TINGS AR BIN RIDDIN AN AUDIOCOMBUSTULATIN DIS WAKE #2

ok ok, and not just this week either,  it’s two getting on for three, delayed by sundry drinking and a visit to Madrid, where although I had a cool view from my hotel room, with deep sierra in the far distance, i did not see much other than the inside of television corporations, no different by and large to the inside of tv corporations anywhere.

I didn’t see any of Goya’s frescos or his paintings of scenes and people through whom nightmares have crept into the world. I did, on freezing evening, have pointed out to me a large, modern building – a set of flats, 30 floors or so high, pyramidal, almost gothic, expressive of wealth – with not a light a shining from one of its countless windows, and with the entirety of its ground floor boarded up against the poor, whose ranks grow daily, and who muster in the tube stations for warmth against the freezing cold that visits from the same picturesque sierra that I could see framing the city from my hotel balcony. Government oppression, restriction on protest, and a limited period of welfare support. Vast semi-gothic empty buildings and the nightmare of poverty creeping from the underground. Goya would have something to paint in Madrid today.

I took with me All Souls by Javier Marias and didn’t realise or remember that he is from Madrid, as is the main character. It’s set in Oxford though, deals in the main with an affair between the narrator and a female academic, and speculations about the emotional and sexual orientations of the characters – a reductive system of emotional interactions taking place behind a veil of Oxford inscrutability that the narrator, as an outsider, has some uncertainty perceiving, even though he is in the middle of its web. It is not at all diverting, though fairly easy to read. That may have been tho because it was the only book I had with me and the typeface was fairly large. There are some thoughts interleaved about people who inhabit time or places like vagrants – lost and marginal souls – and how they can intangibly touch upon our lives by brushing up against the past of our pre-existence. I am being kind, it wasn’t really much about that or enough about it to make any difference to reading the book. It seemed a Laodicean novel, neither hot nor cold, but with no pose either that I could make out. It made me feel dull, as if I were missing something that I didn’t really feel like looking for. Go on, someone make a case for it.

—-

^ listening to this was what I felt like for stretches before I went to Madrid off the back of an internet recommendation. There is a melancholy so intense sometimes that it produces a dull pain in your torso, it is almost separable from feeling and so may be examined, and the taste of death in it is like the taste of death in wine in particular, or drugs of any sort in general. It is not exactly unpleasant, it has savour, and Chanson de la folle au bord de la mer is a helluva piece if you’re paddling in those black waters without armbands.

Oh, and a barcarolle. I’m a sucker for a barcarolle:

—-

The moonlight coming through the leaves and flowers of the apple tree scattered the most whimsical bright spots over Katerina Lvovna’s face and whole recumbent body; the air was still; only a light, warm breeze faintly stirred the sleepy leaves and spread the subtle fragrance of the blossoming herbs and trees. There was a breath of something languorous, conducive to laziness, sweetness and obscure desires.

[…]

A golden night! Silence, light, fragrance, and beneficent, vivifying warmth. Far across the ravine, beyond the garden, someone struck up a resounding song; by the fence, in the bird-cherry thicket, a nightingale trilled and loudly throbbed; in a cage on a tall pole a sleep quail began to rave, and a fat horse sighed languidly behind the stable wall, and outside the garden fence a merry pack of dogs raced noiselessly across the green and disappeared into the dense black shadow of the half-ruined old salt depots.

Made a start on The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, a volume of Nikolai Leskov short stories that I drunk bought on visual appeal alone and promptly forgot about before it arrived in an exciting and entirely unnecessary large box.

I like the placement of the sounds here, which gives a feeling of stillness because they are isolated in the night, and there is something about those song and those silent merry dogs – they are the things we notice when we contemplate the night, sounds that produce a feeling of distanced contemplation of ourselves in the world in the day, of our own placement, and isolated location. (In the story it is also the place where an emotional contract of jealousy that results in death, and later hatred and self-annihilation is made, though it is not clear that is what it will entail, and the seductive night seems almost to have brought about the dangerous promises that are made in it.) Kind of a bit indifferent to the Russian fable thing going on generally, but that’s just probably because I wasn’t in the right mood.

—-

Otherwise? Well, kicking off on the goats to this deranged funk blast:

And this will also be in my Songs of the Year:

woke up at three am ETERNAL one morning, and couldnae sleep, so put on the World Service to drift to. At one point there was an interview with Omar Souleyman, which in my dream state was a bit confusing as I’d been listening to this track a LOT the previous day:

it gets p intense at the 5:12 mark. that’s the point when i usually start jigging my head somewhat.

