Pony, the Trouser Years

///it is 67 degrees thank god and this summer that has fried evryones brains is almost over and it has rained and things are turning green real fast and fall is starting early so they say. the talk is that its going to be a coldwet fall and winter and evryone seems happy bout it.

otherly, have been playing music all the time and had about a week where i was dreaming music and not much else. we got a loose group getting tighter playing folk w/ lots of broken and taped together stuff. finding inspiration from old funk and old mountain groups both of which play every instrument as a rhythm instrument. also inspiration from current broke young bands w/ no interest in career or success but in using music as a kind of ritual or religious practice to free ourselves and as a way to communicate without words and as a way to band together w/ likeminded people.
which has made me think that in 'the current state of things' this kind of act has become very important. most of us spend most of our time working and i think its of great import to create and to create w/ no thought of buying or selling or music as a commoditiy but music as a meditation and music as life. not life as art but art as life.

the newest addition to this is a loop pedal called the line 6...



...which came in the mail yesterday. julie and i spent a couple hours looping drum and guitar and voice and random percussion. you can then slow everything down, play it in reverse etc. the result sounded like voodoo drums and once enough layers were added it became like a tide going in and out. highly addictive. makes every rhythm ive heard since (ceiling fan, train in distance, dishwasher) sound like part of a song.

kraftwerk


les rallizes denudes


eno


amon duul







faust


trad gras och stener

///office job well explained:
"With the differences growing in number and shrinking in significance, the real differences between rich and poor is diminishing, and mankind is levelled into mere variations on poverty. The culmination of the process would be a cybernetic society composed of specialists ranked hierarchically according to their aptitude for consuming and making others consume the doses of power necessary for the functioning of a gigantic social computer of which they themselves would be simultaneously the programme and the printout. A society of exploited exploiters where some slaves are more equal than others."


///&...
"With regard to everyday life, the bourgeois revolution looks more like a counter-revolution. The market in human values has rarely known such a collapse. The aristocratic life with its wealth of passions and adventures suffered the fate of a palace partitioned off into furnished rooms, gloomy bedsitters whose drabness is made even more unbearable by the sign outside which proclaims, like a challenge hurled at the Universe, that this is the age of freedom and well-being. From now on hatred gives way to contempt, love to cohabitation, the ridiculous to the stupid, passion to sentimentality, desire to envy, reason to calculation, the taste for life to the fear of death. The utterly contemptible morality of profit came to replace the utterly detestable morality of honour; the mysterious and perfectly ridiculous power of birth and blood gave way to the perfectly ubuesque power of money. The children of August 4th 1789 took bankers' orders and sales charts as their coats of arms; mystery was now enshrined in their ledgers.

Wherein lies the mystery of money? Clearly in that it represents a sum of beings and things that can be appropriated. The nobleman's coat of arms expresses God's choice and the real power exercised by his elect; money is only a sign of what might be acquired, it is a draft on power, a possible choice.

The feudal God, who appeared to be the basis of the social order, was really only its magnificent crowning excuse. Money, that odourless god of the bourgeois, is also a mediation; a social contract. It is a god swayed not by prayers or by promises but by science and specialist know-how. Its mystery no longer lies in a dark and impenetrable totality but in the sum of an infinite number of partial certainties; no longer in the quality of lordship but in the number of marketable people and things (for example, what a hundred thousand pounds puts within the reach of its possessor).

In the economy of free-trade capitalism, dominated by imperatives of production, wealth alone confers power and honour. Master of the means of production and of labour power, it controls the development of productive forces and consumer goods and thus its owners have the pick of the myriad fruits of an infinite progress. However, as this capitalism transforms itself into its contrary, state-planned economy, the prestige of the capitalist playing the market with his millions fades away and with it the caricature of the pot-bellied, cigar-puffing merchant of human flesh. Today we have managers, who derive their power from their talent for organization; and already computers are doing them out of a job. Managers, of course, do get their monthly paychecks but do they do anything worthwhile with them? Can they enjoy making their salary signify the wealth of possible choices before them: building a Xanadou, keeping a harem, cultivating flower-children? When all possibilities of consumption are already organized, how can wealth preserve its representable value? Under the dictatorship of consumer goods, money melts away like a snowball in hell. Its significance passes to objects with more representational value, more tangible objects better adapted to the spectacle of the welfare state. Consumer goods are already encroaching on the power of money, because wrapped in ideology, they are the true signs of power. Before long its only remaining justification will be the quantity of objects and useless gadgets it enables one to acquire and throw away at an ever-accelerating pace; only the quantity and the pace matter, because mass-distribution automatically wipes out quality and rarity-appeal. From now on the ability to consume, faster and faster, great quantities of cars, alcohol, houses, TV-sets and girlfriends will show how far you've got up the hierarchical ladder. From the superiority of blood to the power of money, from the superiority of money to the power of the gadget, the nec plus ultra of Christian/socialist civilization: a civilization of prosaism and vulgar detail. A nice nest for Nietzsche's "little men".

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he's not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he's being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology."

///osibisa
///german oak:::bunker
///exuma

from the liner notes of albert ayler's record love cry:

...speak to albert, and you will learn first hand of his abiding concern w/ the folk, or universal, aspects of his music, "because the spiritual forces are uniting through the folk. my drummer, he plays rhythms from all over the world...like very, very, old tunes, you know before i was even born, just come in my mind. it's fantastic, fantastic. i talked to somebody today who said 'i heard a little of this and a little of that.' and i said to him, 'well if you heard that, that was beautiful. thanks for telling me.' cause i'm trying to play as much as i can in my lifetime, like being a true messenger. all i do is meditate - i practice and i meditate. you have to go all the way, because that's what coltrane did. the picture that he showed me when i looked into his eyes, that was the universal man." and later, in response to another question, albert explained his meditation in terms of the same universal thoughts. "i can't be restricted to an earthly plane, even though like i was born here and everything."

albert, on sax and his brother donald, on trumpet

interviewproject.davidlynch.com

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilisation which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilised world” -Octave Mirbeau

american primitive: john fahey

his music has just started to hit me. the transfiguration of blind joe death, and america.

