archetypes, she suggests that the best models/images may be precisely those that mobilise confusion and irresolution, creating expressions/conjunctions that are ‘unexpected... unassimilable... beyond the borders of conventional interpretation.’ A pre-expressive attitude – a face that could be about to resolve into an expression of joy, or ire or sulkiness but is, right now, suggestively illegible – is what the fashion shoot aims to produce/record/transmit.

As such, looking totally punk, or all-American – or, for that matter, looking ‘womanly’/‘sexy’ - isn’t necessarily as lucrative, as durably recuperable, as being able to negotiate the space between definable attitudes and aesthetics (I’ve written elsewhere about how, when Chantal Joffe gets it right, her paintings suggest the proximity of sexily compelling poses/expressions to poses/expressions symptomatic of boredom, panic or foetal alcohol syndrome). The same’s arguably true of voices; while studies suggest that different accents and dialects connote different qualities, signifying for the majority of us as posh, kind, stupid, trustworthy or whatever, voices that are mongrel, or grating, unpredictable or texturally compelling have a capacity to levy attention more to do with reduced listening than with our cultural biases.

Chion uses another term – ‘MSIs’ or ‘materializing sound indices’, ‘qualities of sound that direct our attention to the physical nature of its source’ – that suggests something both about the character of sounds that move us, and the reason they do (weirdly I’m thinking here of the tiny breathless hitch with which the beardy-sounding voice of hhWickes inaugurates his pronunciation of that brand name, also of how abnormally high in the mix Elly Jackson’s vocals tend to be, and how well this serves her raw novitiate schtick); you kind of hear these sounds with your musculature and pallette as much as your brain, they act on you physically, on account of their reference back to their production. Maybe, at points where I’m not really keen on where cognition and memory tend to be taking me, its the capacity of these voices to override the semantic that’s so appealing. Certainly I’m going to give Undeniable – feat. an uncharacteristically sweet-natured D Double vocal – another spin.

*(‘uvular rhotics’, I think they’re called – interestingly Keita Takahashi just called his new company uvula because he was struck by the contrast between the (to him, meaningless) English word’s sound, and its ‘disgusting’ Japanese significance)

**Here we’re up already against the gendered sound/meaning opposition whereby women are identified with formless babble, men with syntactic sense – an opposition psychoanalytic feminism has read as a male attempt to disavow the phase when the bouncing baby boy was dependent on the instructive maternal voice. Music has repeatedly been seen as ‘dangerous’ because it subordinates the signifying function of the voice to emotive/aesthetic imperatives. Dudes finding foreign chicks’ botches cute and the quasi-toddlerish extended sibilants currently voguish among hipster girls suggest this same libidinally invested preference for female speech to be infantile/ornamental/purely sonorous – a charge the paragraph this note’s appended to could be convicted of pretty easily too.

***It also suggests the phenomenon’s similarity to the operation of MSG, which (I’m told) activates so many disparate tastebuds simultaneously that the body asks for another helping in the hope of getting a better handle on what’s going on.

Outside the Box

2009-07-22T04:26:00.000-07:00

Making good on the early promise of Jaws 3 and that one level in Earthworm Jim 2 where you could wear threedee goggles, everyone from Pixar to Sony to Dazed and Confused is all about creating stereoscopic depth-of-field fx these days. Prizing 'immersion' and lauding fictions/characters for their 'depth' is so commonplace in discussions of books, movies, telly and games that the entertainment industry's desire to literalise those tags is understadable. Not everyone's so big on interiority and volume though; I've been reviewing a lot of gay cinema lately that taps (consciously or not) into a venerable tradition of challenging 'depth > surface' prejudices and queering spaces, whether by incorporating 2D animation & obvious green screen stuff or by peopling films with defiantly puddle-deep caricatures.

It's gotten me interested in films that think seriously about how cinema uses 2D pictures (1440 of them each minute) to create an illusion of 3D space, in stuff like La Jetee and Funeral Parade of Roses, the photo-scanning thing in Bladerunner and the hero of Blow Up trying to make sense of a space/event by pinning photos up around a white-walled open-plan studio. I just watched Herzog's Nosferatu, which - as a remake of an old film about a reanimated corpse - is all about cinema's status as (pace Laura Mulvey) 'death 24x a second.' It opens with a handheld camera moving across a line of dessicated bodies that, thanks to the organic unsteadiness of the camera operator's hand, occasionally seem uncannily vital (usage of the word 'uncanny' is, of course, advised here; the film's chock-full of phenomena Freud catalogues in his perennially-cited piece on Hoffmann and unheimlichkeit). Though I'm sure there'll be all sorts of revealing self-referentialities in upcoming 3D movies, it'll probably be a while before any film makers who're concerned with what the medium is/does can afford to use this tech - which raises a weird issue; Kojima's spent most his career as videogame designer making it clear he wanted to make movies, but it's possible film makers will discover they've a lot to learn from stuff like Goichi Suda' Killer 7 when it comes to doing 3D meaning-making and storytelling.

