ETHAN SHAW IS A WRITER AND ARTIST FROM HUDDERSFIELD. WILL HE EVER GET HIS ACT TOGETHER
DIARY
Aren’t we all a bit sick of the art diary format? usually art diaries are things by culture vultures who like to dine out at fancy restaurants and rub shouldes with celebrity gallerists. the only notable exception to this rule is matthew collings. his diaries are often punctuated with neat little bits of rambling trivia and biography. stuff to keep the gears going and hold the attention of the reader. so lets try a bit of that for ourselves shall we? first up:
OSAR MURILLO
He’s my choice to win the turner prize in 2019. hes exactly the kind of artist that the modern gallery system was built to pimp. A form of art presented to the masses to educate and save them from themselves. But this art is ultimately sold to those privileged elite who are able to substitute money for taste and understanding. place your bets now kids.
A SONG OF ASS AND FIRE
Game of Thrones should have ended how Monty Python Holy Grail ended where a bunch of cop cars come and arrest them all
A QUICK NOTE ON CLICHES
cliches abound in Game of thrones. We often think something is cliche simply because of its rote familiarity. But there’s really more to it than that. In order to be a cliche something has to hit all three of these characteristics
.A familiar THING
.used in a familiar WAY
. to achieve a familiar EFFECT.
In literature the metaphor of a “heart burning with passion” hits all three of these points. In other words its a naked cliche. If we were to change just one element we would no longer have a cliche. A “heart rotting with passion” is hardly spectacular writing but it’s an instant break of the formula.
So how does this apply to Painting and Sculpture? i think this process of ‘flipping’ cliches is happening all the time in art – especially with groups like Brancaster Chronicles. although they never address these problems in precisely these terms. Some might even be of the belief that avoiding cliches isn’t a guarantee of good work and I agree. but avoiding cliches doesn’t mean a chucking-out of all the things we love about modernist art i.e: space, colour, form etc.. It just means giving them more flexibility.
SHANDY
i took out a copy of sternes’s tristam shandy from the library the other day because i was curious to see whether the hype was real or not. about halfway through the book, right before volume five I discovered that someone had slipped a post it note into the spine. on the note was written;” congratulations if you have managed to get this far- this is an awful book!”
DOG PARK (short story)
i would hear voices. back when i was on the wrong meds and finding difficulty adjusting to life in the city. often the voices sounded like my own. but different. from a different place. the voices would instruct me to go on long walks. late at night or early into the morning. i wouldnt sleep. i would just roam around.
one night i was led into the city. the streets seemed huge because of how deserted they were. like a scene from some italian modernist painting. i went block to block until i ended up outside the central train station. no one else was around axcept for this one homeless looking guy squatting in a bus stop. amazingly he was surrounded by a group of several fully grown golden retrievers. im used to seeing homeless people with dogs. but this was something else. the retrievers were ghostly in the light. mythical. like unicorns or white stags or something. when i approached they all turned to look at me as one. several pairs of eyes. the homeless guy didnt even look up. he just sat there. motionless. can i pet your dogs mate i asked him. the bus shelter was brand new. fitted with energy saving light strips and a tv display for bus times. you could hear the sound of the electric .i asked again. hey mate/ are your dogs friendly. again no response. the dogs just continued to stare at me with their large black eyes. i stood for a few moments not really knowing what to do. then i crouched down and gave him a closer look. dead.
probably hadnt been dead all that long. but definitley dead. i took a few deep breaths and stood up. dogs were still looking at me. i looked back at them for a while and then looked at the homeless guy . finally i aked the voices what i should do. go home they said. just go home and pretend like it never happened. and so i did.
the voices cleared up a long time ago. i still have some psychotic episodes every now and then but generally i go on less midnight walks.
PERCEPTION
I was reading an article about artificial intelligence yesterday and a certain section really sprang out at me.
“The mind apparently does not see an image as a whole. Rather it sees the image as a composition of images and recognising the adjacent relationships of one to another. Why do adjacent relationships have such a strong effect on our visual perception?We have evolved to take advantage of affordances to allow our brain to reconstruct images more quickly. Said differently, our brains immediately recognises patterns that facilitates our interpretation of a scene. Our visual perception performs a kind of semantic inference automatically such that higher level semantic patterns can’t be ignored. That is why(certain optical illusions) cannot be “unseen”…” Not beautifully written but interesting. an abstract artist i think must be someone who plays this game of visual laws whilst bending or breaking all the rules. creating visual affordances that are illogical yet somehow still function. Abstract painting may make use of elements of 3 Dimensional depth ; “overlapping objects, diminishing scale, atmospheric perspective, vertical placement and linear perspective” but never in a sense of embodied ‘reconstruction’ – I.E: something we could physically interact with.
LAFFOLEY ON DIMENSIONS
Then i was reading some essays on the website of paul laffoley about dimensaionality and its importance to modernism. Laffoley is uncharachteristically well read for an outsider artist and clearly very bright.In fact I was so impressed by what I read that I basiucally decided to copy it for you here withouty any adjustment.
