White, Christmas

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

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

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

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) )

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)

 '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

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

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'

'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

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.

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:

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

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

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...