(Then there was an interview with the doctor who did the third ever, and at that point most successful, heart transplant for a baby:

Stephanie Fae Beauclair (October 14, 1984 – November 15, 1984), better known as Baby Fae, was an American infant born in 1984 with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. She became the first infant subject of a xenotransplant procedure, receiving the heart of a baboon. The procedure, performed by Leonard L. Bailey at Loma Linda University Medical Center, was successful, but Fae died 21 days later of heart failure due to rejection of the transplant.

The doctor said they still don’t know why she died.)

—-

What else? Well, One Week One Band did The Fall, which was good, tho – FOR SHAME – they were dismissive about I am Kurious Oranj, one of the great ART PIECES of the LATTER HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY.

There was a great post on Berberian Sound Studio here, (my less substantial tho still frighteningly authoritative thoughts here) – oh and I went to the cinema to see a film very close in spirit to BSS – Dead of Night, one of my FAVOURITE films, and confirmed to myself that I still know many of the lines by heart, such as:

‘Funny sort of joke, it… it isn’t funny!’

‘I am not accustomed to solving complex problems with the casual ease of your Brains Trust, Mr Craig’

and of course

‘Private show for the LOOONIES’.

And over the past two days I have only been listening to this:

Also RIP Colin Wilson.

and if these not-even-weekly scrapings become any more laborious i’m departing to live a life of eremitic hebetude in the outer hebrides straight after xmas, xmas.

see ya, frenz roman.

Tail Ponds #1

My weekly sick bag of indigestible cultural items:

Listened to about four or five times every day over the past week christ. Part nostalgia, part it seeming to suit this time of year. The low comforting bass, the fractured vox of alien elation.

————–

Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, without value

from The Taming of Chance by Ian Hacking

[phrase is from a report on the winner of the 1835 Montyon Prize. Jean Civiale statistically compared two methods of operation for gallstone removal, to find which had the best survival rate. Four adjudicating mathematicians, including Simon-Denis Poisson (even I’ve heard of Poisson distribution), used the report to talk about the relatively novel application of probability to medicine. Their target, according to Hacking, probably the polemical battle between two opposed doctors FJV Broussais – a blood-letting military doctor and speculative pathologist, who believed all illness could be located in specific organs (and indeed suicide was due to the absence of a ‘stay-alive’ mechanism in one of the major organs) –  and A Miquel, who pointed to rising death rates wherever Broussais was in charge. The debate on both sides was polemical and philosophical, which is where the critical quote comes in.

such battles are part of the forging of the tailing ponds of reality that flow out from the alchemical furnace of the present.

gallstone operations. erk.]

In the West [of Europe] the spirit of positivism made out that all laws were mere regularities. A belief in causes over and above regularities was an illegitimate residue of the metaphysical age. Hence it was quite in order to speak of statistical laws. 

from The Taming of Chance by Ian Hacking

[The 19th Century battle to define the extent and power of the province of statistics and probability over the universe and humans. (as against the ‘German’ approach – myriad little causes, which generate statistical distributions, do not cause those distributions; so the distributions are not laws. But only law could constrain human freedom.) On such philosophical disputes huge edifices of political, personal and social perception are built.]

————–

GET THE LP.

————–

A vast yet seemingly invisible presence hovers over the northern suburbs of London. Screened from the consciousness of the city dweller by the pressures of the day-to-day, by self-concern and an inward-looking and anthropocentric culture, the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment – or Scarp as I prefer to call it – broods and waits.

from Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou

[Scarp’s a psychologically and stylistically raw, uneven book, but I like the anti-humanist, slightly alien de-anthropocentrised approach, there’s something Ballardian about it.]

————–

KONSHENS

————–

She was expecting a dressing room out of some movie musical? What she finds; is a sort of casually upgraded ladies’ toilet, stall partitions and so forth – some, to be sure, with glittery stars taped on the doors – a litter of pint liquor bottles, roaches both smokable and crawling, used Kleenex, not recognizably a Vincente Minnelli set.

