Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 1981
My friend Chris came over for his first viewing of Zulawski's monsterpiece, my third viewing. Chris greatly enjoyed it, as did I, and after hearing the commentary track, I don't know if I'm closer to really figuring this film out (for example, how to interpret all the Catholicism once you know that Zulawski is an atheist?). I do know that very few American actors would go as far into madness as Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani do here, especially Adjani, whose wild-eyed looks burn a hole in the screen. ("You have no right to film people's souls!" she reportedly told Zulawski during filming, "This is psychological pornography!"). When Hollywood actors play "crazy" they're always winking at the audience and/or worrying what their Pilates instructor might think.
What Chris brought up was the wider geopolitical metaphors of the film, which I have yet to really unravel (but which were still there in La Fidelite, a fact no reviewer that I read seemed to even grasp). Set as it is in a divided Berlin, with gloomy shots of the Wall, and with its whole story about separation, loss, madness, doppelgangers, and an apocalyptic close, Possession is about inner and outer worlds ending in much the same way that Don McKellar's Last Night does.
Possession (of what? of whom? and to what end?) is probably still way ahead of its time, and is the cinematic equivalent of poking a fresh wound with an infected finger, but it's one of my favorites.
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June 29, 2003
Possession
Burnin' Down the Clubhouse
On Thursday night, some loonball (rumor has it a disgruntled white-trash ex-tenant) set fire to the clubhouse/swimming pool/billiard room of my mom's mobile home park. Who knows if the woman wanted to burn down the whole place, or just cause some inconvenience, but she managed to destroy the whole building.
I spent many a day here in my 20s, having a swim, relaxing in the jacuzzi, and sometimes bringing girls over to see what they looked like in bikinis. So yes, happy days there. Who knows how long it will take for the place to be rebuilt. Just in time for summer! I went down on Friday afternoon to have a look and took these snaps. The entire area smelled like Kragen's Auto Parts.
June 27, 2003
Paint the Sky With Stars - Enya
Reprise 9 46835-2
1997.11.11
Well, there's only one reason I borrowed this from the library, and that was for Enya's first, and best, fluke hit "Orinoco Flow". Yeh, but did I listen to the rest of the CD?
After one aborted listen, having to stop after the horrific "Anywhere Is," I tried again and made it all the way through. Talk about the law of diminishing returns. It's an example of an artist totally misunderstanding what made her first hit so good. There's fifteen other tracks here that have the "Enya" sound--smooth multitracked vocals, crushed digital velvet, quasi-Celtic mysticism, slow tempos--but none of the idiosyncracies of "Orinoco Flow." There's an erratic rhythm in the verses, a grand pomposity to the use of kettle drums, and the lyrics are mostly onomatopoeia. Who cares if "From Bissau to Palau - in the shade of Avalon/ from Fiji to Tiree and the Isles of Ebony" means anything? It sounds good. And don't forget the last hanging chord, like a question mark.
The other songs make sure all the ambiguity of "Orinoco Flow" is solved. The chords are sunnier, the songs finish with major chords. The lyrics get dippy. "Sail away, sail away, sail away" conjured up some sort of wanderlust. "Anywhere Is" features a melody programmed by kazoo, and words such as "The moon upon the ocean / is swept around in motion / but without ever knowing / the reason for its flowing / in motion on the ocean" are trite, especially if you know the sing-song way it's sung.
And if anyone develops a drinking game based around the number of times Enya uses the factory setting "tolling bell" sound (as first heard at the beginning of "Do They Know It's Christmas") then the chap who puts this CD on will wind up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.
June 26, 2003
One Callous Bastard
Nobody seems to have been shocked too much by this quote from Rummy a week ago. In fact, I had to go hunt it down.
Rumsfeld downplays resistance in IraqThe attacks are deliberate attempts to kill Americans, but they are not well coordinated by any central leader or group, Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference Wednesday.
