Alejandro Jodorowsky received a standing ovation when he presented his 1989 film Santa Sangre at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival Friday night to a sold out audience. And that was before the movie screened. The legendary director of El Topo and Holy Mountain announced that a new film would be completed by the summer of 2004. That would make it his first in 15 years. Can't wait. Although Santa Sangre isn't quite the mindbender Holy Mountain is, it's still quite interesting, so I wonder if his new film will measure up. It supposedly has a spaghetti western feel to it and will be shot in Italy . . . already sounds promising. But . . . oh no! Marilyn Manson is a cast member! Well, he didn't ruin Lost Highway. But still, why do otherwise intelligent directors insist on putting him in their films? The Internet Movie Database says it's called Sons of El Topo, but Jodorowsky didn't mention he was making a sequel. "This is a film that will not be shown in theaters," he said. "I am a poet, not a robot."

Jodorowsky mentioned, before he exited the stage, that he can no longer watch Santa Sangre. His son Teo, who died recently, plays a character in the film. As the director tried to escape, fans carrying his comic books swarmed around him, begging for autographs. I knew he had a cult following, but the excitement he generated Friday night was beyond belief.

The first half of Santa Sangre is definitely better than the second half. First half: free associative narrative. In one scene a group of happy Down Syndrome kids snort cocaine, which would normally offend me (my brother has Down Syndrome) but somehow works here. Second half: conventional Italian horror film (it was produced by Dario Argento's brother) with a tidy psychological ending. Somewhat of an homage to Psycho.

I recommend anyone and everyone to see Holy Mountain if you can get your hands on it. Allen Klein, the former Beatles manager, owns the rights to the film and has been notoriously stingy with distribution.

There's lots of Jodorowsky information on the internet. Here's a few links:

Rain Taxi Interview
A Jodorowsky resource page
Mexperimental Cinema Essay

An article on the Los Angeles River, featuring poet Lewis Macadams and FoLAR, the Friends of the Los Angeles River.

I've been aware of Stephen Prina ever since I became a fan of the Red Krayola while still in college. So when giant billboards with his name in lights started popping up all over Hollywood a year ago, I was freaked out and slightly amused. Had he signed a deal with Death Row Records? Was he in some sort of competition with Angelyne for the drive-by market share? It was complete saturation, but pretty funny when you consider that he was advertising a show at the MAK Center's Schindler House. Last night I caught his performance of Christian Marclay's Graffiti Composition at the UCLA Hammer Museum. According to the Hammer website, Marclay created Graffiti by plastering blank musical notation paper in public spaces throughout Berlin in 1996, inviting passerby to compose a collaborative symphony. The sheets were later published as an edition of prints and performance copies to be interpreted and played by other musicians. Prina performed in the same museum courtyard where, only a few weeks ago, Lee Ronaldo and Marclay himself kicked out a free-noise traffic jam. Car horns and pedestrian voices filtered in from Wilshire Boulevard. Almost a Cagean experience, and welcome, since I'm too young to have ever seen Maestro Cage.

Here's the play-by-play. Prina waltzed onto a small stage that held an acoustic guitar with electronic pickups, a Yamaha Motif synthesizer, and an empty table. He wore a plaid suit-vest with matching pants, sported a neat John Waters-style moustache, and carried an L.L. Bean bag with his name clearly printed on the front. He unpacked a few tools from his bag of tricks, picked up his acoustic guitar, and, in a very workmanlike manner, played some chords. After a few minutes of abstraction, he deliberately broke a string. He "operated" on his guitar and returned to playing minimal compositions, accompanied by lyrics like "You should just/sing a song/about a dog/or something." He sang Toni (not Anthony) Braxton's hit "Unbreak My Heart" (actually not a bad song when sung by an anti-diva). Photographed his instruments and the audience. Asked for a beer (6 dollars!). Read a few pages from the synthesizer's technical manual, and placed duct tape over the words "Yamaha" and "Motif", which were written on the front of the keyboard. Banged on his guitar with mallets, creating a vibrating, chiming sound. Played a 12-bar scale, slowly then quickly, slowly then quickly. Announced that he would compensate those of us who could not attend the Aimee Mann-Rufus Wainwright concert going on across campus by performing Wainwright's song "One Man Guy". Performed "One Man Guy". Played his guitar with a portable tape recorder, which was playing, again, Toni Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart". It was all very conceptual (befitting Marclay's exhibition, which is filled with one-note installations like glass drumsticks, giant drumkits, vinyl record sculptures, and humorous collages made from a collection of obscure and famous album covers). None of this really measured up to Prina's collaborative work with Mayo Thompson and the Red Krayola. The highlight was when he said, "For those of you who can't read the inscription on my cufflinks, it is in Urdu, made in Nepal, and says 'U.S. Out of the Middle East', dedicated to Claes Oldenburg, and is one half of my 1992 piece 'Haberdashery' ".

