Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Not the brightest bulb.
Have you ever used the bathroom in the middle of the night and, once you've finished, you flip the light switch instead of anything connected to the toilet? And then, because you realize your mistake, you try to be more alert and as you walk out the room you just stare at the light switch, not flipping it off, because you don't want to make the same mistake twice? Wild guess as to whether that happened to me early this morning
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Not dark yet...
But it's getting there. So, as a timewasting distraction before jumping back into my paper (which, I realized last night, only needs to be 15 pages, whereas I have notes for a paper that would be, oh, 50 or 60 pages - double-spaced, that is), I'm staring at the computer screen and doing my best to be non-productive and restful before writing a paper that will, undoubtedly, revolutionize R.W. Fassbinder scholarship... hehe, heh, *sigh*. I just kept watching, and just kept reading, and just have this huge surplus of disconnected notes about the relationship between voice (new!) and gaze (it's been done), and the weird abstract space/image/time in some, maybe most, of his films. The idea to connect Michel Chion's concept of the acousmetre (well, I guess it's a Pierre Schaeffer concept, but Chion's the one who applied it to film) to the semi-diegetic narrations of In a Year of 13 Moons was kind of a late-breaking lightning bolt that added an extra day to the writing and an extra $23.05 to my credit card bill (for Chion's The Voice in Cinema). The acousmetre is basically a voice that's not tied to a visible source, or, more specifically, a mouth. And, because it isn't attached to a body, it doesn't have to obey the same physical rules as an actual person, often taking on a kind of vaguely omniscient, omnipotent, panoptic quality - as in the old horror movie saw where the phone rings and the threatening caller tells the helpless, virginal blonde that "I'm watching you right now!!!" and then appears from out of nowhere brandishing a gigantic, sharp phallic object of some sort, like a knife or a harpoon.
And by expanding the Lacan-bating emphasis on the look and to-be-looked-at-ness in Fassbinder's films to the voice-inclusive idea of "perception," which explains not only the nicely avant garde feeling that his characters often seem to be posing for the camera, but that they often have a compulsive need to talk, usually either telling their own stories or talking either themselves or someone else into something. The visual is, of course, much more effective, and more trusted - by both characters and the audience. So, any time there's a reliance on the voice, usually as the alternative to an unseen image but sometimes when characters are trying to talk away visuals that are evident if not obvious, Fassbinder overcompensates. That overcompensation can come in the form of dramatic histrionics (though rarely if ever from the protagonist, with Petra von Kant being the most obvious exception), but usually this comes in the form of an excess of audio-visual artifacts and mannerisms scattered around the screen: cluttered frames, busy and distracting soundtracks, allusions to other films, music, etc.
Since I started writing, I've noticed sometimes, as with Querelle, In a Year of 13 Moons and Katzelmacher, Fassbinder seems to be pitting the voice explicitly against the image. In Querelle, the narration goes above and beyond what we're shown, commenting on the action without confirming or contradicting the image; the characters go through a ritualistic verbal denial of their own sexuality throughout the film, even when their pants are around their ankles; finally, Jeanne Moreau's character reads tarot cards at the beginning of the film, launching the action by mentioning Querelle, and then again at the end - when she discovers on her second reading that she was mistaken, with the words "I was wrong. You never had a brother!" she effectively erases the entire film as nothing more than a "mistake," a fever dream that never happened. But even though these various kind of verbal commentary actually do take control of the narrative, the vivid, hallucinatory images are powerful in an entirely different way, one that can't be erased by mere words. Etc.
