Conspiracy guess

Art, film, literature, vegetarian/vegan food, photography, psychogeography, history, stuff. Also, "creative" "writing" "maybe". In Scotland. In different.

[reesmoggcoupplot]

The Messiah, he argues, will not arrive as the fulfilment of history but will reveal a constellation of moments woven into historical time, periods of political emergency in which there is a chance of justice for those whom the ruling powers hope to erase from the historical record. This montage of moments represents the history of the oppressed, which is as diffuse and discontinuous as a modernist work of art. Only with the coming of the Messiah can this history be recounted as a coherent narrative, as the secret affinities between particular acts of resistance are laid bare. What seemed futile and meaningless at the time will then become readable, like an encrypted text we can finally decipher.

Terry Eagleton on Walter Benjamin

[reesmoggcoupplot]

War is tomfoolery. Madness and pollution are constitutive of it, not collateral damage. Polemos and Hybris are partners for life. Both Don Juans of Austria – the victor and the jester who dared claim his name – are buffoons. The warrior is all the more merciless for knowing his armour is for show.

TJ Clark

[reesmoggcoupplot]

while still a young man he had disturbed Spender by declaring that in a civil war the poet would enjoy ‘lying on a roof and shooting at his best friend, who was on the other side’. Such cartoonish ethical imbecility comes not from malice but from not really being a grown-up, from a basic frivolity that finds irresistible anything that’s extravagant, impressive, stylish: ‘All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage,’ Auden would later write. ‘The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.’ 

Ibid.

[reesmoggcoupplot]

He professed to deplore Shelley for saying that poets were the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, a label he thought better described the secret police. That kind of hard-nosed determination not to be taken in seems likely to be the response of someone who feels, in retrospect, that he has been taken well and truly in: he told Spender to drop ‘the Shelley stunt’, with all the firmness of someone counselling himself about his own temptations. The real motivation behind his emphatic claims, you suspect, isn’t a theory about art and historical agency but an obscure yet insistent sense of personal complicity. Mendelson quotes Auden in a late interview (in German) saying, strikingly, that ‘every writer is menaced by his own latent monstrosity,’ and around the same time in an interview with the Sun (those were the days) he confessed: ‘I feel a little guilty about some things I wrote in the 1930s.’ He was heard to say on several occasions in later life that none of his writings in that decade had saved a single Jew from the Nazis – which is probably true, but a pretty punishing criterion of moral efficacy.

LRB on Auden. (Sorry phone, not Sudan.)

[capripantslover]

Girl in tight red capri pants

[reesmoggcoupplot]

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

To the cinema yesterday for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Which is lots of fun, albeit another nail in the coffin of Missouri's tourist industry. Frances McDormand is the tough gift-shop employee seeking justice from a police force which ranges from racist to incompetent to just with its mind on other things.

Like In Bruges, it's a sequence of brutal, bad-taste jokes mixed with occasional but effective emotional beats, but it ups the humour ante considerably by making everything much more serious: rather than comedy hitmen these are real people, and cops. There's still a dwarf though, Peter Dinklage with a mustache that's nearly as big as he is.

The humour comes from the fact that it's a world where there's lots of horrible things happening sometimes for no reason, and everybody seems headed inexorably in totally the wrong direction. The problem is that some things have reasons and can be changed while some things cannot be avoided, but everybody seems really bad at telling the difference.

It's brilliantly made, the writing and editing and direction carrying scenes from violence to comedy to empathy. It never entirely loses sight of the seriousness. Largely this is down to the performances, particularly Frances McDormand who is mighty as the force of moral vengeance, like something out of a spaghetti western. Although she also does a funny scene with fluffy slippers. And the film's not shy of showing how her crusade screws up everybody around her: her son (who's in every film lately) is heartbreaking.

Woody Harrelson these days is incapable of a performance that isn't iconic. And I know lots of people hate Sam Rockwell, but he's perfectly cast as an absolutely awful stupid violent racist (although equally keen on beating up white people) cop who may or may not experience slight improvement. The only oddity is Abbie Cornish: it never explains what the hell Australia's former most promising actress (class of Sam Worthington) is doing in the Midwest.

It feels like a parody of the sort of film where a righteous woman takes on a town (although it's a western, it is more Blazing Saddles than High Noon). It constantly plays games with the audience. I can understand why people have been critical of the film, particularly in its attitude to race. It treats racism as purely a matter for comedy: Blazing Saddles. Like a lot of the best films of 2017, it's mainly a film about what the tools in the filmmaker's toolbox can do. Although it is also a film about families fucking up and small towns and the nature of justice, by and by.

Still, the next film from McDonagh should probably be a regional remake of Sideways in the vineyards of central Missouri. Pay it forward.