In terms of imagery, dimensionality belongs to the systematic and diagrammatic, but its unique context has caused it to be considered in a category by itself; although dimensionality as a rational concept has been in existence in the west for 2301 years, it is only in the past 147 years that it has become an issue which places it in the realm of the authentically new; as the contemporary physicist Brian Greene, advocate of string theory, said of that period in the mid-nineteenth century: “Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of the favorable historical circumstances that strongly contributed to Einstein’s success. Foremost among these are the nineteenth century mathematical insights of Georg Bernhard Riemann that firmly established the geometrical apparatus for describing curved spaces of arbitrary dimension. In his famous 1854 inaugural lecture at the University of Göttingen, Riemann broke the chains of flat-space Euclidean thought and paved the way for a democratic mathematical treatment of geometry on all varieties of curved surfaces.” ; now while space and time have been considered as two of the ultimate categories of natural philosophy [naturphilosophie], dimensionality is somewhat different; the difference began with the eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant [1724-1804] who initiated his thought process from consciousness rather than the products of consciousness; his position on space and time is to the raw data of sensation we add the concepts or forms of spatiality and temporality; space is the form of the external sense and time the form of the internal sense; but we never experience anything except that which is within the spatiality and temporality; and yet somehow we never experience space and time directly; therefore, the space and time in which we order phenomena must derive not from sensation, but from consciousness itself; Kant’s position goes a long way to explain why space has been more acceptable than time; space deals with the discontinuous, the discrete, the concrete, the finite; whereas time doubles the effect of consciousness and its expression is the continuous, the abstract and the infinite; because of the differences between spatiality and temporality, space has always been more easily understood and has resulted in the spatializing of time and in many cases an actual disbelief in the existence of time itself; Henri Bergson [1859-1941] the philosopher of time, criticized the space-time continuum of Hermann Minkowski [1864-1909] –Einstein’s teacher of mathematics – by saying that this structure was another attempt to spatialize time’s nature out of existence similar to the attempt of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides [ca. 515-450 B.C.E.]; opposing reason and concept and space to intuition and metaphor and time, Bergson re-established for modern Europe the insights about space and time developed by the Indian philosopher Shankara [788-820]; his Vedic position is called the Advaita [non-dualistic] Vedanta, which allows no distinction between the individual self and the Brahman [the world is an appearance – Brahman and Atman are one]; Shankara taught that space is inherently passive waiting for the human capacity to divide it, while time is inherently active and can overpower the human self; space evokes care in the human heart, while time smothers the human heart in boredom; since the feminine element has been traditionally considered passive and the masculine active, by the principle of achieving unity by means of opposites, it is no wonder, thought Shankara, that the Western concept of the Fates are represented by women because this would be the means to control time into the unity of Brahman; space holds no such terror for the human heart except if its logic leads to occasions of infinites; contemporary physics deplores infinites in nature; they are defined as: “the typical nonsensical answer emerging from calculations that involve general relativity and quantum mechanics in zero-dimensional point-particles;”
The real issue concerning dimensionality, and what makes it culturally part of modernism, is what is means as a human to be subject to the limits of a dimension; while we all have an almost intuitive sense of what it is like to be immersed with Euclidean space, but there was a time prior to the third century B.C.E. when Euclid’s geometry would have seemed impossible to comprehend, in much the same way that usual perspective introduced by Masaccio [1401-1428] during the Italian Renaissance was not fully appreciated to be a creative extension of Euclidean space;
DAVID BLACKBURN
Cor isn’t physics all heady and marvellous! it really gets the old imaginative juices going. But don’t get too worked up and excited now dear reader. After all this art diary is nowhere even close to finished and I can barley keep my focus at the best of times. let’s take another little detour for now. From the world of quantum physics to the heart of poundland Britannia. Huddersfield town. I recently visited the new David Blackburn exhibition at Huddersfield gallery and it was depressing as fuck. lots of average looking semi abstract pastel drawings. the sort of mild mannered stuff that was endemic in Britain during the eighties. Outside a windstorm was going ballistic and the sound of rain was like machinegunfire on the glass ceiling. A few leaks were dripping into the room and someone had put out some buckets out to catch them. walking through the exhibition I couldn’t help but notice that certain other leaks were starting to appear and drip with hard dripping noises. the whole thing felt completely surreal. like a parody of installation art or something. you could hear the ghost of David Blackburn in the next room warbling in his Yorkshire accent. a documentary film of talking heads. various collectors and art historians. they compete to see who can say the most normcore rubbish about abstraction and landscape.
THE DISCREET CHARMS OF LOUISE BOURGEOIS
We used a drawing of hers as The New House Logo. Hey that’s the website you’re on right now! lucky you! Well Louise is a bit of a difficult personality in any case. A real mixed bag. Diva bathsheba. The fairy godmother to sarah lucas’s cinderella. i personally prefer the abstract sculptures and textiles from her early career over the stuff she did later on. installing those huge scary spiders in the Tate and setting up basement wrestle mania cages. all that morbid creepy stuff is just boring to me. laura palmer in a retirement home. spiders clinging together and crying. Louise could really ham up the melodrama when she had to. The way she ranted about daddy issues and domestic horror as if she were sylvia plath. i have pass the plate on all that. Bourgeois is more interesting when she isn’t trying so hard to be interesting.The appeal of her early drawings to me is their tenderness and their poetry. The drawing we copied the new house logo from is titled Femme Maison which loosely translates to housewife or house-woman. Its a big naked woman with a house on her head. The artist Charles Burns sums up the drawing’s mystery very nicely: Do you think she feels safe in there? or a prisoner?