Of course, the people/objects that come out of the screen will only be telepresent, intangible and odourless (a recent radio ad for a teleconferencing company lists bogus stats regarding how many business people don't wash their hands, shower etc.). Although Sadako crawls out of the telly in Ringu she doesn't lay a finger on her victims, staring them to death instead. Teletactility is technically possible, but (as Vivian Sobchack's discussed) cinema induces tactile sensations in viewers already, and perhaps audiences don't want movies to be more-than-metaphorically 'touching.' I've been making a lot of pictures with chewing gum lately. It lends an ickily material and intimate dimension (and, of course, a literal dimension, a Z axis) to flat, idealised images, especially in the era of Swine flu-induced salivaphobia. It smells nice too.

(Dazed cover from here, gummed Velasquez mine, Sadako from here, M.B.V.3.D. poster here, liquidisation of circa 1960s social convention via camera here, late Dreamcast game resembling aforementioned here, dead Hatshepsut here)

Boys 'n' Beasts

2009-06-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

I don't see that many films in cinemas these days but somehow in 2008 I managed to catch both Mama Mia and Indiana Jones IV. Each was compellingly bad in its own special way, but they also had a dynamic in common agewise, pitching infantile, dull, irremediably pussified 20somethings against age 50/60ish actors who got to be wryly sage and exude dog-eared but 100% authentic charisma and moxy and get finally wed at the end. I guess it's a smart move to target a generation of moviegoers who for reasons of disposable income and net-illiteracy and misc. other demographic factors are much more likely to pick up (or be bought) the DVD/soundtrack CD/tied-in products.

So last nite I saw Looking For Eric, which also has a hero of a certain age - a postal worker who, under the tutelage of le King, finds within himself reserves of hitherto-untapped courage and facility etc.

I was struck by how far it followed the Totoro/Beethoven/Free Willy/E.T. 'kid meets creature which over the course of their necessarily and tear-jerkingly brief association teaches them key life lessons' paradigm. It's an evergreen model Fumito Ueda's upcoming PS3 game looks to be following, but having a grandparent in the role of the boy and a Gallic centre-forward (albeit a very creaturely, hirsute and kind of Totoro-esque one) as his figmental buddy put a different spin on it. While the movie kinda falls into the trap of painting women as saintly & innately forgiving if not especially au fait with life's grizzlier realities, what's more interesting is the way it transvalues the corresponding model of manhood - i.e. that men are outsize, incurably solipsistic kids.

It's pretty positive about a number of 'male' traits and behaviours - cultivating specialist knowledge, gadgetary aptitude, hero-worship, pack-style communality, mischief - that are normally seen as sad and suggestive of arrested development. Loach both allows Cantona to come across as all-but ad absurdum masculine and as an embodiment of humility, generosity, team spirit, improvisatory flair and acceptance of flux. As in one Corinthians thirteen, understanding as a man instead of a child = acknowledging you only ever see as through a glass, darkly, and should as such cultivate Loachly, bro'ly agape. I totally got choked up in a slightly socialistically-inflected version of the proper response to impossible kid/creature love story movies.

(Totoro from here, Trumpetting Eric from here, Ueda boy & griffin from here)

What the Odds Are

2009-04-27T02:21:00.000-07:00

Lost my wallet last week. Does things' being irrevocably gone seem more freakish & unjust given how replaceable/recoverable/immaterial so many things are circa e-capitalism? I realised I felt on some level aggrieved at there being no text field I could type 'wallet' into like I'd do w/ a misplaced file in my hard drive or locating a pub to conduct a date in...

Always found interesting celebrity's basis in proliferation & ubiquity, as in not just the circulation of productions, merchandise, accounts and images but also the shuttling of the people in question across timezones & places (in one capital & Balenciaga tuesday, another & Junya Watanabe Thursday nevertheless on red carpetting & reprising a pose) so that it becomes an almost incredible coincidence you'd be spatiotemporally proximate (even if you've paid, say for a gigticket, to be so - & hence fans' OMFG!ing & spazz-outs). There's a kind of eggs-in-one-basket-averse logic that's touchingly close to pharaohs commissioning statues covered in inobliterably deep-graven cartouches as insurance against their souls being left homeless -tho now its about mobility rather than monumentality, quitting the White house to conduct nuclear war from the presidential doomsday plane etc.

The star/fan dynamic, its radical assymetry (the amount of geographical, neural, discursive space celebrities monopolise, how they can't be expected to invest imaginatively or emotionally at all in people who whether idly or trulymadlydeeply do in them) has - as an erstwhile mopily pretentious suburban teen for whom being a fan of devout fans (Richey Edwards, pre-solo Morissey w/ his fondness for Wilde, who once strewed Bernhardt's vector off a Folkestone ferry with lillies) was central, self-fashioningwise - always fascinated me.

Paul Virilio's (in The Aesthetics of Absence) great on Howard Hughes' 'taste for ubiquitous absence,' his deploying his wealth first to become inordinately visible, then to disappear, always keeping prospective re-appearance up his sleeve (H.H. reputedly 'supported, at great expense, a harem' that he never visited, it being 'enough to know that he had the power of going there & the young women whose pictures he had were awaiting his arrival').

