The ultimate anti-MOJO live DVD!!

JANDEK - Glasgow Sunday the DVD

From the hand of Corwood Industries themself, I was informed:

"...3. We EXpect The DVD IN September, but it hAs beeN delAyed beFORe.." (Note: Case mismatches were part of the handwriting)

My order from Corwood Industries biggest advertiser, Forced Exposure Industries, is in the mail...you WILL be informed....

ZEN meditation

I was fortunate enough to get one of these spizzy Mp3 player Walkman things. Being the non-conformist that I am, I didn't get an iDop, I mean iPod 1. Because the are still too expensive 2. Because every other fuckstick has one 3. Because the i-Tunes software is the clunkiest piece of bullshit software out 4. Because you can't readily port your device into many other computer, the iTunes software only works per individual machine..etc..etc..Anyway I got this Zen thing coz the sound quality is better, it's got an fm radio and it records so I can use it as a tape recorder. The iDop might have a better design, but I'm a person who prefers FUNCTION over design, any day. Anyway, the notion of buying tape recorded songs off the Internerd to play on this machine doesn't gel too well with me, because ultimately, I like to have some tactile information in my hands like recording notes, lyrics, photos etc,, you know some sort of ARTIFACT. Basically I rip CD's off my own collection, and steal the odd track or twenty off SoulSeek and if I LOVE the music enough, I'll buy the CD and add it to my REAL collection..Anysway, I'm gunna post from time to time random ZEN JUKEBOX top 10s, see what ghosts pop outta the machine, like:

1. Public Image Limited - Religion2 - not as 'out there' nor 'extreme' as I thought. At least Lydon still sings like a punk BEFORE he went to jail.
2. Buffalo - Sunrise (Come my way) - Aussie re-issue label Aztec Records finally gave theses 'legendary' lost Aussie stoner rock classics the red-carpet treatment. This plods nicely. Sounds a bit like the Cosmic Psychos, Black Sabbath and maybe Blue Cheer. Only problem is the singer sounds kinda Christian.
3. Le Sun Ra and his Arkestra - medicine for a Nightmare - nice finger popping be-bop jazz from the late Mr.Ra, offa his 'Singles Collection' which I initially ignored thinking it was too straight. What a fucken idiot I was!
4. Chrome - All Data lost - The great thing about the Zen Vision is that it has enabled me to listen to music I haven't listened to in year. And it sounds fresher, even better now to my ears. Chrome must figger as one of the ultimate post-punk bands. I wonder if this stuff has dated better than the Butthole Surfers?
   
5. Jack Nitzsche - Marie - Off the Rhino-handmade '3 piece suite' CD thats outta print. This is really, really nice West-Coast symphonic pop or transcendent pop for better more learned words. Kinda like a rawer, more down to earth version of the Beach Boys.
   
6. Arik Einstein - Hayo Haya - this is something I stole off the Internerd. Israeli psychadelic pop, made sometime between the 6-Day and Yom Kippur war. It sounds Manfred Mann or something.
   
7. John Lennon - Nobody told me - I remember this being a MASSIVE posthumous hit in the early 80s. The guitar sound reminded me of all those British power-pop bands of the time, esp. The Pretenders, did they rip him off?
8. Leonard Cohen - Night comes On - This is off one of those budget Sony 'the essential' series. Sounds like something he did in the 80s. Great lyrics as always, but next...
9. Derrick May - Wiggin (the remix) - Detroit tegno from the late 80s. Sounds a bit dated, but the thing I like about this stuff is the almost naive approach these guys had to using shitty 80s Roland and Korg synth instruments.
   
10. Dragonforce - Through the fire and the flames - ultra-nerd neo-80s Dungeon & Dragons metal. Like Iron Maiden played at 45. Designed to drive you totally meshiger and make you laugh so hard you'll spray beer from nose (thx Ian Jane of DVDManiacs for that line!)
    

The Velvets Influence

Gerard Malanga in the E.P.I

..while John Cale looks on..??!!

