Bad Zero

Something to widen a child's eyes

2007-01-01T23:31:00.000Z

There are a large number of miracles attributed to the Sufi mystic and poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207 - 1273) whose tomb can be found in the Turkish city of Konya.

"Mevlana gölde bir su yaratığının yaşadığını ve her yıl bir insanı ya da bir hayvanı alıp su altına gittiğini duymuş. Görmek için göle gitmiş. Mevlana soyunmadan suya girmiş, su yaratığını karaya cıkarmış. Yüzü insana, ayakları ayınınkine benzeyen canavar herkesin anlayacağı dille yakında bir genci öldürdüğünü ama tövbe ettiğini söyleyip af dilemiş. Mevlana onu bağışlamış, canavar da suya dalıp kaybolmuş."

Rumi has heard that a monstrous creature dwells in a lake and that every year it captures a man or an animal and drags it down to the depths. So he goes to the lake with his companions to investigate. He enters the water fully clothed and brings the creature to dry land. The monster, whose face is like a human's but whose legs are like a bear's, confesses in a language understood by all that he has recently killed a young boy but promises never to do it again and appeals for forgiveness. Rumi pardons him and the monster dives back into the water and vanishes from sight.

from Ariflerin Menkıbeleri (16th century), although I sourced it from the THY Turkish Airlines in-flight magazine. A beautiful miniature from Topkapı Palace which illustrates this scene will appear as soon as I can scan it.

No substitute for panto

2006-12-23T17:48:00.000Z

The Optera, a species of apterous butterfly who find safety in underground caves. They talk like comedy samurai and at the end of every sentence they give a little jump.

Wouldn't the new Doctor Who be better on a hundredth of the budget? They have barely enough money and they waste it. At some point the designers seem to have stopped stealing from African and Meso-American art and started relying on their own imaginations. Are they incurious somehow? Shy of thoughtlessly plundering another's sacred images? Too proud to resort to them?

Doubtless marketing considerations have sawn the legs from their imaginations. It seems they can't allow themselves to think outside the design confines of the surrounding commercial medium. Everyone involved acts the fool, presumably to avoid appearing undignified in the eyes of the sales figures.

As ever the cheaper the effect, the more believable it is. In this respect, Dr Who is as believable as ever. I just feel antipathetic to the world it reflects, although surely by now everyone must be sick of the cross-promotion.

I like the way J. H. Prynne writes in his Tips on Reading for Students of English, "When you read and sing to your young children at bed-time, and buy them picture-books for their early birthdays, remember how susceptible are those of tender years and how much your example will mean to them. If you read aloud to them with humour and truth, and prefer reading matter (choose it yourself) which is not slick child-fodder even when simple and direct and pitched right for young minds; and do not allow them to be drawn into a fear or scorn of poetry, and take them all to Christmas pantos which offer sparks of witty imagination, and give good book-presents to niece and family because you shew that you care about them (both the recipients and the books); then part of the longer-term inwardness of your literary education, a far cry from writing essays and splitting critical hairs, approaches thus a fulfilment which will start to transmit deep values across the generations."

I like that, and I think it's equally true and important in terms of film or TV.

Cut U Loose

2006-11-27T23:58:00.001Z

Royal Trux song from 1988

Thine's like the dread mouth of a fired gun

2006-11-19T18:38:00.000Z

Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell and Koji Wakamatsu's 1969 film Go, Go, Second Time Virgin have angry, confrontational reputations, but as films they are both rather spare and withdrawn.

Their precise framing and stilted philosophical dialogue work to prevent them breaking down before their subject, keep it within manageable confines. They examine their symptoms, as if tracing the line of a scar with their fingertips. Both have a numbness about them that makes them seem damaged, as if working through a trauma, but they calculatedly use this quality as the seduction-bait with which to attract the viewer.

A girl is raped on the roof of an appartment block by a group of students - it is the second time she has been penetrated and she recalls her first loss of virginity, raped by two boys on the seashore. She remains on the roof after the students have finished with her, gazing at the night sky. The following morning she finds she has bled again - hence the title. She dips her finger into the blood and talks to a boy who has been watching her, and who had masturbated during her rape.

In Anatomy of Hell a Man (Rocco Siffredi) is contracted by a Woman (Amira Cesar) to observe her over four nights when she is "unwatchable"; she challenges her viewer to a kind of spiritual journey using sex as a means, to pass through disgust and anger to something beyond it. The woman provokes him and he attempts to overcome her - he daubs her with lipstick, he inserts a rake-handle into her vagina - acts of childish abuse, or an attempt to create a grotesque artwork. The woman overcomes it by staring past it, by retaining her self-containment, until Siffredi understands that he can never finally destroy her and he cries as she sleeps.

Catherine Breillat has said that there is something royal about the Woman, that she is "reine" and "serene". People often get annoyed with this sort of thing, and bad reviews of both films are not hard to find. The woman with the rake in her bottom has a bandage on her wrist, a badge of self-disgust and self-absorption. The former disgust, its first spiritual level, is turned outward in the course of the film, against the men who have inflicted it. She remembers her childhood, and the faces of the boys playing doctor to her patient.

The same oafishness and incomprehension in these faces as in those of the students -

The raped girl talks with the watching boy, who is impotent except when he masturbates. He has a memory of sexual trauma, of being molested by a nightmarish group of men and women, grabbing at his trousers and writhing amongst themselves - the men retaining their ugly glasses in the way that actors always seem to do in porn films - if not glasses, a silly hat perhaps, or a grotesque moustache.

So the boy, who turns out to be a published poet, kills them all and arranges their bodies in a sculptural pattern. And the girl, who is merely repelled by the sight of their corpses, walks forward into the camera and shouts her defiance, her final declaration: Bakayaro! Bakayaro!, loosely but fairly translated in the subtitles of the Image Entertainment edition as Fuck you! Fuck you! - or fools, or oafs, as one could also translate it. At the end of the film the boy and girl commit suicide, throwing themselves from the roof of the tower block. At the conclusion of Anatomy of Hell, while Rocco Siffredi walks alone by the sea or tells lies about her to the boys in the bar, the Woman is cast/casts herself from a cliff into a violent sea - a flash of gothic white and she is gone.

Both Breillat and Wakamatsu are political radicals, and Breillat at least seems to hope that her films can effect change, might lead forward to a world where they are no longer so necessary. But in both films the conclusion is death, either a return to the ocean, or as in Go, Go, Second Time Virgin, a strange geometrical emptiness, the bodies resting on either side of a white line.

The disenchanter

2006-11-16T20:14:00.000Z

"I don't care about the audience"
Lucio Fulci

Even his fans often find Lucio Fulci's films unsatisfactory; there is usually as much to annoy as there is to please. Sometimes the most flattering reviews contain statements of exasperation or impatience; Fulci films are films for which allowances have to be made.

This is of course precisely why they are so valuable. Fulci had lost interest in go-ahead plot by the early seventies. A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971) is on the one hand a police procedural. It is also a study of repression and psychosis not so very different in some respects to Repulsion. But while the film contains a number of dream sequences, the most interesting scenes are those in which the madness of authority integrates itself seamlessly into the private madness of the central character. Carol Hammond is a rich young woman accused of a murder which she had seen herself committing in a dream. While recuperating in a private psychiatric clinic, Carol is chased by a young man who has been hiding in the grounds. After running up some stairs she turns into a corridor with a number of anonymous white doors. Opening one, she finds herself in a vivisection laboratory in which four dogs have been suspended from metal frames and their chests cut open to expose their hearts. They whimper and try to move - the effect is very well done, and comes as a shock to the viewer. Much effort has obviously been expended on the scene, and for what? It adds nothing to the plot - Carol faints to the ground and wakes up in her hospital bed to receive an apology from her doctor, the 'reality' of what she had seen being confirmed. The film then moves on. The viewer is left with the memory of something terrible intruding itself, minimally contextualised - suddenly the film has become more serious, but it is still in no sense a 'serious' film. Of course psychiatric authority is mad/Carol is mad/the dogs are Carol, but the scene is boldest for the way it disrupts the background setting of the 'murder mystery' and forces the viewer's attention. Fulci's scenes of violence (his 'trademark') are always gratuitous, never assimilable into the film as a whole. They are, notoriously, what the fans fast-forward to reach, and by their grotesque power they indelibly stain and highlight the boring bits around them.

Fulci's films are a patchwork, they stop and start, violence erupts out of nowhere and vanishes as quickly as it came. His films are exasperating because they refuse to be consoling. Some film makers like to claim that by showing that "violence has consequences", that "when you sock someone on the jaw, they don't just get up again", they will deny the audience their consoling illusions and force them to reflect on their own capacity for sadism. This is itself a most pernicious illusion. Nothing could be more consoling than to believe that each act of violence is followed by a moralising chain of consequences, or more flattering to the audience than to pretend that they need to be told people bleed when they're hurt. Film makers who reason in such a way are either I suspect in futile pursuit of a prophylaxis - an ultimate act of reportage which will permamently exorcise its viewers' capacity for hatred - or merely pornographers with an incidental taste for the stripped-down and raw. Violence in a Fulci film cannot end in false consolation because it is always uncontextualised - it disrupts the viewer's enjoyment, it makes no sense, it is never explained or exorcised. It cannot titillate because it is either too fantastic, too absurd for belief, or because it is so detailed and explicit that it leaves the viewer himself with no sense of private space from which he can gaze secretly and with pleasure - it is too obvious. Film violence starts to lose its dignity when gazed at for too long - the special effects give out, credibility is lost, or the audience start to find it merely tasteless.

By the time Fulci made The House by the Cemetery (1981), he was no longer interested in providing his audience with the consolations of a resolved plot or coherent motivation. Indeed, House is perhaps his most outrageous film in this respect. Ann the baby sitter has been acting suspiciously. The morning after a visiting estate agent was stabbed through the neck and dragged through the kitchen, we see Ann with a rag and bucket mopping up the blood from the floorboards. Lucy Boyle, the film's wife and mother, has now woken up and comes into the kitchen for her coffee. She makes no comment at all about the enormous blood stain, and she and Ann discuss trivia. It is a scene which many people seem to get indignant about - it is insolent. Of course it can be explained - it symbolises Lucy's capacity for self-deception with regard to the problems in her family, it is a satirical representation of somebody who refuses to see what they don't want to accept - in Lucy's case, her husband's affair with Ann, but these are merely plodding attempts at explication. The principal function of this scene is to disable the viewer's capacity for uncomplicated enjoyment.

In Fulci's 1975 western Four of the Apocalypse the scene abruptly and fantastically shifts from a scorched 'western' landscape to a snow-covered mountain village (filmed in Austria) inhabited entirely by men. Into this society comes professional card-sharp Stubby Preston, on the run from the villains with his pregnant girlfriend Bunny. Bunny is the only female in the village, and after giving birth to a boy, she dies, and the village returns to its all-male state. Stubby leaves the boy in the care of the villagers and returns to the desert. He rides alone. The ending seems set to be consolingly bleak. But as Stubby rides into the distance a little dog starts to follow him, yapping endearingly. The viewer is shocked, almost revolted. The hero has set out alone, but accompanied by a little dog! It is the film's last sudden and disrupting reversal of tone. After all the death and misery portrayed in Four of the Apocaplypse, Fulci refuses to sentimentalise or moralise. Since 'refusing to sentimentalise' is itself a form of sentimentality, the only way Fulci can do this is by introducing the figure of the little dog. The emptiness of the earlier deaths emerge retrospectively in all their bleakness. By ruining the film's expected smooth melancholy closure, everything one has had cause to be melancholy about - the victims of guns or disease - are suddenly recalled to mind, just when the logic of genre expectation would have buried them.

Don't Torture Donald Duck

2006-11-08T11:39:00.000Z

Lucio Fulci's 1972 giallo Don't Torture a Duckling (Non si Sevizia un Paperino) is not his first 'anti-clerical' film - both his comedy The Eroticist (1972) and the historical drama (his favourite among his movies) Beatrice Cenci (1969) contain villainous priests. However the principal subject of Don't Torture a Duckling - the twisted relationship between a priest and his boys - is a particularly difficult and unpleasant one, and caused a certain amount of controversy in Italy upon its release. It makes an interesting contrast with Pedro Almodovar's 2004 film La Mala Educacion (Bad Education), if only because Almodovar and Fulci seem to have such contrasting artistic sensibilities. For example it strikes me that one of Almodovar's defining characteristics is his complete lack of moral severity; in the case, for example, of the miracle baby in All About My Mother 'cured' of HIV, it is as if even the material fact of disease has to retreat before the director's compulsive geniality. In Bad Education, the memories of 'abuse' seem to be memories of something far more ambiguous; one watches with alternating pity and amusement the chance wanderings of people 'following their heart'. Sometimes it leads them to molesting boys, sometimes to murder, and the tears his films unfailingly provoke (at least in me) seem to bubble up from the surface and remain there - by the end of the film my tears have dried up completely, tired of appearing for nothing. Almodovar's camera glosses everything it sees, and he seems to be guided more by pattern and colour composition than by angle or framing. Fulci's eye, on the other hand, curdles everything it sees - anything 'beautiful' at any rate. One watches a Fulci film dry-eyed, despite his repeated presentations of violence and trauma. He uses the position of the camera to definine the moral and emotional weight of his scenes; each shot is a judgement, an act of involvement. The agoraphobic wide-angle compositions of white painted houses and unpaved streets in Don't Torture a Duckling are infused with anger and distaste. Fulci either keeps his distance, shooting from a height, or zooms in as if to point his finger, for example, at a black-clad old woman or a high shuttered window.