And by expanding the Lacan-bating emphasis on the look and to-be-looked-at-ness in Fassbinder's films to the voice-inclusive idea of "perception," which explains not only the nicely avant garde feeling that his characters often seem to be posing for the camera, but that they often have a compulsive need to talk, usually either telling their own stories or talking either themselves or someone else into something. The visual is, of course, much more effective, and more trusted - by both characters and the audience. So, any time there's a reliance on the voice, usually as the alternative to an unseen image but sometimes when characters are trying to talk away visuals that are evident if not obvious, Fassbinder overcompensates. That overcompensation can come in the form of dramatic histrionics (though rarely if ever from the protagonist, with Petra von Kant being the most obvious exception), but usually this comes in the form of an excess of audio-visual artifacts and mannerisms scattered around the screen: cluttered frames, busy and distracting soundtracks, allusions to other films, music, etc.
Since I started writing, I've noticed sometimes, as with Querelle, In a Year of 13 Moons and Katzelmacher, Fassbinder seems to be pitting the voice explicitly against the image. In Querelle, the narration goes above and beyond what we're shown, commenting on the action without confirming or contradicting the image; the characters go through a ritualistic verbal denial of their own sexuality throughout the film, even when their pants are around their ankles; finally, Jeanne Moreau's character reads tarot cards at the beginning of the film, launching the action by mentioning Querelle, and then again at the end - when she discovers on her second reading that she was mistaken, with the words "I was wrong. You never had a brother!" she effectively erases the entire film as nothing more than a "mistake," a fever dream that never happened. But even though these various kind of verbal commentary actually do take control of the narrative, the vivid, hallucinatory images are powerful in an entirely different way, one that can't be erased by mere words. Etc.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Coffee-ness
I spent much of the past week at the Bourgeois Pig, overcaffeinating myself in an attempt to stimulate my brain into, you know, working. Depending on who you ask, it's been effective, sort of. But I've been fundamentally exhausted in such a way that I get home from reading on the north side and fall asleep, or staying conscious in a state of near-sleep. Which is making it hard, and the solution is either more caffeine or less caffeine. Almost there, almost through with the quarter. One small paper down, one larger-ish paper left to go. In the meantime, my apartment's a disaster area (if only I could watch these Fassbinder dvds in an occasionally loud, crowded coffeeshop, I don't think I'd ever leave). I've been slacking on the swimming, too, which is bad, but the stupid little side effect of that is that when I do go, I'm completely rested and feel all in shape and stuff (which my finals-week diet most definitely does not do - based on a highly scientific informal poll, graduate students' cheese intake increases threefold in the final two weeks of the quarter).
Watching Fassbinder, I'm struck by how amazingly good this stuff is, and the thing is that the weirder films, i.e. Querelle and In a Year of 13 Moons, get more fascinating with each viewing. They're very dense films, and they grew denser as his output slowed to, you know, less than 7 per year (yeah, he actually made seven feature films in 1970). I've got a couple days to write, oh, 15-20 pages on this stuff, and I think I'm depending on coffee to provide me with inspiration, ideas, concentration. And I've been listening to a lot of Ornette Coleman, which I've discovered is the ultimate study music for me, more than Eno and his ambient/electro-brethren, more than classical strings, more than the soothing samba music favored by the Bourgeois Pig, etc. I suspect that something like "Lonely Woman" might be the kind of music we'd listen to if we were big, mutant, pulsating, disembodied brains (that somehow have ears?).
Until a week or so ago, I'd had maybe one cup of coffee in about six weeks. And now, now that my system's no longer accustomed to the daily coffee influx, that caffeine packs a punch. So, if you notice that I'm a little, um, jittery, think nothing of it. It's natural.
Today's inspirational verse, courtesy of Stephen Colbert:
"So the Christian Coalition are afraid they'll be called liberals. I don't blame them. After all, there's nothing more Christian than refusing to do good works because you might get called a name."
Watching Fassbinder, I'm struck by how amazingly good this stuff is, and the thing is that the weirder films, i.e. Querelle and In a Year of 13 Moons, get more fascinating with each viewing. They're very dense films, and they grew denser as his output slowed to, you know, less than 7 per year (yeah, he actually made seven feature films in 1970). I've got a couple days to write, oh, 15-20 pages on this stuff, and I think I'm depending on coffee to provide me with inspiration, ideas, concentration. And I've been listening to a lot of Ornette Coleman, which I've discovered is the ultimate study music for me, more than Eno and his ambient/electro-brethren, more than classical strings, more than the soothing samba music favored by the Bourgeois Pig, etc. I suspect that something like "Lonely Woman" might be the kind of music we'd listen to if we were big, mutant, pulsating, disembodied brains (that somehow have ears?).