I just watched Mario Bava's rare psychedelic/psychological/(bi)sex? comedy FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT, released by Italian-cult DVD label Raro, who also released that fantastic Velvet Underground/Vinyl DVD. Blog/Black2Comm maestro Chris Stigliano has a great theory about the 'Velvets Influence' on pretty much everything thats' worthy in modern rock music from the Stones to Alice Cooper, New Yawk ponk, heavy metal, Krautrock - EVERYTHING (except maybe hiphop and disco, though there have been acid-house/mash-up covers of HEROIN and VENUS IN FURS, and Edan the white-rapper has used scungy neo-Velvets type sample in his blunted rap, and you could argue 'Waiting for my man' and 'white light/whiteheat' as being floor numbers, and 'The Murder Mystery' and 'All tommorows parties' thump as beinf rap-like, but hey, didn't Lou brag about being 'The Original Rapper' in the 80s.!@#$!#$)..
Anyway it's interesting to note amongst cult-cinema aficionados that MARIO BAVA can be likened to the Velvet Underground in terms of his own influence on the modern-cult type cinema, especially all the Italian giallos, splatter horror films, and well beyond, made even more pertinent as Bava worked in may different genres (tho' not sure he did a Western, but I may be wrong..ANYWAY Tim Lucas of the VideoWatchdog has recently written a 10,000page BIBLE on Mario Bava, so everything will no doubt be explained there..But after watching FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT, the (indiriect) VELVET UNDERGROUND INFLUENCE (or WARHOL for that matter) on BAVA (who might be perceived as the Velvet Underground of clut-cinema no less!!!_) could not be ignored to these eyes, especially in the scene where they go to that bar for unusual people, complete with an all-female garage band noodling away in the background! Trust me, you'll NEVER wanna look at that terrible I SHOT ADNY WARHOL flick after seeing this!

Frisky in Frisco.

You reckon they could get Brad Pitt for the Charra-wood remake?

I’m repeating myself here, but I need to, to make this point. When it comes to the giallo, popular thinking immediately places Argento-Bava at the top of the pile, in much the same way the punk-think pleb puts the Velvet Underground or Stooges at the top of the musical pile. And sure these are MASSIVE cannons to fill, but like any well developed innerlectyool mind with a capacity beyond that of an inner-city-sharehouse-groopthink tank, there are just as valid, inspiring and FUN works to found outside the gucheral box. In the case of the giallo

The big problem with Fulci’s work is that too much of it is championed for its barf-bag extremist nature such as films ZOMBI2, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE BEYOND and NEW YORK RIPPER. As a result he has quite a big following amongst genetic-defective grunge-core self-flagellators and people who like watching ‘extreme shit cinema’. Still, Fulci’s cinematic career as a whole, rounds out as one of the most interesting in the Euro-cult world. It was tragedy in his personal life that would effect his work from the 70s on, but it would help create one of the most interesting and mind-bending career paths of any auteur in the modern-cinemah era this side of Roman Polanski. And that’s the big kicker, the fact that Fulci still hasn’t been given the ‘high brow’ kudos as a major European ‘auteur’.

But as in all GREAT ART time is the penultimate judge, and the clock and cultural payback has been very kind to the unsung ‘maestro’. Which leads me to my next ‘non Bava-Argento’ giallo you need to see…

NUMERO QUATRO : ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER (Una sull'altra, 1969)

Made at the arse-end of the swinging 60s, ‘One on top of the other’ doesn’t play like a ‘by the rules’ giallo. Sure there are black gloves and babes in there, but not much splatter and slashing for all you sick cnuts. In fact it plays more like a rip-off-type noir ala DOUBLE INDEMNITY, albeit with a trippy and swinging 60s edge. Popular Euro leading man Jean Sorrel plays George Demurrier (said De-moori-yay), a rich, but dodgy doctor based in a very frisky-Frisco, who has a nagging asthmatic wife and is having an affair on the side with a sexy photographer called Martha. So one night after a hot shtoop, wife happens to wind up dead, but to complicate matters she has left him a massive insurance payout. So all fingers are pointed in one direction…Then while trying to relax in an insanely fantastic strip joint, he becomes entranced by the mysterious stripper Monica Weston, played by the insanely hot Marisa Mell

(yep DANGER:DIABOLIKS’ partner in crime and quality time!), who just looks a little bit like his ex-wife..

Notice the black glove?