Don't Torture a Duckling depicts the murders of young boys somewhere in Southern Italy, strangled or struck with a blow to the head, and follows the police investigation (aided by a visiting journalist from the big city). Suspicion falls on the village idiot, the local witch Maciara, and a beautiful drug-addicted Milanese girl before the real perpetrator is discovered. The plot is involved and complex, in the usual giallo style; it exposes a strange network of complicity and corruption. At moments of repressed emotional tension, of which there are many, Fulci often switches to a hand-held camera. As he alternates between empathetic rage and sardonic moral judgement (as in the chain-whipping and killing of the 'witch' Maciara) he switches between fixed and hand-held shots in a way which conveys the conflicted emotions of the viewer - prurience and revulsion - as much as it does the contrasting perspectives of victim and assailant. The murder of Maciara is Don't Torture a Duckling's most 'celebrated' scene and was a great influence on the ear-slicing sequence in Reservoir Dogs, but the critical thing which so many admirers of Fulci miss is that in Fulci's case this is political. One so often comes across films inspired by directors like Fulci which merely accentuate the blood and entrails (necessary and exciting though they may be) while being utterly deaf to the political content of the originals.

I wonder if Almodovar ever saw Don't Torture a Duckling...? Both films are expertly photographed - in the case of Don't Torture a Duckling the greys and whites of stone and earth contrast with the colours of night rain and a beautiful neon-lit interior scene, but with Fulci rich colour is almost always associated with bodily or moral corruption - he is bitterly suspicious of the sensual. They both contain scenes of boys playing football under priestly supervision, but in Fulci's case he chooses to intercut a scene of boys dressed in white on a green field (in heaven?) with that of a priest falling to his death, his face torn by jutting rocks. Desire and its punishment - an unhappy obsession with purity, and its gleefully filmed consequence in the material collision of stone and skin. In an Almodovar film, death or addiction mean nothing as none of it is really anything more than a play; it's as if, with Wallace Stevens, "the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else." Fulci presents the most outrageous fiction, but grounds its presentation in material squalor; by means of genre and fantasy he conveys the desolation of a world where no escape into fiction is possible. His protagonists in The House by the Cemetery and The Beyond find themselves trapped within the confines of an intruding, ever-narrowing fictional world, in the same way that hard material circumstances or the material fact of death confine or entrap people in their real lives. The image of the white-clad boys playing football at the conclusion of Don't Torture a Duckling mocks the priest's idea of heaven and his idea of purity; the character of the priest's retarded younger sister - on whom the discovery of the culprit turns - mocks his conception of divine justice. The priests in Bad Education are clearly homosexual and motivated by desire, whereas Don Alberto in Don't Torture a Duckling is, as far as I understand the film, celibate and heterosexual by inclination: he murders his boys to protect them from the corruption of women. But the key difference between the films is not in the end the incidentals of the motivating psychology of their villains, but that for Almodovar, desire is a life-giving and creative force, however it may mock and expose those who succumb to it, but that for Fulci desire is an absurdity, that corrupts what it touches and is terminated by death. Fulci simply portrays the waste. No poppies grow out of it.

Of course I prefer Fulci to Almodovar, and not merely because I feel attracted to Fulci's sourness. I think it may be because it's Fulci in the end who seems to point a way out. In Fulci movies doors open up and horrors suddenly emerge from them, or doors appear and lead back to where you came from - to sightless oblivion. His films are full of exits and entrances. If I lived in the world of an Almodovar movie, I might never want to leave it. It would be like choosing darkness over sunlight. But by making his art so cold and allowing no successful escape from the world he presents, Fulci makes the viewer conscious of the confines of the real world and of its material limits. Whether the characters in his movies or the viewer outside can overcome them is a question left unanswered, but it is a question his films constantly provoke. Do the violent-minded, corrupt and superstitious townspeople in Don't Torture a Duckling have any way of reforming their society without modernity simply imposing itself upon them and bringing a new cycle of exploitation? Fulci gives no hint that they can and offers no sentimental dreams about this world or the next. Nothing. That is maybe why his films are so provocative and inspiring. One has to wring the politics out of them. It can be found, for example, in his obsession with doors, bridges, fractures, caves and passageways; each contains a body decomposing, or a skeleton.

And that hints at perhaps the most important question Fulci raises. To what extent is a progressive politics, an ethical life really conceivable, set against the individual reality of bodily decay and death, the final material limit?

Leftcenterleft has a discussion of the movie and some screenshots.

Easy mistakes to make

2006-11-04T22:19:00.000Z

A time for angry tears and regrets. In a speech to Khmer Rouge cadres on the Thai-Cambodian border, Pol Pot compared his Democratic Kampuchean government to a baby taking its first steps and not unnaturally acting clumsily and ending up breaking things. One always imagines, for example, that 6o0,000 people would be quite hard to kill. But let loose a giant baby, and things can deteriorate surprisingly quickly. 750,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the American B52 raids inside Cambodia in pursuit of Viet Cong infiltrators, a slaughter which was of course decisive in strengthening the Khmer Rouge. 750,000 is a conservative estimate of the numbers killed as a matter of policy (rather than 'inadvertently' through famine) during Pol Pot's time in power.

Vanity Fair collects second thoughts from Richard Perle and other like-minded fainthearts while Giorgio Fabretti appeals on behalf of the Save Pol Pot Fund

Pol Pot spoke as the representative of the military. He says that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he's responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn't keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house who didn't know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed Chhim Samauk to take care of central committee business for him, and Sao Phim to take care of political education... These were people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end... they made a mess of everything. ...They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, but that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors.

from Brother Number One by David Chandler, pg. 171

2006-11-03T10:50:00.000Z

An Interview with Antonella Fulci

Part One of four posted on you-tube.

from His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

2006-11-02T17:51:00.000Z

My eyes with which I see so easily
will become closed. My friendly heart will stop.
I won't sit up.
Nose me, soon you won't like it - ee -
worse than a pesthouse; and my thought all gone
& the vanish of the sun.

The vanish of the moon, which Henry loved
on charming nights when Henry young was moved
by delicate ladies
with ripped-off panties, mouths open to kiss.
They say the coffin closes without a sound
& is lowered underground!

So now his thought's gone, buried his body dead,
what now about the adorable Little Twiss
& his fair lady,
will they set up a tumult in his praise
will assistant professors become associates
by working on his works?

John Berryman, Dream Song 373

Lucio Fulci

2006-11-01T17:13:00.000Z

1.

Andrei Tarkovsky, while he worked in Italy on Nostalgia, attended a screening of Lucio Fulci's first and most celebrated horror film Zombie Flesheaters, and described it in his diary as "ghastly, repulsive trash".

One thing that I like about films is that there really are no respectable ones, none that are quite gentlemen - not even Tarkovsky, although he comes perilously close. There isn't a clear canon, no films that one simply has to have seen to account oneself educated, and I think we just about find it possible to love anything, reject anything, and not stoop to forcing an interest. And film critics are so fallible - people like David Thomson write with as little (or as arbitrarily minute) an attention to detail and as much offhand authority as someone like Pliny the Elder, and it makes them both irritating and unintimidating - it keeps the field open. I like the wretched disservice it does to directors like Lucio Fulci, director of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Don't Torture a Duckling, City of the Living Dead, The New York Ripper - unannotated, unassimilated, uncontained within any respectable bounds.

Fulci himself had a complex and divided attitude to his own work. On the one hand he knew he was a hack, working in a variety of popular genres: comedies, thrillers, westerns, horror - whatever made money. On the other, he saw himself as the student of Visconti, the heir of Bunuel, a man attracted to the structures of genre but compelled by a mixture of wilfulness and artistic seriousness to sabotage them. He is well known in this respect for directing two thirds of a film "with his left hand", as the Italians say, and then suddenly spoiling the fun with something jarring, something felt, something truthfully disquieting. I like his work very much, although I started out by despising it. The moment came after sitting through The House by the Cemetery one rainy afternoon and suddenly wondering, what if this apparent incompetence is actually artfulness, what if - just suppose - Fulci knows what he's doing?

I find the shock of the new first communicates itself to me as ineptitude, and the contempt I feel causes me to replay the thing over and over again in my mind as an exhibit for derision until I become half-guiltily conscious of my fascination. The choice is either to reject it with a sort of Stalinist moral sternness, or to submit to it like an infection and see what it makes of me.

Fulci is famous (among horror fans) for what, exactly?

For an obsession with eyeballs and their mutilation, for longueurs punctuated by scenes of grotesque violence, for derivative, badly acted, structureless films which for some reason find themselves banned under the provisions of the Video Recordings Act and accrue themselves an undeserved cult reputation. Only.... Fulci suddenly reminded me now of John Berryman and the Dream Songs, language hacked into pieces, loudmouthed and half-ful of it, grandiose and threadbare, threatening suicide. And I want in the next few posts to focus on a few of Lucio Fulci's films, my favourites, and elucidate some of their virtues (to speak tiptoeingly like I'm critiquing Berryman or someone).

Idling over

2006-10-15T11:36:00.000Z

Been watching Breakfast at Tiffany's. I had no idea... the wondrous horror of Mickey Rooney - not five minutes in - with his teeth from The Thing or from a figure at the base of a crucifixion. Does it sink the film completely, does anyone think, or is it an artistic choice, boldly disfiguring what would otherwise be too much like perfection? They should remake it maybe. Instead of the Jap, they could make him a terrorist trying to solder the wires between prayer sessions. Talking of commercial cinema, I notice that first prize in the ultimatebond competition available to purchasers of the James Bond Ultimate Edition is Win An Aston Martin!* So what would you do on the 364th day? Presumably they've thought of that and you won't be able to drive the thing without a minder or an electronic tag and you'll have to return it each night to dedicated secure premises miles from your home. And then there's the cost of insurance, and doubtless a depreciation charge at the time of return.

Roger Moore was 79 yesterday. Congratulations Sir Roger.

* for a year

Love's Cross-Currents

2006-10-11T20:00:00.000Z

I blog so intermittently... I just can't seem to make a habit of it, the disciplined morning habit I once hoped to cultivate. What foxes me too is this desire to communicate; one has to perch on the edge of some dissatisfaction and rock about on it. As someone said, sometimes I just look at the stars... and can't be bothered. But having recently gained more than, say, ten puzzled readers from Czechia, I feel guilty about it. Oh, but here's something so perfectly written, so intensely enjoyable and I am simply going to transcribe it. Because Algernon Charles Swinburne's A Year's Letters is out of print and no one has read it. Buy a second hand copy tonight! I recommend it to the world!