Common to the visible/invisible eras, Virilio argues, is Hughes' desire to be everywhere/nowhere (same diffs) that was expressed through attempts to homogenize space, first via media exposure, aeronautics, global circumnavigation speed records (which kinda = taking playboy globetrotting/jetsetting to the nth degree) then by living alone, nude & becysted in 'rooms... narrow & all alike, even if they are worlds apart' with screeens showing his movies in lieu of windows ('the windows were all shaded and the sunlight could no more penetrate... than the unanticipated image of a different landscape... suppressing all uncertainty, Hughes could believe himself everywhere & nowhere, yesterday & tomorrow, since all points of reference to astronomical space or time were eliminated').

Its w/ reference to the visible-invisible parabola Virilio says Christ is 'the inverse of Hughes,' tho its true in a more fundamental way; Elaine Scarry's said its very possible to miss how boggled by J.C.'s thereness, his amenability to being seen and spoken, people in the gospels get; in contrast to the omniscience/-presence of Jehova (who tautologically am the great I am), Jesus' 'predicative generosity' means 'consent to be at a given moment confined by some attribute... to be, though everywhere, apprehensible at every given moment as only somewhere rather than everywhere.'

While on a deistic tip, I love fan-art - of which one-time celluloid Hughes Leo Di Cappie has occasioned his fair share - for that religiosity porn also often has. Hence the violation of the above otherwise tonally harmonious collage w/ some pencillings of total baldwin Channing Tatum.

(autistically detailed tatum from here, monochrome hatshepsut here, teenyboppers here, Giottan J.C. & co. here, Caravaggian J.C. & co. here)

Tacit Snow

2009-04-01T14:32:00.000-07:00

As an appendix to an earlier post plus an aperitivo for forthcoming attractions, saw Queen Christina the other weekend, wherein Garbo, gazing mesmerized out a window, mutters 'the snow is like a white sea, one could go out & be lost in it... and forget the world' while the audience - who has no visual access to the snowfield - gazes mesmerized at the gazing b/w Garbo's face's snowy surfaces & declivities. Not sure I've seen her in anything else but she's amazingly magnetic for the film's entirety - tho pretty much everyone else is formidably hammy & stilted, which could account for it.

(Garbo lapped by all-but Pughesque collar from here)

o'er 'n' about

2009-03-22T11:41:00.000-07:00

Just read about the great Disney rotoscoping scandal, which reminded me of (the also-rotoscoped) Waltz with Bashir. As with the g.d.r.s. - which people've carped has marred & bespoiled their childhoods etc. - rotoscoping in Bashir functions to suggest the difficulty of identifying w/ alien people, eras and experiences (including one's own past). Layering, overwriting and filtering, which techniques I've incidentally been lately mucking about with as I teach myself Photoshop, constitute both Bashir's subject (it's about protagonist/director Ari Folman's attempt to recover his own psychically-suppressed wartime biography) and its methodology. Besides metaphorising the soldiers' modes of parsing the horrible stuff they have to see & perpetrate, the overlaid animation stops the representation of war being too pornographically grimy or schmaltzily exploitative. Right at the end Folman deploys a couple of minutes of archive footage, footage which he's both 'earned' the right to use and schooled the viewer to (better) understand over the course of the movie.

The film capitalises on the uncanniness and increased ambiguity of rotoscoped faces. The way interviewees move, fidget, unconsciously itch their noses etc. makes it clear they're real, but the rotoscoping frustrates the viewer's impulse to look for evidence of what being in a war does to someone on their face or in their eyes. Freud (L. Freud, that is) has talked about the necessity - when painting nudes - of treating the head as another limb, Deleuze of the difference between head and face, & these nearly-faces blur that line, showing that while cartoons tend to be unambiguously hyper-expressive, they can also be eerily inscrutable. Obvs this is especially true of comic books, what w/ their being static & mute. Having recently done my culturally mandated reading of Watchmen and checked out From Hell too I'm suitably wowed by how Moore and his collaborators exploit comics' formal features to whodunnit &/or whydunnit ends.

Still haven't managed to see the celluloid Watchmen. Maybe what I'm most curious about is if/how it'll handle the bit where they relate Dr. Manhattan's biography after he decamps to Mars . The fact the narrative's related via still images distributed on a page is exploited to super-dazzling effect in this issue. Dr. Manhattan's an erstwhile mild-mannered physicist who, due to the drastically nuclear complications of an experiment, exists in a privileged relation to space, time and matter (past/present/future an open book, teleportation & the manipulation of reality's constituent atoms no problem etc.). The character's reminiscing, in part on account of a polaroid he's found, and the reader's meanwhile being filled in on his backstory, laid out in achronologically sequenced panels between which dense & various relations of causality and coincedence obtain (the book's very much about humanity's pattern-recognition/-formation capacities & their potential to redeem or damn us - hence Rorschach*). The visual rhymes, echoes, ironies etc. would survive the transition to cinema, but suspending stills against a white page's vacuum turns out to be such an effective way of conveying outer space's inert airlessness, the character's scrambled temporality & the fact that Merleau-Ponty's contention that

'the multiplicity of points or 'heres' can in the nature of things be constituted only by a chain of experiences in which on each occasion one and no more of them is presented as an object, & which itself is built up in the heart of this space. And, finally, far from my body's being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body'

doesn't hold as true as it ought for him that I can't really imagine a movie treatment matching up...