Can George prove his innocence? And who exactly ARE all these hot ladies screwing him and his mind? While it may not be a flat out giallo, Fulci’s ONE ON TOP OF THE OTHER must rate as one of the seminal (literally, figuratively, and maybe physically for some!) ‘Erotic thrillers’ of the mod-era. Tapping into the late swinging-60s vibe, replete with a very burlesque Jazz-score, lotsa sexy-psych visuals and oodles and oodles of - as Joe Bob Briggs would say – garbonzas, ONE OPN TOP OF THE OTHER is top-shelf, classy cult-trash. But it’s Fulci’s clever twisty plot, his usage oh-so-fine visuals including the odd-jump cut, split-screens and some subtle rear-projections, that make this film more than the some of its parts. And despite some of the narky plot holes and clunky expositions, there is no doubt that Fulci was a fine narrative craftsman, especially in the last twenty minutes, where film gets kinda dark, without someone having to vomit up their entrails or get their eyeballs gouged out, or something similarly disgusting. Many Fulci experts rate the giallo he made after this one LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN – as his best, but I disagree. ONE ON TOP moves better and has a more ridiculous, but no less SATISFYING conclusion, and prolly works better than LIZARD as a whole. In many ways, the film can be seen as a precursor to that very popular American giallo of the 90s’ (also set in San Fran) BASIC INSTINCT, but really, would you rate Sharon Stone anywhere near Marissa Mell?

Soon to be used as an album cover by some shitty nu-punque act.

If you wanna see this film and can’t wait for the Anchor Bay Special Edition that was meant to appear late last year/early this year, you can buy a bootleg from Luminous Film Werks on the Internerd. It’s basically a video copy ported onto a DVD-R. But this film DESERVES the red-carpet treatment pretty soon…

Giallo! Giallo! This aint the film called 'Vertigo'!

The giallo gloved hand of SLASH!!!!

These days I’m pretty big-time into that Italian-pulp-cinema genre from the late 60s and 70s called the giallo (and NOT the trendy womens' shoe-store chain here in Melbourne!) Personally, in my own head and no-one else's, I reckon it’s the most happening sorta obscure film-genre that the pomo-homos haven’t mined yet. I still don’t know why, since the giallo’s have plenty of themes ready-made for today’s trendies, like class-politics, repression, lesbianism and other kinks, cuckold men, sex, murder, rich people, trendy fashion and funky music, etc..etc..etc…For better or for worse the giallos paved the way for that Americanos genre the ‘slasher’ movie. In their own day, the gialli were pretty much the Italianos ripping off Hitchcock, although they weren’t uppity Poms, so they would show you more titties, more blood, and more sunny skies. The word giallo literally means yellow, and the genre named after cheap pulp-lit crime fiction novels that incidentally had yellow covers. There might be some other significant, deeper, meaning but I’ll leave that for the psych-minors. Oh and the killers generally wear black gloves and funny hats.

Part of my own innarest in the giallo stems from my love of Brian DePalma’s films, sexy Italian women, and probably not much else. Aficionados will automatically point you to the two kings of the giallo genre – Mario Bava and Dario Argento – and their films: Deep Red, Tenebre, Sleepless, The girls who knew too much, Blood & Black Lace and Twitch of the Death Nerve – while all landmark/dogma examples of the genre, aren’t always the best places to start (well in my opinion, anyway). So I’ve decided to pick out of my nose, the FIVE BEST NON-BAVA-ARGENTO gialli that are worth watching, starting with the best-early-De-Palma-movie-De-Palma-never made:

NUMERO-CINQUE: THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS.

While many more overweight fans of the giallo genre don’t rate this film, I do. Within 5 minutes all the trademarks of the genre are established: gloves, girls, blood and boobs, the opening scene would be ripped off hook-line-and-stinker by De Palma is his sorta-legendary DRESSED TO KILL. It’s got an inherently stupid premise, whereby our heroine decides to move into an apartment block where two previous hot-chicks were slashered, just so the slasherer can attempt to slash her and give us a story. Another good thing about this film, we are introduced to the Numero-Uno sex-goddess of the genre in sexy-Algerian-Italian actress Edwidge Fenech. We immediately get to see her Edwidges and a few other things. Remember the name, as she’s the boss in many of the best non-Argento-Bava gialli.

The Edwidge sangwich!

ANOTHER feature of the giallo is the use of funky-op-art type architecture and visuals. The giallo while being partly pomo-rippoff also prided itself on its modernisma. So you got lots of pan-global settings, and lots of moderne-60s-70s architecture and settings. And also lots of drugs. But that’s another story…

This isn't the Starship Enterprise, nor one of those Yuppy-disco-bars

So in short, THE CASE OF THE BLOOD IRIS, while not delving deep into the mysteries of the human soul and condition, is a good place to start. Sure it aint got all the production values of some of the better films, but it’s got a lot of the basics of what the genre is all about. There’s only one problem though, the DVD is only available as part of the AnchorBay ‘Giallo Collection’ boxset. Bummer!