Stu Gotz is sitting in his office, with a cigarette in one hand and a paper cup of something ambiguous in the other. Soon teh cigarette will be in the cup. He runs a lengthy O-O. “You want to audition, MILF night is Tuesdays, come back then.”

from Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

[I’m enjoying Bleeding Edge – here the internal uptalk, the easy use of emoji shorthand, conversation, thought and descriptions full of wide-ranging referents, the fooling about in the playpen of expression, the easy indifference to proprieties. That reminded me of a phrase from Blanchot’s famours Gaze of Orpheus essay:

Il introduit, dans le souci de l’œuvre, le mouvement de l’insouciance où l’oœuvre est sacrifeé : la loi dernière de l’œuvre est enfreinte, l’œuvre est trahie en faveur d’Eurydice, de l’ombre.

(It adds a certain carelessness to creative carefulness – a carelessness that sacrifices the work of art. It infringes the work of art’s most sacred law, betrays the work for Eurydice, for a shade.)]

————–

well, that faith/soul axis seems a bit fucked right now, but there’s always hope.

The Usual

I was sitting quietly in the corner of an entirely fictional pub the other day and overheard the following conversation at the bar:

‘I’ll tell you something, You never hear of the idiot and the dog these days.’

‘Not these days, no.’

‘I wonder what happened.’

‘The usual I expect.’

‘Yes.’

[They contemplate The Usual]

‘Well, no great hole, and I’m sure and I’ll survive.’

‘Probably.’

Fired by this burst of public enthusiasm, but aware that there was nothing to be done about what they had quite correctly identified as The Usual (horrific, mundane, inescapable), I felt I could at least make some half-hearted attempt to keep the ashes warm…

In fact, I thought, as I munched on my entirely notional bag of dry-roasted peanuts, the act of writing seemed very like the act of trying to light, maintain, and stay warm by, a peat fire. You have a little kindling, which will give the initial flame, and a large amount of damp, old, cheap compressed earth, which will form the substance of the fire. You also have yesterday’s paper, the crossword a scant third completed, and a barely flammable box of matches. By means of these, plus a fuckload of artificial firelighters (placeholder for drink and drugs let’s say), you eventually light the kindling, the flames giving an initial burst of optimism. Once you have got this burning nicely, you put on a large piece of peat, which immediately stifles the flames and creates a deal of smoke. You find more quickly-burning material to throw on it, and through a mixture of cosseting, extreme care and a fuckload more firelighters, eventually get the underside of the peat to start glowing, though it’s clear the outcome of the entire time-consuming enterprise is never anything less than dubious.

If you are lucky, lucky mind, the peat will reach a critical temperature and start, well burning would be too much, smouldering in a way that suggests it is not imminently going to stop. Success. You may place on more peat.

The fire itself will of course never give off any heat, unless you hold your hands very very close to it, – ie can be considered no sort of success in and of itself – and will require almost constant care and attention merely to keep the semblance of it going. Nevertheless it may offer some private pride and a little local warmth.

You have read stories about how families kept the thing going perpetually, the slow-burning nature of peat allowing the fire to lie in abeyance overnight, only to be revived the next morning with the addition of more peat and a little careful blowing. Thus the fire never goes out, and provides a constant source of much-needed warmth and sustenance for the entire household.

Naturally, what you see the next morning is little sustenance and a load of ashes, still somewhat warm yes, but clearly very far from being of any use to anyone or anything, even yourself with your very low threshold of success.

You rake out the grate, make a cup of tea, put on your heaviest jumper and two pairs of socks, and fetch the duvet from the bedroom, before settling to today’s crossword.

Of course, if The Usual is anything, it is an acknowledgement that flames do not burn forever.

So, rather than even attempt anything of worth, I’m going to set the bar low and use this place as a weekly record of Things I Have Liked Or Found Mildly Diverting. Basically youtube embeds and a couple of quotes.

As a USP it might need some polishing. Crowds or even small mildly diverted groups I do not expect.

THIS IS THE WINTER OF YOUR MIND

ah, wonderful and frightening days: Kommandant Mark E Smith and gruppe surveilling London and London people from a jeep. ‘Day 5’ in the Zagreb set of songs (anyone recall what Day/Movement 4 was?), and slap bang in the middle of Smith’s period of fascination with mitteleuropa, a feature of which was his oft-repeated slogan ‘Before the grub, comes the moralist’ (a reversal of Brecht’s dictum, ‘First grub; then moralist’ in the Threepenny Opera):

A song so heavily characterised by Smith’s trademark suffix of ‘uh’ to all but words with it already there that they released a b-side version called Free Ranger.