(vulpine nuptials from here, pensive Folman here, pensive blue nudity here)

*sort of also what this blog's about; the pretty much all-surpassing and occasionally pernicious pleasure I acquire from tracing/recognising/asserting however-arbitrary linkages and associations between things

Vermoulu

2009-03-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

Just read, via Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, about Helen Mayer Harrison and John Harrison's project Casting a Green Net: Can It Be We Are Seeing a Dragon? which saw the two artists delimiting an area of the Pennines bounded by the Humber, the Mersey and misc. Roman roads in order to consider cultural and ecological interlinkages within it. Only when they'd set these bounds did they find they'd outlined a dragon. Wilfuly hallucinated out of OS maps, the Harrisons' dragon - with its two marigold wings and beaked profile - is illustrated above, as are a couple of AGF's even more Rorschach-y blot-dragons. It's kind of like the woman-shaped map in Rider Haggard's She (with regard to which, transposed into a chic Gallic electro register, this too).

Dragons, as the mapping of one onto (or maybs the discovery of one within) the Pennines suggests, are instruments of territorialization and deterritorialization. Always occupying as-yet unmapped frontiers (hence 'here be dragons' plus also 'It Came from Outer Space') they embody the negotiation of borders - between places, between species, between the real and imaginary. AGF's Dancefloor Drachen - the LP which the inkblot dragons were produced to illustrate - is about digital property, about modes of acquiring and altering others' music in an age when bricks&mortar pressing plants & record shops are increasingly superfluous, and is as such preoccupied with shifting boundaries.

As with giants and Krakens, dragons speak to a kind of animistic need to imagine animals on the same scale as the landscape, who are or at least are able to shape that landscape, animals the forms of which are suggested in rockfaces and bunched clouds - hence the Rorschachiness of AGF's and the Harrisons' dragons. Also pictured above is a plastic dragon-islet playset which I owned as a kid that opened up and had a smaller dragon in it. Pictured too is Shadow of the Colossus, a recent, deeply melancholy videogame where you kill 16 behemoths that turn, dead, to piles of mossy rubble which look from the right angle like like the monsters they used to be pre-ossification. The game takes some design cues* from the earlier Panzer Dragoon Saga, wherein you rode a dragon over ruins and deserts. One of the interesting things in Panzer was the dragon's malleability; there's three images above of the screen where you moved a cursor between 4 points in order to genetically reconfigure your mount in real-time. Aspects of the dragon would evoke a rhino, a narwhal, a cricket, a gecko, an egrit without its ever looking entirely like any of them, or even like a straightforward chimera-like composite.

Reading Baker grapple with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming-animal' - which has to do with creating new, contingent combinations of attributes, with multiplicity and metamorphosis, 'deterritorialization' and the liquidation of known boundaries - reminded me of this facet of the game. Becoming, in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, is not a matter of A turning into B or A + B turning into C but of perpetual, indefinable flux (nothing is and nothing becomes; everything is becoming) and 'becoming-dragon' is no more or less viable than 'becoming-antelope.' As often w/ Deleuze, its an attractive idea insofar as it gets close to something of the way I find I think or intake stuff. I spent the lengthy tail-end of a recent party propped up frazzledly watching maybe 4 hours worth of Planet Earth, hours which are only now imperfectly recoverable - so that while there's odd gestures or textures or images that've stayed with me I can't, for example, say just what species the animal that tore out a long, red shoehorn of inner neck from another animal on a pebbled, spumy shore was - I've just a sense of scattering, slickness and blubber, mingled somehow w/ tactile data from the bubblewrap on the fancy-dress costume of the girl sat next me. The emotional residue smacks a bit of being a kid, back when it was okay to imagine or credulously read about or draw up dragons.

*not to mention its mood (which is that sort of bereft, coastally-salty bleakness you get in Old English poetry) plus a taste for portentous Engrish titles

(AGF's dragons from her website, poemproducer, worth-seeing-in-motion dragon morphing from this vid, Dune-y colossus from here, OS map dragon from Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, dragon islet from here)

Implicit/Allusive Spoilers OR 'like wet gloves they bobbed and shone til he sluiced/ Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead'

2009-03-02T12:35:00.000-08:00

Firstly, it's conceivable that Bale's intentionally channeling a certain puppyfat-prone midfield ace in The Prestige right? With his inanely boyish grin and estuary vowels? The movie deployed pretty much every key fin de siecle gothic trope (live burial, orientalism, dopplegangers, fragmentary journals, science and/science as magic, the gaslit pursuit of incognito gentlemen by incognito gentlemen over Eastcheap cobbles*) but in a deft and intelligent way. Its spin on the gothic idea of the selves we're obligated to murder in order to attain the condition of civilization (the actual unattainability of which ideal means the murder has to daily re-occur) was pretty chilling/affecting/effective, and as evocative of the 1970s/80s sci/bio-fi gothic of Alien, The Thing or Bladerunner as it was Jekyll, Dorian or Dracula (it's a movie almost as preoccupied w/ parthenogenesis as Alien 4). Even ScarJo's bungled UK English isn't that excruciating.