Once out in the garden, Reginald became more wonderful than ever. Any one not two years younger and half a head shorter must have doubled up with laughter before he had gone three steps. Our friend's patronage of the sunlight, his tolerance of the roses, his gentle thoughtful condescension towards the face of things in general, were too sublime for words.
When they came to the parapet of an old broad terrace, Reginald, still in a dignified way, got astride it; not without a curious grimace and some seeming difficulty in adjusting his small person: tapped his teeth with his whip-handle, and gave Frank for a whole minute the full benefit of his eyes. Frank stood twisting a rose-branch and looked meek.
The result of Reginald's scrutiny was this question, delivered with much solemn effect.
I say. Were you ever swished?
Swished? said Frank, with rapid heat in his cheeks.
Swished, said Reginald in his decisive voice. Birched.
Do you mean, flogged? Frank asked this very diffidently, as if the query singed his lips.
Well, flogged, if you like that better, said Reginald, conscious of a neat point. Flogged. But I mean a real right-down swishing, you know. If a fellow says, flogged, it may be a whip, don't you see, or a strap. That's caddish. But you can call it flogging if you like. Only not at school, mind. It's all very well before me.
Reverting from these verbal subtleties to the main point, Reginald put the grand query again, in a modified shape, but in a tone of courteous resolution, not to be evaded by any boy.
Does your father often flog you?
I never was flogged in my life, said Frank, sensible of his deep degradation.
Reginald, as a boy of the world, could stand a great deal without surprise; experience of men and things had inured him to much that was curious and out of the usual way. But at the shock of this monstrous and incredible assertion, he was thrown right off his balance. He got off the parapet, and leant his shoulders against it, and gazed upon the boy to whom birch was a dim dubious myth, a jocose threat after dinner, with eyebrows wonderfully high up and distended eyelids. Then he said; Good - God! softly and dividing the syllables, with a hushed breath.
Goaded to insanity by the big boy's astonishment, agonized by his silence, Frank tenderly put a timid foot in it.
Were you? he asked, with much awe.
Then, with straightened shoulders and raised chin, Reginald Harewood took up his parable. Some of his expressions must be forgiven to youthful excitement, and for the sake of accuracy; boys when voluble on a tender point are awfully accurate in their choice of words. Reginald was very voluble by nature, and easy to excite on this painfully personal matter.
Ah! Yes. I should think so. My good fellow, you ought to have seen me yesterday. I was swished twice in the morning. Can't you see in a man's eyes? My father is - the - most - awful - Turk. He likes to swish me - he does really. What you'll do when you go to school - (here a pause) - God knows. (This in a pensive and devout manner, touched with pity.) You'll sing out - by Jove! won't you sing out the first time you catch it? I used to. I do sometimes now. For it hurts most awfully. But I can stand a good lot of it. There were bits cut right out of me yesterday on one side. Here. And one twig stuck in the cut and I couldn't get it out for half an hour. My father can always draw blood the third or forth cut. It's ever so much worse than a whole swarm of mad bees stinging you at once. Makes a fellow tingle to the bone. At school, if you kick, or if you wince even, or if you make the least bit of row, you get six cuts over. I always did. When I was your age. The big fellows used to call me all manner of chaffy names: Pepperbottom, that was out of a book; I know the book; I bet you don't; and the Wagtail; because I used to wriggle about on the block: between each cut; I know I did. They call me Wag now, and Pepper, for short. Not the young ones, of course. I should lick them. I say, I wish you were going to school. I'd look after you. You'd be letting fellows get you into the most awful rows. Ah! wouldn't you? When I was your age I used to get swished twice a day regular. The masters spite me. I know one of them does, because he told one of the big fellows he did. At least he said I was a curse to the whole school, and I was ruining all the young ones. He did really, on my word. I was the fellow's fag that he said it to, and he called me up that night and licked me with a whip. With a whip like this. He was a most awful bully. I don't think I'll tell you what he did once to a boy. You wouldn't sleep well to-night.

from A Year's Letters (written 1862, first published in Tatler, 1877) reprinted in a beautiful annotated dark blue edition from Peter Owen Ltd., London, 1974.

2006-09-08T09:59:00.001Z

"I survived. Mum took me to my Gran and Auntie in a village near Hamburg. I've been clean for 18 months. It frightens me to think of Detlev. I often think of him. I'd like to give him some of my strength, and help him. But first I need the strength myself."

Christiane speaks from beyond the grave, over an image of the countryside in winter. At the end of Christiane F we see her in a toilet cubicle injecting herself for the last time before her head slides down the tiles and out of frame. The scene fades and reopens over snow-covered fields. The recovery is moving because it comes out of nowhere and is in no sense already implicit in the events we have seen or the psychology of the characters. It's a sort of millennial redemption fantasy, moving because we know in real life, as presented on screen, it could never have happened. What is more moving than a beautiful untruth?

"And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.
And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise."

(Luke 23, 42-43)

There is a complete break between the film and its coda, the same inapprehensible gap as between the squalid earthly life of the thief and his future in heaven. I find this moment of fantasy the only moving part of Christiane F. As for the rest of it, its mission is to demystify addiction, to force it to strip, in a way which leads to nothing in the end but bafflement.

In Charles Bukowski's short story Something About a Viet Cong Flag, the sadness of the washed-up drifter protagonist is conveyed all the more affectingly by describing what could never have happened, the fulfillment of his meanest hopes.

"Red pulled his switchblade and hit the button. The blade was flat across her nose, pressed it down.
'How do you think you'd look without a nose?'
She didn't answer.
'I'll slice it off.' He grinned.
'Listen,' said the guy with the flag, 'you can't get away with this.'
'Come on, girly,' said Red, pushing her towards the rocks

"... Red was fucking Sally. Leo watched. It seemed endless. Red went on and on.

"... There was a patch of shade and Sally sat between them.
'You know, though...' she said.
'What?'
'It wasn't so bad. On a strictly sexual basis, I mean. He really put it to me. On a strictly sexual basis it was quite something.'
'What?' said Dale.
'I mean, morally, I hate him. The son of a bitch should be shot. He's a dog. A pig. But on a strictly sexual basis it was something...'"

Or compare John Norman's chronicles of Gor, which so many intelligent people find endearing. They bring to mind the inadequacy and sadness which adults feel if children are unmoved by attempts to frighten them. The slave-women have names like Audrey and Barbara.

"'I will try to please you,' she said.
'In Port Kar,' I said, 'a girl who is not pleasing is not unoften bound hand and foot, and thrown naked, as garbage, to the urts in the canals.'
'I will try to be pleasing,' she smiled."

from Beasts of Gor, pg. 440

Suburban loneliness is powerfully conveyed by John Norman's long elaborations of its compensating dream. In the same way, Bukowski, in stories like Rape!, Rape! and The Fuck Machine describes the sordidness of socially-constrained fantasy and its secret yearning for love.

"Yes I like being raped. I knew you were following me. I was hoping. When I got on the elevator without you, I thought you had lost your nerve. I've only been raped once before. It's hard for a beautiful woman to get a man. Everybody thinks she's unaccessible. It's hell."

from Tales of Ordinary Madness

Pol Pot on the dialectic

2006-09-07T14:20:00.000Z

"Everything is interrelated. This means that all things always have influence on one another. It further means that nothing can exist by itself and has never existed by itself. Observe activities in our revolution or problems outside of the revolution. They are all in the domain of this law.

"Example: In the situation of a person who has injured a buffalo's leg. We must analyze. If we do not, the buffalo will be put in the stable and the next morning it will be let out to pasture. We must ask if the child or the old man who tends the animal injured it, or who else did; and if it was done, why? Was it unintentional, or was it to oppose the cooperative. Look for a person who has something to do with this matter, the person who tends the animal and the places where he tended the animal in order to find out if anyone other than the cowherd himself could have injured the animal. The cowherd, what composition is he, what class stand, what political stand, which milieu is his stand in contact with? If the cowherd did not injure the animal, ask him if anyone came to the place where the animal was, etc. We follow up. Following up is a measure. If we cannot find out in one or two days, we will find out in three or four days.

"A skinny cow is handled similarly. We must find out what is wrong with it. Why is it skinny, what material reason, what reason of consciousness? We raise this matter in order to illustrate the law of dialectical materialism in order to accustom our analyses to follow this law."

from Sharpen the Consciousness of the Proletarian Class to be as Keen and Strong as Possible (1976), translated and reprinted in Cambodia 1975 - 1978, ed. Karl D. Jackson

Sonic Youth (what was it anyway)

2006-09-06T21:53:00.000Z

I remember as a student walking through a sun-bleached park in London and having just bought a tape cassette of Dirty and it having made no great impression, when suddenly the imstrumental section of either Sugar Kane or Teresa's Sound World rolled wondrously into my mind out of what seemed like nowhere, and Sonic Youth's music seemed utterly vital and transforming and I rushed back to my bedroom and listened to the whole album through. I remember queuing up at 08.30 outside HMV to be the first to buy Experimental Jet Set, half-worried in case it sold out - of course I was the only person in the queue. To my dismay the assistant in HMV told me that although it had been delivered, they probably wouldn't start unpacking it until after lunch. I came back in the afternoon and it still wasn't on the shelf. But anyway.

The first thing that annoyed me about Experimental Jet Set was the quote on the back cover - Once the music leaves your head it's already compromised - surely the whole problem with commodification is that it renders one's inmost thought compromised from the outset - the quote seemed like a sly way of dismissing the fact and of excusing what I feared might be a shabby compromise. Added to which I felt irritated by the artful imitation of shaky handwriting on the back cover as if the "writer" were too wasted to form a straight line on the "D", say. But the main reason for hating it was Self-Obsessed and Sexxee, Waist, and all the other songs by Thurston on the album. His obsession with strung-out teens had its full flowering on Psychic Hearts, but the worst of it began here along with the even more tedious male voyeur figure, who narrates both the above. There is something eerie and (as the ads say) wonderfully satisfying about someone - especially an attractive girl - becoming frail and wasted and gradually sinking into oblivion*, and it's a subject that Royal Trux approach with compassion and insight on Cut You Loose. But there's something nauseating about the way Moore foregrounds his voyeurism as if that alone were a sufficient self-condemnation, and something not fascinated enough about his star-struck observer. The thing I rather dislike about Christiane F is the journalistic distance the camera keeps from its subject - it's extraordinary how uncompromised the eye of the director seems to be by the attractions of his subject. Christiane has sex or shoots up before the camera and the camera watches like a waiting paramedic or a half-comprehending bystander. Although doubtless the product of great directorial tact, it's unsatisfactory somehow. Of course Moore's persona of a leering voyeur is no artistic solution either. Someone who gets it exactly right (aside from the Trux) is Paul Morrissey*** in his Trilogy and in particular in his silent short films All Aboard the Dreamland Choo Choo and Like Sleep, both available on the Flesh/Trash/Heat box set. In the first film a young man draws a Violet Wand along his body before stabbing himself in the thigh with an engraving tool; in the second a black couple inject themselves - with an old-fashioned dropper - leaving a thin trail of blood along each arm. Both films are about 10 minutes long but the action in each is extremely slow. The camera is clearly fascinated by what it sees - not only by the rituals of self-harm or addiction, but by everything in the frame, by the light and by the surface of objects. Morrissey's slow, patient observation, his fascination with the act of viewing, be it a rumpled sheet or a line of blood, gives his work not only a critical distance, but the capacity for pity. The truest compassion has its origin in the material, in the objective gaze. Compare Hippocrates, who writes in On The Sacred Disease,

"Such as are habituated to their disease have a presentiment when an attack is imminent, and run away from men, home, if their house be near, if not, to the most deserted spot, where the fewest people will see the fall, and immediately hide their heads. This is the result of shame at their malady, and not, as many hold, of fear of the divine. Young children at first fall anywhere, because they are unfamiliar with the disease; but when they have suffered several attacks, on having the presentiment they run to their mothers, or to somebody they know very well, through fear and terror at what they are suffering, since they do not yet know what shame is." (trans. WHS Jones, Loeb Vol 2)

Hippocrates wants to be among the diseased, he observes their condition and their suffering with the same rapt interest and reserved care as Morrissey exhibits in his films.

*Compare the aimiable sadism with which an anaesthetist tells his patient to count to ten as he injects the anaesthetic** while the nurses and ODAs stand around grinning. The patient never gets further than three.

**The milk makes them doll-like. Propofol is the anaesthetic of choice and the beautiful thing is that it looks exactly like milk, not surprising as it comes as 1% propofol in a soya emulsion.

***Morrissey thinks Christiane F is an excellent film. I think Kurt Cobain did too.

Despite their reputation as experimentalists, Sonic Youth have always preferred to work with traditional song structures - sweet, repetitive melodies held in conformist alignment by Steve Shelley's slick and unscary percussion. (They should never have got rid of Bob Bert!) Indeed their moments of violence and dischord serve only to accentuate the predictability of the songs, which stand out from the background noise, edge-enhanced and sentimentalised. And the rebarbative elements are in any case no more than cool-sounding effects, kids making a mess, chosen not for their truth value**** but on the basis of whether or not they sound good. Which is why they get dropped into the most inappropriate contexts (Diamond Sea) or turn silly (Becuz). Milton Babbitt draws a distinction between "music", the work of a serious composer or interpretive artist, and mere "aural pleasure", in which musical choices are made in terms of the immediate gratifications they afford the listener. Well I love Milton Babbitt and have long mooted writing him a fan letter, and this distinction is as outrageous as it is liberating. It more or less disposes of Sonic Youth's entire output and that of most other rock bands, although I maintain that Kurt Cobain in songs like Radio Friendly Unit Shifter was trying to capture something far more exact with his effects and distortions. And Washing Machine is a grand track.