Slavoj Zizek on the death of Charles R. Douglass, the inventor of canned laughter: "So then, would it not be a proper funeral for Charles R. Douglass if a set of sound-machines were to accompany his coffin, generating whispered laments, while his beloved surviving relatives enjoyed a hearty meal, or perhaps got some work done elsewhere? Far from finding it offensive, I think perhaps he would appreciate the recognition of such a burial" Will You Laugh for Me, Please?

During preparations for a dinner party yesterday I was able to catch bits and pieces of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (the beginning and ending, mainly) and the same few scenes from Rebel Without a Cause I always see: the knife fight at the planetarium, the chickie run, and Jimmy's papa in an apron. I should really sit down and watch the whole thing one of these days, even though I've heard every character has a daddy complex and it's almost too much to handle. But Sal Mineo sure does look amazing. Later, I caught Strangers on a Train and was thrilled to find that the carousel could be deadly. Every time I watch a Hitchcock film I'm reminded of the inspired Fordist nightmare he was never able to shoot: the camera slowly follows the construction of a car on a Detroit assembly line, from the very first bolt to the last touch of paint. We see robot arms and mechanized tools constuct the car from scratch. Finally, when the car is finished, the door is opened for the first time. A dead body falls out.

The horror, the horror. Potus and Flotus (or as they prefer to be called, the President and First Lady of the United States) recently went on safari in Africa, where they were shocked to discover that the elephant, sacred symbol of the Republican Party, really has no shame. "This is a White House that plans every trip down to the last detail and plots out every camera angle to make sure that Mr. Bush is always shown in the most presidential and flattering pose possible. So the horror of the White House advance team can only be imagined when Mr. Bush, Laura Bush and one of their twin daughters, Barbara, cameras trained on them as always, pulled up on a dusty drive in the game park in Botswana and encountered a male elephant determinedly but ultimately unsuccessfully trying to mate with a female." Samson Mulugeta of Newsday, who is among the small pool of court reporters allowed to accompany the president, took notes: "As the pool convulsed into giggles, Potus turned back and smiled sheepishly. Barbara threw her head back in embarrassment and covered her face with her hands. Then Potus threw his cap over his face to shield himself from the impending coitus (which never materialized). Flotus's expression was not visible from our angle." No doubt she was horrified. As Potus gave the elephants a relaxing massage, Flotus called out, "O.K. darling, that's enough." (drawn from In and Out of Africa, Bush Is His Usual Brisk Self, by Richard W. Stevenson, New York Times, Sunday, July 13, 2003)

So long Mr. Chumps. I'm travelling to the snowy north to visit my corporate relatives. They may not have internet access, so this blog will be inactive for a few days. Until the weekend . . .