Euston, We Have a Problem

from J.-P. Falret’s 1822 dissertation on hypochondria and suicide, giving the predisposing causes of suicide:

heredity

temperament

age

sex

education

reading novels

music

theatrical productions

climate

seasons

masturbation

idleness

 

lrb copy eds need greater knowledge of youtube pop

Enjoyed reading Diarmaid McCulloch’s piece on the Council of Trent in the latest LRB – One Enormous Room (DMc uses a quote from Kenneth Clark at the beginning ‘I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room’)

But it really, really needed to be titled ‘One Big Room, Full of Bad Bishops’

eg.

And we sound like Luther Luther Peter Peter Bishop of La Cava

Them basic bishops give a shit, but I don’t even bother.

 

I got Tridentine plenum

I got that ius divinum

Open Papal representative

Trust me in your diocese

Yeah you can kiss the ring, but you can never touch the crown

I smoke a million Reformation butts and I ain’t never coming down

Bish, you ain’t et Orbi

I see you work in Urbi

Council II, Supersize

Hurry up, need Luuumen.

Gnarly, radical

Ex cathedra magical

Santa Maria Major, Concilium episcopal.

Call me if you need a fix,

Call me if you will recuse,

See them Presbyterians

They don’t ever leave the group.

We’re in the Adige, cruising,

We’ve got the stolen plate

Serving Pope Paul 3 over there in the City State

Trent’s colder than a fridge or a freezer

We’re snatching all your bishops at our LEISURE.

 

One big room, full of bad bishops.

etc

 

Luther Luther Peter Peter Bishop of La Cava

We’re looking at Madonna but we’re glossing the Church Fathers,

Paul – you know I keep that work in my trunk,

Got the Law on sole faith, if you wanna press your luck.

We’re yelling “free matrimony”,

Till we get Tametsi,

Young, rich and flashy

I’ll be with Medici

You can’t find that? I think you need a Danti map

My Florentine Pitti pals, did push Savanarola back.

Encycle that, my groupies follow the Curia,

I’m writing up a Vulgate and calling I Loyola

While you’re looking bitter, I’ll be looking better

The type of bishop that you wish was present at Nicæa.

Nuncio, director, plus I’m my own boss,

So plush, mitre fierce with the gold gloss

Which means nobody getting over me

I got the swag and it’s pumping out my monasteries.

 

One big room, full of bad bishops etc.

 

Ohhh, all you basic-ass monks out there?

Man I got a room full of bad bishops.

They don’t need Zwingli, they don’t need Luther. Calvin.

my favourite people in *religion and the decline of magic* so far

the antinomian who declared that he would sell all religions for a jug of beer

the butcher in the diocese of Ely in 1608 who set his dog on the people as they went to church

Brian Walker, who in 1635 was asked if he did not fear God, retorted that, ‘I do not believe there is either God or Devil; neither will I believe anything but what I see’ and who as an alternative to the Bible commended ‘the  book called Chaucer.’

A Cambridgeshire man was charged with indecent behaviour in church in 1598 after his ‘most loathsome farting, striking, and scoffing speeches’ had occasioned ‘the great offence of the good and the great rejoicing of the bad.’

The Bexley man who in 1313 made images of wood and stone in his garden and worshipped them as gods, before proceeding to kill his maidservant [obv that bit’s not so good]

When Mr Evans, rector of Holland Magna, Essex, preached in 1630 about Adam and Eve making themselves coats of fig-leaves, one loud-mouthed parishioner demanded to know where they got the thread to sew them with.

of confusion regarding communion: At one church in the area there were only two male communicants. When the cup was given to the first he touched his forelock and said, ‘Here’s your good health, sir.’ The second, better informed, said, ‘Here’s the good health of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ At Chippenham a poor man took the chalice from the vicar and wished him a Happy New Year.

the salutory story of the man of sixty who had all his life attended sermons, twice on Sundays, and frequently on other occasions in the week. yet the answers he gave the minister who questioned him on his deathbed spoke for themselves:

Being demanded what he thought of God, he answers that he was a good old man; and what of Christ, that he was a towardly young youth; and of his soul, that it was a great bone in his body; and what should become of his soul after he was dead, that if he had done well he should be put into a pleasant green meadow.

the people in 1547 of one parish in Cambridge where, ‘when the vicar goeth into the pulpit to read that he himself hath written, then the multitude of the parish goeth straight out of the church, home to drink’