ABCRIT BICKERING
Abcrit dot com is where a clique of middle class artists and writers swap essays about abstract painting and sculpture. the theorising that goes on is very substantial and intelligent. but it also has a habit of getting bogged down by libidinal in-fighting, usually between Robin greenwood. the site’s manager and Alan Gouk, a freakishly tall veteran abstract artist from the seventies. greenwood appears to be an ex pupil of Gouk’s (as well as an ex pupil of the famous sculptor Antony Caro). but a lot of the time its greenwood himself who’s taking the role of the schoolmaster. somewhat reminiscent of Andre Breton whipping the surrealists into shape. There’s a lot of complicated discourse about formalism and the science of visual pleasure. The challenge is to try and be as objective and as concise as possible without trying to sound all clever about it. but of course i have a lot of admiration for all this high minded seriousness. I’m a baptised formalist as well, although I do get afflicted by small sinful doubts. i mean, its hard not to lose faith when Gouk and Greenwood start measuring dicks on the comment forums. Robin looks to present a ‘new way’ for today’s abstract artists but Gouk is conservative in his outlook. As far as he’s concerned modern painting has already been been adequately defined in terms of direct ‘frontality’ (such as you’d find in the work of High Modernists like ben Nicholson and Matisse) whereas Greenwood is more complex. His heroes are the old masters like Tintoretto’ Constable and Cezanne. in fact a lot of the time Greenwood seems to be advocating for a kind of abstract equivalent to those painters. which seems a bit like wanting to have your cake and eat it. i suppose deep down greenwood is an expressionist. he prefers drama over poetry. or to put it another way structure and clarity don’t appeal to greenwood without the surprise move-the mechanical cuckoo in the clock.
FILM LIST
what follows is a short list of the best films ever made; although I can’t promise that a few of them arent made up. conider it a kind of game. or if you prefer dear reader you could always just scroll on and enjoy watching the text fly upwards like the opening credits of star wars.
Sweet Smell of Success: Alexander Mackendrick (1957)
Triadic Ballet: Margarete Hastings (1970)
Duelle: Jacques Rivette (1976)
Body Fever: Ray Dennis Steckler (1969)
Good Dame: Marion Gering (1934)
Carnival of Souls: Herk Harvey (1962)
Thunder: Takashi Ito (1982)
A Day of Fury: Harmon Jones (1956)
Gena The Crocodile: Roman Kachanov (1969)
Hands Across the Table: Mitchell Leisen (1935)
Folies Meutrieres: Antoine Pellissier (1984)
The Major and The Minor: Billy Wilder (1942)
Wait until Dark: Terence Young (1967)
Fear in the Night: Jimmy Sangster (1972)
Quatermass and the Pit: Roy Ward Baker (1967)
The Quatermann Xperiment: Val Guest (1955)
Napoleon: Abel Gance (1927)
The Tenth Symphony: Abel Gance (1918)
Three Bad Sisters: Gilbert Ray (1956)
The Cloud Capped Star: Ritwik Ghatak (1960)
The Green Pastures: Marc Connelly (1936)
The Fire Within: Louis Malle (1963)
Guru the Mad Monk: Andy Mulligan (1970)
The Seventh Commandment: Irvin Berwick (1961)
Terrors: Eugeniusz Cekalski (1938)
The Strongest: Axel Lindblom (1929)
The Thing: John Carpenter (1982)
Twilight: Julio Branco (1945)
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!:Russ Meyer (1965)
Ilsa! She-Wolf of the S.S : Don Edmunds (1975)
Stardust Memories: Woody Allen (1980)
Hannah and her Sisters: Woody Allen (1986)
Interiors: Woody Allen (1978)
Not Reconciled: Jean Marie Straub (1965)
Neko z Alenky: Jan Svankmajer (1988)
Sampo: The Day The Earth Froze: Aleksandr Ptuko (1959)F
Le Mepris: Jean Luc-Godard (1963)
An Autumn Afternoon: Yasajiro Ozu (1962)
Floating Weeds: Yasajiro Ozu (1934)
Tokyo Story: Yasajiro Ozu (1953)
The End Of Summer: Yasajiro Ozu (1961)
Early Summer: Yasajiro Ozu (1951)
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin: Liu Chai-Liang (1978)
Blast of Silence: Allen Baron (1961)
Spider Baby: Jack Hill (1967)
Last Year at Marienbad: Alain Resnais (1961)
Vampyr: Carl Theodor Dreyer (1932)
la Jetee: Chris Marker (1962)
Hitler: A Film From Germany: Hans-Jurgen Syberberg (1977)
Parsifal: Hans-Jurgen Syberberg
Violated: Walter Strate (1953)
Close-Up: Abbas Kiarostami (1990)
The Scarlet Hour: Michael Curtiz (1956)
Eux D’Artifice: Kenneth Anger (1953)
Scorpio Rising: Kenneth Anger (1963)
Lucifer Rising: Kenneth Anger (1972)
Inauguration of The Pleasure Dome: Kenneth Anger (1954)
Fireworks: Kenneth Anger (1949)
Puce Moment: Kenneth Anger (1949)
Easy Street: Charlie Chaplin (1917)
Salome: Ugo Falena (1910)
Wine of Youth: King Vidor (1924)
Madchen in Uniform: Leontine Sagan (1931)
They Do Not Exist: Mustafa Abu Ali (1974)
The Phantom House: Bertram Millhauser (1920)
Black Ermine: Carlos Hugo Christensern (1953)
Maciste in Hell: Guido Brignone (1925)
Blue Blood: Nino Oxilia (1914)
The Birds: Alfred Hitchcock (1963)
Seven Samurai: Akira Kurosawa (1954)
The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda: Ira Cohen (1968)
Take Care of ZouZou: Hassan Al Imam (1972)
The First Love: Mari Terashima (1989)
Mabodet El Gamahir: Helmy Rafla (1967)
The Delicious Little Devil: Robert Z. Leonard (1919)
The Hollow: George T. Nierenberg (1975)
I Love A Mystery: Henry Levin (1945)