Until a week or so ago, I'd had maybe one cup of coffee in about six weeks. And now, now that my system's no longer accustomed to the daily coffee influx, that caffeine packs a punch. So, if you notice that I'm a little, um, jittery, think nothing of it. It's natural.
Today's inspirational verse, courtesy of Stephen Colbert:
"So the Christian Coalition are afraid they'll be called liberals. I don't blame them. After all, there's nothing more Christian than refusing to do good works because you might get called a name."
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Gunvor Nelson
Experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson came to campus last week for a screening of three very personal films: her tribute to her daughter My Name Is Oona (which the screening notes claim might be her best known film), the experimental mother/daughter/mother fiction Red Shift, and an absolutely devastating documentary portrait of her dying mother that I believe was called Mother. I'm not sure how representative these films are of the rest of her work, but her impressionistic, flowing montage is truly remarkable. And, I have to say, the experimental canon is such a boys' club, Nelson's films are a wonderful balance to the cumulative testosterone of her fellow filmmakers. Feminine without being overtly feminist, Nelson's more concerned with exploring ideas of immediate relevance to women without (explicitly) positioning her work against any conventions or traditions. My Name Is Oona and Mother are undoubtedly the most beautiful, affecting films of their kind that I've seen. There's something hypnotic in Nelson's images, and she's got a remarkable eye for the extreme close-up. The extreme close-up, used liberally in Red Shift, strikes me as a key technique to understanding her films, even if it was rarely used in the other two films last night. With Red Shift's magnified portraits of features and body parts, and Oona's endless, overlapping repetition of the name on the soundtrack, there's a sense in which Nelson's films fetishize the smallest, most tangible details (or at least they attempt to make these details tangible through the film) as a sort of defense mechanism, a way of understanding powerful and possibly painful relationships to her subjects (her daughter, her mother, aging, death) piece by piece, keeping them immediately comprehensible while allowing the montage to express the complexities and ambiguities (and the various inexpressibles) she feels towards them.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Atom Egoyan
Atom Egoyan was at Chicago last week. He came to our German class, just sat there listening for an hour. (I didn't say anything remotely smart while he was there, in case you were wondering - but as soon as he left...) He spoke at the Mass Culture Workshop about physical relationships with technology in his work, but really more generally than that. He's done several pieces - films and installations - in which old-fashioned tape recorders play a central role, and he's fascinated with them because the user does have such a physical relationship with the machine, a relationship that's one a wholly different order than the one with a computer, an mp3 player or any other kind of digital technology. Old analogue machinery creates an impression of having some sort of physical manifestation of its processes - you can, to a certain extent, see it working. In other words, Egoyan is incredibly sensitive to the postmodern (which I bring up because I'm finally the tiniest bit confident as to one specific aspect of the most poorly-defined word in the English language), and nostalgic for the modernist. You can see this in his films, which are structured/styled in a manner that's often characterized as "postmodern" and yet place an extra emphasis on physical transit - think of the body hunt in Exotica, the bus crash in The Sweet Hereafter, and all those customs agents that keep reappearing from film to film.
I'm kind of obsessed with the way that space is organized and categorized on screen, and have a vague suspicion about the possible relevance of Manuel Castells's "space of flows," which is, in my own horribly incomplete understanding, similar to Egoyan's conception of digital technology: space that's organized by informational logic rather than physical, geographical logic, and in which physical distance is less a factor than access within the network. My further vague suspicion is that, not only does the cinema have a similar relationship now to postmodernism that it did in the 20s and 30s to modernism, but that the cinema has been one of the central places where we've been working through that transition from modern to post, and that there's something fundamentally postmodern (in that incomplete "space of flows" definition I tried to explain above) about the onscreen organization of space, which would therefore lead one to conclude that the cinema has not only reflected that transition but, in some sense, led the charge.