****So can a musical choice have a truth value? And what is a truth value anyway?

Well it was a pity. The signature waves of ecstatic dischord - creatively exhausted by Diamond Sea and reduced to an idle jog by Sunday - lost all capacity to inspire me until they seemed merely like tame replications of a drug high. The only way to overcome a temptation is to yield to it, but Sonic Youth have always preferred to stand back from the edge of temptation without ever abandoning the thought of it or refusing its terms entirely (though to be fair I've heard nothing since A Thousand Leaves, not even Goodbye 20th Century). Their studied remoteness from situations they're not really remote from (on the cheaply judgemental Skip Tracer for example) seems snotty and dishonest.

This post was inspired by the example of Carl at The Impostume and his analysis of what exactly he disliked so much about Saint Etienne. Actually I always wondered whether Saint Etienne's records weren't a satire directed at the type of people who enjoy Saint Etienne, nostalgic for a time they never lived through or a life they never had*****. Compare Teenage Riot, the worst song on Daydream Nation - street action as retro fashion show. And could there be a worse political song than Youth against Fascism? I can't believe it was recorded in earnest by these smart, well-connected New Yorkers, and though I understand the anger that made Crass record White Punks on Hope, I wouldn't have thought anti-fascism was a very worthwhile subject for parody.

*****I preferred the Generation Game with Larry Grayson.

I love Ruggero Deodato, he's so evil

2006-09-05T20:22:00.000Z

A Yanömamö girl picks lice from the hair of a man with club-fight scars

Last night I attended a focus group for Extreme Films Research and discussed House on the Edge of the Park in a group of four. The BBFC certificated copy has been cut by 11m 43s for scenes of "gross sexual violence and humiliating nudity". However the clear judgement of the focus group was that we all liked the film for its "class politics". We had each experienced something like a journey from addiction to recovery, a private shame transformed by discovering that one's debilitating preoccupations mirrored the codes and structures of capitalism. A conservative critic might frame the whole grounds for discussion in terms of the "problem of human evil", a classic non-problem from a Marxist perspective. At any rate Trotsky's view was that atrocities are more likely to take place when soldiers are fighting for a cause they know to be unjust. It may be we get up from bed and walk to work each day in the service of an unjust cause and by punctuating our lives with staged atrocities we recover something of the will to live. Films like House on the Edge of the Park were compared to a drug, or to the way the Yanömamö Indians like to brain each other with enormous clubs until they form hard welts on the surface of their heads; young men stagger around after each blow, returning for more until they finally collapse to the ground. The wonderful thing is after a few days when the mind starts to clear - one knows one has recovered enough to get back on the trip again.

Four more thoughts from Pol Pot

2006-09-05T19:57:00.001Z

If you have a disease of the old society, take a dose of Lenin as medication.

"Lenin" in Cambodian rhymes with quinine.

The sick are as sly as rabbits, and can swallow a whole pot of rice.

If you do not complete your task during the day, you will complete it by night.

Work is a fight: you blaze like fire and reduce tree stumps to ashes.

The two vowels of "Pol Pot" are different in Cambodian; "Pull Port" would be a vague approximation. The grotesque, fairy-tale quality of the name in English is also absent in the Cambodian, in which "Pol Pot" is - or at least was - a quite anonymous-sounding name; "Jim Jones" might be a fair translation.

Who said the revolution wasn't going to be pretty?

2006-09-04T12:18:00.000Z

The pornography of a long black skirt and what aren't actually little white ankle socks. Kim Jong Suk as a partisan.

from "Pol Pot's Little Red Book"

2006-09-04T09:03:00.000Z

"There are no Sundays; there are only Mondays."

further quotations from Pol Pot will litter this blog.

The Senator's birthday

2006-08-27T18:10:00.000Z

Screenshot from "Emanuelle in America" (D'Amato 1976)
Only one m - from the cheap Italian imitations of the prestigious Emmanuelle originals.

Breath of bale

2006-08-27T12:24:00.000Z

Thoughts about porn inspired by the Porn Symposium and the examples of Different Maps, The Measures Taken, InfiniteThought, Beyond the Implode, and K-Punk

Property porn: it's hardly the property which is being degraded by the glossy photo spreads, or the cars by those revealing open bonnet shots. Pornography is an opportunity for the viewer half-consciously to degrade himself, to feel both the rush and its short-lived inadequacy. Such material naturally incites violence. Gastronomy porn provokes daydreams of plunging one's fingers in cake and cream, smothering one's face in it. It's the rage parodied in a zombie film - images of the undead messing their hands in the entrails. It's the desire behind disaster movies, symbols of Capital lasered to rubble. Some films play out these fantasies of destruction, only rarely in fact to progressive effect, while others are content with the gloss image and unobtrusively stoke the aggression and anger which make us productive. Immersing oneself in the latter, one often feels disgusting. After watching a cannibal movie one can feel strangely cleansed.

Political pornography: Sometimes by watching exploitation films the apparent chaos of political relations starts to seem a bit clearer. Some political sources seek to clarify, others provide a more dirtying thrill. The pornography of dust-covered babies exhibited like holy relics on the one hand and revisionist photo analysis on the other. Could the child have been reburied? Is the dummy merely there for effect? Nazi girl band Prussian Blue is named for the cyanide deposits not found on the walls of the 'gas chambers' in Auschwitz. The very name is a smiling denial, clean and insolent.

Violent pornography: Joe D'Amato, whose horror films are notable for their childlike honesty and fearlessness, also made a vast number of porn films. He was the first to use fibre optic technology to develop the "snatch cam" and shoot the scene from inside his actresses. In "Trap Them and Kill Them" (aka Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals 1977) women's stomachs are slit open with knives and their guts pulled out and eaten (by Vietnamese asylum seekers in need of work). D'Amato isn't afraid to light the scene so that the rubber nature of the torsos is discernible. His method is always to switch on the lights, and if what gets revealed is banal and disillusioning, so much the better. Are the snatch cam and its sister the "butt cam" actually effective in turning on the punter? D'Amato follows the lust to reveal, to possess, or to disassemble to its final absurd (cf. Absurd (D'Amato, 1981)) , unerotic conclusion. Pornography, and violent pornography in particular, often foreground the desolation which succeeds the orgasm, the shadow of impotence which threatens even the moment of triumph. In real life, rapists often lose their erections when they try to penetrate. This may, of course, lead to a substitute form of aggression. The Japanese director of "pinku eiga" Koji Wakamatsu highlights this in such films as "Violated Woman in White" (Okasareta Byakui 1967) in which a young male intruder in a nurses' home, unable to relate or respond to the girls he finds there, and traumatised by the sight of two of the girls having sex, tortures and kills them. He is incapable of physically raping them - this is the case with many of Wakamatsu's male protagonists - and engages in acts of violence in order to break through the girls' apparently sealed self-containment, in the hope - I suppose - that it might efface his impotence. The film tracks the futility of his attempts. At the conclusion of the film, he curls up in the lap of the surviving girl, surrounded by corpses, crawling up the umbilical noose into pre-natal oblivion. Wakamatsu relates this to politics, the violence of the student Left being a product of political impotence - precisely impotence, and not merely powerlessness, an impotence provoked by the sight of stacked shelves in a supermarket or cheesecake photographs in a magazine. Impotence produces impotent rage, which stops far short of liberating parody. Joe D'Amato's films often engage with political subjects - with race and with social and political corruption in "Emanuelle in America" (1976) for example - but always in the form of parody. His touch is far lighter than Wakamatsu's, but the effect can paradoxically be heavier and more desolating. D'Amato's vulgar, inscrutable eye never imposes a vision, but simply presents things in the cheapest, most direct way possible, so the world's sordidness lies helplessly on display. He reminds me of the monkey smoking a cigarette in "Trap Them and Kill Them" as it contemplates a lesbian encounter in the jungle - it's a beautiful scene, and perhaps best understood as a self-portrait of the director.

Emotional pornography: That which tries to do the dirty on emotion, or keeps the emotion in a hutch like a guinea-pig or thinks it can lead it somewhere deserted and get it to stand on a chair with a noose round its neck and kick the chair away. I figure that when Tom Baker left, Doctor Who lost the ethical heart that made it valuable, a sensibility that only Baker himself was able to safeguard, and from that time on the programme evolved into cheaply manipulative showbiz. "Black Orchid" was the story that shocked me, that final scene where the display of the book neatly softens and cleanses all emotion, the Doctor smiles, and the 'sting' before the closing credits stabs home the episode's total cynicism.

Child pornography: A pornographic view of childhood revisits "lost innocence" and tries to infuse it with dirt. If you believe The News of the World, child sex-murderer Robert Black used to like wearing a child's swimming costume, as an act of paedophilial transvestism. It's curious how all the girl bands have their songs written, filmed and choreographed for them, for the most part by men. But how strange, always to write in the persona of a young girl, for an audience of young girls... I imagine them preparing to write, assuming an imaginary mask, inhabiting the part, living in that sound world. How scared and ridiculous they might feel if all the lights were suddenly switched on and there they were lying on the bed, jammed into the clothes of a nine year old. A pop sexuality is a paedophile sexuality, maybe - the same pattern of addiction, constantly tugging the sufferer back to that perfect light, that perfect hit, the one sunlit time. And then naturally enough one resents such perfection, one would like to make it filthy. Hence something dimly remembered from childhood gets "a new adult look". I remember seeing a girl sitting on a low wall, she must have been about nine, she looked like one of the All Saints. Except she made the All Saints look ragged and old, and I suddenly realised "Oh, you're the original!"

My porn name: it brings to mind the miseries of life at the call centre.

"How many hits have you had in the past hour?"
"five... "
"seven..."
(glumly) "three..."
"ELEVEN!"
"Well done. Keep it up".

The love of dolls

2006-01-27T16:12:00.000Z

There was a puppet maker in 19th century Japan who lived with one of his dolls. They were effectively man and wife, and slept, ate and spent most of their leisure hours together. He was quite devoted to her, and on the puppet maker's death, they were buried in the same coffin. I'm not sure whether this is a rather noble story, or a pathetically sad one. But the latter seems the narrower judgement. I almost envy him. One could compare him to the sort of man whose wife dies young and who himself lives into old age, refusing to remarry or to break the hold that his memories have over him. Now I spoke about this to a friend of mine once, and she thought such an attitude was more akin to self-mummification than genuine love. And I don't myself believe that there is any afterlife in which such devotion could be honoured. A dead woman cannot return love any more than a doll. Or is there any possible world in which a machine, a puppet or a picture can reciprocate love? Every boy who falls in love with a girl on a poster wonders if there might not be some nobility, some glory to be had if they light a little candle in a special shrine devoted to her. Anyone who has seen Welcome to the Dollhouse remembers the shrine that Dawn makes with candles for the singer in her brother's band. Is there any philosophical plane on which prayers to this guy - in reality, loutish, smug and indifferent to her - might be answered? Or I wonder if someone will write a book called "What Your Computer Thinks About You", in the same style as those books which discuss the feelings which our dogs and cats are supposed to have for us.

Paul van Ostaijen

2006-01-26T19:37:00.000Z

Belgian poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896 - 1928) described poetry as "a game of words, anchored in the metaphysical". I feel quite determinedly that the opposite is true, and would prefer to call it an investigation with language, anchored in the material. Van Ostaijen's poetry is sorrowful and delicate, and his description of the nature of poetry has so much more charm than mine. I think of a ship's anchor lodged in a cloud.

More charm, and also more desperate need. Van Ostaijen's experience of the Great War in occupied Belgium, from out of which he wrote Feasts of Fear and Pain and Occupied City, helped give rise to his yearning for the purely lyrical, a yearning which could never really be satisfied in the everyday world, except glancingly in poetry.

My hands feel for my hands / incessantly

This is one of my favourite poems of his, from The First Book of Schmoll -

GEOLOGY

Deep seas around the island
deep blue seas surround the island
You do not know
whether the island is of the stars overhead
you do not know
whether the island is on the axis of the earth
deep seas
deep blue seas
the plummet seeks
sinking it seeks and seeking sinks
seeking its own seeking
and goes on
sinking
and goes on
seeking
deep seas
blue seas
deep blue seas
deepblue seas
sinking
seeking
the upside-down stars
doubly blue
and doubly fathomless
When will the blue plummet
in the blue seas
find the green seaweed
and the coral reef

An animal that hunts life towards an imagined peace
- a delusion in a million millenial cells -
like an animal that hunts and finds on its blind fingers
nothing but repetition of enacted action
like an animal
the sailor's plummet
sinks
If this sinking were to settle past your eyes you could not know
a greater emptiness

translated from the Dutch by James S Holmes

That's so, too

2006-01-13T18:13:00.000Z

from Eastern War Time by Adrienne Rich

4

What the grown-ups can't speak of would you push
onto children? and the deadweight of Leo Frank
thirty years lynched hangs heavy
: "this is what our parents were trying to spare us"
here in America but in terrible Europe
anything was possible surely?
: "But this is the twentieth century" :
what the grown-ups can't teach children must learn
how do you teach a child what you won't believe?
how do you say unfold, my flower, shine, my star
and we are hated, being what we are?

screenshot from The House is Black by Forough Farrokhzad

Poem

2006-01-09T16:44:00.000Z

It was an icy day
we buried the cat
then took her box
and set match to it

in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.