Lady Eleanor Davis, who in 1625 ‘heard early in the morning a Voice from Heaven, speaking as through a trumpet these words: “There is nineteen years and a half to the Judgment Day”‘. From then until her death in 1652 she had a continuous career of prophetic utterance, interrupted only by consequent periods of imprisonment. Contemporaries believed her to have predicted the deaths of Charles I, Laud and Buckingham, as well as that of her first husband. her ecstatic and utterly obscure pronouncements were frequently printed, and as frequently suppressed. In 1633 she was imprisoned and heavily fined by the High Commission for illegally printing at Amsterdam a commentary on Daniel in which she made dark predictions about the fate awaiting Laud and Charles I. A few years later she went berserk in Lichfield Cathedral, defiling the altar hangings and occupying the episcopal throne, declaring she was the Primate of all England. This led to a further period of restraint.

two bits of commentary from Keith Thomas worth quoting as well:

[In the Elizabethan period] a substantial proportion of the population regarded organised religion with an attitude which varied from cold indifference to frank hostility.

&

Not enough justice has been done to the volume of apathy, heterodoxy and agnosticism which existed long before the onset of industrialism.

Cannot be said enough. It is not something we have just discovered, or to be used as some indicator of ‘progress’ – worldly indifference is persistent.

Le Samuraï

Are intellectual teenagers still into existentialism? or have we exited that age? is it all about theory now? Students downing Badiou and Laruelle to the strains of Tristan Murail? If so, they’re right to. It seems more intellectually demanding, more crazy, more of a shibboleth between the old fucks and the young guns, more of an induction to the modern age than the rudimentary post-romantic shoulder-shrugging of existentialism.

But

I liked Camus a lot.

And I don’t really buy that ‘not real philosophy’ thing.

It may not be real philosophy, but it’s real something, and that something’s very appealing when you’re a teenager: a post-romantic sense of the isolated individual, indifference to conventional social mores (which in return punish that indifference or contempt), misery, nausea and anxiety as necessary corollaries of a universe without epistemological and ethical certainty. Each of these provided serious explanations. it was useful. I could do with something like it now. Nobody understands me. Life’s so unfair. They were self-help manuals, shit self-help manuals admittedly, self-help manuals for people who couldn’t help themselves, but self-help manuals nevertheless, which not only explained why you were so fucking miserable, but why in fact you were some kind of hero for being so fucking miserable. I needed that!

But I picked up The Myth of Sisyphus again recently and was bored out of my mind, so that avenue’s shut. because for a teenager existentialism wasn’t so much about truth, it was about image – how to mentally position yourself in the world, how that looked. So if there’s one thing that french existentialism can be thanked for, it’s cool french films, because that was how the theory became flesh. It reversed the unglamorous polarity of the solitary teenager.

I went to see Le Samuraï when I was 16. The old Lumiere cinema in st martin’s lane, now a gym or something god-fucking-awful like that.

It was a big screen, with lots of soft grey seats ranged in arcs. There were three people in the cinema – me, a cycle courier about five rows in front of me, and a sleeping businessman, two rows behind and about five columns to the left of me.

I remember the setting and the film vividly. the film had a big impact. I got it on dvd, watched it several times.

Anyway, I watched it again the other night. i remembered it well (I said a couple of the lines before they were delivered on screen). How did it stand up?

That’s the opening frame. anyone who’s lived by themselves in a studio flat knows how the inside of your head becomes that flat. look at that first frame again – that’s the inside of someone’s head.

What you can’t see here is that just at the end of this opening the camera moves back and forth in the room, so you get the sensation of looking in a doll’s house. it produces a sense of artificiality, we are looking into this film, as you would look into a doll’s house. By a psychological trick that I don’t really understand, when you do that – emphasise the artificiality – you widen the sense of looking at something universally applicable (we all stand outside it) and less like we’re viewing the specifics of a documentary. Does anyone else get that? I don’t know, it seems a bit rarefied. I’m not sure I’ve articulated it enough.

Once again, you get a strong  sense that the room is a psychological state. for Melville, the director, rooms are like traps. They’re where you end up. There’s a terrifying scene in another of his films, Le Cercle Rouge, where the alcoholic marksman is beset by visual hallucinations in a bout of delerium tremens. rooms are bad. rooms are cages. and to extend the parallel of course, the inside of your head is also a trap, it’s where you end up, in the end.