I'm kind of obsessed with the way that space is organized and categorized on screen, and have a vague suspicion about the possible relevance of Manuel Castells's "space of flows," which is, in my own horribly incomplete understanding, similar to Egoyan's conception of digital technology: space that's organized by informational logic rather than physical, geographical logic, and in which physical distance is less a factor than access within the network. My further vague suspicion is that, not only does the cinema have a similar relationship now to postmodernism that it did in the 20s and 30s to modernism, but that the cinema has been one of the central places where we've been working through that transition from modern to post, and that there's something fundamentally postmodern (in that incomplete "space of flows" definition I tried to explain above) about the onscreen organization of space, which would therefore lead one to conclude that the cinema has not only reflected that transition but, in some sense, led the charge.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
George Kuchar
Attended a screening of George Kuchar's most recent videos at the Siskel on Thursday with Pam and her housemate Emily, both of whom I think enjoyed themselves or at least found it interesting, but I loved it unconditionally. As he did when we brought him out to Seattle, George showed several of his diary videos, all of which were wonderful, and followed it with a ridiculously overblown campy melodrama that he made with his students at the Art Institute in SF, and which went on way too long. Of course, just as much as the actual work, the filmmaker was the draw and the biggest source of entertainment, and he didn't disappoint.
The program started on the wrong note when whoever it was that introduced Kuchar read a portion of an essay calling him "one of the great artists in the history of the medium," or something like that. Kuchar's films don't require such hyperbole. His place, along with his brother's, in the history of film, underground or otherwise, has much more to do with the amazing surplus of goodwill the rest of the film world feels towards him/them. His films are easy to like in a very fundamental way. The Kuchar brothers are both quintessential New York characters, lovably eccentric and wholly non-threatening (which is particularly important when you take into consideration the lurid subject matter of so many of their most influential films) - and their movies have a similar appeal. Amateurish, occasionally overearnest, delightfully strange, what-the-hell random, the Kuchars are perhaps unfairly treated something akin to outsider artists in the history of experimental filmmaking - the "perhaps" is there because when placed alongside Jacobs, Brakhage, even Jack Smith, it's clear that the Kuchars have a different, much less deliberately confrontational, relationship with the medium.
George Kuchar's diary videos on Thursday, all of which he shot over the summer and had recently finished editing, are truly delightful (to repeat myself), free-flowing jumbles. His presence at the center of all of them is key to their appeal, along with their endearing over-utilization of editing tricks (George has Final Cut Pro now, evidently). And I love the very basic philosophy of his video-making, that he carries a camera with him whenever he feels like filming something and then just turns it on, whether that's taking his aging mother around the block, visiting John Waters or Robert Breer, having dinner at a friend's house, or watching Mother Angelica on late night television. He'll jump from one location to another, and even, in one film, alternate between documentary and fiction, with no apparent motivation (narrative or otherwise). All this can be done because Kuchar creates a space that neither mythologizes nor belittles the everyday, but is instead an investigation of the quotidian for the sometimes faint traces of the stuff of melodramas and movie spectacles. But Kuchar makes no effort to compile them into one grand lurid narrative (even his grand lurid narratives are disjointed enough that they can't really be considered as such), he realizes they exist as bits and pieces and doesn't try to force them into any other formation.