The L.A. County Museum of Art has been screening a film series to coincide with its Modigliani exhibition. The Roaring Twenties in Paris: Silent Classics from the Cinémathèque française showcases nine avant-garde films from the interwar era. Friday night, Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher was preceded by a series of incredible shorts. Mon dieu, if Bald des quatz'z'arts, an anonymously shot documentary, is any indication of what a 1920s Paris party was like . . . hundreds of suited and well-coiffed men, costumed freaks in lobster-tailed suits, nautical-geared muscle-men carrying nude and bejewelled flappers . . . sailors, turtles, and mermen hoisting banners, screaming "L'Arte!" . . . 8 minutes of pure mosh-pit bacchanalia. Unbelievable. And I could have watched René Clair's 20 minute long Entr'acte (written by Francis Picabia and starring Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, and Man Ray) for hours. Balloon-headed dolls expand and collapse. A bearded ballerina dances on glass. Mourners chase a runaway hearse. When they finally catch up to its lost pinewood coffin a magician pops out, jack-in-the-box style, and makes his mourners vanish. Oh living-dead magician, won't you point your wand my way and suck me into your movie? Picabia wrote, "Imagine for a second that this film is a machine gun and that the music of Erik Satie which will accompany it resembles thunder. And see, over the city, this great light which resembles a conflagration!" Unfortunately, Satie's music did not accompany last night's screening. It thundered nonetheless. Clair's later La Tour is a quieter conflagration, an 11 minute meditation on the construction and consecration of the Eiffel Tower. Études de mouvements by Joris Ivens seems a precursor to Tarkovsky's traffic sequence in Solaris. But while Tarkovsky lets the camera linger, Ivens emphasizes speed and movement, both automotively and editorially. And Noël Renard, a minor filmmaker, dedicates Balançoires to "the infinite crowd." A couple of lovebirds romp around a bustling funfair where they get a taste of the afterlife from Fakir, the resident hypnotist. According to Claudine Kaufmann, who presented the films, Renard's reputation as minor is due to his blatant appropriation of avant-garde film techniques. I found his Christian dualism of light and dark, good and evil, heaven and hell unbearably facile. Eugéne Deslaw's city-symphony Montparnasse, by contrast, canvasses the panorama of Parisian life perfectly (or more precisely, the perfect Paris of imagination). After these beauties I found it hard to stomach Usher's petty gothicism. Even Buñuel, Epstein's assistant director, tried to disown it. Perhaps I should watch the film once more, in isolation.

Here's a little history lesson. I received a response from Albert Onello to my ephemeral but very sincere baseball questions of a few days ago. He writes:

In a very idiosyncratic and labyrinthine journey through blog-land I washed ashore 'Harlequin Knights' and was pleased to spend a few moments 'there'. Noticing a few questions in a recent post, and presuming you're asking these questions sincerely and would like some semblance of an 'answer' to them, I'll offer some response....
 
I think the shortest 9-inning major league game is 51 or 52 minutes, if my memory serves me correctly, in a game that took place I think back around 1920. It was probably the last game of the year and everybody just wanted to go home, so I'd guess things moved along rather briskly.

Why is the bullpen so distant from the dugout? 'Cause pitchers have to warm up during a game, and they can't be too close to the action, both for their safety and the safety of those playing the game. Some 'bullpens' are in fact 'on' the 'field of play', between the foul lines and the stands --- see Wrigley Field, for instance.

Shouldn't pitchers sit with their teammates? Well, in some precincts pitchers are not considered 'ballplayers', they're 'pitchers', and this is maintained only half-kiddingly.

Some relief pitchers do sit in the dugout early in the game, the presumption being that the starting pitcher will do his job and last at least a few innings, meaning that the relief pitcher won't have to be available to warm-up and thus doesn't need to be in the bullpen. Some pitchers would rather be 'out' in the bullpen, however, 'cause things are a little 'looser' out there and there's a chance to relax a bit more (than in the dugout, which is closer to the action and the watchful eyes of manager and coaches). This falls under the same principle as why certain students sit in the back of the class --- their actions are more easily camouflaged from authority figures.... So there's a little more freedom out in the bullpen. Former New York Yankees great Whitey Ford was known to set up a nice brunch buffet out in the bullpen, complete with table and checkered tablecloth --- you can't do that in the dugout. Also, there are *only pitchers in the bullpen, save for a bullpen coach, who was probably a pitcher in his playing days, and a bullpen catcher, who often isn't a playing member of the team, and, on the assumption that like kinds cleave to like kinds, the bullpen is a pitcher's domain.

Nosebleed seats? Well, this has to do with altitude and lack of oxygen, leading to 'nosebleed' with the 'higher up' seats in the stands. A little overstatement there, but you get the idea I'm sure.
 