"You've got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month," Rumsfeld said. "There's going to be violence in a big city."
About a dozen U.S. servicemen have been killed by hostile fire in Iraq since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1. American military commanders in Iraq say attacks on their forces happen daily, though one commander on Tuesday dismissed the fighting as "militarily insignificant."
This is up there with his "riots and looting are the kooky mistakes of liberated "free" people" quote. Of course, if this had been the Clinton administration, they'd have been calling for resignations right then. This isn't just casual murder, this is the beginnings of a quagmire. Plus: The loss of a son or daughter is not "insignificant," no matter much you fly the "Mission Accomplished" banner, Rummy.
The Perfect Cup of Tea
We're a bit partial to good ol' British tea over here at the Compound/Clearinghouse/Deprogramming Center, but these days we use a bit of Asian ingenuity to get our hot water with the perpetual boiler. However this BBC Photo Instruction Page is telling us how to really make a trad cuppa. I'm not too sure I agree with the "milk first" rule, especially because 1) I use tea bags and 2) I'm a bad judge of the future milk/tea ratio. Still, if you're curious, here's how you really should do it.
June 25, 2003
We're Going to Hack the Chalice!
Many fans of the Atari 2600 console from the '80s consider Adventure the finest game that company created. Minimal sound effects, moebius mazes, dragons that looked like ducks (and kinda like microscopes when you killed them), a sword that was a big arrow, and mostly...just...silence, made this a mesmerizing winner.
I guess it would have happened sooner or later, but not only are Atari nostalgia geeks making their own games in their own cartridges but some guy has gone and hacked Adventure so it now has more levels, more mazes, more everything. Crazy, man, crazy.
Lastly, some group called Naked Intruder has made a mini-album of industrial metal-type music all from Atari 2600 sounds. (We'd prefer somebody to have a go at something ambient.)
All found at Atari Age
Master Directory Block Rockin' Beats
Phew. After much futzing with the intricacies of Data Rescue X, I was able to pull everything off the damaged drive I needed. I think the corruption of the MDB occurred because of some event back in August 2001, as I had a lot of mysterious ghost files from that time popping up in duplicate or triplicate (my first attempt at rescuing data garnered me 6.6 GB of files from a 3.1GB HD that was only 1.3GB full). I then used Disk Format in OSX, which allowed me to erase the volume and install a OS9 driver. That done, I used a trial version of Prosoft's Data Backup to shift all the rescued files over.
I punched my fist in the air like a monkey in a too-tight flightsuit when I booted up off the new disk and the happy Mac face came up, then loaded, then Entourage loaded up where I had left off. Nice. A few minor things don't work--I lost registration codes for some third party software, and some of my aliases don't go to where they should--but it's as if nothing happened. Of course, I just lost a day of work, so time did pass. On the other hand, I didn't have to take it to the shop to get it fixed. Phew.
June 24, 2003
Sorted!
You are now looking at my CD collection. With a day spent restoring my crashed drive (see the main page for that story), I spent the down time doing something I've been meaning to do since 1996: sort my CD collection into a manageable alphabetical order. I was stuck in the house anyway. I always used to keep my collection in order, but the bigger it got, the lazier I became. Since coming to the Mills Compound in December, this has been on my to-do list. I knew it would take some time, and it did.
Most of my CDs have had their cases tossed and replaced with thin poly bags that hold both booklet and J-card. (You can get them at Bags Unlimited.) So what you are looking at is a fraction of what it could be.
I sorted 'em into alphabetical piles on the floor and took this picture. You can see the piles for B, C, and F are the largest, the reason being my obsession past and present for The Beatles, David Bowie, Beck, Elvis Costello, and The Fall. The P pile should be bigger as an extra three feet of Pizzicato Five CDs were already sorted and on the shelf. The "Various Artists" pilie was big enough to divide into two, and next to that there is the Soundtracks pile, the Jazz pile, the Classical pile, and below that Video Game Soundtracks, and VCD (mostly porn, apparently. Where did that come from?) And do you really care about this?