///john brown

///“Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards.”
-Kierkegaard



///i sort of had a religious experience the first time i watched days of heaven. it had such an effect that i hardly watched any films over the next year. it has such a clear vision and i couldn't get into anything else in the same way. i found it to express very very large things in very very simple ways, assured in a quiet way but also frightening. this essay via the criterion collection:



///Like many American directors who emerged in the early 1970s, Terrence Malick went to film school—to the American Film Institute, where, indeed, his fellow students included Paul Schrader and David Lynch. But unlike many film school graduates, Malick arrived there, in 1969, with an already rich and varied past—in the study of philosophy (he translated a book by Martin Heidegger) and in journalism (Newsweek, the New Yorker). He also arrived with a script fully worked out down to the last detail: Badlands, a “criminal lovers on the run” tale inspired by the exploits of real-life teen killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate. Immediately after graduating, he began taking studio script writing and rewriting assignments (he even worked on an early, discarded draft of Dirty Harry). But, determined to bring his long-conceived first feature to the screen, he was simultaneously pushing to get Badlands produced as a truly independent, “on the run” project, gathering financing through a partnership with several investors and ultimately shooting with a nonunion crew on a budget of less than $350,000. Warner Bros. released it to great acclaim in 1973.

Badlands, for all its exceptional qualities of style and tone (especially Sissy Spacek’s blankly ironic voice-over narration), seemed to blend in with the general drift of 1970s New American Cinema—the pointed reworking of movie formulas and the debunking of social myths familiar from the films of Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, or Bob Rafelson. But his next feature, Days of Heaven, scrambled all presumptions (even the most glowing) about Malick. He put the project together quietly, with producers Bert and Harold Schneider and close collaborators who included art director Jack Fisk, and shot in the wheat fields of Alberta, Canada, in 1976. He then spent two years in the editing room with another friend, Billy Weber, crafting the material to achieve the aura he first dreamed of: “a drop of water on a pond, that moment of perfection.”

I vividly remember the experience of sitting in a large, state-of-the-art theater in 1978, encountering this work, which seemed like the shotgun marriage of a Hollywood epic (in 70 mm!) with an avant-garde poem. Wordless (but never soundless) scenes flared up and were snatched away before the mind could fully grasp their plot import; what we could see did not always seem matched to what we could hear. Yes, there was another “couple on the run”—Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as the lovers Bill and Abby, he fleeing a murder he inadvertently committed working in a Chicago steel mill, she pretending to be his sister during the wheat harvest season in the Texas panhandle near the turn of the twentieth century—but this time, the filmmaker’s gaze upon them was not simply distant or ironic but positively cosmic. And there was so much more going on around these two characters, beyond even the dramatic triangle they formed with the melancholic figure of the dying farmer (Sam Shepard)—now the landscape truly moved from background to foreground, and the work that went on in it, the changes that the seasons wreaked upon it, the daily miracles of shifting natural light or the punctual catastrophes of fire or locust plague that took place . . . all this mattered as much, if not more, than the strictly human element of the film.

Above all, the radical strangeness and newness of Days of Heaven was signaled to its first viewers by its most fragmented, inconclusive, “decentered” feature: the voice-over narration of young Linda Manz as Linda, Bill’s actual sister, who is along for the ride, often disengaged from the main action but always hovering somewhere near. It might have seemed, at first twang, like a reprise of Spacek’s “naive” viewpoint from Badlands, but Manz’s thought-track goes far beyond a literary conceit. It flits in and out of the tale unpredictably, sometimes knowing nothing and at other times everything, veering from banalities about the weather to profundities about human existence. Sometimes even her sentences go unfinished, hang in midair. In this voice we hear language itself in the process of struggling toward sense, meaning, insight—just as, elsewhere, we see the diverse elements of nature swirling together to perpetually make and unmake what we think of as a landscape, and human figures finding and losing themselves, over and over, as they desperately try to cement their individual identities or “characters.”

Today, with the hindsight allowed by Malick’s more recent The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005), it is clear that it was Days of Heaven, not Badlands, that truly announced his characteristic style and manner of filmmaking. Where his debut was tightly scripted, its successor was, deliberately, a much more loosely structured affair. Malick gave himself the freedom to shoot material not always centered on the lead actors, but also on the land, animals, little spectacles with groups of extras . . . with the intention of finding the best final form for the whole in postproduction (sound editing being as crucial as picture editing to his work). He has taken this approach to greater and ever more adventurous lengths in his subsequent films. While some industry-minded pundits tut-tut Malick’s preferred shooting method as wasteful and unfocused, it is an entirely valid creative process that aims—as in the cinema of Wong Kar-wai or Jacques Rivette—to discover the film in the course of its material making, rather than in the “abstract” phase of its writing.

Writing, of course, remains important for Malick, who is an extraordinary word stylist. The shooting script of Days of Heaven does not much resemble the finished film—in many cases, elaborate dialogue scenes have been reduced in editing to a line or two, a mysterious reaction shot, and a cutaway to some natural phenomenon. The literary qualities of the project are, however, already evident on the page: the richly stylized and poetic vernacular of ways of speaking, the expressive cycle of seasons, and an elemental story line that is derived (in its essence) from various biblical sources. But this primal, mythic story ends up as thoroughly displaced as the legend of John Smith and Pocahontas in The New World. It is hardly surprising to learn that Shepard (who is a superbly haunting presence in the film) thought himself to be playing someone who was less a flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional psychological character than a kind of sketch, silhouette, or ghost.