The sense you're left with of lives stunted or wasted, of selves expensively, performatively dissembled, made me think of Judith Butler's notion of 'heterosexual melancholy' - straight culture's disavowed sorrow over the people we're required not to be &/or love. On another tack, kinda weird that Hugh Jackman's dandified stage-magician turn might have inspired this year's bizarre, razzledazzle-y Oscars format tho isn't it?

*Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's argued that a 'tableau of two men chasing one another across a landscape' is central to Frankenstein in particular and Victorian gothic in general. Pretty much The Thing's entire cocktail of bromantically tinged & paranoiac macho rivalry, icy climes, monstrosity and science is cribbed directly from Shelley.

(Kurt, hirsute and investigating, is from here, Lampsesque bale here, Frankencrevasse here, Frankenhug (w/ Drogba) here)

Equine Pathos II: The Verbinskining

2009-01-21T04:36:00.000-08:00

I've previously talked a) about how much I enjoyed Ring and b) about equine pathos (whereby the portrayal of horses being injured is used to lend stories tragicky spiritualistic heft). Well, just saw the American version of Ring, the which I'd fully expected to be bad for reasons of innate anti-Hollywood snootiness plus because Gore Verbinski's next film was Pirates of the Caribbean, which I still find so incongruous that I call bullshit on my brain whenever it reminds me of the fact and have to aiemdeebee it. It was pretty fun self-righteously hand wringing about the badness of it all and I'd been happily shooting fish (wise-beyond-his-years kid who makes spooky crayon drawings - pow! - superfluous Naomi Watts underwear shot w/in five minutes - kablam! - switching the male character from an academic to a brodaciously grungey camera op - doosh! and etc.) for over an hour when THIS came along, nudging the whole enterprise into a world of actually kinda valiant badness I'll admit I hadn't banked on (**SPOILER/question** can you ever bank on a horse threshed by a ferry rudder?). So hats off, Gore.

White, Christmas

2008-12-31T05:41:00.000-08:00

Decrypting faces rendered in bwgreyscale was involved in a lot of what I did over christmas, somehow or other.

Fassbinder's Veronika Voss arrived courtesy of lovefilm and in defiance of seasonal postal hitches on the 24th. Among the extras there's an interview w/ the cinematographer, Xaver Schwarzenberger, who chats guturally about wanting to achieve a graphische as opposed to malerische type of B/W (much guttural rumination about the predisposition of French cinematographers towards the latter, more painterly approach). Voss - played by Rosel Zech - is a washed-up Zara Leander-esque actress frozen out by the post-Goebbels industry. Zech's jowels and the wedginess of her nose phase in and out of emphasis w/ the flux of the light (which is always metacinematically strained through windshields, raindrops or panes, interrupted by ceiling fans or deflected by mirrorballs) making her look anything between milkily 16 and a haggard 60.

I was reminded of the many and ingenious proboscisectomies via airbrushing, lighting and angling performed on Erin O'Connor back when M&S ad ubiquity was but a twinkle in her sunken & girder-browed eyes, before her nose's weird convexity became shorthand for hi-fash sophistication/perversity of taste (she remains my favourite of the post-supermodel crop of Flemish and Anglo-Irish gawks incidentally). Things seem to have come full circle lately because her nose is kinda under erasure on the M&S duro-bags, which look like an oblong band of tippex has been applied to them, a reverse of Alec Guinness' Semticization in the David Lean Oliver Twist (which was on the other day, and beautiful) or Nicole Kidman donning that dopey prosthetic schnozz to win an Oscar/my eternal enmity for crimes against Woolfy.

Tempted to do a phallic women thing/quote Sterne here - not going to though, don't worry.

So M&S's bag designers used a pic of Erin with bangs tho, which I discovered was also a self-branding tool employed by my grand-paternal great-grandmother and her half sister circa their days on the music hall stage. We spent boxing day poring through a cache of photos that will most likely figure prominently in the study of bobs and bangs between Cleopatra and Louise Brooks that I very much hope to someday publish. Depicted is Dorothy (the half sister) who can be differentiated from my dad's dad's mum by way of the absence of a chincleft. The same hair and nostrils and dimples, framed by different costumes and stages, stay constant across a couple of decades, though she's especially hard to age in undated photos because she seems to have specialised in little-girlish roles long into her (and the century's) 20s.

The span of time the photos covered, in fact, is probably about the same as that which the compilation of Jaime Hernandez's Locas stories I got for Christmas covers. I won't yet try to articulate my love for this book (except to say it'll surely vex my NY resolution to love my fellow man more than printed media) but one page is reproduced above from a point in the series when Hernandez'd been drawing the character Maggie for a decade and a half. He's got so good that he can do nine panels of her hardly moving but looking utterly alive and self-identical (which impression I hope is only heightened by the pixelisation, which at least precludes plot spoilers) despite being rendered in two tones and scarcely more penmarks.