He Knew Women: F. Hugh Herbert (1930)
Broadway Babes: Mervyn Leroy (1929)
Three on a Match: Mervyn Leroy (1932)
Heat Lightning: Mervyn Leroy (1934)
Deviation: Jose Ramon Larraz (1971)
Blood: Andy Milligan (1974)
Daughter of Darkness: Lance Comfort (1948)
Aroused: Anton Holden (1966)
Desperate Living: John Waters (1977)
The Werewold Versus The Vampire Woman: Leon Klimovsky (1971)
Miranda: Ken Annakin (1948)
The Gruesome Twosome: Herschell Gordon Lewis (1967)
Requiem for A Vampire: Jean Rollin (1971)
Pink Narcissus: james Bidgood (1971)
The Magic Christian: Joseph McGrath (1969)
Triumph of The Will: Leni Riefenstahl (1934)
A Virgin Amongst The Living Dead: Jesus Franco, Jean Rollin (1973)
Mazurka: Willi Forst (1935)
Tess of The Storm Country: John S. Robertson (1922)
The Ghost of Rosy Taylor: Edward Sloman (1918)
The Constant Nymph: Edmund Goulding (1943)
The Wicker Man: Robin Hardy (1973)
Gunfight at The O.K Corral: John Sturges (1957)
Ivan The Terrible Part I: Sergei Eisentein (1944)
Ivan The Terrible Part II: Sergei Eisenstein (1958)
Strike: Sergei Eisenstein (1925)
Portrait of Maria: Emilio Fernandez (1944)
Princess Yang Kwei-Fei: Kenji Mizoguchi (1955)
Daughter of Shanghai: Robert Flory (1937)
Judex: Georges Franju (1963)
Eyes Without a Face: Georges Franju (1960)
Blood of the Beasts: Georges Franju (1946)
The Ruling Class: Peter Medak (1975)
Now, Voyager: Irving Rapper (1942)
Sure Fire: Jon Jost (1990)
Stella Dallas: Henry King (1925)
One Way Boogie Woogie: James Benning (1977)
Throw Away Your Books rally in The Streets: Shuji Tereyama
Pastoral: To Die in the Country: Shuji Tereyama (1974)
The Dying Swan: Yevgeni Bauer (1917)
The Kingdom of Fairies: George Melies (1903)
The Colour of Pommegranates: Sergei Parajanov (1969)
Ashik Kerib: Sergei Parajanov (1988)
Faces of Children: jacques Feyder (1925)
Whirlpool Of Fate: Jean Renoir (1925)
Japanese Girls at The Harbour: Hiroshi Shimizu (1933)
Willow Springs: Werner Schroeter (1973)
Abi foq al-Shagara: Hussein Kamal (1969)
The Empty Pillow: Sallah Abouseif (1957)
Taiga: Ulrike Otinger (1992)
They Call It Sin: Thornton Friedman (1932)
No Tommorrow: Sallah Abouseif (1958)
Camille 2000: Radley Metzger (1969)
The Piano Teacher: Michael Haneke (2001)
Madonna of The Seven Moons: Arthur Crabtree (1944)
Gertrud: Carl Theodor Dreyer (1964)
Gallant Lady: Gregory La Cava (1933)
Satan’s Rhapsody: Nino Oxilia (1915)
The Full Deck: Jaques Feyder (1934)
The Atomic Cafe: Pierce Rafferty (1982)
Faust: F.W. Murnau (1926)
Godzilla: Ishiro Honda (1954)
Godzilla’s Revenge: Ishiro Honda (1971)
Mothra: ishiro Honda (1961)
Hanna Amon: Veit Harlan (1951)
Restless Blood: Teuvo Tulio (1946)
Bare Knees: Erle C. Kenton (1928)
The Devil’s Cabaret: Nick Grinde (1930)
The House is Black: Forugh Farrokhza (1963)
Satan’s Brew: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976)
World on a Wire: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (19730
Black Narcissus: Michael Powell (1947)
Peeping Tom: Michael Powell (1960)
The Red Shoes; Michael Powell (1948)
N or W: Len Lye (1938)
Kes: Ken Loach (1969)
Ecstasy: Gustav Machaty (1933)
The Incredibly Strange Creatures: Ray Denis Steckler (1964)
Rat Pfink A Boo-Boo: Ray Denis Steckler (1966)
Eugenie: Jesus Franco (1970)
The Diabolical Dr. Z: Jesus Franco (1966)
Dynamite: Cecil B. Demille (1929)
Earth Spirit: leopld Jessner (1923)
As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally: Jonas Merkas (2000)
Quick Billy: Bruce Baillie (1971)
The Night of The Hunter: Charles Laughton (1955)
L’Inhumaine: Marcel L’Herbier (1924)
Under The Bridges: Hekmut Kautner 91946)
Immensee: Veit Harlan (1943)
Dr Stangelove: Stanley Kubrick (1964)
2001: A Space Odyessy: Stanley Kubrick (1968)
The Hart of London: Jack Chambers 91970)
Dodsworth: William Wyler (1936)
The Innocents: Jack Clayton (1961)
Voice of The Nightingale: Wladyslaw Staewicz (1923)
Pentimento: Frans Zwartjes (1979)
Spare Bedroom: Frans Zwartjes (1970)
Her Wild Oats: Marshall Neilan (1927)
Cat Women of The Moon: Arthur Hilton (1953)
The Bad Seed: Mervyn LeRoy (1965)
Pickpocket: Robert Bresson (1959)
Au Hasard Blathasar: Robert Bresson (1966)
Mouchette: Robert Bresson (1967)
The Devil, Probably: Robert Bresson (1977)
Diary of a Country Priest: Robert Bresson (1951)
Katzelmacher: Rainer Werner Fassbinder: (1969)
Chinese Roulette: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1976)
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)
In A Year of 13 Moons: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1978)
Fox and His Friends: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1975)
Mutter Kuster Goes To Heaven: Rainer Werner fassbinder (1975)
Beware of The Holy Whore: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1971)
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1972)
Martha: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973)
Follow Thru: Lloyd Corrigan (1930)
Madame Satan: Cecil B. Demille (1930)
The Affairs of Anatol: Cecil B. Demille (1921)
The Road To Yesterday: Cecil B. Demille (1925)
Male and Female: Cecil B. Demille (1919)
Maria Callas Portrat: Werner Schroeter (1968)
Moon Over Miami; Walter Lang (1941)
Horrors of Malformed Men: Teruro Ishii (1969)
Kanchenjungha: Satyajit Ray (1962)
Star Garden: Stan Brakhage (1974)
Dog Star Man: Stan Brakhage (1964)
The Act of Seeing with One’s Eyes: Stan Brakhage (1971)