The Australian critic Meaghan Morris once suggested that Days of Heaven is a film in constant motion, and indeed about movement in all its forms: human, natural, mechanical. Cinematographer Nestor Almendros—whose work on François Truffaut’s similarly “triangular” costume drama Two English Girls (1971) may well have inspired Malick—loved to describe the form of the film’s complex setups: the camera tracking and dollying in and through, up and down the farmer’s house, this odd mansion plunked in the middle of a vast field, while various players enter and exit the frame in elaborate choreography. In fact, even the simplest shots have a trace of this type of structure: the mise-en-scène of Days of Heaven aims less at fluid continuity between images or gestures—indeed, it is a remarkably elliptical film—than at the creation of each filmic “unit” as a cell that refers, in a nonlinear way, to all other parts of the film, via echoes, comparisons, subtle flashbacks, and flash-forwards.

Malick’s underlying aesthetic aim—one he shares with several great directors, and which was already evident in Badlands—is to encourage the proliferation of a wide range of moods, sights, sounds, and surface textures, while simultaneously arriving at an overall, unifying form. Nothing expresses this better than one of the most beloved elements of Days of Heaven, its play of different musical “inputs,” those Malick appropriated alongside those he commissioned: the music veers from classical to folk, but what holds the ensemble together is that Ennio Morricone’s grave score literally inverts the melody of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. One reflects the other, just as land and sky reflect each other in those characteristic Malick panoramas bisected by the horizon line.

Malick’s films have sometimes been frozen, by those unsympathetic to them, into pious homilies or grand statements: Man versus Nature, the redemptive path to God via love and sacrifice, the corrupting effects of Civilization encroaching upon an idyllic Wilderness . . . Yet nothing is so certain or schematic in his work. As always, everything is in motion, seeming opposites ceaselessly transforming each other. Days of Heaven shows us, in myriad inventive ways, how nature and culture are always intertwined, how a certain kind of technology, a certain kind of civilizing process, is part of even the humblest garden arrangement, the most elementary use of a cloth to cover the body, the fashioning of a piece of a tree to make music . . . This is part of the deep Heideggerian legacy in Malick: there is no pure Being, only the action of hands upon the world, fashioning (for better or worse) a living space, a temporary arrangement of people and materials. And those “cosmic” shots that conjure heaven and earth gazing at each other as in a mirror: these are far from constituting a reassuring New Age bromide. Malick resembles, at one level, the tragic philosopher Simone Weil: the God in heaven in whom she so fervently believed was not, in her view, by our side and guiding our every step, but rather someone very far away, discernible only as a distant echo, someone who had set in motion a terrible Destiny Machine that would first bring us pain, separation, betrayal, and wars before it delivered us any faint or fleeting redemption.

Malick is a true poet of the ephemeral: the epiphanies that structure his films, beginning with Days of Heaven, are ones that flare up suddenly and die away just as quickly, with the uttering of a single line (like “She loved the farmer”), the flight of a bird or the launching of a plane, the flickering of a candle or the passing of a wind over the grass. Nothing is ever insisted upon or lingered on in his films; that is why they reveal subtly different arrangements of event, mood, and meaning each time we see them. Because everything is in motion, everything is whisked away quickly, and the elements of any one cellular moment are very soon redistributed and metamorphosed into other moments. Just look at and listen to the last minutes of Days of Heaven, with their split-second swing between end-of-the-line melancholic emptiness and wide-open possibility, for a sublime illustration of this ephemerality, which is miraculously caught and formalized in the language of cinema.


///about nestor almendros:



///"Since I lack imagination," Almendros wrote in his marvelous book, A Man With A Camera, "I seek inspiration in nature, which offers me an infinite variety of forms." Almendros, who died in 1992, shot seven films for Eric Rohmer, nine for Francois Truffaut, and four for Robert Benton. He worked with Alan Pakula on Sophie's Choice, Martin Scorsese on his Life Lessons episode in New York Stories, and won his Oscar for Terence Malick's Days of Heaven. I can't think of a single explosion in any of the films he shot, not a single matte painting, not one special effect that was not done "in the camera." Perhaps he was just lucky to work in a time before digital enhancement, before the 12-second attention span, before special effects became more interesting to look at than the human face. But there is something more-he was always true to a light's source, true to the emotion evoked by the cast and color of light as it changed through the day. He rejected the typical lighting schemes of the '40s and '50s, which called for key lights, backlight, fills and highlights. He preferred to first capture or augment existing light, then shape and bend it. He respected light's truth-telling element, the way it can expose and conceal.

It is in the films he shot for Rohmer that his veracity is at its most simple and elegant. Almendros was one of the first cinematographers to work exclusively with bounced light, which merely complimented the daylight or reinforced incandescent lamps one would normally have in an apartment. In Rohmer's My Night at Maud's (1969), which he shot in black and white, he kept the lamps in the frame and had white panels placed off-screen to reflect additional light onto the actors. The apartment was painted white with black furniture. For the night scenes he used the existing street lamps, usually working at the widest possible lens aperture. This approach, a simple rendering of character and setting, never distracted from the purity of performance and theme that Rohmer looked for.

Almendros was well-suited to the director's moral rigor, his delineation of the choices men and women must make to live right. Born in Spain in 1930, Almendros fled Franco's regime 18 years later and landed in Cuba, where he organized Havana's first film society. When Batista became dictator, he left to study filmmaking in New York, where he made his first impressive short, a direct cinema documentary on the last 10 minutes of 1958. Shot in Times Square, he used the light of theater marquees to illuminate faces, capturing figures in silhouette. When Castro staged his coup, Almendros returned to Cuba to make documentaries.