(Guinness Fagin from smh, Erin profile from a Karl Lagerfeld shoot back before he'd fete insipidities like Emma Watson, my mum's Erin bag from my mum's closet, 9x gesticulating Maggie from J. Hernandez's Locas, Dorothy as flower child and Scotch dragoonette, graphische Vosses from Veronika Voss)

Equine Pathos: A List

2008-11-24T09:51:00.000-08:00

Lists are assimilable & discussable & consequently an optimal blog post format. So here's one about instances of horses figuring in 'oh the humanity' type scenarios in such a way as to make those scenarios seem tragic-er. Any I've missed?? By all means 'hit up' the comments.

The list's (by the way) to mark the having happened of something I've been waiting for: Jon Ronson's piece in the Guardian mag this saturday is the first time I've actually read the Christopher Foster case (the day before the bailiffs are due round, ruined businessman murders wife and daughter, kills pets and horses, torches mansion, stable and cars, shoots himself) framed as a prefigurement of financial catastrophe. I'm pretty sure its gonna become a component of the UK credit crunch ur-myth though.

Part of why the story's so susceptible to mythologization is because Foster offed the horses; while hardly worst thing he did, the venerable convention of troping them as sad-eyed and behoofed incarnations of all that's good in the human soul means violence against horses lends any tragedy a full-on last days of Rome-type resonance, as the following'll demonstrate:

1.In Zola's Nana there's a dissipated scion of the aristocracy who immolates himself and his racehorses when a scheme to dodge bankruptcy fails. Witnesses attest to uncanny equine screams.

2. In Waltz with Bashir a soldier otherwise desensitized to the horrors of war is sickened by the sight of a derelict hippodrome full of dead and mutilated horses, the rotoscoped fly-crawling eyes and foaming lips of which are lingered on

3. Just how wrong-headed Macbeth's regicide is is suggested by accounts of horses going cannibal

4. When the town's pillaged in Andrei Rublev there's a shot of a horse falling downstairs, which you can't imagine PETA being cock-a-hoop about

5. Probably They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (though I've not seen/read it)

I think it says a lot that in order to convince people they should be as misanthropic as he was Swift devoted a quarter of Gulliver's Travels to describing self-righteous genocidal bigot horses. Maybe we should have an embargo on using them to make things seem kinda profound for a while.

Possession, Pianolae, Polly

2008-10-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

I really liked Polly Harvey's last LP, a whalebone and sepia affair in which hexes and live burial and possession and all those Gothic staples figure more or less latently/metaphorically (as the cover pretty economically signals). One of the songs, 'The Piano,' is about how following the cues a musical score prescribes can compromise yr identity; by reprising the postures another, earlier piano player once assumed - occupying the same space and, if not the same time, the same rhythm they did - the protagonist's able to effect a symbiotic (re)union w/ them. To quote:

'My fingers sting / Where I feel your fingers have been / Ghostly fingers/ Moving my limbs.. Oh God I miss you.’

I was >>ing through Bladerunner in order to get to the bit where Deckard scans the photograph the other day (while trying not to smirk at the meta-ness of that scenario) & I was struck by how, immediately pre-scanning, there's a similar piano/intersubjectivity conjunction, whereby the sheet music on Deckard's piano (he falls asleep at it immediately pre-scanning) is juxtaposed w/ the photos by way of which the replicants are furnished w/ false or borrowed memories.

Like those good girls in days of yore whose facility with the spinet guaranteed their marriageability/tractability replicants aren't supposed to improvise.

ALSO did Polly Harvey crib her hair from Bladerunner era Sean Young??

(Pianola lithography + encoded Beet's 5th (that's what the dashes and lavender crescents are) from adclassix, sepia portrait from here, Peej + adorable redrawing of rock criticism's paradigms here, Rachel pensive at piano + her coiffure from leagueofmelbotis)

Post Apocalyptate

2008-10-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

Saw Tate Modern's new turbine hall installation last week, the one where its notionally 2058, London's drowned and sculptures by Moore, Bourgeois & Nauman taken in from the rain cohabit with refugees, on whose bunks there's strewn assorted classics of apocalypt-lit - Ballard,* Wells, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 etc.

Basically it does the same thing I think Doris Salcedo's crack in the floor did more eloquently and economically, evoking a time when contemporary culture shalt be but relics and ruins, playing on that Tate as surrogate cathedral trope and the (not wholly unjustified) gloom w/r/t our civilization's/planet's long-term prospects we're all feeling right now.

The Tate also, you may remember, featured in a decline and fall context in Children of Men,** another work that tapped into this whole inverted Ozymandias complex we seem to have, whereby rather than being shamed into dumb humility by the monuments of long-vanished cultures we cultivate this vain curiosity about how we'll look to posterity, what future Hornbyesques will rank as our top 5 greatest hits - remember Michael Caine's adorable portrayal of an old geezer who gets dewy-eyed listening to Aphex Twin LPs from the turn of the century? Ahahaha.