The Jaki Leibzeit Drum Clinic

Rockin out wit Jaki

Life has been getting in the way of this Blog thing of late. Too many family duties, project thingoes, guitar fiddlings, ganjing, werking my gjerkin, and watching some funky Gialli has detracted somewhat. I just watched bits and pieces of the CAN DVD, mainly the CAN FREE CONCERT from the early 70s. One thing is quite clear early on in it - geez who wouldn't want Jaki Leibzeit to drum in their band? A gun, maestro, one of the wildest, loosest and tightest drummerz of all-time, I might even pip him over Ginger Baker or some other twats (that bloke from ROYDE?)...But DON'T DESPAIR! Coming up I have more fantastic toilet-break reading like : My 5 favourite non-Leone Spaghetti Westerns and non-Argento/Bava Giallos. Tasmanian/Melbourne band Keith's Yard: Aussie kids, are Weetbix Kids. Something possibly worthwhile on Vincent Nathali's kinda-whatever-sorta Cybperpunk flick CYPHER, a guided static virtual tour of my house, including shots of Sid my-pet Wolf-Spider, the skank Kubrick tunnel, and my sugar-shitsharp Tasmanian Oak floorboards from the 60s! Who are the important new American auteurs, and does anyone give a shit when Xbox 360 and Playstation3 are on the horizon? Why people ignore contemporary Australian culture (coz its SHIT and run by elitist snobs who have never worked an honest day, nor made an honest BUCK in their lives!) and some other shit I can pluck outta absolutely, positively nowhere, but might be of interest to YEW> Breaker>>Breaker 10-4...................................................................................@#$>...........!

LEGENDS of Country/blues guitar

Don't mess with Rev. Gary Davis - he's a religious man, you know.

Its interesting in these multi-media Internerd days that the best way to listen to music is to actually watch it. Many an innerlectyool goes on and on and on and on and on about the 'authenticity' of music like it's some sort of badge of honour to validate the totally shithouse, trendy, annoying and ultimately DATED music some of them blab on about. All you have to do is look at the LAMERS that write for Salon or Slate or the Villgae Voice or CMJ journal, or...., there are thousands of them out there (me too, but I'm too low-brow and lack diction) with sqaure glasses or fat arses getting paid good salaries to write about some fucking CUCK post-structuralist NOTHING treatise on the Fiery Furnaces or the Curried Arshole Party or the Ex or ...., it's all too easy, and I'm ranting.

ANYSWAYS, some of the best shit you can listen to is on DVD, especially now that is delivers bootiful STEREO or even better DOLBY DIGITAL 5.1 or even DTS into your lounge room (if you can afford it).. But one thing the digital age does nicely is polish up the raw and the scungy - like BOOTLEGS, raw FAN RECORDINGS or heck, even old 50s or 60s 'documentary' type recording - like the beauties that appear on this DVD I borrowed from the public library 'LEGENDS OF COUNTRY BLUES GUITAR VOL.2 (Vestapol/Rounder)..Anyway, this DVD is the best ART MOVIE I've seen this year, no doubt. Raw footage taken in some of these blokes' houses or trailers, in fact in one scene you can hear the phone ringing in the background! Dunno how to describe it, but it really puts the 'meaning' of the whole Blues thing into perspective. These were just regular blokes, playing guitar in their own inimitable way - no pretence - and what seem quite clear as the origins of what the snobs call 'outsider' art, but ultimately reps. the DEMOCRITASATION of art in it's purest sense. Sure, we have that now with the fuggen GLOBAL IDOL reality-TV-George-Orwell-'60-minutes-of-HATE'-shite-no-talnet-shows, but this blues stuff was something else. Watch it, listen to it - the pure, raw, fluid, complex playing - and have yr mind blown in chunks. More observations and thoughts to come...

NICO enrico

NICO: CHELSEA GIRL (Polydor)

I've had this digitalised on my Zen thing for the past week or so. An intensely beautiful and creative album, you had Nico having some of the best songwriters of her generation, if not all time ply their skills here: Reed, Dylan, Hardin, Cale maybe, and some might say Jackson Browne, but it aint forcken me unless I'm a total ignoramus or a fan of agit-plop (enlighten me otherwise if you could be frucked.) It could easily be pegged as a lost Velvets album, and Siren released that Velvets boxset in the early 90s that even chucked some track on it. Cale, Reed AND Morrison all play on it. ALL great stuff, a no brainer. As a youngerish adult I remember reading some bio on her, I can't remember the name exactly, but it was a total trag-comedy, the funniest part being her love affair with an over-weight biker in Western Australia only known as skvosher! Like Ed Kuepper, Brian Eno and a few others, many people are put off by Nico's monochromatic, Teutonic voice. It's really not that bad compared to say 95% of those indie-shmindie gelechters that get lots of press in the Village Voice and other yuppie lifetsyle rags.