Almendros tells how he used mirrors to illuminate the interiors of peasants' huts, how he caught the sun's reflection and bounced it off the white-washed walls. He shot film and watched film, but he grew frustrated with the rigid and nationalized Cuban film industry. In 1961 he was ostracized by colleagues for voting Truffaut's The 400 Blows as the year's best film. Fed up, he exiled himself to France where, eventually, he ended up working with the very director he defended.

His first feature was La Collectionneuse, which he shot in color for Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder. Working with five photoflood lamps, the sun, and whatever practical lights they had, he boldly pushed the limits of his film stock, at times shooting with only a bedside lamp to illuminate a face. He intentionally overexposed backgrounds, used his mirror idea for interiors, and stayed true to the warmish skin tones created by incandescent bulbs and sunsets. These were revolutionary techniques at the time.

Meryl Streep and Kevin Dline in Sophies Choice (1982).
The Wild Child (B&W/1969), his first film for Truffaut, is remarkable for Almendros's faithfulness to a light's source, whether it is a large picture window or candles. That fidelity is pushed further in Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (1975), where he worked at near underexposure to preserve the effect of the natural light. "This was really a film about a human face" Almendros wrote, referring to Isabelle Adjani's engrossing portrayal of a woman going mad. Set in Nova Scotia in 1863, he experimented with kerosene lamps, and some of his interiors have the texture of oil paint.

Truffaut's films were often about obsession, and about the incessant writing and recording of one's thoughts. Almendros, obsessed with truth, was the perfect collaborator. In The Man Who Loved Women (1977), his earth-toned palette gave the film-ostensibly a comedy-an underlying edge of darkness, in which the protagonist's incessant memoir-keeping isolated him. In the claustrophobic world of The Last Metro (1980), Almendros accentuated the dim interior lighting of the 1940s by dipping the 25-watt bulbs in a yellow bath, and he painted the street lamps blue because at the time blue light could not be picked up by enemy radar. The light in that film closes down the world of the characters.

Almendros shot three features for Bar-bet Schroeder who, before he took his enormous bellyflop into the overcrowded pool of Hollywood hacks, actually made some interesting films. It is hard to believe that Schroeder, the director of Kiss of Death and Desperate Measures-two artless disasters-was a founding producer of films of the French New Wave. As the director of Maitresse (1975), Schroeder unflinchingly told the story of a dominatrix (Bulle Ogier) in love with a petty crook (Gerard Depardieu), complete with explicit scenes of real flagellation. To solve the problem of shooting in a windowless S & M chamber, Almendros placed lamp-shaped flourescents in the frame and attached flourescent tubes to the walls, which not only created an envelope of light, but also suited the bizarre faux-deco set design of the underground lair.
Richard Gere and Brooke Adams in Days of Heaven (1978).
The final scene, in which Depardieu and Olier screw in the driver's seat of a speeding convertible, is notable for the sunlight flickering on their faces as the car moved in and out of the shadows of trees. Haskell Wexler, Almendros' American colleague, used the same shot six years earlier in Medium Cool.

Almendros's first American film was Monte Hellman's Cockfighter (1974), which is one of the great forgotten films of that rich movie dec. It's an oddly sweet-natured depiction of an anachronistic, backwoods Southern sport; illegal and violent, but with a tent show code of conduct, and an idiosyncratic cabal of itinerant characters that elevate it to the level of something like a Sunday softball game. Almendros authentically rendered what he called "the tacky but extraordinarily photogenic image of contemporary America." There is an archetypal depth to his compositions, an immediate sense of melancholy in the way the sun glints off the roof of a Ford pick-up, or in the string of trailers haphazardly littered around a Georgia barn, or in the orange shag of a cheap motel carpet. Cockfighter is rural cinematic anthropology, much like one of those Les Blank shorts, in the way it authenticates and confers nobility on the eccentric.

Almendros was just two years away from Days of Heaven, and he still adhered to his simple philosophies of light's true source, and to his disdain of technical gadgetry. Twenty years ago, of course, even the gadgets were crude compared to the computer-generated thrills of today. "Nothing is worse than the abuse of technical devices: diffusers, telephoto lenses, slow motion," Almen- dros wrote. "When they have nothing in- teresting in front of the camera, many directors resort to tricks." Does this sound like any of the movies you've seen lately?

Take a look at Cockfighter's key scene, in which Warren Oates shoots off his mouth, and then watches as his rooster is killed in an impromptu match with a rival cock. Is there a more truthful, more violent, more extreme slow-mo close-up of a single, life-shifting moment in all of film? It copies Peckinpah in the opening scene of Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973), where a chicken gets its head blown off, but Hellman/Almendros's scene is pure cinema, not elegy. And it tells me that when Almendros uses a trick, he makes it count. He pulled out all the stops for Days of Heaven (1978).

David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls Days of Heaven a movie "that is photographed to death," and there is some truth to that. Whenever Malick's narrative grows thin, he cuts to another gorgeous shot: horses framed against a moon blackened by smoke; the Victorian mansion bobbing in a yellow ocean of wheat. But I've thought the film's strength was its elemental purity. It is a myth, and myths are simple, but myth-making is a grand business, and must be rendered like a force of nature.