William Carlos Williams

There is a rat rotting under my floorboards. We levered them up and discovered droppings and scratch marks. The rat man has put down some warfarin.

I remember seeing a dead cat. I was walking along the pavement into town one winter morning and saw a trail of blood leading from the kerb to a patch of grass. The cat had been knocked down - presumably by a car - and had staggered across the pavement to die. One of its eyes was hanging out, and I was astonished by how large it was. When I saw a human eye being removed, or "enucleated" at work, we kept it in a plastic pot and it was quite small. But when one looks at a cat skull, it is interesting to see how far back the socket goes. A cat needs to react far more quickly than a human, and its eyesight is doubtless a lot sharper.

photo courtesy of Forest & Kim Starr (USGS)

Blue is the colour

2006-01-03T19:18:00.000Z

The dark spot, the beautiful blue bruise on Neptune, my favourite planet. A photo from Voyager 2 in 1989.

2006-01-03T16:49:00.000Z

drawing by Vija Celmins

2006-01-03T16:30:00.000Z

Those not live yet
Who doubt to live again -
"Again" is of a twice
But this - is one -

The Ship beneath the Draw
Aground - is he?
Death - so - the Hyphen of the Sea -
Deep is the Schedule
Of the Disk to be -
Costumeless Consciousness -
That is he -

Emily Dickinson 1879

"Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure" wrote Oscar Wilde and when I think of that quotation, I always think of this poem, and its weird depth. What is the draw? "The act of pulling, the bending of the bow, attractive power, anything having the power to attract a crowd..." Well, the Afterlife is fairly crowded. Is that "live" pronounced as in "alive", or as in "living"? The OED doesn't help. The disk must relate to that disk of snow in the last line of "Safe in their alabaster chambers" describing the soundlessness of the point of death and the vanity of riches,

Diadems drop, and doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.

The hyphen of the sea, it feels to me, is what is inescapably linked to the sea, what the sea will always naturally represent - death, or mortality absorbed in infinity. Also the literal sea in its role as hyphen, linking and sundering, with this poem like a message signalled across the ocean and broken up in the transmission.

Empire

2006-01-02T07:44:00.000Z

In 1964 Andy Warhol made an 8 hour film of the Empire State Building, a continuous shot of the same static image, broken only by the need for reel changes. A one hour excerpt is included on a compilation of short films by Warhol obtainable from Raro Video in Italy or Xploited Cinema in the US. The full 8 hours was projected onto a wall in the South Bank last September, but I missed it. Watching the hour-long version, I was surprised by the amount of activity on screen - I was actually hoping for large parts of the movie that the activity would settle down and I could simply look at the image without being distracted! There are so many processing errors or flaws in the film stock that the subject of the film is as much about the nature of recording and the beauty to be found in its imperfection as it is about the contemplation of commercial or political power. And because there is in spite of all this only one scene to look at, because the star of the film never moves or changes its expression, it is all the harder for the viewer to turn from the screen - I didn't want to miss a single frame unless I missed something important. The Empire State Building glows fiercely in the night, slightly over-exposed. My feelings towards it changed continually, but for the most part it seemed baleful. For the duration of the film its energy is contained within the frame and its power is held in stasis by the camera. The constant flares and laboratory marks seem to testify to the difficulty of keeping its power within bounds - it interferes with the attempt at recording like a ghost in a recorded séance.

Happy New Year

2006-01-01T16:19:00.000Z

The Holy Family

2005-12-27T22:25:00.000Z

by Poussin. The tree on the left is an orange tree, which blossoms and fruits at the same time, a symbol of fertility and blossoming purity, represented ideally in the Virgin Mary.

2005-12-27T21:11:00.000Z

Employment

He that is weary, let him sit.
My soul would stir
And trade in courtesies and wit,
Quitting the fur
To cold complexions needing it.

Man is no star, but a quick coal
Of mortal fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth control
A faint desire,
Lets his own ashes choke his soul.

When th' elements did for place contest
With him, whose will
Ordain'd the highest to be best;
The earth sat still,
And by the others is opressed.

Life is a business, not good cheer;
Ever in wars.
The sun still shineth there or here,
Whereas the stars
Watch an advantage to appear.

O that I were an Orange-tree,
That busy plant!
Then should I ever laden be,
And never want
Some fruit for him that dressed me.

But we are still too young or old;
The man is gone,
Before we do our wares unfold:
So we freeze on,
Until the grave increase our cold.

George Herbert, 1633

Herbert's weariest poem. The brash confidence of the opening verse is trodden down as the poem progresses till it stops dead in the frozen earth. Life is a business, or "Life is Business", as our modern ears naturally hear it, although the use of "business" to mean specifically commercial transactions does not predate the 18th century, according to the OED, and that makes obvious historical sense. It was used in Herbert's time to refer to a person's occupation or daily activity, and that might include buying and selling. However prior to the 17th century, "business" seems also to have meant "anxiety" or "source of anxiety and concern", and this sense has perhaps survived in expressions like "it's a bad business..." or "what a terrible business!" (Expressions reminiscent of an Edwardian period drama - a murder-mystery probably - but perhaps people still use them.) That sense of "business" is the earliest cited in the OED, from 950, translated in the source as the Latin solicitudinem, but by the 17th century it seems to have to have been used in a more neutral sense: serious occupation or public affairs, as opposed to having a good time, or "cheer".

Whereas the stars/Watch an advantage to appear... again, one thinks of business in the modern sense, and in fact a sense of "advantage" as commercial advantage, or "pecuniary profit" was active in the 17th century. "Another fleet... had fallen upon the Molucca islands, bringing away great advantage" (Grotius's Low-Countrey Warrs, 1665, cited in the OED)

Festive erotic screenshots

2005-12-22T20:10:00.000Z

from Mario Banana 1

2005-12-22T20:08:00.000Z

from Emanuelle in America

2005-12-22T19:57:00.000Z

from Throw Away Your Books, Let's Go Into the Streets

Art and Engagement

2005-12-22T19:25:00.000Z

I heard Harold Pinter on the radio this evening describing the necessary antagonism that theatre creates between artist and audience. Part of him despises the audience - and the audience more than reciprocate with their sadistic shuffling and coughing. But Pinter pointed out that the duty of the performers is to rise to that challenge, to meet the audience in combat and overmaster them. Certainly, it is not good to flatter them, to offer to "entertain" them. Part of the viewer is resentful of art, and jealous of its self-containment; a part of the artist wishes to twist the viewer's hand right back until it hurts. What fun! The concept of the fight, or the engagement, kicks through the "entertainment" lie and allows people to verbalise their anger when confronted by genuine art. That's good for the artist too, who should never be flattered. It's dispiriting for flatterers to hear that an artist is irritated and made uncomfortable by praise; what artists long for is a passionately-felt attack on their work, a proof that their play or their film has wounded the heart of a sensitive critic.

And my thought all gone & the vanish of the sun

2005-12-15T15:51:00.000Z

2005-12-15T15:44:00.000Z

I think one can only capture The Dream Songs' lurches in tone if one reads them while half-drunk. Berryman does extraordinary violence to the language, dismembers his sentences with a theatrical wave of the knife. And in their stumbling and their turning bewildered back on themselves, his poems are already remorseful, conveying a distinctive self-conscious pathos.

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.
I saw the point of Loeb
at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,
baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound
attend while he is cooked

until with trembling hands hoist I my true
& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains -
it's the texture & the thought -
but I will like them now, spooning at you,
my guardian, slowly, until at length the rains
lose heart and the sun flames out.

Dream Song 95, by John Berryman

Richard Loeb, along with his accomplice Nathan Leopold, became famous in the 1920s after murdering a 14 year-old boy with a chisel in an attempt to do something "Nietzschean". He was himself only 18 at the time, and the product of a respectable middle-class family. He was later killed in gaol by another inmate. The two friends were the inspiration for Rope.

Tea Rose Hybrid

2005-11-23T10:04:00.000Z

Blank limits of Art

2005-11-22T20:40:00.000Z

photo by Daido Moriyama

2005-11-22T18:20:00.000Z

I was once invited outside for a fight by a fan of the Dead Kennedys for suggesting that the song Police Truck might be interpreted as pro-police. It documents a scene of police brutality accompanied by a pruriently righteous guitar part. It's an early song, and the Kennedys themselves evolved a more politically constructive lyrical and musical style. From the leering aggression of Saturday Night Holocaust to the fair-minded suggestions of Stars and Stripes of Corruption ("How about more art and theatre instead of sports?") the Dead Kennedys certainly made a rational political journey. But the music was somehow neutered, and everyone prefers the early work, rage and moral nihilism notwithstanding. The Kennedys ran up against the limitations of punk, of a restricted aesthetic. Unprepared to burst their musical boundaries, they gave up the ghost and disbanded. They had no tools to advance their style without diluting it. Kurt Cobain's suicide I interpret as a musical admission of defeat, among other things. There was nowhere else for Nirvana to go without abandoning the Seattle sound entirely. Despite his political engagement, he ended up trapped in his aesthetic graveyard; improvising freely at the end of a performance, "did you really pay to listen to this shit?" he asked the audience. But by decisively abndoning his fans and truly investigating the "shit" they resented, he might have saved his art.

Perhaps there is no rational political future. Perhaps there is only continued existence and grey variations of more of the same. The films of Lucio Fulci convey this philosophy with open-eyed horror. The drab grey hell of The Beyond is a symbolic representation of the non-possibility of any fundamental change in economic or social relations. Beyond this world, suggests Fulci, is a pale waste inhabited by homeless alcoholics. We are condemned, in this world and the next, merely to feed and to wander. His hero and heroine, abruptly transfered to the afterlife, find they have become blind. There will be no redemption or change. Fulci himself, as a Catholic and an anti-fascist, shrank from the horror of this, but despite himself he was unable to film happy endings.

If religion provides only illusory comfort, and if Marxism too is an illusion, if there is no religious or secular hope, one ends, in Art, with the repetitive and destructive emptiness depicted by Fulci, or the weary estrangement of this poem by Kipling, one of his Epitaphs of the War:

SALONIKAN GRAVE

I have watched a thousand days
Push out and crawl into night
Slowly as tortoises.
Now I, too, follow these.
It is fever, and not the fight -
Time, not battle - that slays.

Rudyard Kipling

Kim Longinotto, the truth, and the human

2005-11-22T16:29:00.000Z

I've just come back from a screening of the documentary Sisters in Law, by Kim Longinotto, who also directed Divorce Iranian Style. Both are filmed without commentary, and follow the stories of various women trying to seek justice for themselves within a traditional legal system. Sisters in Law was filmed in Cameroon with Florence Ayisi, and follows a number of cases - for example that of a Muslim woman called Amina, who succesfully prosecutes and divorces her husband for beating and abusing her. She was the first woman to obtain such a prosecution in her area, and she was helped by a group of Cameroonian women lawyers, prosecutors and activists. It would be fatuous to call the film inspiring, since the stories were so sad and the lives they described were so harsh, and, besides, the fight belongs to them and not to well-meaning observers. But the film concluded with the first Cameroonian woman judge introducing Amina to her legal students - most of them women - and showing to them by inspiring example, how a brave stand by a single individual could force society to change.

Kim Longinotto was present at the screening to answer questions at the end. One criticism raised was that as a Western woman filming the proceedings, she was inevitably going to be intervening herself in the world that she films, and that she couldn't pretend to be some kind of 'neutral observer'. Longinotto readily conceded this, and made quite clear that she was engaged, as a film maker, in the struggles she documented. Amina was apparently very keen for her case to be filmed, and this was clearly, in part, in order to exert pressure on the judges, who would be conscious that their decision would be made "in the eyes of the world". On the other hand, it is strange, remarked Kim Longinotto, how soon people forget that the camera is present, and Amina, on returning home from court, was asked "Were there any other women there with you?", and she replied, quite unselfconsciously, "No! Only me!" It's interesting in that respect that Longinotto uses quite a large camera, and avoids using hidden cameras, and this may paradoxically result in more natural behaviour.