In recent times I've been becoming a more hoity-toity pretentious cunt, epseically in regards to cinema, and got wind of the French drekteur Phillip Garrel, who I think had an affair with Nico, and she DEFINITELY became his muse, even to this day, espesh in one of his more recent flickers, SAUVAGE INNOCENCE.

Benchmark pose/attitude for inner-city boho chicks

Anyway her work with Garrel despite being quite arty, poetic, surreal and torpid, is also a good snapshot of where Nico was at, at that point in her life, which is the gothic, anorexic, junkie look, that incredibly is quite popular amongst some more glamorous sub-cultures of the wealthy mentally ill.

The Inner Scar - geddit?

I am digressing here. LA CICARICE INTERIEURE is the film for which the Nico album DESERT SHORE was the soundtrack, pardon my poor positioning of nouns. For those that haven't heard DESERT SHORE, it's a very folky, Celtic-Gallic, ancient sounding record, like much of the freaky folky shit going at the time. Getting back to CHELSEA GIRLS, well you have one of the truly genre busting freaky-folk indie-shmindie records of all-time right there and then. So for you freak-folk fuckers, get DESERT SHORE and CHELSEA GIRL and twiddle the night away. Getting back to filmic studies...

Nico: A good ad for heroin useage VS.

Emily, who came out of the grave (see Emilio Miraglia killer DVD boxset booty!)

So Nico wasn't in a good way, but she made these avant-garde art-films that have massive, innerlectyool clout amongst the hoity toities and the toitie hoities , and made some of the best freak-folk, post-Velvets third-album muzak of the time. But really it was Reed practicing for BERLIN and the like. So there you have it to chew on.

Hacker Art - was gonna call it KeyGen Soundtracks

I've been cucking around on this InterNerd thing since day one, nearly, which makes me a pretty TRAGIC nosepicker. One of the things that appealed to me about compyouters as a kid, was this concept of replicating information. It really appealed to my anachronistic sensibilities, but the coolest thing about the computer shmegaggie was that you can get shit for FREE. And valuable shit too, like games or editing programs or utilities. I mean sure it renders a society useless if people put the hard yakka in and get no kudos, but I don't see the software industry keeling over YET, and it's been, what, nearly 30 years now???

ANYWAYS, I remember, back in the day, when I was a confused shmendrick trying to find my way around a dull Compyouter Degree, full of the most BORING deadshits from the suburbs (well 90% worth anyway!) I found that, well these boring deadshits with the straightest, most self-righteous, Born Again existences were actually the biggest kvetch GUNNEFS (Smalltime thieves). Yep Jeff from Montrose and Dan from Fountain Gate would love to escape their menopaused wives to steal and swap the latest games from America, or word-processors or porno slide-shows or whatever software they could copy for free.. OK, I've digressed a bit here, but going back..

I remember meeting this dude on a Bulletin Board really late one night who posed as Vanien Franken from the Damned (even though he didn't know ANY of their music, he was into Rick Astley, Pet Shop Boys, New Order and Devine!?!@!) after being blasted and reading some article on 'cyberpunks' and how all these computer programmers and geniuses were apparently MASSIVE acid heads and whatnot. I guess San Franciso is along way from suburban Melbourne. Anyway this dude became my drug dealer(and then mysteriously DISAPPEARED!), but he also had a massive collection of really shit-hot pirated games from the UK on his Amiga super-dooper-trooper-compyouter:

The Amiga - the Brian Eno of computers


The Amiga was renowned for it's superior graphics and sound capabilities, and was about 10 years ahead of nearly any other computer at the time (alot of early electro-techno d00dz used these to compose with). Many of the Crackers who pirated or cracked the copy-protection on the software would brag about their feats by posting a ANSI (American National Stds Institute) Graphics 'Tag' or a VGA (Video Graphics Adaptor) trailer (like in a moofie) art before each game, complete with techno muzak. Most of the music was of a lo-fi MIDI file type of techno, some slightly squelchy almost acid, but unfortunately most of the geeks were geeks and liked the sorta irritating happy-pappy techno pop of the late 80s. It's interesting as during the 90s the music veered closer into the 'Ardcore sorta rave shit, and the darker core stuff. The SERIAL KEYLER stuff above has a daggy sorta Nin Inch Nails type industrial-goth-techno, which many of the cracker geeks would get into.
Twk - Euro elctro- tech diff-diff massive!