Anyway, it's all sorted now and shelved away. At last I know where everything is.
June 23, 2003
Flags - Breathless
IMME Records IMME-1001
1996.08.01
Second only to Pizzicato Five, Flags was my favorite Shibuya-kei band back in the rosy days of '96-'97. Produced by Tetsutaro Sakurai, they were his side project to Cosa Nostra, and featured five girls of different looks and personalities that he used to sing his Todd Rundgren- and Laura Nyro- inspired pop. There was Harry, the spooky, arty one; Aki, the girly one; Maria, the one who sounded like Kahimi Karie; Emiko, the earthy, fun one; and Rio, the slightly older, glamorous one. Or that's how they seemed to me.
After buying all four of their releases and all six of their singles, I had given up on even finding their rare CD-ROM mini-album combo from 1996, let alone being able to afford it (Japanese collector prices being astronomical). Imagine how I almost choked on my Raisin Bran when I saw this at Tokyo Recohan for something like $7. It was a no-brainer.
I was slightly disappointed to find out that the six songs here are not new, despite the titles I've never heard of. They are actually all remixed versions of the songs found on their second album MOR from a month before, with English lyrics instead of Japanese. Some sound like demos--all the sounds I know are in place, but they don't fit together as well. "Wonderland," the English version of their best song "Nowhereland" (a song I so loved that I ripped off the title for my movie), is awkward and blocky, one take short of being brilliant (it's interesting to compare and contrast, of course). It's like those albums you discover only in your dreams--it sounds like them, but something's quite off.
The QuickTime movies that accompany the songs are the usual bland Japanese promo variety, with usually one or two set-ups and no imagination of what to do for the entire 5 minutes. Only "Wonderland" gets any sort of treatment, with the band vogue-ing and being subjected to several digital effects. The dancing doesn't suit the music, though. Mostly the videos prove what I always thought, based on the very few publicity photos I have seen of them: Emiko (left) is the cutie (she also has the best voice). After their 1997 album Cream they vanished into the ether.
Outlook Not So Good
After about five fortunes from a "Magic 8-Ball," I usually begin to wonder instead what makes the thing work. Wouldn't you love to take one apart? Sure you have. The Inscrutable 8-Ball Revealed
After about five fortunes from
After about five fortunes from a "Magic 8-Ball," I usually begin to wonder instead what makes the thing work. Wouldn't you love to take one apart? Sure you have. The Inscrutable 8-Ball Revealed
La Fidélité
Dir. Andrzej Zulawski, 2000
Inspired after listening to the audio commentary on the Possession DVD, I felt the urge to watch Zulawski's most recent film, which has been sitting on my shelf since I bought it in Taiwan last year (and still not available in the States). Of course, I didn't expect it to match the bugout weirdness of Possession, but it had something going on, one being a discussion about tabloid culture and capitalism. The plot has Sophie Marceau (a respected young photographer) marrying an upper-class man she respects more than loves, and fighting off the urge to sleep with a much younger working-class paparazzi photographer. The two central words of the film are "Fidélité" (of course) and "Verité", both of which are explored in the personal and in the realms of commerce, and how the latter undermines the former. Marceau's character's life is intruded upon numerous times, her most private moments made public, but she too is guilty of this, working for the same tabloid press as the young photographer (and for the Murdoch-like goon that may or may not be her true father). How media, and the mediaization of our personal lives, destroys us is one thing the film explores; how to escape is another matter. The film is apparently based on a novel by Madam de la Fayette, but I didn't know this going in. Zulawski also uses a lot of quotes from Auden throughout, and a brief glimpse of the John B. Root film "Principe de plaisir" on a TV. It bears watching again, as it was complex in its characters and plotting--a second viewing would reveal more of its structure, I believe.
June 22, 2003
Is This Thing Recording?