The film was made without commentary, and Longinotto was also criticised for this, for not contextualising the society which she filmed... "What is the ratio of Muslims to Christians in Cameroon?" "What are the various language and ethnic divisions?" But, in truth, no amount of contextual facts will force the viewer to perceive another society with a humane sensibility. Longinotto changes the world through her films by first altering bare perceptions, by appealing to conscience. And it is only on such a base that facts have much relevance or use. I saw Divorce Iranian Style in 1998 and it was the first time I had ever seen Iranians outside the Death to America pantomimes or war reporting. And any slight knowledge I have of Iran, based on books like Roy Mottahadeh's The Mantle of the Prophet, was founded on the first shock of human recognition. Talk of airstrikes on Iran with nuclear-tipped warheads is absolutely dependent on people never seeing films like Divorce Iranian Style, or Longinotto's other Iranian documentary Runaway. One of the most popular Iranian films in recent years was a satire on the clergy, called The Lizard. It has great popular appeal, but it was only ever shown in the UK at the ICA as far as I'm aware and is only commercially available on a wretched bootleg from iranian.com. When Iranian graphic artist Marjane Satrapi visited Utah to give a reading, someone asked her "Can you see the moon from Iran?" Artists like Longinotto and Satrapi have to build on a surface of almost complete ignorance, but the question is actually a rather sweetly poetic one - and the questioner at least had the interest to attend a talk by Satrapi. When al-Jazeera interviewed Israeli politicians, I believe it was the first time many in the region had heard an Israeli speak. There are actually very few Israeli films released in the West; while its news profile is very high, its cultural - its human - profile is almost non-existent. And if that is true in the West, it is probably all the more true in the Arab world. It helps aid the process of demonization. "Where are your horns?", my Israeli colleague was asked.

Longinotto prefers to film in medium shots, avoiding close-ups, rapid cutting or ostentatious camera-work. It is a very modest, unobtrusive style. That may in part be the reason for the immense emotional power of her work. Her films almost always bring tears to the eyes, tears of longing and of shame on the part of the viewer, not so much the smug tears of empathy. It is the longing to make a connection, to reach out an authentic hand. And the means by which Longinotto consistently achieves this is mysterious. To me, it is an alchemy produced by her engagement, by the value her art places on justice and truth. The greatest art is a moral challenge to the viewer and is itself the product of a moral sensibility. The alternative is amusing, but does no more than fiddle at the burning. I was reminded, watching Sisters in Law and listening to Longinotto, of Peter Watkins, of Culloden and Punishment Park ....and also of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol.

Morrissey is quoted in Bob Colacello's memoir and biography of Warhol, Holy Terror, as saying to him, "I mean, what could be more ridiculous than the pompous, pseudointellectual notion that the director is the most important person on a movie? Everyone knows the most important person on a movie is the star!" Morrissey, Longinotto and Watkins are united by their determination to efface themselves as artists before what they film, for their moral commitment, unsparing and hostile to compromise, and by the mysterious power of their work, bestowed like a blessing upon the righteous, and impossible to fake or imitate. Aleister Crowley wrote in Liber AL vel Legis, "Every man and every woman is a star", and between the starry potential envisaged by Crowley and the grimy, abject starriness of a Morrissey subject, are the figures of Amina in Sisters in Law, or the little girl taking the place of her clerical father in Divorce Iranian Style, and dispensing satirical justice from his chair. They are stars, and Longinotto their committed observer.

The BrightLights Film Journal has an overview of Longinotto's work here

And Red Pepper has a very brief interview

A puzzle to hunters

2005-11-17T16:44:00.000Z

2005-11-17T16:34:00.000Z

So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear,
yet never to be caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths -
this animal of that one horn
throwing itself upon which headforemost from a cliff,
it walks away unharmed;
proficient in this feat which, like Herodotus,
I have not seen except in pictures.
Thus this strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness,
has come to be unique,
"impossible to take alive,"
tamed only by a lady inoffensive like itself -
as curiously wild and gentle;
"as straight and slender as the crest,
or antlet of the one-beam'd beast."
Upon the printed page,
also by word of mouth,
we have a record of it all
and how, unfearful of deceit,
etched like an equine monster of an old celestial map,
beside a cloud or dress of Virgin-Mary blue,
improved "all over slightly with shakes of Venice gold,
and silver, and some O's,"
the unicorn "with pavon high," approaches eagerly;
until engrossed by what appears of this strange enemy,
upon the map, "upon her lap,"
its "mild wild head doth lie."

from Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns by Marianne Moore

2005-11-16T20:14:00.000Z

Mimosa tree and flowers by Sosetsu (17th Century)

Sleeptree songs

2005-11-16T19:47:00.000Z

Four poems from Heian Japan

from Lady Ki to Otomo no Yakamochi, with a sleeptree flower and some reed blossoms...

For you, my slave,
I picked these reed blossoms
From the fields of spring
With my own hands.
Eat them and grow fat.

Should the mistress alone
See the sleeptree,
That opens in the day
And sleeps in love at night?
Look upon it too, slave.

He replies:

This slave must be longing
For his mistress -
Though I eat the buds of reed you send,
I grow but thinner, thinner.

The sleeptree you sent, love,
That I might think of you,
Will only bear flowers,
Never bear fruit.

Lady Ki was older than Yakamochi and the wife of an imperial prince, while Yakamochi (718 - 785) was a lower ranking courtier. The sleeptree is the mimosa, which folds up its leaves and "sleeps" at night. Its name, nebu or nemu, sounds like the word for sleep, and the characters with which it is written have erotic connotations, "untie pleasure".

from A Warbler's Song in the Dusk - The Life & Work of Otomo Yakamochi by Paula Doe

2005-11-15T22:48:00.000Z

from The Story of a Glove by Max Klinger

Elm

2005-11-15T22:42:00.000Z

for Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminshed and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Sylvia Plath

Ectoplasm

2005-11-15T22:19:00.000Z

Ectoplasmic faces produced in the course of a séance

Pity the monsters

2005-11-15T00:44:00.000Z

Charles Ogle as Frankenstein (1910)

CGI is the death of theatre, yawn.

2005-11-14T23:46:00.000Z

There is a scene in Cannibal Holocaust where the Shamatari (one of the three featured "cannibal" tribes) are grotesquely murdering some captured Yanomamo. Two men are dragging what looks like a stone axe wrapped with cloth up and down a girl's chest. Why are they doing that? They may be tenderising the meat in some way, but it's hard to be sure. The 'effect' as such is not particularly convincing, but neither are most of the others in the film. For some reason, it doesn't seem to matter. Most viewers don't seem to notice - not even the wig falling off the 'severed head' of Faye in the final massacre. So what power does Cannibal Holocaust possess? Does it have this power in spite of its bad effects, or partly because of them? The scene with the Shamatari is highly theatrical; it is a staged vision of hell. And the means that it uses are theatrical means.

Peter Hall, in an essay comparing the cinema to the stage, wrote that the miracle of theatre was that with a few bare boards and some simple props, one could create a world, a world that the audience would enter, and that would be completely real to them. Whereas in the cinema - one duff effect and the spell is broken, the magic is ruined! But perhaps this is a distinction between different kinds of film, as much as between theatre and cinema. Some directors are, after all, extremely theatrical. John Waters is a good example. The pantomime sets of Desperate Living are entirely convincing, albeit made out of scavenged trash and cardboard. Mortville is as real as if I saw it on the TV - maybe more so. The limitations of certain films - the technical limitations they have in terms of presenting the 'real' - signal to the audience that what they are watching is not merely real. What they are watching is not therefore a failure, but something with artistic intention like a play or a poem. Something, therefore, with artistic power. In a performance of Titus Andronicus, and I think too, in one of Sarah Kane's plays, blood was symbolised pouring from the wounds of the characters by using long red streamers. And yet the audience were still shocked and traumatised - perhaps all the more so. Imagine Cannibal Holocaust with FX by Tom Savini. It would be a film drained of its improvisatory, theatrical imagination, and hence most of its artistic authority. The best thing about the zombies in a Romero film is their simple grey make up with well-perfused fingers and eyelids. Night of the Living Dead in particular gains in power from the cheap effects. The worst thing is the realistic entrails, the slop and the showpiece dismemberments that do nothing to save or elevate Day of the Dead. They are too convincing - mere technical achievements. The audience look on with indifference.

Having said that, I don't mean to imply that a 'theatrical' effect is a bad one - only, that it will not be a seamless one, that it never aims at superrealist precision. The effects themselves will be all the more imaginative - but using the kind of simple stage tricks seen in Ringu, for example, when Sadako crawls from the TV set. Not difficult to work out how they did that! But it was a scene that drove a nail into the audience. It shouldn't be difficult to work out how they impaled the girl in Cannibal Holocaust, but even Italian judges and British customs officials were convinced it had 'actually happened'. It's not because these sort of people are stupid - as some would have us believe - and not because a more elaborate effect would have had some give-away CGI sheen, but because the bare-bones theatrical techniques signal the presence of an artistic as opposed to a technical vision, and have the most artistic power. And it is the heart of Cannibal Holocaust that people find so disturbing.

... the metaphysical side of bad dreams

2005-11-14T21:23:00.000Z

"This may seem strange, but I am happier than someone like Bunuel, who says he is looking for God. I have found him in the misery of others, and my torment is greater than Bunuel's. For I have realised that God is a God of suffering. I envy atheists; They don't have all these difficulties."

Lucio Fulci

Iron Rose

2005-11-14T21:01:00.000Z

sweet, portentous lust - from Jean Rollin's "Rose de Fer"

Sometimes, when I necked with a stranger, I went
close to that - pheromone, sweat,
scorch, kiss of life - tasting in him
some male, unmothered world, and through him
a male world was tasting me.
Every time, I was pretending, without knowing,
that I could lay my body like a soul in his hands
and he would not take it. But he might. But he would not.

Sharon Olds

Mictlantecuhtli

2005-11-11T22:24:00.000Z

Mexican God of death

"The unwanted unwanting the world"

2005-11-10T21:52:00.000Z

THERE IS NO RIOT

Even that desperate gaiety is gone.
Empty bottles, no longer trophies
are weapons now. Even the cunning
grumble. "If is talk you want," she said,
"you wasting time with me. Try the church."
One time, it was because rain fell
there was no riot. Another time
it was because the terrorist forgot
to bring the bomb. Now, in these days
though no rain falls, and bombs are well remembered
there is no riot. But everywhere
empty and broken bottles gleam like ruin.

O MY COMPANION

This afternoon white sea-birds
were quiet, very quiet, until
a cloud over the sun fooled them
it was sunset. The fishes laughed
at the hook in the bait. The cork danced.

Where you are, I am. Lost and seeking
I question the waste. The wind
is blue smoke. From the fires
no flame sprouts. In the distance
day is a foreigner. If a child drowns
it is the sky's fault. If sea-birds stray
the sun's. O my companion.

FOR WALTER RODNEY

Assassins of conversation
they bury the voice
they assassinate, in the beloved
grave of the voice, never to be silent.
I sit in the presence of rain
in the sky's wild noise
of the feet of some who
not only, but also, kill
the origin of rain, the ankle
of the whore, as fastidious
as the great fight, the wife
of water. Risker, risk.
I intend to turn a sky
of tears, for you.

from Selected Poems by Martin Carter (1927 - 1997)

Caileag spioradail às an t-Seapan

2005-11-08T20:34:00.000Z

photo by Nobuyoshi Araki

Another Japanese tale of horror

2005-11-08T18:06:00.000Z

PART ONE

There was once a girl of middling appearance and marriageable age who lived in a remote house with her parents. She used to sell candies in the nearest village. She would push round a wooden cart and the neighbourhood children would scramble up to it. The cart was a rather dilapidated one, but she made it attractive with bright coloured cloths. When the candies were sold, and her work finished for the day, she would walk the few miles back home. To anyone watching her as she made her way, it might seem that she was thinking. Not merely daydreaming, or turning things over in the everyday sense, but actively, furiously thinking. An onlooker might be reminded of ants, or of a cloud of mosquitos. There was something rather disturbing about it.
She had much the same manner at dinner, but her parents were used to it. As soon has she had finished, she marched out rather stiffly to her bedroom, and took out an old book with many hundreds of blank pages. This was her diary, and every night without fail she would fill out a page with whatever it was that she wrote - because no one to this day has any idea what she did write, or what it was that so troubled and preoccupied her. Her father had little interest in his daughter, and it would never have occured to him to read it, and her mother, with whom she made the candies each morning, had never learned to read or write.