The TWK KeyGen(erator), plays a ditsy Euro-electro sort of 'anthem, track thru the chintziest MIDI, but hey, the fucker will definitely get yr PowerArchiver working!

There's a whole WORLD in invisible art that hackers create, and that in this Computer Fuckhead is completely over-looked and shunted. I guess the closest companion is all that Graffiti and these days stencil Art that is fantastic when it's brilliant, but TERRIBLE coz every fucken spastic does it. But the computer art goes more-or-less ignored, but I know some fucken trendy fuckhead out there will go out and wave his dick around as if he discovered it, or some under-sexed Librarian with a $100K art-administrator job will no doubt start hyping this thing (if it hasn't already been done, then , aarr get fucked!)..(instant WIRE, there's a BOOK on it, see link below!)

Here are some sorta interesting links to some of this Computer Hacker art, there are music files, but I'm too fucken lazy to find a program that will play 'em.

ANSI Art


DemonScene

ANSI whatever shit

Oh fuck, I'm tired and gotta go to bed, just look at Wikpedia's bullshit or apparently there was a whole magilla on it in America already. Sheeit!

Olga Erotica

Olga's Girls (Synapse Films) - So I finally get to see this Lesbo-Druggo-psychedelic 'shocker', that is really a very clever silent movie framed around the moral pretext that it's some sort of documentary expose on the ugly underworld of female prostitution, narcotic drug use, organized crime and bitch fights! There's plenty of fine, real women, getting their gear off, displaying the 2006 range of Victoria's Secret underwear and accessories, shooting smack, fondling eat other, smoking pot, and for all you kinko-sicko-Industrial nipple piercers - TORTURE! I'd like to go into more detail, but my bloomin' compyouta DVD-R won't play for me to take some delicious screen shots. The film exposes all the taboos of the time, heavy drug use, lesbianism, white slavery, prostitution, power struggles, the evil tentacles of organised crime, torture, humiliation, brain washing, mind control, etc..etc! It's alot of fun, with a great soundtrack that veers from Bambi-in-the-woods type classical music, Ravel almost, to swinging early-Mod guitar shit via the Phil Upchurch Combo's 'You can't sit down'. Audrey Campbell who plays the notorious Olga, looks at times really harsh and really foxy, esp. in a great seduction scene. Director Joseph P Mawra directs his actors in a Bresson-like minimalism and precision, framing and lighting the film beautifully and maximising the kinky eroticism the girls, while playing it straight to enable it to keep it's mockumentary edge and conflicted moralism. Mawra was also responsible for the legendary sleazer 'Shanty Tramp', of which late Geelong garage-punk combo The Dirty Lovers made a classic single about. 'Olga's Girls' is pure early 60s grindhouse sleaze, sure it drag in parts, but there's enough raunch, eye candy and flat out sleazy nutiness to keep the biggest Inner-City-slob more than satisfied and amused.

Le Mepris (Contempt) 1963

Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, based on the Novel Contempt by Alberto Moravia

'Contempt' is one of those films I keep re-watching, simply because it's so good to look at, and so sad and true. It appeals to my feelings about the people that inhabit the modern world and love and ambition - all the crap that makes everything work whether we like it or not, or deny it otherwise with material ostentationism, familial dogma or just simple Born-again shitheadedness. 'Contempt' was made long before I was a twinge in my dad's pants or a quiver in my mum's panties. To me, 'Contempt' really defines that term 'French New-Wave' when you try to explain what all that shit means. For one, 'Contempt' is one of the most 'modern' looking films I have ever seen, except for maybe 'Blade Runner' and most of Stanley Kubrick's and Cronenberg's films. I still don't 'get' Wong Kar Wai, but watching 'Contempt' again for about the 23rd time, I don't need to. He's just a wanky po-mo version of Godard for the ho-mo culture mafia. But as my film watching has increased somewhat, and I can now start to name-drop and one-up with the biggest fucking film-geek nosepicker, 'Contempt' for me begins to take on that architectural minimal fillum aesthetic that Italy's Antonioni did so well in 'L'Aventura', 'L'Eclisse' and 'The Passenger' doubled up with Coutards super-shit-sharp cinematography.