"My job was to simplify the photography, to purify it of all the artificial effects of the recent past," said Almendros. To that end, he and Malick studied the silent films of Griffith and Chaplin, they used real firelight to illuminate faces, they recreated the arid loneliness of Andrew Wyeth and the inviting interior warmth of Edward Hopper, they achieved all of their special effects in the camera. For the stunning shot in the locusts sequence where the insects ascend to the sky, they dropped peanut shells from helicopters and had their actors walk backwards while running the film in reverse through the camera. When it was projected everything moved forward except the locusts!

Almendros tells of his struggles with his union crew, of how he would walk through the sets turning off lights, of how he would push the sensitivity of his negative, of how he went against standard wisdom by shooting actors from below against a white, burned-out sky. He and Malick must have been quite a sight, striding through the wheat, crafting these issues/29/images of wrath and beauty, pushing all known limits. "Nature's most beautiful light," Almendros wrote, "occurs at extreme moments, the very moments when filming seems impossible." Days of Heaven was a movie made in those precious minutes between sunset and nightfall.

Almendros continued working in America and France, made more films for Truffaut, then a few for Robert Benton. Kramer vs. Kramer (1978) secured his reputation as a great lighter of faces; Places in the Heart (1984) was dense with atmosphere and hope, and Sally Field has never looked more honest in a role. His final film was Scorsese's Life Lessons (1989). Hard- ly an appropriate exit for Almendros, it is still a virtual Cliff's Notes of his proven techniques: the huge windows in the artist's loft, the candles in the birthday scene, the revolving spotlights on Steve Buscemi and the audience in the subway station.

He will always be remembered as a cinematographer of absolute truth. He discovered beauty in the sepulchral darkness of the human face, and disquiet in the still life of a landscape. The next time I have to sit through a Hollywood blockbuster (or, let's face it, even an indie with a budget) and endure that in- evitable onslaught of pyrotechnics, blue strobes, noirish shafts of hard light, overlit interiors and those dime-a-dozen smoke-filled slow-motion establishing shots, I will close my eyes and mourn the passing of Nestor Almendros, a true master of light.

///john huston's under the volcano. essay from criterion as well:






///Under the Volcano, made in 1984, is the thirty-fourth of thirty-six feature films in a body of work that began in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon. Already ill but brimming with vitality, John Huston was then seventy-eight years old. He had always alternated personal projects, often adaptations of books he admired (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948; The Red Badge of Courage, 1951; Moby Dick, 1956), with more overtly “mainstream” works, succeeding brilliantly at reconciling the demands of both in the genre film (The Maltese Falcon; The Asphalt Jungle, 1950; The African Queen, 1951). Yet in the final years of his life and his career, he tended to save his passion for his personal literary projects, and his commissioned works from the period—Phobia (1980) and Victory (1981)—demonstrate a total lack of commitment (in contrast, even a film as impersonal, and as difficult to shoot, as 1958’s The Barbarian and the Geisha contains some “Hustonian” touches). Perhaps it was a sense of being at the end of his life that made Huston stop pretending to be interested in other people’s projects. It seems he couldn’t be bothered even to try to hide the mediocrity of the material he had been handed in Phobia and Victory, films that could have been made by a more anonymous director without anyone noticing the difference.

It was with The Man Who Would Be King (1975), a project that he had been thinking about since the 1950s—based on a Rudyard Kipling story—that Huston made his return to literary adaptation. After the success of that bold “action-adventure” (in which both the action and the adventure are more within the characters than on the screen), Huston began favoring fictional works that were problematic, in terms of translating them to screen, because of the importance given to internal monologue or their absence of action. In less than ten years Huston would adapt three stories considered to be “unadapt-able”: Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor, Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, and “The Dead,” by James Joyce. In each case the adaptation rose to the challenge by deliberately ignoring false problems and by choosing to render the spirit rather than the letter of the original. It was not a matter of filming everything but of filming only what Huston liked, which is, in fact, a constant throughout his work. The culmination of this approach, The Dead (1987), is a film that is both respectful and free, and it became a kind of legacy work, in which Huston does not so much film Joyce’s story as use it as a pretext for offering his daughter Anjelica and his son Tony the gift of his artistic heritage.

Three years earlier, Under the Volcano had been an important step toward this achievement. The original novel, whose adaptation had already tempted (and discouraged) Luis Buñuel, among others, was not a choice dictated by its facility. Lowry had spent ten years polishing his only major work (it was published in 1947). In six-hundred-plus pages, he recounts the last day in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, a fallen British diplomat, in a Mexican village. While an eruption of the Popoca-te-petl volcano threatens, mescal transports Firmin back into his memories, to his internal world, but also through the present, where he confronts his brother and his estranged wife. The film could be disappointing to the unconditional admirer of Lowry’s cult novel. From the book, Huston and newcomer screenwriter Guy Gallo kept only three of the original four main characters (there was also a childhood friend, M. Laruelle, the fourth point of a love quadrangle, turned triangle in the film), a few situations, but above all a framework, which allowed Huston to portray a very intimate confession. The screenplay systematically eliminates the most literary aspects of the source (flashback structure, interior monologue) in favor of an unfolding that takes place in the more realistic present and that allows some doubt to remain over what Firmin’s past could be. Thus brought back to the present moment, Under the Volcano is a film of exorcism. Through the alcohol-induced convulsive movements of Firmin, a fallen diplomat whose evening clothes are but a reminder of past dignity, Huston puts what is perhaps his own fear of decline, of departure without making peace with one’s loved ones, on the screen. A few years later The Dead would be the film of reassurance: in it Huston puts a majestic final point on his work through a pure, emotionally moving song that reunites a couple in confession.