An elderly man trudged his way up to the remote house one evening. From her room the girl could hear the old man and her father talking. Not unnaturally, in the course of her work in the village, she had attracted a number of admirers, and not just among the children. What was taking place that night, as her mother knelt by the table pouring saké, was a negotiation. And sure enough, when she arrived home the following evening and greeted her parents, her father informed her that she was going to be married, to a young farmer in the nearby village. He had noticed her as she lifted the cloth from the sweets on her cart, surrounded by a press of excited children, and he had watched her from a distance as she pushed her cart home, her head bent, and her long hair blown by the wind into tangles.
And that night, as every night, the girl wrote her diary, in lines now graceful and flowing, now jagged and broken.
She remembered him, vaguely. He had a yearning expression. He was the heir to a reasonable-sized farm and a substantial, if rather characterless, farmhouse. The wedding would take place in a matter of months, and now, whenever she wheeled her sweet-cart into the village, she avoided looking around at the houses and surrounded herself with the children.
It was around this time that her diary-activity became more intense and concentrated. Each night she would stay up until the early hours, straining her eyes at the pages.
Eventually the day came when she was to be married, and the night when she would be accompanied back to his farm by her husband, and the morning when she would have get up before sunrise, before even the birds, and set out her husband's clean clothes and prepare his breakfast. Each day would be like that, stretching out monotonously until what seemed like infinity, but her consolation, and her curse, was that each night she retired to their bedroom before him, writing and writing with intense concentration.
She refused to show her husband what she was writing, and indeed to say anything meaningful about what she was putting in her diary. She would glower at him horribly if he so much as approached it. For the first few months of his marriage, he was happy to humour her in this, and he did not treat it as an insult. He had been lonely a long time, and had long found her fascinating. He was glad to be married, and to have his food prepared for him. He felt grateful to heaven. And yet, as the months went by, the couple began to chafe against each another. He found her secretive devotion to the heavy book troubling, exasperating, and finally disgusting.
One afternoon as she walked into the village to buy provisions, he opened the cupboard in which she kept it, carefully, slowly removed it, and stared at its dark cover, challenging himself to open it. It was absurd, he felt, that he should even feel nervous about it. It was a hundred times-over his right as a husband to open the pages and discover for himself what she was writing. And at that moment the room became grey as a cloud crossed the sun, and a strange chill came over him.

to be continued...

お化けのせかい

2005-11-08T16:26:00.000Z

painting by さとし

A lonely ghost story from Japan

2005-11-08T16:15:00.000Z

There was once a young man wandering by himself in the sun-dappled forest. He carried a bow in his hand and a quiver on his shoulder but he was not interested in hunting. He was absorbed in thinking. But not thinking anything in particular. It was one of those days when his thoughts seemed to weigh rather heavily on him, although if asked he could never say exactly what the trouble was.
Passing beneath a group of shady trees, he took a path that he did not remember noticing before, and emerged after a while into a large and beautiful clearing. In the middle of the clearing was what looked like a hunting lodge, built of wood, with shuttered windows and a wooden balcony at the front. There didn't seem to be anyone about. He called, but there was no reply. Deciding to take a closer look, he stepped up onto the balcony and approached the door, pressing his hand against it. At once it glided open and he saw the brightly shining face of a beautiful woman.
"How very strange to see you", she said. "I hardly see anybody. I live a very secluded life here in the forest". The young man was too shocked to speak. "But since you're here", she continued, "come in anyway, and I'll boil you up some tea".
The hallway led directly through to what looked like a kitchen. On either side were two plain wooden doors. She opened the door on the right and led the young man through into a sitting room. It was sparsely furnished with a low table and an old wooden chest. There were also a number of birds fluttering restlessly in little cages. She dropped some seeds into each before going to the kitchen, returning with a small pot of tea.
They talked for a long while and the conversation flowed naturally from the first, although it was hard to say exactly what it was they talked about. The young man simply had the feeling of time passing by delightfully. As the afternoon wore on, however, and he noticed the rays of the declining sun through the shutters, he said "I must have kept you for hours. Perhaps I ought to be making my way back".
"Oh no", she replied, "I was hoping you might stay to dinner. But there was something I was wondering if you could do for me".
"Anything", he said.
"I was hoping you could mind the lodge while I'm gone. I need to go away for a short while. I won't be long". She stood up and led him into the hallway. "Make yourself at home in the sitting room", she said, "or wander through into the kitchen. But there's one thing I want you to promise me".
"What's that?"
"That you won't.... You can go into any room in the lodge - but don't open this door". And she pointed to the door on the left.
"But why on earth not?" he asked, surprised.
"Because you mustn't", she replied. "I want you to promise me faithfully that you will not".
"Then I will not. Of course. Absolutely" the young man said.
She smiled and turned to leave. She had an eerily beautiful face. Stepping down onto the balcony, she walked towards the forest and was gone.
Of course the young man found this curious, and after returning to the sitting room and thinking about her beauty for a while, he began to feel strangely ill at ease. He walked back to the hallway and stood before the left hand door. It was a plain wooden door with nothing interesting about it. Nonetheless its very blankness seemed provoking. What could lie beyond it?
He had promised very faithfully not to go inside, and a promise was a promise, especially one made to such a beautiful woman. But suddenly the thought of her beauty crossed his mind like a shadow, and almost angered him. The feeling passed, and he returned to the sitting room to peer at the birds and set them aflutter by tapping their cages.
But after some minutes he returned to the hallway and stared outside. There was no sign of her returning. The left hand door caught his attention. Without thinking he placed his fingers on the handle. He snatched them away, but then slowly returned them. It was only a door after all, and he was naturally curious.
He thought of her beauty, and somewhere in his mind he felt a stab of hatred. She would never know, and he would certainly not admit it. That wouldn't stop them having a beautiful dinner that night, and him paying her elaborate compliments.
He looked outside. Again, there was no sign of her. After pausing for a while, he turned the handle.
He pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

The room was empty. He looked around - it was completely bare. Yet at the corner of his eye he caught a strange glimpse of feathers. At the edges of his hearing he had a vague sense of the fluttering of wings, and then everything seemed to vanish from around him.
He woke up to find himself lying face down and alone in a deserted field. It seemed to be the following morning. He wiped the dew from his clothes as he picked himself up. The woman, the lodge and the beautiful clearing had all disappeared, although the field he recognised. It was not far from his home. What had he done when he opened that door? And what had become of the woman? He went back in his mind over everything that had happened. He recalled it all quite clearly, and felt desolate.
And for many months afterwards he would search through the forest and try to find that shady path to the clearing. He never stopped thinking of the little wooden lodge and the beautiful woman.
He never found either again.

Nagasaki

2005-11-08T11:21:00.000Z

photo by Tomatsu Shomei

2005-11-08T11:01:00.000Z

At this point in time, millions of souls collect
to say McTeague's gilt tooth should not have been taken away
& other American tragedies
imaginary & real: Hart Crane in Paris, wreckt,
Adlai in London, looking on a day
for a terrible partner, a tease.

O yes, at this point in time the American soul
gathers its forces for the good of man
but it has memories.
Henry Adams denied this, & he was right
but for the few the place is crawling with ghosts
like lice in a pan.

When will the fire be turned on? and by whom?
heating the memory and soul alike
until both crisp.
Not soon, I wonder, but in some lead-shielded room
mistakes are being made like the Third Reich
perhaps, I lisp.

John Berryman, 4th July 1968

Ròs buidhe

2005-11-01T16:44:00.000Z

A flower for Nasrin Alavi, whose fascinating book We are Iran has just been published by Portobello Books. It is a compilation of articles on every imaginable subject by alert and courageous Iranian bloggers, interspersed with Alavi's analysis. It is a door into a world the Western reader might never imagine existed - over 64,000 blogs written in Persian!

"Reading We Are Iran, you have the sense that, for more reasons than are obvious, the worst thing that could possibly happen to Iran now would be US intervention."

Buy it here

Nasrin Alavi comments on Ahmadinejad and his recent speech in a letter to Christopher Dickey at his Shadowland Journal blog.

2005-10-29T09:45:00.000Z

photo by Boris Mikhailov

A Farewell Thing While Breathing

2005-10-29T09:35:00.000Z

a farewell thing while breathing
was walking down the hall
in underwear
with painted face like clown
a bomb from Cologne in right pocket
a SEASON IN HELL
in the left,
stripes of sunset
like
bass
running
down
his
arms,
and they found him in the morning
dangling in the fire escape
window,
face frosted and gone as an electric bulb,
and the sparrows
were in the brush downstairs,
and
friend,
sparrows do not sing
they emit sound,
and
they emitted sound,
and they
(the people, not the sparrows)
carried him down the steps
like a wasted owl.

Charles Bukowski

2005-10-29T09:03:00.000Z

Kurutta ippeiji

from Beloved

2005-10-27T15:06:00.000Z

"You could stay the night, Paul D."
"You don't sound too steady in the offer."
Sethe glanced beyond his shoulder toward the closed door. "Oh it's truly meant. I just hope you'll pardon my house. Come on in. Talk to Denver while I cook you something."
Paul D tied his shoes together, hung them over his shoulder and followed her through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood.
"You got company?" he whispered, frowning.
"Of and on," said Sethe.
"Good God." He backed out the door onto the porch. "What kind of evil you got in here?"
"It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through."

...

She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry. It seemed a long way to the normal light surrounding the table, but he made it - dry-eyed and lucky.
"You said she died soft. Soft as cream," he reminded her.
"That's not Baby Suggs," she said.
"Who then?"
"My daughter. The one I sent ahead with the boys."
"She didn't live?"
"No. The one I was carrying when I run away is all I got left. Boys gone too. Both of em walked off just before Baby Suggs died."
Paul D looked at the spot where the grief had soaked him. The red was gone but a kind of weeping clung to the air where it had been.

Toni Morrison

2005-10-27T12:21:00.000Z

2005-10-27T12:20:00.000Z

2005-10-26T00:29:00.000Z

Charles Bukowski (1920 - 1994)

2005-10-25T23:40:00.000Z

2005-10-25T23:30:00.000Z

My father

he carried a piece of
carbon, a blade and a whip
and at night he
feared his head
and covered it with blankets
until one morning in Los Angeles
it snowed
and I saw the snow
and I knew that my father
could control nothing,
and when
I got somewhat larger
and took my first boxcar
out, I sat there in
the lime
the burning lime
of having nothing
moving into the desert
for the first time
I sang.

from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

2005-10-25T23:28:00.000Z

The Loss, The Loss, The Loss

the violets are waving like whores on a train out of
Norfolk,
Virginia was a nice lady who had nice
legs
but had to wear these
elastic plastic stockings because
of
bad veins due to a
Dutch greatgrandfather who
drank 12 quarts of beer a
day
and she died
when she
set herself on fire in the men's room of a
Pennsylvania eastbound
while smoking a Dutch Master in her (lower) lips
for $20
for 3 sweet boys from Harvard, really nice boys really
who wanted to photograph this
thing
where after the cigar the
3/4 jacked-off bulldog
in the wire suitcase (got on board through devious
means) was taught to leap in like
Normandy
like the waves off the coast of an
expensive resort
like
Joan of Arc
like your fingers holding mine
as the right-wing politician who wanted the presidency
and thinks atomic power is the chariot of Christ
cackles in his bloody sleep
of new life of man born in unfortunate places
and denied the final grace:
the social security of a
pisspot in a pisspot
day and
time.

from Penguin Modern Poets 13

Our investigating reporter

2005-10-25T22:33:00.000Z

Joe d'Amato films have a reputation for sleaziness; they have a beady little eye for the right stone to lift up for bugs. I am a little suspicious of horror films which use suggestion, which prefer shadows and light-tricks to blunt presentation. As somebody's sensible grandmother said, "If it's there in the dark, it'll be just as much there when the light's on". Restraint can be a way of smugly avoiding the question, under the guise of artistic tact. D'Amato lets everything show, and if there is more banality on display than horror, so much the better. Or if there is horror, there it is, warm by your side; or it walks in and stands before you, matter-of-fact and indifferent. And the outrage and the pain come from you, they're not faked by the film; the films work, most often, very simply by switching all the lights on, and following things through to their logical conclusion. In Orgasmo Nero 2, d'Amato marks out a stretch of sand for a childish play, a horror-porn-environmental fable with the production values of a piece of street-theatre. A film completely without dignity. But a film made as if it were the last that were ever made, with no eye on posterity; regressing to childhood honesty, and doing merely what it wants to do, saying merely what it feels like saying, in the short time left to it.

from The Sugar-Cane

2005-10-25T21:52:00.000Z

On festal days; or when their work is done;
Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance,
To the wild banshaws melancholy sound.
Responsive to the sound, head, feet and frame
Move aukwardly harmonious; hand in hand
Now lock'd, the gay troop circularly wheels,
And frisks and capers with intemperate joy.
Halts the vast circle, all clap hands and sing;
While those distinguish'd for their heels and air,
Bound in the center, and fantastic twine.
Meanwhile some stripling, from the choral ring,
Trips forth; and, not ungallantly, bestows
On her who nimblest hath the greensward beat,
And whose flush'd beauties have inthrall'd his soul,
A silver token of his fond applause.
Anon they form in ranks; nor inexpert
A thousand tuneful intricacies weave,
Shaking their sable limbs; and oft a kiss
Steal from their partners; who, with neck reclin'd,
And semblant scorn, resent the ravish'd bliss.
But let not thou the drum their mirth inspire;
Nor vinous spirits: else, to madness fir'd,
(What will not bacchanalian frenzy dare?)
Fell acts of blood, and vengeance they pursue.