So in that context, the title 'new wave' fits like a new pair of socks. Except for maybe the stupid top hat that the main character Paul Javal (Michel Picoli) wears, the whole style of 'Contempt' feels like any fucken page out of Vogue or Harpers - 'Contempt' is the sort of creative endeavor that 'defines' fashion and crap like that. OK, aesthetics and stylistics aside 'Contempt' is still a great piece of movie work, and IMHO the best Jean-Luc Godard film I've seen, except for 'Masculin/Feminin'. Basically 'Contempt' is about the breakdown of a marriage, the price you pay for creative, and more important 'personal' compromise, as well as other things like the nature of drama and conflict and all that fucken messy shit that causes suffering and pain and possibly redemption.

It's the stuff that people who have the guts, bust their souls over in order to create art, and possibly leave their mark with (but really art is an indulgence many can't afford to have, especially when at the end there is DEATH).

'Contempt' starts off with this weird psychedelic and sublime shot of Brigitte Bardot's ass with all these trippy colour filter stuff to 'art' it up a bit. She's lying in bed and asking her husband Paul (Michel Picoloi) what he thinks is beautiful about her.

A well framed Tinto Brass..

Quite literally fucken everything externally about her is (beautiful), it's just the internals that get so fucken tricky, as the story will reveal. Paul is a screenwriter, who has been commissioned to write a movie for American producer Jermey Prokosh (played by Jack Palance). The film he is writing is a remake of Homer's 'The Odyssey', but Prokosh wants to make it sexy and 'contemporary' or whatever. The guy hired to make this film is German director Fritz Lang who plays himself - both Lang and 'Paul' have to contend with the compromises that Prokosh demands, since quite basically he's paying for the shit. Added to this is Prokosh's power/sex/mind games that he plays on Paul's sexy wife Camille (Brigette Bardot), and you have major emotional conflict happening.

When Paul and Camille return to their luxury apartment later that day, we have a whole half hour of one of the greatest and most full-on emotional male-female sexual/political scenes ever seen ever in the motion picture history. To deny the brilliance of this passage is to deny the fact that you
have a brain, it is simply that good.

In the mood for a po-mo ripoff?

With his marriage and love life completely fucked, Paul has little choice but to follow his heart with all he has left - his writing. This follows with a emotional vomitus eruptus par excellence that Paul has with Prokosh, venting his 'Contempt' toward the compromises he has to make in order to get his vision or passion out into the world. Basically no one gives a fuck and he's left in the end with pretty much nothing. 'Contempt' is heavy stuff, but it moves along at such a fluid and dreamlike state, that it takes you until the end of the film for you to realise the emotional wallop this film has just hit you with. Throughout the film there is this deeply malancholic and grande classical music motif, which would be used by Martin Scorsese in his equally excellent film 'Casino'.

From the beginning we are aware of the sexual/emotional potency of Camille, something she wields like a cocked and loaded gun. The simplicity of the power she uses so effectively undermine Paul's values and dreams and aspirations is scary to say the least, but that is just the nature of the beast. Paul is no angel, and his treatment of Camille, especially during their drawn out fight is both misogynist and righteous, some may beg to differ, but ultimately he's left impotent and scared. But there is more to 'Contempt' than just the whole love/hate sorta thing. Just as important is the whole exploration of the creative process, and the compromises and basic mind fuck that goes with it.

'Contempt' is a fucking great film that hit me on a really personal level. It left me feeling instensely inspired.

NOTE: The CRITERION DVD is a simple no-brainer purchase for the absolute best version of this film yr gonna see. It's prolly even better than anything you'll see at yr local Cinemateque. The restoration makes the film look even more modern, slick and timeless, and EVEN BETTER than anything Wong Kong has ripped off. There's extras and other shit, though I reckon the soundtrack coulda been jizzed up a bit more. Image quality, espesh colours are so good, you'll cry.