In Under the Volcano Albert Finney portrays a figure of decline and of grandeur that had lived within the filmmaker from his earliest works: from a simple outline, it developed into a secondary and, finally, a main character. Huston, after having entrusted it to his own father, Walter (Captain Jacobi in The Maltese Falcon, and particularly the ragged old Howard in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), continued to pursue it. Captain Allnut (Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen), Captain Ahab (Gregory Peck in Moby Dick), Reverend Shannon (Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana, 1964), and the boxer Billy Tully (Stacy Keach in Fat City, 1972) were all its avatars. He himself, in his most gripping performances as an actor (in Richard Sarafian’s Man in the Wilderness, 1971, and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, 1974), would enjoy bringing it to life. Early in his career this could be interpreted as the quest for a father figure, but this character gradually evolved into the filmmaker’s own double. With it he shared the craggy countenance, the penchant for alcohol, and the nostalgia for the exotic. Geoffrey Firmin is the ultimate incarnation of this figure, which Huston would have to sacrifice in order to continue along the path that would lead him to The Dead. Finney’s brilliantly theatrical interpretation is balanced by the actor’s delicacy in expressing the secret nuances of the character, particularly in the very allusive scenes with Jacqueline Bisset, an underrated actress who here has one of the most beautiful roles of her career. (Huston’s 1982 Annie, a much less impersonal film than one might believe, gave the director his first contact with Finney, whose solitary Daddy Warbucks is like a smiling, caricatural version of the melancholy, tragic Firmin, the latter fond of black dinner jackets, while Warbucks prefers white.)

To imbue Under the Volcano with its poisonous climate, Huston turned to Gabriel Figueroa (pictured below), the exceptional Mexican director of photography. Celebrated for his pictorial black and white, Figueroa (who began in 1932, with Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva Mexico!) had created for John Ford (The Fugitive, 1947), Buñuel (seven films), and especially Emilio Fernández (twenty-three films) a gripping imagery consisting of majestic landscapes and chiaroscuro in the style of Goya. (Emilio “El Indio” Fernández plays the character Diosdado in Under the Volcano.) Figueroa had already worked with Huston on The Night of the Iguana. For Under the Volcano he would use color to create, from the early images of Firmin’s nocturnal wanderings, an allegorical universe that mixes death (sugar-candy skulls and bones, laughing masks) and celebration (garish lanterns, garlands). Figueroa’s use of overexposed day scenes adds dry textures, palpable heat, and a feeling of suffocation. Trapped this way, between a night peopled with wild illusions and the blinding light, Firmin seems irremediably condemned.

In this climate of heat and dust, whiteness signals the progression of death, as if Firmin’s entire universe were becoming ossified. In The Night of the Iguana, black and white had allowed Figueroa and Huston to emphasize a heat that was more humid (clothing drenched in perspiration, swimming) and a darkness that was more sensual (the midnight baths of Ava Gardner and her minions). These two films, together with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, constitute a kind of Mexican trilogy for Huston. All concern characters in exile searching for a new beginning. Here, at the border with the United States, Mexico offers the fantasy of an imaginary geography, where Hustonian “misfits” wander between adventure (Sierra Madre) and sex (Night of the Iguana), before accepting death (Under the Volcano). (We can add as a codicil a little-known but fascinating film by Huston: We Were Strangers, 1949, set in an imaginary Cuba, in which John Garfield and Jennifer Jones, both seeking rebirth, are torn between desire and ideological commitment. The digging of an underground tunnel exacerbates the passions and dooms them, symbolically, to suffocation.) Great travelers, Huston’s characters are also runaways: the filmmaker is always happy to emphasize the mental over the geographic and to describe exile (Asia, Europe, Mexico) as a place reduced to basic impulses, obliging the runaway to confront his truth and his death. Huston’s Mexico, where emphasis is placed on its suffocating qualities rather than on its open spaces, is, in these three films, the place that offers the fewest ways out and that most resembles a real trap.

Under the Volcano is, as we see, a fundamental part of the Hustonian edifice. It marks a move from the implicit to the obvious for obsessions present since the filmmaker’s earliest work. Its desperate and destructive character seems like an obligatory passage for Huston. Geoffrey Firmin’s last day allows the filmmaker to paint without complacency the emotions of a man facing the end of his life. The Dead will provide no such figure for identification. The day will become a few hours, and a town will be reduced to a simple middle-class apartment. This is the ultimate act of modesty for a filmmaker who often preferred indirect speech. That is why direct speech makes Under the Volcano such a precious film: John Huston’s own voice was rarely heard so clearly. Make no mistake: just as Malcolm Lowry must have been in full possession of his art as a writer in order to render the poetic frenzy of an alcoholic, John Huston was in full possession of his when he put it on the screen.

///john huston has become one of my favorite directors as of late. he directed the misfits, beat the devil, under the volcano, and many many other classics.

"Huston's protagonists often represent extremes. They are either ignorant, pathetic, and doomed by their lack of self-understanding or intelligent, arrogant, but equally doomed by their lack of self-understanding. Between these extremes is the cool, intelligent protagonist who will sacrifice everything for self-understanding and independence. Huston always finds the first group pathetic, the second tragic, and the third heroic. He reserves his greatest respect for the man who retains his dignity in spite of pain and disaster."

''If you make movies about movies and about characters instead of people, the echoes get thinner and thinner until they're reduced to mechanical sounds.'' -jh

night of the iguana




///Captain Beefheart's 10 commandments of guitar playing:::

1. Listen to the birds.
That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.

2. Your guitar is not really a guitar Your guitar is a divining rod.
Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one.

3. Practice in front of a bush
Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush dosen't shake, eat another piece of bread.

4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.

5. If you're guilty of thinking, you're out
If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.

6. Never point your guitar at anyone
Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.

7. Always carry a church key
That's your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He's one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song "I Need a Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty-making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it.

8. Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument
You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.