The program started on the wrong note when whoever it was that introduced Kuchar read a portion of an essay calling him "one of the great artists in the history of the medium," or something like that. Kuchar's films don't require such hyperbole. His place, along with his brother's, in the history of film, underground or otherwise, has much more to do with the amazing surplus of goodwill the rest of the film world feels towards him/them. His films are easy to like in a very fundamental way. The Kuchar brothers are both quintessential New York characters, lovably eccentric and wholly non-threatening (which is particularly important when you take into consideration the lurid subject matter of so many of their most influential films) - and their movies have a similar appeal. Amateurish, occasionally overearnest, delightfully strange, what-the-hell random, the Kuchars are perhaps unfairly treated something akin to outsider artists in the history of experimental filmmaking - the "perhaps" is there because when placed alongside Jacobs, Brakhage, even Jack Smith, it's clear that the Kuchars have a different, much less deliberately confrontational, relationship with the medium.
George Kuchar's diary videos on Thursday, all of which he shot over the summer and had recently finished editing, are truly delightful (to repeat myself), free-flowing jumbles. His presence at the center of all of them is key to their appeal, along with their endearing over-utilization of editing tricks (George has Final Cut Pro now, evidently). And I love the very basic philosophy of his video-making, that he carries a camera with him whenever he feels like filming something and then just turns it on, whether that's taking his aging mother around the block, visiting John Waters or Robert Breer, having dinner at a friend's house, or watching Mother Angelica on late night television. He'll jump from one location to another, and even, in one film, alternate between documentary and fiction, with no apparent motivation (narrative or otherwise). All this can be done because Kuchar creates a space that neither mythologizes nor belittles the everyday, but is instead an investigation of the quotidian for the sometimes faint traces of the stuff of melodramas and movie spectacles. But Kuchar makes no effort to compile them into one grand lurid narrative (even his grand lurid narratives are disjointed enough that they can't really be considered as such), he realizes they exist as bits and pieces and doesn't try to force them into any other formation.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Briefly
Briefly, as if I want to go swimming today I have to leave in ten or so minutes. I'm writing this blog because the format suits me and because it gives me a means of procrastination that feels not entirely unproductive (because, I'm, like, you know, thinking through things, and shit). I often wonder, however, just how much of a tree-falling-in-the-woods effort this is. So, if you read this, please let me know. Danke shoen.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Animations
Went to a program of short animated films by Adam Beckett at the Siskel today. Beckett's five films in the program (he only completed six before dying in a fire at age 29), were all kinds of amazing. They were at their best when they were least psychedelic, a compulsive rotation of evolving shapes and patterns, some of which felt downright heroic for their ingenuity and the pencil hours it must have taken to produce them. The films were paired with other abstract/weird animations curated by Jim Trainor, including Oskar Fischinger's Motion Painting #1, which I'll never tire of seeing. There's a pseudo festival of animation around the city this weekend, including an appearance from Naomi Uman (which I can't make it to, unfortunately). I'm definitely going to the Sunday afternoon program of films by Robert Breer and his daughter (whose films are fantastic, by the way) Emily.
Wavelength
Watched Michael Snow's Wavelength the other night for a class (on 16mm, other screenings this week: Weekend and Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). Can't get it out of my head, really, although I'm not really sure how to describe it. Fascinating, and I think I've starting to get a handle on what exactly fascinates me about it, but it's hard. So much of film analysis is based on the concrete and tangible (form in service of narrative, of theme, of argument), that switching over to something that doesn't articulate any sort of argument, in which narrative might as well be nonexistent, and in which the theme is ambiguous at best, can feel utterly alien. They're often described in terms of technique, much like painting or sculpture, but that's most definitely outside my own area of expertise, if you can call it an expertise. What I like about it is what's been occupying a lot of my brain, or at least that portion that fantasizes about what I will one day (soon) be studying instead of actually doing any studying: the way that space and distance are coded, particularly how they're infused with so much substance and significance by the oh-so-slow zoom in. And then there's the resolution, that final transporting image that the film spends 45 minutes explaining as an image (a photograph on the wall constantly at the center of the frame), but that functions, somehow, as a "real" escape from the confines of the room.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Randomness and Alternative Time Usage (aka Harder Better Faster Blogger)
Have a lot of work to catch up on over the weekend. Lots and lots, much of it dense psychoanalytic theory. I have to admit that I giggle occasionally at some of the assertions, which have abstracted themselves from experiential or observational analysis so much as to seem ridiculous on first glance, second glance too. A Lacanian's specialty, as I understand it from the little I understand of recent psychoanalytic criticism.