[reesmoggcoupplot]

Um it’s good to know someone shares my hatred of pandas. (But seriously the panda lovers were Edward Heath and Alex Salmond, one an evil paedophile, one a corrupt tosser).

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/29/margaret-thatcher-aversion-to-pandas-declassified-papers

[reesmoggcoupplot]

You see a lot of shit adverts on Tumblr, and then you see these two. The girl on the left has psychic powers, and her mother will kill you if you find out about them.

[reesmoggcoupplot]

Shepard and Moreau

Two of Michelangelo Antonioni's collaborators have died. Jeanne Moreau starred in La Notte, which is lots of fun, and Sam Shepard wrote Zabriskie Point, which is also lots of fun. Shepard was involved in some terrible movies but provides considerable hilarity in Patti Smith's first volume of memoir, as well as some delightfully overwrought plays and Paris, Texas. Fool for Love is dire, the worst film Altman ever was involved with; probably the worst film Kim Basinger was involved with. But in one year he was in The Pledge, Swordfish (with Travolta and Berry), Blackhawk Down, and Gary Gilmore’s father in a TV movie. A few years after that he was the narrator in Charlotte’s Web. Moreau kept busy too: from young and sexy for Louis Malle to middle-aged and sexy for Bertrand Blier. And multiple Orson Welles - The Trial and Chimes at Midnight.

[reesmoggcoupplot]

Search history.

[reesmoggcoupplot]

[reesmoggcoupplot]

Edith Walks and Gimme Shelter(!)

Filmwise, I've just watched 2 impressionistic, music-heavy documentaries in which English icons confront the forces of darkness: two days of infamy, the ends of two eras.

Edith Walks is Andrew Kotting's latest journey around Britain. It's got something to do with Edith Swan-neck, wife of King Harold Godwinson (sometimes called his mistress because it wasn’t a Christian wedding); she reassembled his dismembered body after the Battle of Hastings. Kotting and friends travel from Waltham Abbey to the sea near St Leonard’s along with Jem Finer’s music machine and a drummer. It features a lot of Alan Moore and a little Iain Sinclair. The former is typically full of shit; he claims he can recognise the site of the Battle of Hastings, long lost to historians, and theorises that Harold was reincarnated as Hereward The Wake, who was born in the 1030s, but it's obviously not literal. Equally, if Harold was a symbol of something English and mystical, there's no indication of what that thing was, but if you dislike all nationalism maybe that's the point. Compared to Kotting's John Clare film By Our Selves, which features the director dressed as a straw bear, EW is low on facts and high on music, song, and impressionistic imagery. It doesn't outstay its welcome, the music is good, and Claudia Barton is suitably otherworldly in the title role. But do your research beforehand.

Gimme Shelter is the classic documentary about the Altamont Free Concert, directed by Maysles, Maysles, and Zwerin. It's partly a conventional concert film, with lots of live performances and scenes of hippies doing crazy hippy things, and complaints about how hard it is to put on a free concert. But also partly putting Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts in an edit suite and showing them footage of bad things going down, the end of the 1960s. It tells everything that happened that day about as well as could be expected, despite the absence of commentary or narration. And unlike Woodstock there's no hippy bullshit, but there's not much peace and love in Sympathy for the Devil or Under my Thumb. Apparently George Lucas was one of the cameramen but none of his footage was used. I'm not sure which King of England that Mick Jagger would be a reincarnation of, but it probably ends in II.

[reesmoggcoupplot]

The Piano Teacher

Well made but smug and nasty is a description that fits many of Michael Haneke’s films but especially The Piano Teacher which I watched this week. A film like Blue Velvet or Beau Travail can mix brutal psychosexual drama with ambiguous lyricism but Haneke is all sophomoric Freud/Reich. And not as smart as Hitchcock. I've read a little Jelinek though not the source for this, and a lot is probably taken from her novel, even if she sometimes can be more ambiguous and multivoiced. Summary: sexual repression is bad, repressed middle class women with an interest in high culture are awful, let's combine an actress drawn to the extremes with a director obsessed with easy predictable shocks and together we can go wild. I started watching it last weekend but gave up and switched over to Fast and Furious Five which is better-made and Dwayne Johnson is a better actor. Yawn.