9. Keep your guitar in a dark place
When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.

10. You gotta have a hood for your engine
Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.


///ben chasney of six organs of admittance on downloading music etc:::

The start of Six Organs coincided with the beginnings of wider online file sharing and a greater emphasis in limited edition runs of releases, whether in terms of vinyl or CDR runs or the like. Did you have any feelings, positive or negative, about these developments at the time, and have your feelings changed much between then and now?

BC: "I feel that what was once considered fetishism in collecting music may become much more important in terms of creativity and long-term consciousness (and I don't use that term as some hippie speak). Let me explain: what I have noticed over the years is that people are being more and more herded, by themselves, into believing that faster is better when it comes to obtaining music. Faster has always meant "better" to the modern mind, so it makes sense that if one can obtain music faster with new technology, one must be progressing, right? But we humans happen to be living at a peculiar time as we find ourselves at the point on the technological line that is about to go vertical in its exponential slope on the chart of progress. Essentially, we are standing on the verge of what some scientists call the technological singularity, which is the point where technology will begin to overtake humans in intelligence as they recreate themselves and reproduce.

"Yes, this is some William Gibson business, but landing on the moon was once a fairy tale as well (this year Stanford University created a helicopter that could teach itself to fly by watching other helicopters. If that isn't sci-fi, I don't know what is). Some see this as a positive future and a part of our evolution as we fuse our bodies with this technology. Some see this as the end of Humankind (Paul Virilio has stated that there will be aliens on this earth but the aliens will have evolved from us. And we won't even get into what Virilio says about the inevitable 'accident' as we fuse ourselves with technology). So back to what I was saying before - I see people thinking that faster-is-better as conditioning themselves (I don't believe this is some conspiracy) for the inevitable technological singularity.

"And it's not just the idea that faster-is-better that informs this conditioning. Another is separation from other humans. People have begun to separate themselves from other people and substitute it with a representation of an analogue (people meeting face to face) community; ie blogs, message boards, websites, etc. This representation is mediated by forces out of their control. And I see all of these things as a great conditioning for the inevitable point where man faces this singularity.

"So I see these limited releases (or even non-limited but made with intent) that used to be considered merely fetishistic objects as actually tiny pieces of analogue (as in real life, I can touch it) strands that may keep us human just a bit longer. They are not immediate in their existence. There might be a blog that has ripped the information from the cassette tape, LP or CD and even taken a picture of the object to further represent it, but it is nice to know it exists as a real object out there. I don't think it will stop the inevitable end, but they are nice barbs in the road. And being aware of it is important, or at least interesting.

"For instance, the other day I came across the first Sun City Girls LP on a blog. It's absolutely out of print, no way I will probably ever see it in a store or on eBay for a sum I could afford, so that left me with a clear conscience about downloading it for free. But I realized, how much pleasure would I get from it anyway? Why do that? Just to say I have it, that I have heard it? I decided not to download it because it would be much more enjoyable to at least share the experience with someone else. Maybe someone will play it for me one day. Until then, it's just information.

"And I do believe we are becoming addicted to information. You only need to look at those people who have hard drives filled with songs that they have never even listened to. They are not even collecting music. They are collecting information. And the more people become addicted to information and the faster they can obtain that information, the less they will be able to contemplate that information, and it is the contemplation of the information which makes it art."

An argument I've heard advanced is that there's been a general devaluing of music in recent years - not merely in economic terms and expectations, but as a more central role or defining marker of what makes a person and who they are. What would be your take on this assertion?

BC: "I do believe that music is generally being devalued because of this addiction to information that I was speaking of. I like to compare it to a drive through the countryside. If you are driving at a comfortable pace then you are able to enjoy the sights of the countryside for yourself; the trees and the color of the sky and the sad-eyed cows, etc. If you are driving 100 miles per hour, there is no way you will be able to enjoy what the countryside has to offer. You will be too busy reacting to contemplate; the potholes, the corners, the lone farmer's truck.

"In this way, as everything has been made available and there is so much to take in and the speed at which we are able to acquire music increases, there is no way to contemplate and really think about things unless one makes a conscious effort NOT to take everything in. It's a matter of contemplation vs. reaction. People need to learn that they don't need to obtain everything that is available to them (this would be good advice for politicians as well). I see this also as a reason why music criticism has generally declined in value and importance as well. There is too much for critics to think about. They have no time to contemplate, they can only react.

"Music began to play a more widespread role in a community aspect as records began being produced and disseminated. When the radio broadcast the same sounds to the same houses and one knew that they were listening to a song that perhaps someone in some other house was listening to at the same time, that was a shared experience. Or they had a record and they could play it for a friend.

"As music began to be disseminated in a much less focused manner it began to lose its means as a way to strengthen communities, at least on a reproduced scale that was outside of a performance. I would argue that a bunch of avatars arguing over whether or not a band’s record is as good as the last on a message board is a less strong community than a group of friends listening to a record together (even if the friends got into an argument over the same thing. And especially if they got into a drunken argument and started beating each other up!)

"So I would say it's not the music that has become less important but the new communities that have been created. However, if a certain music has tied itself to that sort of community instead of trying to exist autonomously, then yes, I think that music is of lesser value as well. Just to me though, I can't speak for others when it comes to values. But then again, I find the game of canasta of much less value than my grandmother, so it's all generational I guess!"

///after hours-new favorite movie


///face of another


r. newman "sail away" -most subversive songwriter ever


///isb


///lonely are the brave


///magic lantern-high beams



///roof of my house fell in today, which happened to be the day i was to look at a new place. i feel like it knew and gave up. the new place is a fixer upper but very cool, much space and very cheap. sxsw starts in a few days and things are going to get wild round here.