Cat’s Cradle: Stan Brakhage (1959)
Cobra: Joseph Henaberry (1925)
In The Land of The Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis (1914)
Holy Ghost People: Peter Adair (1967)
A.K.A Serial Killer: Masao Adachi (1969)
Succubus: Jesus Franco (1968)
Plemya: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy (2014)
Kameradschaft: G.W. Pabst (1931)
Manhatta: Charles Sheeler (1921)
The Blue Bird: Maurice Tourneur (1918)
Sparrows: William Beaudine (1926)
Thais: Anton Guilio Bragaglia (1917)
The Day The Earth Stood Still: Robert Wise (1951)
Le Planet Sauvage: Rene Laloux (1973)
Belle et la Bete: Jean Cocteau (1946)
The Three Sided Mirror: Jean Epstein (1927)
Coup De Grace: Volker Schlondorff (1976)
Salon Kitty: Tinto Brass (19760
Warning Shadows: A Nocturnal Hallucination: Arthur Robinson (1923)
House: Nobohiko Obayashi (1977)
A Page of Madness: Teinosuke Kinugasa (1926)
Crossroads: Teinosuke Kinugasa (1928)
Fire in Castilla: Jose Val Del Omar (1961)
Berlin- Schonhauser Corner: Gerhard Klein (1957)
Double Suicide: Masahiro Shinoda (1969)
Queen Kelly: Eric von Stroheim (1932)
Foolish Wives: Eric von Stroheim (1922)
The Wedding March: Eric von stroheim (1928)
Blind Husbands: Eric von Strohheim (1919)
The New York Hat: D.W. Griffith (1912)
Death’s marathon: D.W. Griffith (1913)
The Painted Lady: D.W. Griffith (1912)
The Good Doctor: D.W. Griffith (1909)
Broken Blossoms: D.W. Griffith (1919)
An Unseen Enemy: D.W. Griffith (1912)
Way Down East: D.W. Griffith (1920)
Intolerance: D.W. Griffith (1916)
Black Sabbath: Mario Bava (1963)
The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Mario Bava (1963)
Kill Baby, Kill!: Mario Bava (1966)
The Black Cat: Lucio Fulci (1981)
Osaka Elegy: Kenji Mizoguchi (1936)
Man of The Sea: Marcel L’Herbier (1920)
Sisters of the Gion: Kenji Mizoguchi (1936)
The Rape of The Vampire: Jean Rollin (1968)
The Nude Vampire: Jean Rollin (1970)
Paher Panchali: Satyajit Ray (1955)
The Third Man: Carol Reed (1949)
Get Carter: Mike Hodges (1971)
Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song: Melvin Van Peebles (1971)
Eros Plus Massacre: Yoshishige Yoshida (1969)
Shadows: John Cassavetes (1958)
A Woman Under The Influence: John Cassavetes (1974)
The First Charge of The Machete: Manuel Octavio Gomez (1969)
The Late Matthias Pascal: Marcel L’Herbier (1925)
Dementia: John Parker (1955)
Tomorrow’s Children: Crane Wilbur (1934)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes: Robert Fues (1971)
Pigs and Battleships: Shohei Imamura (1961)
The Shanghai Gesture: Josef Von Sternberg (1941)
The Scarlett Empress: Josef Von Sternberg (1934)
The Fire: Giovanni Pastrone (1916)
Man With A Movie Camera: Dziga Vertov (1929)
The Damned: Luchino Visconti (1969)
After Death: Yevgeni Bauer (1915)
Beyond The Valley of Dolls: Russ Meyer (1970)
Goddess: Setyajit Ray (1960)
Le Grande Jeu: Jacques Feyder (1934)
Shock Waves: ken Wiederhorn (1977)
Sugar Hill: Paul Maslansky (1974)
Dishonoured: Josef Von Sternberg (1931)
Shogun Assassin: Kenji Misumi (1980)
Sweet Movie: Dusan Masakavejev (1974)
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: Jacques Demy (1964)
White Zombie: Victor Halperin (1932)
Danse Serpentine: Auguste Lumiere (1897)
Juliet of The Spirits: Frederico Fellini (1965)
Falling Leaves: Alice Guy-Blanche (1912)
Jubilee: Derek Jarman (1978)
The Death of Maria Marlibran: Werner Schroeter (1972)
The Exterminating Angel: Luis Bunuel (1962)
The Bride of Glomdal: Carl Theodor Dreyer (1926)
Has Anybody Seen My Gal?: Douglas Sirk (1952)
Written on The Wind: Douglas Sirk (1956)
Thieves’ Holiday: Douglas Sirk (1946)
All That Heaven Allows: Douglas Sirk (1955)
Metalepsis in Black: Aryan Kaganof (2016)
Threnody For The Victims of Marikana: Aryan Kaganof (2015)
Phantom of The Paradise: Brian De Palma (1974)
Night Tide: Curtis Harrington (1961)
The Doll: Ernst Lubitsch (1919)
Faces: John Cassavetes (1969)
Dark Waters: Andre De Toth (1944)
City Lights: Charlie Chaplin (1931)
The Gold Rush: Charlie Chaplin (1925)
The Howl: Tinto Brass (1968)
Variant Chants: Joseph Bernard (1983)
Gabriel Over The White House: Gregory la Cava (1933)
Caligula: Tinto Brass (1979)
Earth: Tomu Uchida (1939)
Blue: Derek Jarman (1993)
Curse of The Demon: Jacques Tourneur (1957)
To Be or Not to Be: Ernst Lubitsch (1942)
Seeds of Sin: Andy Milligan (1968)
Portrait of Jennie: William Dieterle (1948)
The Servant: Joseph Losey (1963)
Mabuse The Gambler: Fritz Lang (1922)
House By The River: Fritz Lang (1950)
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die: Joseph Green (1962)
Wait Until Dark: Terence Young (1967)
Experiment in Terror: Blake Edwards (1962)
GAY PRIDE
Phew i’m glad that’s all over. aren’t you? did you spot any cockatoos on the way? wait,hang on a second. were are we now? just let me get my bearings…Oh that’s right. its the middle of the week and im on my way to m&s to try to try and pinch one of those novelty lgbt sandwhiches they’ve got. lettuce. guac. bacon. tomato. lgbt. released just in time for gay pride week. i manage to steal two and scoff them in the pigeon park surrounded by crackheads and old age pensioners. i feel the post shoplifting rush of adreneline and grin to myself like a fox eating shit off a barbed wire fence. i’m still careful not to let anyone catch a glimpse of the rainbowed sandwich packaging though.