I really want to get Lynne Tillman's new book, American Genius. I know nothing about it except for that kickass title. I of course have no time for leisure reading right now, and have several large piles of books that I've been planning on reading one of these, with a not-all-that-small pile of "nightstand books" (quotation marks as in, I don't have an actual nightstand, just two cardboard boxes piled on top of each other) that I've been "planning on reading next" for who knows how long. As with several of my other favorite authors, Tilmman's books, no matter how much ridiculously gushing praise they get, are released in paperback only - good for me, the poor, broke grad student who feeds all his money into the library printers, but it would be nice if the author of No Lease on Life got a little respect from the industry.
The Kleptones have two albums available for download from their website (www.kleptones.com), neither of which I was aware of. Steven Shaviro turned me on to the Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera on his blog, The Pinocchio Theory (www.shaviro.com/Blog). So far, the two post-Hip-Hopera albums seem to be more conventional mash-ups, in the a+b=c format (of course adding sprinklings of d, e, f). Night at the Hip-Hopera collapsed a veritable history of hip hop into the collected works of Queen, interesting conceptually in a fundamental way, for its play with issues of race and masculinity (in addition to playing black music in an extremely white way, Queen were swaggering poster boys of leather-bound masculinity, with a small but relevant secret - now juxtapose that with hip hop; Shaviro covers similar ground much more eloquently on his blog, by the way). 24 Hours, the album I'm currently listening to, is certainly energetic and always keeps the mix surprising and clever, and definitely has something to say (lots about money, especially; also quotes McCluhan more than once, with the "all-at-onceness" line sample standing out very early on disc 1 - not sure, but that may come from Waking Life). The standout track so far is "Daft Purple," a mash of my second favorite Daft Punk song, "Harder Better Faster Stronger" and Deep Purple's "Fireball," along with a "Money" interlude, some Jethro Tull, something by a rapper named Hijack, and the aforementioned McCluhan alongside dialogue from The Breakfast Club, and more, I'm sure. I've heard that Daft Punk song dozens of times, but had never figured out that it was an ironic endorsement of company life, of buying into and living for the system. I'd always just assumed it was about dancing. Vocodered Frenchmen aren't all that easy to understand, so I have an excuse.
Still haven't gotten sick of Wild Honey, or Love You. Trying to pick a favorite Sonic Youth song, for time-wasting purposes, realized that Rather Ripped's Jams Run Free is most definitely in the running. Possibly on the bill for next monday, JLG's Passion plus... wait for it... JLG's jeans commercials, a dozen of them. Jeans, by Jean-Luc Godard. I'm sure he made himself utilise prostitution as a metaphor for the capitalist system in his next feature as penance. Saw Psycho on 35mm last Monday for a class, had to skip Sauve qui peut (la vie) in order to do so. It was fucking great. The little bit of theory I've read so far this year has focused so heavily on Hitchcock that I feel increasingly aware of what to look for in his films, and am consistently surprised to find his films even more meticulously crafted than even the theorist's give him credit for (or deny him credit for, depending on what you're reading). There's always more to look for in a Hitchcock film. Which is good, because we've already watched four Hitchcocks, and we're supposed to have watched Strangers on a Train three times, and I have to do a detailed analysis of The Lady Vanishes that will require three full viewings at least and a shot-by-shot deciphering of a scene. It's a lot of Hitchcock to take in all at once, but better him than just about anyone else, I suppose. It was Kristi's birthday on Thursday, and in addition to a surprise package still on its way, I've been cheerily spending time making birthday mixes. I have to watch myself, though, because I'm making her a whole box set of mixes (7 and counting), and as I run out of my original ideas for a Mix For Kristi, I drift into my own tastes more and more, and lately those are running towards the darker, more dissonant, skronk end of the semi-popular music spectrum.