///this band on heavy rotation



///obama is the antichrist in case you haven't heard. this idea has been around for a while (my aunt mentioned this a few years ago). mccain has an add called "the one" which plays off this and there are a number of websites, the best of which is barackobamaantichrist.blogspot.com which is so ridiculous (actual quote: "Let me say something before we get into the whole VP thing: Do I still think Obama is/could be the Antichrist? Lately I have been having my doubts."--geez) i can barely believe that it's real. other entries point out that obama cannot be a christian: "Obama has declared himself a committed Christian. He can call himself anything he likes, but there are certain markers among the evangelicals he is courting that one must meet in order to qualify for that label." the close minded nature of this comment can speak for itself. i'll just say that w/ a quick glance through history you could come up w/ a bunch of christians who in no way match up w/ todays christian conservatives (bohme, eckhart, blake, emerson, merton, novalis, st augustine, the desert fathers, gnostics, swedenborg, kierkegaard, catholics, quakers, etc etc) but anyway...the mud slinging is harsh, which brings me around to this guy named lee atwater, a south carolinian and mastermind of modern attack politics who mentored karl rove and blah blah he was a pretty despicable person and he'd be a good subject for a documentary because at the end of his life he contracted cancer, became a catholic and had a change of heart, apologizing to many of his victims. he wrote this in life magazine before his death:
"My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul."
heavy. people should take heed.

end w/ this from aformentioned jakob bohme:
"When thou art gone forth wholly from the creature [human], and art become nothing to all that is nature and creature, then thou art in that eternal one, which is God himself, and then thou shalt perceive and feel the highest virtue of love. Also, that I said whosoever findeth it findeth nothing and all things; that is also true, for he findeth a supernatural, supersensual Abyss, having no ground, where there is no place to dwell in; and he findeth also nothing that is like it, and therefore it may be compared to nothing, for it is deeper than anything, and is as nothing to all things, for it is not comprehensible; and because it is nothing, it is free from all things, and it is that only Good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is. But that I lastly said, he that findeth it, findeth all things, is also true; it hath been the beginning of all things, and it ruleth all things. If thou findest it, thou comest into that ground from whence all things proceed, and wherein they subsist, and thou art in it a king over all the works of God." [The Way to Christ, 1623]

so things are falling apart. ive heard about the "collapse of everyeverything" and really it's not something i mind i mean isn't it a good thing that things are coming apart and limping along. yes i'd say. i mean i've been around some and i'd say that greed and selfishness have become this nations highest ideals and now that this big pile of debt and fake money is catching up w/ the ones handing it out and catching up w/ the ones who've used this money, so called, to buy a big house a big tv a big car and never have to really do anything the rest of their lives well now maybe things will just find a natural balance and i have a feeling that this natural balance will mean that americans won't have the god given right, so called, to do whatever they want w/o regard for anything but their own cornered off lives. i've looked around and like i said i've been around, i'm no bull in the woods and i think to myself "self, is it not strange how this whole big moving society/economy is based on buying unneeded things. it's like running in a very small circle and they've got to convince ya that you need a new this or that or what and never why really just a how (and that's money of course) so the moment you can walk around let's get you to a school because, let's be honest, we don't care about you expanding yr mind or appreciating the wondrous world about you or really caring about anything, mostly we want you to think about what you will do when you grow up (you will work in an office, i'll go ahead and tell you) and all the money you will need to buy new things so that you, you bright young thing, can keep america great." and if you decide that it is not a new stucco house or sneakers that will make you happy but maybe what yr after is peace of mind or love or a walk in the wood, well then this is like declaring war on the very thing that drives america - soulless commodities, waved in front of yr face, things that ya must have and when you have one the feeling is gone and you look for another another ad infinitum. so i say there is another way and i've had it in my mind for a long time.

i've been listening to loren connors, i saw mister lonely, i read hermann hesse's book demian, i'm buying a bike, i've been swimming, i've got some secrets.

think i'm getting amber this camera for her birthday:


or this one:


currently reading: ether, god and the devil by wilhelm reich. so fucking good good good.


also reading a book about director chris marker, whose film sunless is the best thing i've seen in a long long time. it completely affirmed ideas i'd had about cinema and awoke new ones. looking at 16mm sync sound cameras also. arriflex 16s (used similar model before):

these are under $3000 for a whole kit w/ lenses etc.

make it new. this is my new mantra. also: help us, destroy yourselves. the first is some ezra pound wisdom the second was graffiti talk during the may 68 french riots.
this is the first time i've put anything on here in some time, and believe that much has changed, nearly everything. there is no recounting. there is no there there.

my car, the scene of two crimes. the dented blue honda was robbed of goods and music by crooked fingered local. i imagine him listening to pere ubu and alice coltrane. transcendence occurs. in a twist like that of a raymond carver book, crooked finger broke into a house down the block, while in the middle of this crime the owner of the house came home and a struggle ensued. during the fight my cell phone was dropped. detective brown manages to track me down and the above story is explained into my little ear. my phone is returned. for the next three days i receive calls from mexican drug dealers and one prostitute named conchita st. hemisphere, or so she says. i fake a mexican accent and lure all parties to a drug den in east austin where i hire five west side hard-tooths to aid me in my ambush of aforementioned nerdowells. we corner them, yell obscenely about the room while lighting cigarillos and complementing each others ponchos. they are all given lower back tattoos and i tell them that this here is their warning and that they would be wise to not cross me again. we then got that lean and hit the local cantina where a nearly dead priest married me and conchita st. hemisphere on the spot. she bought me a diamond encrusted grill and i taught her how to hallucinate.

the future rushes from my back becoming the past the supernatural is the not yet understood natural ex ex ex hex cast a rose against your old soul the soft circle grows