As for 'road movies', what about 'The Last Detail'? That comes immediately to mind.

Anyway, good luck with your blog. I'll be watching....
 
Sincerely,
 
Albert Onello

Chris Burden has been making model bridges out of Mysto and Meccano Erector sets for several years now. I owned an Erector set once. I think I made an oil barge, destroyed it, and then returned to my Star Wars toys. Last night at his Bridges and Bullets show at the Gagosian gallery, among the Bev Hill party arters and the otherwise underdressed, several new Burden Bridges were unveiled: the Indo-China Bridge, the Tower of London Bridge, the 21' Truss Bridge, the Antique Bridge, and the big big behemoth, the 32 foot Curve Bridge (I'd like to get another B in there). You can find examples of the sort of bridges he builds here. And bullets? Yep, in the back room gold bullets rested in states of well-encased zen. Compared to the bridges (so large and skeletal, always threatening to collapse like a bunch of dominoes) the bullets seemed like puffs of air. I didn't even realize what they were at first . . . lipstick containers? Rumpelstiltskin's golden thimbles? One group of bullets (the round ones) were called Roundies. Another group of bullets (the pointed ones) were called Pointies. Very cute, which I suppose was the point. I liked the turn-of-the-century toy technology, the big boy artist playing with his toys, the unexpected beauty of the golden bullets. But then I read the press release. "Burden's particular interest in bridge construction reflects his fascination with man's basic urge to overcome barriers, to master the forces of nature, to speed travel, link communities, to widen horizons." Master the forces of nature? Speed travel? Was this written in the late 19th century? We laughed and laughed. It's possible that the language here is supposed to mirror early modernist discourse, but it's too naked and uncritical to be taken seriously.

And an essay on Kharms and the OBERIU group by Eugene Ostashevsky at New American Writing.

"Daniil Kharms was: a pipe-smoking St. Petersburg bachelor, an author of stories for children, a wearer of outlandish clothes and pseudonyms, a regular arrestee for alleged political offences including spying for a foreign power, and a member of OBERIU, the Union of Realist Art. He was also an absurdist poet and prose writer of the 20s, 30s and early 40s - perhaps the St Petersburg poet and prosist of his generation." from The Other St. Petersburg

I've been a fan of Kharms ever since I discovered his work a few years ago. His stories take me back to the days when I believed a litter of goblins lived beneath my bed and sent me covert messages at night.

More Daniil Kharms at danielcharms.com

Limetree reads Skunk Hour line for line. Having never read Lowell, I should admit I feel a bit unqualified to discuss in-depth the dispute currently raging between Ron, Brian, Kent and the others. I was always warned away from Lowell. Still, I'm following the debate like mad.

Funny, but in college at UC Santa Cruz the first book of poetry I was asked to read on a course syllabus was In the American Tree.

An Encounter

On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was on his way home.

And that's just about all there is to it.

--by Daniil Kharms, the Soviet absurdist, via The Scampton Veterinary Optician

Last night at Edison Field the Royals blanked the Angels and I had many questions. Why is the bullpen so distant from the dugout? Shouldn’t the pitchers sit with their teammates? What’s the record for the shortest nine-inning game? Why do they call them nosebleed seats? Fortunately on the way to the ballpark I found a chapbook by Juliana Spahr hidden in the backseat of my housemate’s car entitled Uneveness & The Blood Sonnets (you can read an early excerpt here, via How2. The chapbook version is much revised). Spahr is a poet and professor at the University of Hawaii, Manoa and, along with Jena Osman, edits the journal Chain. Uneveness charts Spahr's relocation to Hawaii with two friends and their consequent colonial jitters. They wonder whether they can in good faith live in a place with a history of colonialism. "Then they began to realize that it was hard to find a place that had not been colonized by someone at some time." Spahr eloquently recounts in her narrative how she managed to come to terms with her place in the island's history. Most importantly she continues to learn from other writers, including Hawaiian writers and post-colonial writers whom she had previously found irrelevant to her work. In time, living in Hawaii and reading all the available poetry (including poetry of the sovereignty movement) leads Spahr and her friends to re-evaluate the "radical" poetic practices they had been taught in graduate school: "It wasn't that they had to give up their love of the radical as defined as modernist techniques," she writes. "It was that they had to resee the radical, to see it as the continent not the mainland or as one space in a sea of islands. They began to see poetry as a series of contiguous systems, systems that didn't merge but that were beside one another."