[furtho]

Orange Juice pictured in The Face magazine, 1981 (via here)

[reesmoggcoupplot]

L'Eclisse and Antonioni

On Wednesday night, with my Virgin Media cable TV not working, I tore the wrapping off my Alain Delon DVD box set and watched Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse. I've now seen all 7 films from Antonioni's golden (and silver) period from L'Avventura (1960) to The Passenger (1975). And L'Eclisse isn't the best of them: its last 10 minutes, in which famously nothing happens and nobody turns up, is amazing: much more full of life than 90% of his work. The rest has something to do with capitalism. But here are the classic 7 Antonioni films, including his Italian tetralogy and the three films he made internationally afterwards, ranked by personal preference. 1. Red Desert. His first colour film is his most beautiful and often the most silly, from the early scene where Monica Vitti begs for a sandwich outside a horrible polluted factory that surely inspired the opening of Joe vs the Volcano. It's the most pure expression of Antonioni's idea that as a sensitive filmmaker wrestling with the inhumanity of the modern capitalist world, his angst was best represented in the figure of a chic but unhappy blonde woman. For the same reason, it's also the most Disneyesque of his films. 2. La Notte. The story of a bunch of bored Milanese sophisticates over the course of a night, this is the most entertaining and quotable of his films. It surely influenced Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, and is the Antonioni film for fans of Fellini (it also stars Mastroianni). The black and white cinematography is perfect and it's less self-pitying than most of the director's work. 3. Zabriskie Point. The most Bressonian of his films, and I don't just mean that the acting is terrible, although the young American cast is pretty but wooden. As with late Bresson (e.g. The Devil, Probably) it feels like a sincere attempt to understand the youth rebellions of the late 1960s. There are some brilliant, strange, poetic sequences, a great soundtrack, beautiful American landscapes, and a storyline which does make sense underneath it all. Plus it has the best title. 4. Blow-Up. The least Antonioniesque film: the Swinging London scenes are all great fun, but for me the open-ended mystery works less well than in L'Avventura, partly because the star David Hemmings can't really communicate the same angst and confusion as Vitti (he just looks blank). 5. L'Avventura. The original (he'd made a bunch of films before then, but this inaugurated his famous trilogy, with La Notte and L'Eclisse to come). It spawned a thousand films with open endings, with its plot of a woman who disappears on a trip to an island, and then nobody really bothers to look for her. But this film is better than most not only because it's entertaining and pretty, but because rather than just giving a mystery and ostentatiously failing to solve it and saying "fuck you", it does give a convincing account of why the characters don't bother trying to find an answer. 6. L'Eclisse. A searing indictment of capitalism with a lot of ugly people in a stock exchange, mainly losing quite a bit of money. The start, where Monica Vitti breaks up with Francisco Rabal, is brilliantly done, and features one of the most phallic buildings in film history. The ending, where nothing happens but the scene is full of life and activity, is unusually lyrical and even optimistic. The middle is Vitti (and to a lesser degree everyone else) running around a lot. 7. The Passenger. Pretty desert scenes, and no Antonioni film is less than fascinating, but by this stage he's working to a formula, with an ostentatiously fucked-up plot about an uncharacteristically blank Jack Nicholson pretending to be other people. What is identity? Nothing. What is the desert? Harsh and empty. What is truth? Meh. What happens at the end? ...

[samsketchbook]

BICYCLE MONSTER!

LIKE A BIKE BUT BETTER!

LIKE A DOG BUT WORSE.

HIS NOSE SHOULD MAYBE BE WETTER.

IF YOU PET HIM, WHOOPS, YOU’RE CURSED!

I constructed him from  wool, wire, a red velvet dress that fit me badly, and a bicycle I got of the trash.

[reesmoggcoupplot]

Surviving Desire

It probably doesn't come as much of a surprise that Hal Hartley played an important role in my youth. The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and Amateur all meant a lot with their mixture of improbable dialogue, romanticism, cynicism and nihilism; the men who are like boys and yet like Dostoyevsky characters or at least Dostoyevsky academics. A couple of years ago I re-watched The Unbelievable Truth, Simple Men, and Amateur, all of which are still very good films with a lot to say about masculinity and indie music (Trust didn't seem to be available).

Today I watched Surviving Desire, which he made for TV shortly before Simple Men. It's not as good as his best although it's interesting and playful. The plot, about a college lecturer played by Hartley-icon Marton Donovan, who falls in love with a student, is very schematic verging on creepy, although it could be considerably worse. There is some wonderful experimentation, such as a dance scene - apparently a rehearsal for Simple Men (which blatantly rips off Bande A Part). A lot of bizarre, inexplicable stuff. And a great deal of Dostoyevsky; Donovan's character comprehensively fails to teach the Brothers Karamazov. I think 25 years later we're less inclined to indulge men lusting over their students, but it's certainly not a film that views the situation as romantic. There's a making-of doc which is dull except for the producer who says he felt that he was paying people so little he had to provide beer and then sex/hook-ups. But everybody hooked up in the end, hurray!

The DVD also includes 2 shorts. Ambition is quite a lot of fun, with a bored guy who fantasises about kicking a lot of ass on the way to work and then it gets really crazy; plus the prophetic Theory of Achievement which is about real estate in Williamsburg. Both films are about having to work for a living and trying to avoid your job defining you. Hal Hartley does appear to be somewhat making films, and I can totally understand why it went to shit around 1993.