IDEAS FOR A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
200 years into the future and the attempts of mankind to colonise other planets have been an unmitigated disaster. the strain of zero G space has caused catastrophic health problems amongst off-worlders. countless are left blind due to the effect of gravitational shifts on vascular fluids. neural nervous syystems are flattened and inflamed. many go insane. Off world colonisiation (called terraforming and Xenoforming) is abandoned overall as an enterprise and instead, the efforts to improve and re-vitalise the earth were amped up. This process was expedited due to the advent of a programmable matter revolution called MESH; which uses nanotechnologies derived from 3d printing software and generative crystals. The revolution in nanotech resulted in a substrate that enabled humans to compute on “dumb” matter. Rather than having to make do with merley silicon we can now compute on anything from wood to flesh. The computational density
of dead objects becomes virtually limitless so that everything, organic and inorganic can be literally intelligent and sentient. eventually all humans are born with computational systems in their cells. Entire ecosystems are salvaged and permitted to flourish. Geo-engineers are able to replace extinct flora with smartforests and revive extinct species through virtually identical facsimilies. Mesh deformation is capable of mimicking the augmendicity of DNA. Humans are able to literally “copy” themselves in an act called “splintering” or “divvying”. This gives rise to the notion of the “dividual” and the self being a constellation of “exocortices” rather than one individual
finite cortex. A result of this is the taboo and subsequent illegalisation of dying. Recreational death is class A illegal stimulant amongst teenagers and thrill seekers.some special humans have the genetic trait of
“absorbtion” wherein they can symbiotically merge with another person and become a cluster-person(s). certain other species have also been able develop this trait on various scales. Some humas however believe it to be unethical to copy conciousness (conciousness is also fungible, and can be “cashed” like money. Illegal Archivors try to cash people while they are routing and it is a huge social problem). These abstainers call themselves “OOO’s” (Object-Oriented-Objectivist). There are also “Informorphs” who can jump out of their “meatbodies” by copying themsleves into other substrates, literally running on something else that isn’t their bodies. “Maker Culture” wherein the making of things that in turn make other things becomes a kind of global philosophy. This makes the notion of liability abstract- are you responsible for the thing that you made?- what about the third order of that thing you made? “Fog”- the sentience of matter- is also a hunge phenomenon. It is present from the smallest particle to the very largest network. Everything has “Objecthood”. Walls and trees are not only individual sentient “beings” but also extentions of yourself. Most things however only have a finite amount of programmed “brute force” so their influence is safley scaled. Otherwise a butterfly might, as
it were, literally, summon up a hurricane. However, because of this phenomenon a problem emerges with the arrival of “GREYGOO” a mutated nanoscale self-replicating agent that has to sequester carbon to make copies of itself. This creates an attack of the blob type situation that threatens to reduce the entire surface of theworld to “GREYGOO”. To be honest lot of these ideas I just stole off of Ray Kurzweil and his books. all things considered it would be a very difficult book to write a book like this if only because its way too far out. . Most sci-fi writers just tend to stay clear of concepts like the singularity.
HERON
im watching a film about patrick heron. he was a cool artist’ if not a little overrated. now hes talking about pure visual pleasure’ whatever that means. you cant go on looking at anything for more than a milionth of a second withouty moving your eyes he says. its apparently a physical law that your eye gets bored and immediatley wants to move. justy try it. try slowly swivelling your eye across your visual field. it cant be done. it goes from this point to that point to that point. the stuff of that is rythym. when i see a robin hopping twig to twig’ i think of how amazingly it jumps from this point to that point and how its all done in jerks. all of which has a perfect starting point and ending. well exactly the same thing is happening when you look at something. one time i was watching a gay porno and spotted a tasteful patrick heron print mounted on the wall of the set. now everytime i see a heron painting i cant help but think of sweaty bareback gay sex.
poor heron.
HERONS AND BADGERS
herons used to be a popular christian symbol. apparently this was because primitive christian folk believed that herons would use their own blood to feed their YOUNG. primitive medieval folk also used to believe that badgers had two legs shorter on one side of their body so that they walk more easily
across sloping ground. i remember reading this in a book by thomas browne.
MODERNISM ON ICE
I wrote on the abcrit forums.
“Its no use getting upset up about the Tate and post modernism making everything tacky- that stuff’s not even very fashionable right now. young people will come back to modernism the same way they came back to vinyl. Maybe that sounds dumb but – it’ll come back around. People will rediscover Matisse and Cezanne and Picasso. Modernism never died- it was just put on ice.”