When I was a kid, one of my most valuable possessions was a Sears mono cassette recorder, on which friends and myself made hours and hours of ridiculous skits and other shenanigans. I thought the thrill of hearing your own voice would have been lost to the camcorder generation, but apparently PC owners with MusicMatch Jukebox software have something called "Mic in Track," the ability to hook a mike up and record straight to mp3. Possibly these people don't know that their efforts are also downloadable from Kazaa if they save everything in their shared folder. Ah-ha....
Check out the audio verite at Stark Effect - mic in track.
Discovered at Boing Boing
June 19, 2003
An Ode to Mupesa Solomon
Ever got one of those spams supposedly from some poor resident of an African dictatorship promising you a 10% cut of millions of dollars if you help them squirrel some money out of the country? Sure, we all have. You ever wonder who these people are? An intrepid Scot and his buddies abroad set out to scam the scammers. This is absolutely brilliant stuff, and worth the long reading time. Thanks to my friend Chris for passing this on.
June 18, 2003
It's all falling apart for
It's all falling apart for Blair now. But where's our equivalent? Why are we having secret meetings? Why do we have a press that still, still wants to believe that Bush wouldn't knowingly lie?
Cook gives first evidence to Iraq inquiry Tuesday June 17, 2003Former foreign secretary Robin Cook today dealt a series of devastating blows to the government's case for a war against Iraq, saying that it was "now clear that Saddam Hussein did not represent a 'clear and serious threat'".
Giving evidence to the foreign affairs select committee inquiry into the government's handling of the war - and the evidence used to back its case - Mr Cook cast doubt on both dossiers of evidence against the Iraqi leader, revealing that "Iraq was an appallingly difficult intelligence target to break".
The GOP are becoming very
The GOP are becoming very brazen about their evil aims. Grover Norquist is letting us all know that he and his cohorts desire to destroy our entire system for the rich. How can he be so bold? Because he assumes 1) the general public don't know and don't care and 2) there's nothing we can do about it. Will we prove him right?
Tipping the Republicans' Hand?
Norquist is, of course, assuming Bush will win reelection next year, and nothing in politics is as certain as he may think. But this is a plausible scenario, and his description of what Republicans will do with the opportunity is one that commands attention.He foresees Bush signing into law measures to abolish both the estate tax (or "death tax," as he calls it) and the capital gains tax. He also expects to see a statute that will make all savings accounts tax free. This is hardly speculative. Bush already has seen Congress pass a phaseout of estate taxes and a reduction in capital gains levies. The tax-free savings idea was floated by the Treasury last winter but temporarily set aside. With an increase in corporate deductions for capital investments and an end to the alternative minimum tax -- designed to catch those who would otherwise shelter all their income -- Norquist says the Bush era will eventually produce the conservatives' dream of a flat-rate income tax. When janitors and CEOs have to give the same share of their paychecks to Uncle Sam, Norquist foresees voters uniting in a continuing demand for ever-lower rates -- and no longer will Democrats be able to advocate tax hikes that target only the top brackets.
The consequence of this -- not spelled out in his essay but clearly in his mind -- is a massive rollback in federal revenue and what he regards as a desirable shrinkage of federal services and benefits. In short, the goal is a system of government wiped clean, on both the revenue and spending side, of almost a century's accumulation of social programs designed to provide a safety net beneath the private economy.
June 14, 2003
Here's the full text of
Here's the full text of the Bill Moyers speech given on June 4 at the Take Back America Conference (and mentioned below). I heard it yesterday on KPFK, and the transcript can't make up for hearing Moyers' voice, so stirring and resonant.
This is Your Story - The Progressive Story of America. Pass It On.