IGGY POP - New Values (arista/BMG)

When I was a wee shnook, my brother useta harass me with Iggy Pop. He'd sing me songs like 'Im bored', tell me the guy was a Nazi sypathiser and tell me horror stories about a concert he did where he saw some alcoholic scumbag cold-cock some heroin addict sacumbags or vice versa. And Iggy fans would always be an interesting lot. You'd get the working-class Yobbo Iggy fans that would swear by a steady diet of Stooges RawPower and Funhouse. You'd have the University femmo chick fans that would tell you how 'beautiful' Iggy is physically, even though he always looked like a skinny runt with muscles to me. Then you'd have, in my town anyway, the heroin addict art-fuck fans that went to private schools, did art-school, read gay French literature and hung out with artists that paint or take photos, or guys that play in bands that tour Berlin. Which gets me to this record NEW VALUES. Straight out, I think this is Iggy's BEST solo album, full stop. Forget LUST FOR LIFE, leave that to the dreckos that hang out at Cherry Bar and try to act intelligent and sophisticated. The IDIOT is too gothic and New-Wavey and cluttered for my tastes, and after that you're led up the garden path to some BLAH BLAH BLAH and ar fuck it, I reckon he didn't make a half listenable rec until AVENUE D, which I think is a great contemporary AOR album. The most interesting thing on NEW VALUES is Iggy's intelligence, epsesh in the lyrics. Supposedly smart people never take Ig's lyrics seriously. They always put him down to 'teen suburban angst' or some shit, he's never taken as a lyricist who can talk like, you know, a mentsch. In many ways NEW VALUES finds the Ig finding his own feet and becoming a mentsch. Free of all the glitter and gloss of the Bowie influence, the Ig confronts his banal mid-Western existence to evolve from teen suburban angst to adult-suburban angst. If teen angst is all about everything being fucked, well then adult angst is about self improvement, despite everything being fucked. Self-improvement is the key to this record, and for most of it, the core of Iggy's solo career. From the opener TELL ME A STORY, Ig comes out singing about the trials and tribulations of the average American shmuck, until he proudly proclaims on NEW VALUES - 'I'm healthy as a horse'. As a result, Ig has made the most PUNK of his records since the Stooges. NEW VALUES takes the piss outta the whole middle-class self-improvement shtick at least 30 years before barachlo like Hank Rollins or the Fight Club, or every neu-punk band that gets their good-looking faces on the TV these days. GIRLS is a classic, a proud anthem for heterosexuality, that if sung these days would be laughed at. Thing is, Ig aint joking here, even if he sounds like it, you can't do that these days. And the playing on this track is fucking BRILLIANT. That's another great thing about this album, and that makes it ever more punk, it's the playing through the whole fucken thing. It's all fantastic. Classy, sophisticated, at times relaxed and edgy rock n' roll played by a gun band led by RAW POWER maestro JAMES WILLIAMSON, Stooges/Detroit ring-in SCOTT THURSTON, JACKIE CLARK bass, and Kraut-precision via drummer KLAUS KRUGER. The record holds up as well as similar punk records of the time, in fact I reckon this baby has aged better than BLANK GENERATION, another sophisto-ramantico-street-hassle type record from that period. In many ways NEW VALUES plays like the best late-70s Rolling Stones album that never was. You can't go wrong with tracks like FIVE FOOT ONE, CURIOSITY, BILLY IS A RUNAWAY and the anthem I'M BORED. Really there's no duds on this album, even the extras on the CD aren't bad. I mean, could you ever imagine the Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the STORKES, I mean STROKES singing 'I wish life could be Swedish Magazines'? Fuck no.

First past the post

I had my own personal Blog web diary, gulcha repository 6 years ago, in fact I started around the same time as I start this - Easter/Passover. I had some friends who became InterNerd millionaires for 3 days hype me to this site called the StileProject, which was a mixture between Howard Stern, Cannibal Holocuast and Deep Throat the movie. It was hilarious, and had chutzpah. I thought the guy Stile who created it was older than he was (apparently only 21 or something at the time), so it turned out the 'audience' I was mingling with were late teen early 20 somethings high on nu-metal, porn and drugs. My site, while trying to gain a more 'mature' aesthetic, got many of these gimps clicking through (though mainly to download the free pr0n I had on offer). Regarldess, maybe one or two of them would been turned on to music by Iggy Pop or films by Bresson, or a comic by Charles Burns - anything to get 'em away from Limp Bizkit or a McG movie or Paris Hiltons lack of any sex appeal? As I get older and have a family myslef, I feel some sort of perverse mitzvah to try and teach the kids about culture, gulcha, trash that sticks, that lasts, that fucken kicks against that Juggernaut of globalmedia dhiarrea and hussle that is turning the masses and even the counterculture into a self-serving horde of zombies both right - and they would never admit it - left into a mono-cultural mass arse-fuck of useless pulp. I believe my aims are true, but fuck it, this is MY BLog, and I will do what the fuck I like. If you like it stay for the ride, otherwise, get fucked.