One of the replies to this comment came from Carl kandutsch a texas real estate attorney and telecommunications contractor. He said:
“The significance of modernism – the reason why it came into being – is to acknowledge that the existence of an art (like painting, sculpture, etc.) cannot be taken for granted (because no tradition can any longer perform that function or gather the spiritual authority to make its continued existence self-evident. Therefore, the faith that modernism “never died” or may “come back” is contrary to the spirit of modernism. An artistic medium like painting has a human history, meaning that it is born, and it can die.”
And yet Carl himself is a testament as to why this isn’t true. perhaps he simply lacks imagination. Great art is a form of immortality. the only art destined to die is the average. the mediocre. the lowest common denominator stuff that most of us prroduce. in this way picasso and the modernism he represents will last forever. and will always be ready to hand.. maintained through myth and merchandise. Karl himself is very invested in maintaining the cultural myth of modernism. after all he writes book-length essays on his website about Kenneth Noland and “expressive intentionality”. I PUT IT THAT IF MODERNISM IS DEAD THEN KARL IS THE WORST KIND OF NECROPHILE.
For modernism, history is not just the fanciful reconstruction of the past, but a tool to determine the authentically new from the past as opposed to what has been lauded as original and turns out not to be; this is history as the inverse of science fiction [which attempts to project ideas developed in the present onto a future scenario to help separate the merely fashionable from the new]; and to create a morgue of ideas from the past that can be revived because they have shown to be authentically new as history unfolds.
“As its culture folds back upon itself, it proliferates self-referential models of a cybernetic type, attentive to feedback-sensitive self-stimulating or auto-catalytic systems. The greater the progressive impetus, the more insistently cyclicity returns. To accelerate beyond light-speed is to reverse the direction of time. Eventually, in science fiction , modernity completes its process of theological revisionism, by rediscovering eschatological culmination in the time-loop”: Nick Land- “Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shaghai Time”
NOW FOR A PLAYLIST OF GIRL GROUP MUSIC FROM THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES
REPERATA & THE DELRONS- BOYS
DIANE RAY- PLEASE DON’T TALK TO THE LIFEGUARD
CAROL JONES- PROBLEM CHILD
TAMMYS- EGYPTIAN SHUMBA
KARI LYNN- CLEO
ROBIN WARD- WONDERFUL SUMMER
CLEOPATRA BELLES- MELVIN
DUSTY SPRINGFIELD- THE CORRUPT ONES
MISS VENUS- DER APOLL VOM BIKINI A TOLL AUA-AUA
MYRIAM MARTIN- LE BLUE BEAT
PEANUT BUTTER CONSPIRACY- DARK ON YOU
LUE RENNEY- YOUR WIGGLE & YOUR GIGGLE
JO BARBARA- FRIED RICE
BARBARA FELDON- 99
DIVINE- FEMALE TROUBLE
THE POPPY FAMILY- THERE’S NO BLOOD IN BONE
PEGGY MARCH- MALE NICHT DER TEUFEL AN DIE WAND
PRISCILLA PARIS- MY WINDOW
BERNADETTE- CRAZY YOGI
PEGGY MARCH- YA OH YA
APRIL STEVENS- TEACH ME TIGER
LORI BURTON- NIGHTMARE
SECRETS- THE OTHER SIDE OF TOWN
HALF SISTERS- FORGET WHERE I LIVE
DEBORAH WALLEY- SOMETIMES IN THE DARKEST HOUR
MABLE JOHN- DON’T HIT ME NO MORE
NICO- I’M NOT SAYING
LAURA LEE- DIRTY MAN
REPARATA & THE DELRONS- TAKE A LOOK AROUND YOU
STARLETS- MONEY HUNGRY
GLORIA BROWN- LOOKIN’ FOR MY BABY
LINDA CARR (I’M IN LOVE WITH THE) GARBAGE MAN
ANNETTE- MONKEY’S UNCLE
PLEASURE SEEKERS- WHAT A WAY TO DIE
SARA MONTIEL- TOUCH ME
BERNADETTE- THE SLOSH
GLENDA COLLINS- BEEN INVITED TO THE PARTY
SHAO FONG FONG- I LOVE A GO GO
ALTHEA & THE MEMORIES- WORSE RECORD EVER MADE
NOW I’M INTERVIEWING SCARLETT HIRST
For the New House website. hey that’s the website you’re on right now! congratulations! You know, i feel bad for any schmo who wants to be a performance artist because everyone will desperately want to make an example of you as someone making asinine pointless crap, and also marina abramovic sucks. but it can be good so….
JOYCE AND SYPHILIS
i got into an argument with a guy on youtube who refused to believe that james joyce had syphilis while writing finnegans wake. the guys name was Ron Maimon and he was spouting horrible nonsense.”Read each chapter aloud, slowly, in an Irish accent, following all the notes, then read it again QUICKLY without looking at any notes, and you will literally hallucinate as if you were dreaming, scenes of the most majestic beauty and heroism, all belonging to the night-consciousness of another figure, who you will come to know as well as you know yourself. DO NOT TAKE ANY DRUGS. Do not drink alcohol. Just read it as I described. It’s the best book ever written.”
But naturally i had problems accepting this kind of guff.
“But Ron” i argued. “Surley there real excellence of finnegans wake is in the wordplay and the puns. not the story! Joyce was too far gone from syphilis to make a coherent narrative. the Wake is largley an easthetic document. a kind of shimmering void. very beautiful but ultimatley hollow.”