I really want to get Lynne Tillman's new book, American Genius. I know nothing about it except for that kickass title. I of course have no time for leisure reading right now, and have several large piles of books that I've been planning on reading one of these, with a not-all-that-small pile of "nightstand books" (quotation marks as in, I don't have an actual nightstand, just two cardboard boxes piled on top of each other) that I've been "planning on reading next" for who knows how long. As with several of my other favorite authors, Tilmman's books, no matter how much ridiculously gushing praise they get, are released in paperback only - good for me, the poor, broke grad student who feeds all his money into the library printers, but it would be nice if the author of No Lease on Life got a little respect from the industry.
The Kleptones have two albums available for download from their website (www.kleptones.com), neither of which I was aware of. Steven Shaviro turned me on to the Kleptones' Night at the Hip-Hopera on his blog, The Pinocchio Theory (www.shaviro.com/Blog). So far, the two post-Hip-Hopera albums seem to be more conventional mash-ups, in the a+b=c format (of course adding sprinklings of d, e, f). Night at the Hip-Hopera collapsed a veritable history of hip hop into the collected works of Queen, interesting conceptually in a fundamental way, for its play with issues of race and masculinity (in addition to playing black music in an extremely white way, Queen were swaggering poster boys of leather-bound masculinity, with a small but relevant secret - now juxtapose that with hip hop; Shaviro covers similar ground much more eloquently on his blog, by the way). 24 Hours, the album I'm currently listening to, is certainly energetic and always keeps the mix surprising and clever, and definitely has something to say (lots about money, especially; also quotes McCluhan more than once, with the "all-at-onceness" line sample standing out very early on disc 1 - not sure, but that may come from Waking Life). The standout track so far is "Daft Purple," a mash of my second favorite Daft Punk song, "Harder Better Faster Stronger" and Deep Purple's "Fireball," along with a "Money" interlude, some Jethro Tull, something by a rapper named Hijack, and the aforementioned McCluhan alongside dialogue from The Breakfast Club, and more, I'm sure. I've heard that Daft Punk song dozens of times, but had never figured out that it was an ironic endorsement of company life, of buying into and living for the system. I'd always just assumed it was about dancing. Vocodered Frenchmen aren't all that easy to understand, so I have an excuse.
Still haven't gotten sick of Wild Honey, or Love You. Trying to pick a favorite Sonic Youth song, for time-wasting purposes, realized that Rather Ripped's Jams Run Free is most definitely in the running. Possibly on the bill for next monday, JLG's Passion plus... wait for it... JLG's jeans commercials, a dozen of them. Jeans, by Jean-Luc Godard. I'm sure he made himself utilise prostitution as a metaphor for the capitalist system in his next feature as penance. Saw Psycho on 35mm last Monday for a class, had to skip Sauve qui peut (la vie) in order to do so. It was fucking great. The little bit of theory I've read so far this year has focused so heavily on Hitchcock that I feel increasingly aware of what to look for in his films, and am consistently surprised to find his films even more meticulously crafted than even the theorist's give him credit for (or deny him credit for, depending on what you're reading). There's always more to look for in a Hitchcock film. Which is good, because we've already watched four Hitchcocks, and we're supposed to have watched Strangers on a Train three times, and I have to do a detailed analysis of The Lady Vanishes that will require three full viewings at least and a shot-by-shot deciphering of a scene. It's a lot of Hitchcock to take in all at once, but better him than just about anyone else, I suppose. It was Kristi's birthday on Thursday, and in addition to a surprise package still on its way, I've been cheerily spending time making birthday mixes. I have to watch myself, though, because I'm making her a whole box set of mixes (7 and counting), and as I run out of my original ideas for a Mix For Kristi, I drift into my own tastes more and more, and lately those are running towards the darker, more dissonant, skronk end of the semi-popular music spectrum.
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