*As a blogger from the London suburbs who's half-digested misc. modish Theory, I'm obligated here to mention the Kode9 & Spaceape LP - as inspired by Ballard's Drowned World (the which maybe the next printing could synergistically say on a cover sticker?)

**which I didn't much like, to go on the record. Bladerunner or Alien or Terminator 2 are pretty outwardly straightforward but let you extrapolate this or that, whereas this film wanted to let you know that it was very densely and profoundly freighted with serious and courageous messages about weighty issues but was basically a thriller with cute sight gags (Did you peep that London 2012 hoodie!)

(Ballard & dubstep debated here, cracked ramp from here, mossed trunk from here, pseudo-Bourgeois arachnid of the post-cataclysm from the guardie, Napoleon/Sphinx tete-a-tete voici la (sic) )

2008-10-17T06:28:00.000-07:00

Its hard to know whether Goyan flagellants, voodoo ritual, abuses at Abu Ghraib or Robert Mapplethorpe's S/M pix provided the lion's share of the inspiration for the candy speckled hoodie top right, but the transmutation of fanaticism, abjection and terror into directional casualwear is something we can all get behind, I think.

(Polka dot ritual from a Maurice Bessy book I'll yet blog about, hoodie from I don't remember where, processional Goya from here, NSFW becowled Mapplethorpe beefcake from artnet, document of US interrogation techniques from Errol Morris' discussion of the hooded man myth on his NYT blog)

2008-10-10T05:53:00.000-07:00

'The presentation of the story of this last adventure was given purposely in slow motion; not with the intention of instilling terror into the reader, but of giving the murder the effect that is sometimes to be derived from an animated cartoon. Moreover, the latter method would best suit the display of the extraordinary malformations in our hero's soul and body'

Jean Genet, Querelle of Brest

(Bacon out of Michael Leiris' monograph, Vampire Savior (sic) electrocution from Sega Saturn magazine, flat out Wile E. from the youtubes, mashed papier on a Danish kitchen table, teleplasmic gush from photographymuseum.com, tissue from cytochemistry.net)

Rom-hom-horror

2008-09-18T13:57:00.001-07:00

I finally saw Ring, which, gratifyingly, was pretty great. Bar the cursed VHS conceit I knew zero about the plot, which ended up really reminding me of some of the ghost stories crotchety lesbian aesthete Vernon Lee was writing in the late 1800s. Those are almost all about how brainwork and research establish dangerous, selfhood-compromising links w/ the dead. They've got this deeply queer and melancholy quality; all the protagonists feel estranged from their own time, like they'd only be understood by these dead figures they fixate on. As Terry Castle's argued there's a pretty venerable literary tradition where ghosts are readable as i.e. thwarted sapphic passions. Lee belongs to it, but it was unexpected to find that Ring does too...

There's that amazing bit where - having exhaustively researched Sadako, psychically tapped her memories then tres symbolically dredged the well she was flung down - the main character, a female journalist, has this cathartic embrace w/ Sadako's sodden corpse. The whole mediate, queerly fraught relationship is totally Lee and the hug's really moving - more so, say than when yr supposed to be happy for Molly Ringwald and the yuppie guy at the end of Pretty in Pink.

///BONUS queer non-sex scene from a film of the last decade///

Also I watched Iron Man the other day, and was really reminded of Zizek's contention Edenic sex would be dispassionate, mechanical, basically rectological during the bit where Gwynnie has to deftly manipulate the circuitry inside the prone RDJr's chest cavity, and it's a totally above-board clothed scene in which she's basically fisting him... Bits of that movie (inc. Ghostface aka Tony Stark contributing to the OST, drolly) were pretty interesting, really.

(singer Sargent's portrait of his buddy Vernon Lee from paintingall.com, Sadako's toilette from obrasilero.com, Nanako Matsushima's Shelley Duvallesque gawp (always cast big-eyed, slightly mucoid-featured potential victimesses = rule 1 in telepathic horror) from windowtothemovies.com)

RIPDFW

2008-09-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

So CBS went w/ the above, none more obit-ty photo. Never really had a generational figurehead/personal hero die, by way of their own hand or otherwise, during the hormonally volatile years in which I imagine that sort of thing would have seemed highly profound (though I do recall everything seeming pretty thanocentric circa ODB, John Peel and Yassir Arafat popping their respective clogs almost simultaneously) but this has reacted with trivial, subjective sadnesses of mine in a way that's sort of surprised me. I heard via e-mail, having just replied to a message re: a piece on Sarah Kane I've been writing and while watching Richey Edwards' last interview on tube, as if the crux of the crossroads they'd all have been buried under in the olden days was the middle of my browser window.