Once Upon a Time in China
Dir. Tsui Hark, 1991
Just borrowed a lot of DVDs off Jon, as Mr. Monkeypants is going to Japan for a few months. This is one of them, and this is the first time I've actually seen this movie, though I've read about it several times. Jet Li made a name for himself as martial arts master/folk hero Wong Fei-Hung, the same character Jackie Chan plays in Drunken Master 1 and 2. Bad guys exist of two levels: the low-down dirty gang, and the Imperialist pig dogs from both Britain and the U.S. (all played, as usual, by strange looking white men with beards). The film concerns itself a little with this uneasy period in Chinese history, when the West was making its presence known, and conning Chinese to come to America to find gold. Kung-fu can't beat the Western guns, but Wong does well by using an umbrella and other props. Mostly, though, there's oodles and oodles of absolutely top-darts fightin', all choreographed by Yuen Woo-Ping, not as much wire-work as I'd thought, and great camera work by Tsui Hark and whoever was cinematographer (the credits list six people). Culminates with a classic fight atop a set of bamboo ladders, ripped off most recently in that Musketeer flick.
Nice DVD, too. The film transfer is crisp, the print looks unworn, and the extras feature brief clips of classic footage featuring the earlier version of Wong Fei-Hung, played by Kwan Tak-Hing (who made something like 70 films as the character, still bustin' heads way into his 70s). The fighting in these originals look slow and stagey, but the historical factor makes it enjoyable. The DVD also comes with a nice booklet outlining the history of the character and some general kung-fu/Wu-shu facts. I hear there's a version that's six minutes longer, and a DVD that has English audio commentary, but this one is fine.
June 10, 2003
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I've noticed that people are
I've noticed that people are starting to follow up on the scary revelation in the New Yorker piece on Karl Rove, which said that Rove's ambitions lead beyond Bush to the destruction of the two-party system. There was a raging L.A. Times op-ed about it and now Bill Moyers has run with it.
Bill Moyers' "Presidential" Address by John NicholsDemocratic presidential candidates were handed a dream audience of 1,000 "ready-for-action" labor, civil rights, peace and economic justice campaigners at the Take Back America conference organized in Washington last week by the Campaign for America's Future. And the 2004 contenders grabbed for it, delivering some of the better speeches of a campaign that remains rhetorically -- and directionally -- challenged. But it was a non-candidate who won the hearts and minds of the crowd with a "Cross of Gold" speech for the 21st century.
Recalling the populism and old-school progressivism of the era in which William Jennings Bryan stirred the Democratic National Convention of 1896 to enter into the great struggle between privilege and democracy -- and to spontaneously nominate the young Nebraskan for president -- journalist and former presidential aide Bill Moyers delivered a call to arms against "government of, by and for the ruling corporate class."
Condemning "the unholy alliance between government and wealth" and the compassionate conservative spin that tries to make "the rape of America sound like a consensual date," Moyers charged that "rightwing wrecking crews" assembled by the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies were out to bankrupt government. Then, he said, they would privatize public services in order to enrich the corporate interests that fund campaigns and provide golden parachutes to pliable politicians. If unchecked, Moyers warned, the result of these machinations will be the dismantling of "every last brick of the social contract."
"I think this is a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America," said Moyers, as he called for the progressives gathered in Washington last week -- and for their allies across the United States -- to organize not merely in defense of social and economic justice but in order to preserve democracy itself. Paraphrasing the words of Abraham Lincoln as the 16th president rallied the nation to battle against slavery, Moyers declared, "Our nation can no more survive as half democracy and half oligarchy than it could survive half slave and half free."
June 03, 2003
Must See TV. By now
Must See TV. By now you've probably heard (or maybe not) of the marvelous dust-up between Al Franken and Bill "Excuse Me While I Unplug Your Commie Mic" O'Reilly live on C-SPAN. It all happened at the LA Book Expo and for once, Bill wasn't able to control what people heard. He fumes and gets stroppy and yells, but Franken tears him off a strip. Molly Ivins tries to calm 'em down. Anyway, you gotta see it, and it's archived here.
Book TV.org