Reading this, I couldn't help but think of the current contretemps between Ron Silliman and Brian Kim Stefans. And hear a proto-echo of the "Seventeenth Way" Kent Johnson mentions in his letter to Limetree. I don't wish to speak for Spahr, so I won't, but it seems to me that we should situate our writing practices historically. I don't see the current value in an us against them poetics, a School of Quietude with Lowell, et al versus a Post Avant with a who knows who. So maybe Ron is still operating under an historically bygone perspective . . . maybe it was a necessary position in the 1960s and 70s but is now no longer relevant. Like the radical who won't shake hands with the democrat. Maybe even Ron could learn something from Lowell, if only negatively. Once I watched D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back with my dad. When it came to the scene where Dylan mean-spiritedly disses Donovan in a guitar duel by singing a biting It's All Over Now Baby Blue, my dad became enraged. He couldn't understand why they weren't playing together. You know, jamming. I asked my dad, "Do you really think Donovan had anything to teach Bob Dylan?" My dad, a huge Dylan fan, who wouldn't be caught dead with a Donovan record, considered this for a minute, then said, "Yeah. He couldn't teach him very much, but he could teach him something."

I saw a (Lights!) new print of (Camera!) Godard's A Woman is a Woman (Action!). First time I've ever seen it, actually. Invention and vitality abide in the celluloid, but Anna Karina's second film with the director seems today like a market indicator of new wave cinema's dispersal: literary and filmic allusions are down five points, obtrusive scores are holding steady, abrupt editing is through the roof. How can I assess this film when both Spike Jonze and McG have been licking the ice off the Brechtian cake?

My mis-memory: Go to sleep, little father, the old world is behind you!

Greta Garbo, in the title role of Ernst Lubitsch's 1939 film Ninotchka: "Go to sleep little father. We want to be alone."

May '68 graffiti: "Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!"

After seeing Luis Buñuel's The Milky Way I feel I should second its inclusion on Ernesto's list of favorite road movies. Like Pasolini's Hawks and Sparrows, The Milky Way follows the misadventures and missed adventures of two holy fools (one old, one young) as they ramble down the open road, in this case the Way of St. James, a medieval traveler's route that guided pilgrims from all over northern Europe to Spain. The film rehearses two millenia worth of heresies, blasphemies, and sacrileges as the wanderers encounter such ex-communicados as the Marquis de Sade (played by Michel Piccoli), Archbishop Caranza de Toledo, and the devil himself. Those not raised Catholic may find it tiresome. Having gobbled the host a few times in my youth, I was ecstatic. Dueling cardinals say things like, "You've committed a semi-Pelagian error," Jesuits complain about the sins of the Jansenists, Jesus Christ starts to shave before Mary tells him he looks better with a beard. It was filmed in 1968 -- during one sequence, the young vagabond watches schoolgirls recite ecclesiastical law at the Institution Lamartine and daydreams that a group of 68ers is executing the pope; when his dream-shots are fired at the pontiff they startle members of the Lamartine audience: "Is there a shooting range around here?" someone asks. "No, I was just imagining the pope being executed." "Heh, you'll never live to see that day!" While not as funny as his later stabs at the bourgeoisie, it certainly split the opinions of his contemporaries. According to Buñuel (in his book My Last Sigh), Carlos Fuentes saw it as an anti-religious war movie. Julio Cortázar went so far as to suggest that the Vatican must have put up the money for it. Of Buñuel's later films it is perhaps both the most specific and sweeping in its satire: "Besides the situation itself and the authentic doctrinal dispute it evokes," he writes, "the film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready if need be to kill or die for it. The road traveled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology."