James Grainger (1724 - 67), a Scottish doctor and poet who moved in 1759 to St Kitts, where he wrote The Sugar-Cane, "a West India georgic", describing the soil, the climate and the management of slaves.

from The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, edited by Paula Burnett

A POSTER OF OUR DAZZLING VICTORY AT SAARBRUCKEN

2005-10-25T21:32:00.000Z

In the centre of the poster, Napoleon
rides in apotheosis, sallow, medalled, a ramrod
perched on a merrygoround horse. He sees life
through rosy glasses, terrible as God,

and sentimental as a bourgeois papa.
Four little conscripts take their nap below
on scarlet guns and drums. One, unbuckling, cheers
Napoleon - he's stunned by the big name!

Another lounges on the butt of his Chassepot,
another feels his hair rise on his neck.
A bearskin shako bounds like a black sun.

VIVE L'EMPEREUR! They're holding back their breath.
And last, some moron, struggling to his knees,
presents a blue and scarlet ass - to what?

Rimbaud, translated by Robert Lowell

Emanuelle

2005-10-24T21:40:00.000Z

The lamb of God

2005-10-23T00:20:00.000Z

Francisco de Zurbaran (1598 - 1664)

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

2005-10-23T00:13:00.000Z

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first borne spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918)

2005-10-23T00:10:00.000Z

A film by Peter Watkins

2005-10-22T23:14:00.000Z

Punishment Park was, still is, criticised, held in contempt and derided for being 'hysterical', 'unrealistic' - "So, did any of that actually happen?" My God, I usually use 'righteous' as an insult, for those smugly confirmed in their own cause and enjoying the feeling it gives them, but this film is righteous like a prophet, its compassionate scream too piercing to be heard. Let's face it, most people identify with the 'tribunal'. Or no, but... To call this film 'hysterical' replicates exactly the charges made by members of the 'tribunal' against the young people before them. By polarising audiences so completely, Punishment Park draws out the same tensions among the viewing public that it portrays - when criticism of it is so vehement, how laughable to accuse this film of naive exageration and political crudity. The American flag flies at the beginning of the film reversed, as in a mirror. Why should righteous truth be sugar-coated every damn time for the idle consumer? The truth remains the truth, especially if it is the artistic truth, and it is not up some elitist mountain, but right there before us. Here's a stupid title for a book: Everything you know is wrong. And here's another one: You are being lied to. Goddamned commodified rebellion! The answer - as Punishment Park shouts over and over again while finding itself (to its visible distress and anger) almost completely inaudible - is, if you want to cut through the crap, look around you! - it's here, not somewhere hypothetical! And if anyone's telling lies around here, it's us telling lies to ourselves.

Punishment Park lasted four days on its release in the United States, before the distributors withdrew it. "Lack of customer interest". Too right! What self-respecting customer would want to sit through that for 88 minutes, and get harried, and mauled, and upset? Well, in Brighton, England, at any rate, it played for one 6 o'clock showing on one screen on one day; it raised its pitiful, sincere head, to the indifference which is the lot of every prophet. Who could blame Peter Watkins, the director, with all his immense technical fluency and facility, from giving up at this point, and starting to sweet-talk his audience? He never has. Because the audience never deserve to be sweet-talked, ever, by anything that aspires to be Art, not because the audience are unworthy of Art, but because real Art tries to convey the truth more than it thirsts for the next round of applause. "If Christ was on the earth today, people wouldn't even crucify him. They'd invite him to dinner-parties and laugh at him". I can't remember who wrote that.

But it's not apt. How sweet, how secure our lives are, if Punishment Park can be accused of 'hysteria', when young men are deported to Guantanamo Bay with less cause than brought the young people in this film before a fictional tribunal, and when the forces of liberation in Iraq have shown even less regard for the lives of their charges than that shown by some 'caricature' goons in a film.

Punishment Park is a bright flame of creative truth. I just wanted to say that.

2005-10-22T10:00:00.000Z

Koré

2005-10-22T09:56:00.000Z

As I was walking
I came upon
chance walking
the same road upon.
As I sat down
by chance to move
later
if and as I might

light the wood was,
light and green,
and what I saw
before I had not seen.

It was a lady
accompanied
by goat men
leading her.

Her hair held earth.
Her eyes were dark.
A double flute
made her move.

'Oh love,
where are you
leading
me now?'

Robert Creeley

2005-10-22T09:55:00.000Z

A Bad Morning

2005-10-22T09:50:00.000Z

The silver poplar, a beauty of local fame
An old hag today. The lake
A puddle of dirty suds - do not touch:
The fuschia among the snap dragons cheap and vain.

But why?
Last night in a dream I saw fingers pointing at me
As at a leper. They were callous, stained with work and
They were broken.

You don't know! I cried,
Conscious of guilt.

Bertoldt Brecht

2005-10-21T15:46:00.000Z

I remember

2005-10-21T15:29:00.000Z

It was my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.

Stevie Smith

Mischief

2005-10-21T14:56:00.000Z

'Oh,' he said, 'I have lived with nothingness
so long it has lost its meaning.
I have said "yes" to the universe
so many times its echoes
have returned increasingly as "no".
I have developed my negatives
of the divine and preserved their technicolour
in a make believe album. I realise
the imagination is alive only
in an oxygenated world. The truth
is less breath-taking than the vacuum
into which it withdraws. But against
all this I have seen the lamb
gambolling for a moment, as though
life were a good thing. This, I have said,
is God's roguery, juggling
with the scales, weighting the one
pan down with evil piled
upon evil then sending it suddenly
sky-high with in the other a tear
fallen from the hardest of eyes.

R. S. Thomas (1913 - 2000)

2005-10-21T14:55:00.000Z

2005-10-18T18:56:00.000Z

It was like a fine, bloody thread being pulled through their hearts

2005-10-18T18:44:00.000Z

Who are you?

The spider clamps the bluefly - whose death panic
Becomes sudden soulful absorption.

A stoat throbs at the nape of the lumped rabbit
Who watches the skylines fixedly.

Photographs of people - open-mouthed
In the gust of being shot and falling

And you grab me
So the blood jumps into my teeth

And 'Quick!' you whisper, 'O quick!'
And 'Now! Now! Now!'

Now what?

That I hear the age of the earth?

That I feel
My mother lift me up from between her legs?

Ted Hughes, from 'Gaudete'

2005-10-18T17:07:00.000Z

By the smoking remains of the plantation

2005-10-18T16:24:00.001Z

By the smoking remains of the plantation
we shelter on the dirt-strewn floor of the Rush room.

Blow pipes find a vantage-point through parted grass;
they will each grab an arm, they will slice off your hair.

The peace of our minds is disturbed
by strange echoes of miscegenation.
Under sentence of death we track the stars.

"What", we asked Boo from our cage,
"do they intend to do with us?"
Boo pointed grimly to Clothcat,
tossed to lie torn and unstitched
with the mummified woodlice.

"Students of heart sacrifice", he stated philosophically,
"believe it to have been a comparatively painless death".

We had talked quite pleasantly I thought with the chief of the tribe.
"If you point at a rainbow", he told us, "your arm will fall off".

"I've always wondered", I asked Boo, "about the woodlice".
"They're just distractions", he replied, "discarded bribes".
And as we waited for the sun to dawn I came to know
all about the courtship of spiders.

The courtship of spiders

The male spider has to offer the female spider a gift.
If they find nothing else they even offer a woodchip
cunningly wrapped in silk.

Some inadequate spiders just offer a bundle of web.
The female mostly notices this, and fiercely rejects it.
Sometimes the male persists.

Spiders often demonstrate extreme sexual dimorphism.
The male can be tiny. Seeing them come back again and again
they seem wonderfully brave.

If the female captures the male I don't think he feels much pain.
Their heads are gnawed off at the neck but it's nothing personal.
A matter of instinct.

When spiderlings hatch, they all hastily flee from each other.
If you can confine them to one spot they will eat each other.
None of them know better.

from The Bell Curve

A Marxist fairytale

2005-10-18T16:21:00.000Z

A photo by Romain Slocombe

Porn doors explode!

2005-10-17T11:19:00.000Z

2005-10-17T11:17:00.000Z

I've just seen the John Waters film Cecil B. Demented. Well, it was OK. Actually I hate the kids, and it was definitely a film made with the kids in mind. But then, if it was propaganda, it was at least propaganda in a righteous cause. John Waters obviously has a lot of respect for Spike Lee. The kids in Cecil B. were standard issue multicultural, which was a bit of a disappointment. The racial politics of Pink Flamingos was much more intriguing. We see Divine going to the post office and striding along the sidewalk. Strange that it's a black neighbourhood. We see the passersby looking astonished, but in a guarded rather than a hostile way. The post office workers are too shocked to say anything. This is the White Queen, maggoty-beautiful, casting all shame to the winds.

By the way, I think the same actor who plays the Chief on the tropical island in Emanuelle in America is the same man who spoons out the eye from the severed head in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Spike Lee's Bamboozled wasn't the first film to mash its teeth into race prejudice, to inhabit its stereotypes to such an extreme degree that they transgress themselves, bursting into liberating pieces. Joe d'Amato (who else?)'s films are a richly coloured travelogue, a wildly-spiced carnival of racial stereotypes driven to their last absurd limits, a racial delirium. And I think that the actors enjoy themselves, by and large. The three above-mentioned directors all prefer to work with a a team they know well, a travelling community of the otherwise unemployable (and in the case of Spike Lee, who else would give African-Americans such decent parts?), forming a supportive environment for the creation of a liberated community.

The carnival of perversion, dreams of miscegenation. Divine with the giant lobster. The best scene in the oeuvre.

Sombre too, as we watch the black minstrels burning the cork before the mirror, the candle flame shining in the curve of the spoon. And in the shots of the toys and little ornaments at the end of Bamboozled, we see the complexity and strangeness of hatred, the eerie fascination of these defunct, absurd objects. Seeing the sequence of old films, silent-era, talkies and cartoons, all showing negroes in absurd or demeaning roles, one wants somehow to reach out and pay some sort of honour to the players. Why is this? Some sort of yearning, not guilt or self-hatred, not sentimentality either, exactly. A girl with a scarf on her head, looking out to the left and smiling, how well-observed it is, and how tenderly moulded. Are black people better observers of whites than vice versa? Compassion arises from precise observation, from simply deciding to look. In all these objects (many from Spike Lee's own collection), we see something divided aginst itself - complex, hostile, and full of longing.

Time-like delirium cools at this crossing

2005-10-17T11:11:00.000Z

2005-10-17T11:04:00.000Z

The Pulley

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
Let us (said he) pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom lay.

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.

George Herbert, from The Temple 1633

2005-10-17T07:43:00.000Z

The poet prays to the Virgin for help

2005-10-17T07:33:00.000Z

I pray to the Divine Mother of God,
Heavenly Queen of all living things,
that she grant me the pure light of the little animals
that have a single letter in their vocabulary.
Animals without souls. Simple shapes.
Far from the cat's despicable knowledge.
Far from the owl's fictitious profundity.
Far from the horse's sculptural wisdom.
Creatures that love without eyes,
with a single sense of infinity's waves,
that gather in great piles
to be eaten by birds.
Grant me the single dimension
that little flat animals have
so that I can tell of things covered with earth
beneath the hard innocence of the shoe.
No one weeps because he understands
the millions of tiny deaths at the marketplace,
the Chinese multitude of headless onions,
and that great yellow sun of old, flattened fish.

You, Mother, forever to be feared. Whale of all the skies,
You, Mother, forever joking. Neighbour of the borrowed parsley.
You know that to speak of the world
I must understand its slightest flesh.

Federico Garcia Lorca

from Lecture: Poet in New York
(translated by Christopher Maurer)

a photograph by Tomatsu Shomei

2005-10-16T22:17:00.000Z