If we didn’t get all that, Alain Delon keeps a songbird in a cage. Throughout the film, the songbird represents the state of delon’s being. I’m calling him Delon btw because his actual name in the film is Jeff Costello, which for a modern english viewer is too laughable to use without smirking.

One of the things I didn’t pick up the first time I watched it is that delon is a dandy. He’s a dandy in the Beau Brummel sense, that is, he dresses not to stand out but to fit in, and does so with an aesthete’s minute attention to detail.

This impeccability of course makes him stand out.

Props tho to his fixer, here sporting what i’m calling his gesang der jünglinge sweater

The dandy thing comes into sharp focus at one point in the film, where, in a bid to evade police, delon takes a route to 1, rue Lord Byron. That reference immediately clicked with something Kingsley Amis had written on James Bond:

the fact is that, inside that conservative dark-blue worsted suit and under the same skin as a bearer of the hardly-earned double-0 prefix, there lurks an intruder from another age. we can identify him easily enough by adding in at this point some of the accounts of the physical impression given by Bond, his looks and what people feel they signify.

…and with the warmth and humour of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal and cold.

…

the table was becoming wary of this dark englishman who played so quietly, wary of the half-smile of certitude on his rather cruel mouth. who was he? where did he come from? what did he do?

Well, he started life about 1818 as Childe Harold in the later cantos of Byron’s poem, reappeared in the novels of the Brontë sisters and was around until fairly recently in such guises as that of Maxim de Winter in Miss Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. The Byronic hero – Byron’s sentimental and humourless idealization of part of himself rather than any kind of real Byron – the Byronic hero is lonely, melancholy of fine natural physique which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret.

This is delon in le samuraï, and that 1 rue Lord Byron made it easy to identify that this is how were are at least partly to view delon – as a romantic hero.

The paradoxical or absurdist idea of singular anonymity conveys itself in another aspect of delon’s appearance in this film – he never makes the slightest attempt to disguise himself:

At one stage the police ask him to swap his hat and mac with two other people in a line up. He and his dispersed pieces of clothing are identified immediately. Even in disguise he is only the image of himself. This has certain consequences for the film. he can never expect to go unnoticed and so must avoid being seen.

The film is a single action, and everything in it tends towards its completion. this spartan exclusion of the unnecessary is matched by the script: the dialogue is extraordinarily spare, even for a noir, even for a Melville noir, and all of it can be taken as both content and explication, like the passing comment to a group of poker players –

je me perdre jamais. jamais vraiment. 

(I never lose. never truly/completely)

These statements compel analysis after the final reel, for a film which is, like the expressions of the actors in it, motionlessly opaque. There are no tells. facial expressions are an attempt to engage sympathy, to encourage the belief in an outer and an inner where the apparent former can be explained by the suggested latter. even the slightest expression of feeling offers, therefore, reason, and reason has no place in this fatalistic and absurd world. once again, the spareness encourages this sort of extreme analysis, and in that sense, is cognate with Camus’ sparse algerian, sun-bleached and desert presentation of the absurd. we are presented with a singularity.

I wondered because of this, while I was watching, whether this was a reductive film, but the fecundity of speculation required by the viewer I think puts a reverse on that accusation.

There are, after all, plenty of other things to enjoy about this film. the palette is marvellous – all dull greys and washed-out blues:

It’s nearly always raining. No matter the dirigiste economic exertions of the government, the Paris represented here is the fucked up paris of the ’60s – the massacre of the algerians in ’61, the barricades in ’68, a year after Le Samuraï was made.

Some of the images have almost the appearance of a Caravaggio painting:

The film also contains one of the great chase scenes in any film, across the Paris metro:

The chase is predominantly successful because it intensifies to a point of climax the film’s two principle notions of uncertainty and visibility. for delon, a great deal apparently hangs on his ability to correctly identify people from their impassive externals (their internal or hidden life here is not a spiritual or emotional one, incidentally, but one of persecution). For the police, the singularity of delon is either visible or not. the film solves these two strands by re-encrypting an image posed in The Third Man. This keeps the audience in a state of suspense until the end of the film, but the resolution of that practical riddle only pushes the uncertainty about what was known and intended back into the labyrinth of the metro and beyond.