Many thanks to Rick Visser at Artrift for naming Harlequin Knights as the first "Best in Show" recipient. I've been so surprised at the response my blog's received after only a few weeks of existence. I only wish I had more time to spend here. Be sure to explore Artrift, a blog devoted to visual art and culture.

What better way to spend Independence Day than watching The Phantom of Liberty? "I'm sick of symmetry."

Kent Johnson responds to Kasey and Brian Kim Stefans on Ron Silliman's School of Quietude/Post-Avant binary: "I wonder how Ron would figure a Pessoa in his Manichean board game of poetry?"

For the moment I will recuse myself from the debate (although I like the idea of a "Seventeenth Way"). Coincidentally, just the other night it struck me that, aside from Samuel Pepys, Fernando Pessoa would have made the perfect blogger. Consider his brief diurnal entries from The Book of Disquiet (chosen almost at random):

2

I have to choose what I detest -- either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born.
Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.

89

The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.

97

The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world's facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.

Many of his entries are longer than this, of course, though no more than a few pages, and most can be read non-sequentially. And don't many bloggers adopt pseudonyms (or heteronyms, in Pessoanese) or blog on several blogs at once, under variant personalities or avatars?

Ray from Bellona Times points me to his take on The Straight Story.

Saw Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool, and a concert film from the 1970s, Willie Nelson's 4th of July Picnic.

Dracula, like previous Maddin films, was shot on an extremely low budget (according to the director, iris-shots were made by punching holes in black construction paper and placing them over the camera lenses) and looks exactly like a silent-era film. This can be somewhat precious, but the effect is so uncanny, the story so oneiric, that I was entirely bewitched. Dancers from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet (this is actually a filmed performance of a ballet, set to Mahler and thoroughly Maddinized) portray all your favorite characters -- Lucy, Minna, von Helsing, the Count . There are some longueurs (Dracula and Lucy pirouette endlessly in a graveyard amongst giant mushrooms) but it's one of this year's best.

I was really disappointed by Swimming Pool. I've enjoyed some of Ozon's previous films (Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Under the Sand, 8 Women) but this was like a bad re-make of a Claude Chabrol film. Charlotte Rampling was great as usual, but the film's late metamporphosis into a psychological thriller was uninspired. And Ozon's fascination with women is beginning to seem increasingly creepy. The puppetmaster strikes again.

Willie Nelson's 4th of July Picnic is an amazing concert film from the "cosmic cowboy" era of country music. There's almost a punk energy to these performances (it was filmed in 1977, I believe). Waylon Jennings croons, Leon Russell grows extremely drunk and incoherent as the night progresses, and Willie starts things off with a clear-throated rendition of "Whiskey River". This is outlaw country at its best.

Listening to Cat Power for the first time. She's really good! I always thought she was the indie-rock Jewel or something. Initially mis-heard the lyric "I'm not that hot new chick" on her song "He War" as "I'm not that Hollywood chick." I like my version better, but only because I live near Hollywood.

I finally found a copy of Kenneth Koch's novel The Red Robbins. My housemate lent me his copy a year and a half ago and I've been searching for my own, without any luck, ever since. The novel begins (without indentations, I haven't learned the html yet):

Jill ran her fingers down the tough golden beard of history. It was fine being there, but she wished there had been boards on the floor. Professor Flint was late; it was already three o'clock. "Chow down!" shouted the corporal, and all the men ran in to the eating quarters. "Very tropical weather, Sergeant," said "Dutch," an unusual man who had been hanging around the camp a lot recently. The cord snapped, having suddenly come undone, and the hawsers slipped out onto the blue, frothy waters of Lake Superior.

Joycie was swimming, as usual, without any clothes on. A big bird passed over the tub which had been covered with black tar by a recent accident. The planes sped by. Jules hugged Bonny, but Bonny wasn't very responsive and so Jules finally shrugged his trembling yellow shoulders and went back into the little hut where he began pulling apart the whitefish. "So this is Alaska," said Uncle Mutt -- "quite a layout you've got yourself here!" Lyn was afraid he would try to sleep with her because she didn't have any clothes on.

"Santa Claus" mounted the big black sweating horse panting with energy; "Santa Claus" was the nickname of this big criminal who rode off into the West . . .