(wistful troubadourish foto, cbsnews.com. Copious, interesting tributes at http://www.edrants.com/remembering-david-foster-wallace/)

'a posteriori gourmandise'

2008-08-28T03:04:00.000-07:00

'his servant brought him a nourishing enema compounded with peptone... his predilection for the artificial had... attained its supreme fulfilment! A man could hardly go further; nourishment thus absorbed was surely the last aberration from the natural that could be committed'

J.K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (A Rebours) (1884) Ch.15

(exultant Cartman from southparkstudios.com)

Where then's now

2008-08-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

Just back from the Edinburgh festival, where I saw Grezegorz Jarzyna’s production of S. Kane's 4:48 Psychosis, the one she wrote before/about topping herself. Couldn't work out if the turn of the century costumes, which made me think of stuff Kim Gordon's clothing line put out back in the day, were intentional or just, like, a Polish thing. Then I remembered that - kind of like that disney island where it's NYE every night or maybe like outsourcing call centres to the subcontinent or having yr photos backed up on a server somewhere or an otter sanctuary - East Europe is where the pre-millennial anglo angst slack gets picked up nowadays, to prove which I've dredged up a flyer for the 2k7 Exit festival in Serbia (the prodigy played, so did basement jaxx and lauryn hill); you'll plz note the Face-esque layout + effulgent, lime-toned Matrix type and take for granted I can barely see my keyboard for dewy-eyed nostalgia

(4:48 pic from eif.co.uk, proj from exitfest.org, strappy topped festival girl from the exit festival's myspace, subcontinental nuclear testing from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998, auntie kim from Kim Gordon Chronicles Volume 1 (cheers Jok))

R.I.P.Y.S.L.

2008-08-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

When that model ‘plunged to her death’ the other week (Ruslana Korsunova, while I was googling the whom, incidentally, itunes threw up Roxy Music’s Tara, which seemed super apt given its air of windswept albeit basically hollow melancholy and the fact that the title = both offhand geordie mode of adieuing and the name of many upscale girls from circa Roxy) it was sort of awkward because fashion’s not very good at seriousness and basically any tribute-payers had to find a respectful way of asserting she was good at a job that boils down to walking, being hot/photographed.

HOWEVER this month’s Paris Vogue manages a weirdly moving R.I.P Y.S.L by having lots of old good photos of old good models in his clothes (mostly (conveniently) black of course), by teaching you to apply black cosmetics via images of the ever-more haggard/feral Malgosia Bela, by having oldenpics of Kate Moss in the proximity of new pics – catalysing own mortality type reflexions - and by also being the pro fur issue, meaning a shoot where a frail Brazilian teeters about in the dusky pelts of ignobly slaughtered noble beasts flipping the bird at PETA sympathising placard brandishers. All of this, when I flipped through the magazine drunk on the train home last Saturday, left me a) w/ an impression of profundity/poignancy b) even more abidingly smitten w/ Carine Roitfeld, her iron editorial fist and whole callous, vapid, pseudo-erudite, pseudo-evil schtick.

Incidentally, Carine-darling and owner of everyone’s favourite decolletage Lara Stone said in a recent interview she didn’t think of herself as a very creative person, which is just wonderful given how Pixie Geldof reputedly told paps post ODing ‘creative people can be allowed to make mistakes’ (quote fr. london lite or quite possibly the london paper or metro) and altdom’s whole quasi-art production = inherently holistic and serious non-thesis etc.

(L. Stone pic out of that summer 2k7 Another Magazine shoot w/ all the crocheted kneesocks fr. supermodels.nl, Paris Vogue pix, contents, lonely belgian 15 yr olds' discussion thereof @ http://www.thefashionspot.com/forums/f78/vogue-paris-august-2008-daria-werbowy-inez-van-lamsweerde-vinoodh-matadin-70337.html)

ALSO:

2008-08-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

While the below was in progress, stumbled across this, the which pretty much renders commentary redundant, n'est pas?

(pic fr. stealthfighter.org (duh))

Vorticism, glitchy nostalgia

2008-08-03T08:28:00.000-07:00

Went to see the Wyndham Lewis portraits show and the Vorticit stuff they've hanging at the Tate last week. It's all definite and exoskeletal, stealth bomberesque as opposed to the provisional, blurry ‘n’ diachronous indeterminacy of cubism and futurism. He vents all he elsewhere manfully eschewed and resisted - psychology and sentimentality and non-opacity - on some kitschily spectral portraits of the wife come the 1950s tho. His earlier, ardent anti-girliness = a portait of a tallowy V. Woolf w/ gouty Rabelaisian clubhands. Serves her right for feminism and that.

Bonus!

stills of glitch-riddled 90s mecha battle game Virtual On, from before Americans and technological advance rendered everything in games as solid as glossy as an assiduously buffed deuce coupe or the greased dugs of a Maxim centrefold.

(Pix fr. greeninteger.com, randomknowledge.files.wordpress.com, news.bbc.co.uk, ag0ra.co.uk, 24hourmuseum.org.uk)

What it is this copse is

2008-08-03T07:41:00.000-07:00

Exquisite corpse being, you'll recall, that surrealist parlour game whereby a gang of you pass paper round and draw disarticulated heads and thoraxes and legs etc. and you end up w/ mutant emanations of yr hive-mind. W/in this digital spinney or thicket misc. scraps of cultural flotsam will be juxtaposed and sutured and bricolaged in a similar way, is the intention. It's - in the words of Janet Jackson - all for you, whomever...