I’m still not sure I’ve located the decisive moments, or understood entirely the motivations of Le Samuraï, and I think that’s how it’s supposed to be – that ambiguity born of its minimalist resistance to interpretation is paradoxically its richness. And as I’ve suggested, I find it rich in other ways. It’s Melville’s best film I think, tho not his best trailer – that would be this:

It’s still a good film, I still really like it. If i call it my favourite that’s probably only for the usefulness in conversations of having a favourite, and I’m not sure that it hasn’t been surpassed for me these days by The Maltese Falcon, a very similar film in some ways, even more remarkable in those ways and others, perhaps.

But there is one thing about this film:

fuck me it makes you want to smoke.

Berberian Sound Studio

Hey, it’s me. yes me.

Summer’s over, and i’m back from sojourning in my secluded, larch-bound chalet in HELL. I started a tumblr. it’s more of a conventional microblog – what i had for tea, sub op ed ‘thoughts’, emotional overdisclosure, that sort of thing, so it’s not a replacement for this fantastically serious and heavyweight… well, ‘blog’ doesn’t really seem to do something so profound justice – it’s more like something, idk, that i goddam curate. anyway, from time to time, i’ll xpost things from there that seem to have a place here, and vice versa, because believe it or not there are still tremendously exciting things bubbling under at the idiot and the dog. anyway, here’s something cnp’d from there on BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO – GO SEE IT (unless you’re the sort of twat who gets intellectual film studies self-kudos from just going to see hollywood dreck – hey, when i went to see Charlies Angels II: Full Throttle I felt like goddam UMBERTO ECO, so fucking what?)

berberian sound studio #1

berberian sound studio is the best film i’ve seen in years. that is all.

berberian sound studio #2

no that is not all. (a lousy phrase, no better than ‘enough said’ or ‘end of’)

(+ kind of SPOILERS I guess – I hate knowing anything about a film other than the barest elements before going to see it).

berberian sound studio was the best film i’ve seen in years (and I like it even more this morning), because of

1. its spatial and physical representation of sound to create a tangible psychic landscape within which the events of the film take place.

2. the remarkable way which the film allows its sonic & psychical content to constitute the reasoning and plot of the film. yes, the clue’s in the title, but it still seems an artistically daring thing to do (the film is rather runic) and requiring exceptionally brilliant execution to work, which it gets.

3. its mapping of the whole frigid anglican male v catholic kitsch schlock v genuine evil. i did half wonder whether the whole virginal and pure anglican male thing was slightly played out or in danger of being trite (wicker man, yes, but also wolf solent by john cowper powys, arthur machen’s earnest young post-victorian men, disorientated in fin de siecle aestheticism). But for several reasons this isn’t the case. Toby Jones is great, for a start, with his mole in wind in the willows features, also, the film avoids triteness by playing the role subtly, its only an element of the film, not the point. there’s also a scene… no, that’s another point. but there is that always interesting exploration of the strength of purity against corruption, and how puritanism itself is intensely corruptible, more so than more pragmatic spiritual states.

just with regard to that point about ‘genuine evil’. by upping the tangibility of sound in the film, it also does something to the appreciation of evil, itself intangible or difficult to capture. it’s as if the viewer’s radar has been readjusted to appreciate the taste of things in a film that would not normally be portrayable. there is a subtle sense of how madness comes creeping in on the back of evil, how they work together. (incidentally, i’ve since seen reviews which say that gilderoy goes ‘mad’, i think that’s an exceptionally simplistic approach to take to this film, nevertheless, madness, or rather mental unhingeing, plays its part. it’s also taking a non-literal film very literally.)

4. the documentary of box and leith hill. a brief and wonderful scene that played straight to my heart and mind. my heart, because it’s some of the countryside i love most (was it cobbett who said that dorking was reputed to have the sweetest air in england – before the M25 of course). my head, because of the way it located the battles going on in the sound studio and in gilderoy’s head in english pastoral – it was both a moment of sweet respite, and a representation of the malign or sinister pastoral of john cowper powys, machen, also john ireland – the dismembered rural, the something nasty in the woodshed, the rustic earth as inimical to human civility.  so yes, this was pure catnip to me. maybe i’m overplaying it as a consequence, but this is a very associational film (brief memories or moments of reality flash up in gilderoy’s head, stimulated by momentary verbal or imagistic associations).

5. it being, in my experience, a very accurate portrayal of how italians and english work together.

Just Checking

Accidie’s a sin, right?