This point deeply upset Ron. “James Joyce did not have syphillis,” he raged. “He wasn’t a womanizer, and Nora was his monogamous lover. The story is coherent, it has a plot, it’s a dream plot, but it’s a plot. I can explain every section and every event to you, how it goes, in your bourgeois language, so your bourgeois brain can understand. You see, I read the book.It took a while, because I had to keep rereading until the imagery was clear
“Book I is well understood, it’s all that people ever talk about. I won’t bother with it.
“Book II ch 1 introduces the passion play of the two brothers, the sister, and the sex-drama of the schoolgirl class that the two brothers fight over. NO, they are not fighting over their sister. NO, the schoolgirls are not a representation of the sister. They are her classmates. The sister’s lover is the recurring Tristan figure.
“The quietest lull is book II ch 2, which is simply the most abstract of academic talk, in the deepest part of sleep, as a sort of geometrio-philosophical symphony. It’s not a representation of ‘schooling of the children’ or any such nonsense, don’t read secondary sources. Just read the book. Book II ch 3 resolves the conflict in book I, as you discover what HCE did exactly, why it’s no big deal, and ALP reassures him, in her dream role as ‘helpmeet’. This is how subservient ALP is to HCE. Book II ch 3 is the most important in the book. Book II ch 4 is the four seagulls watching Tristan and Isolde making out, then turning into gossipping evangelists. It’s foreshadowing of book III ch 4.
“Book III ch1-3 is the crazy ADULT brother rivalry of the socialist brother (the Joyce stand-in, Shem) , with the stuffy ordinary bourgeois brother (the Stanislaw stand-in, Shaun). This section is straightforward, but SAVAGE, and it includes the ONLY (mildly) incestuous parts, which represent themselves as jealousy of the father over Isolde and Tristan, so he whips her and beats her, and expresses ownership and contempt, and so on. I have to say this, because there are ‘readers’ who imagine the most sordid of incestuous sex nonsense in this book. This is the only lace where it exists, and it’s always in hints and subtext, even here, where it is most pronounced and violent.
“Then comes the reveal of Book III ch 4, which is like when you get to the whodunit in a murder mystery. You find out what’s ‘really’ going on.
“Book IV is a denoument, but strange, because you’re back in the dream-world, and you get an uplifting ending which is the ‘death of ALP’ as the dreamer wakes up. All she asks is to be remembered, and then you realize that she is a dream-wife, not a real-wife, and her recurring place in the dream is made clear, she is the ‘eve’ to HCE’s ‘adam’, the kind of complete fulfilling partner that can only exist in dreams.. Not in messy reality. “
No dear reader your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. Ron has actually taken it upon himself to explain the entire of finnegans wake to me in bulletpoints. how very helpful indeead.
ron concludes this malarkey by saying “And that’s what makes Finnegans Wake so epic. It’s about finding the SOCIALIST WAY to represent epic literature, the HONEST WAY, as a dream inside the head of a character. Because that’s what Homer really is. That’s what visions of the gods ultimately are. They aren’t the one true God. They are a hallucination, much like the night of sleep depicted in the book.”
I decided to double down and ignore that whole sermon:
“Joyce died of syphilis and went blind in one eye because of it. Two of Joyce’s wives admitted to this. And as far as this affected his style – there are too many rough spots to have been left on purpose. You claim to understand the work better than I. But might I merely point out that no two Joyce scholars have ever agreed on the Wake’s aim, intent or meaning. Nothing more than a vague assertion. The book is a mess- albeit a fabulously worded mess. And it’s all well and good for you to call me bourgeois- rattling on about dreams and hallucinations as if these were the most important things in the world.”
Ron left a final comment but then rather tellingly he deleted it. the only evidence of its existence is a brief excerpt that popped up on my notifications page.
“Yes I know how stupid and incompetent you are. that’s how stupid and incompetent most bourgouis readers are. i am socialist. James Joyce was a socialist…”
And the note trails off there. The most glaring irony on Ron’s part is that he himself isn’t what you’d call a reader, or at least not a reader in the truest sense of the word. He is no Joyce enthusiast. He instead is a Joyce cultist. far more in love with an idea of Joyce than any actual writing by the man. an idea of Joyce that is personal and primarily sentimental, grounded in some pathological need for some kind of romantic Joycean figure. Ron requires Joyce to fulfil his role as fetish figure and refuses to accept anything about him that doesn’t conform to this bias. Ron here is probably the kind of guy who decided that he was a Joyce fan long before he even opened one of Joyce’s books. and Joyce being so difficult to interpret and so esoteric in his style is almost like honey to swarms of desperate poseurs. Geeks and socialists like Ron who can misprision Finnegan’s wake as some bizarre metaphor for class consciousness (and even were this Joyce’s true intention the book utterly fails to convey it effectively-much as it fails to convey anything). Ron can also can idolise Joyce as a hero and gentleman even though Joyce was a philanderer and neglected his sick daughter. And so’ when Ron is confronted by someone who does not conform to his own dogmatic bias he ens up resembling the priest from Aguirre wrath of god who becomes enraged when an Amazon Indian disrespects the bible. Although instead of “sacrilege’ ‘sacrilege’, this demented priest cries out “bougouis!” “bougouis!”
WAIT
a low flying drone or something with a prominent searchlight is circling the area around my house…I think I might have heard someone firing a gun out on the street earlier. Oh god…It’s going to be a long night.
LOVECRAFT
what a monster eh? a real bigot. a lot of left wing intellectuals are attempting to rehabilitate Lovecraft for a modern audience (the problematic fave generation) but the truth is that lovecraft despised modernism. he was an old fashioned conservative anti humanist . Back in the day he was widley regarded as a poor writer and a crank because he wrote in a really old fashioned style. but lovecrafts prose has aged very well. It doesn’t sound outdated anymore. It sounds stylish. cinematic even. primed for the age of infowars gnosticism’ twin peaks and creepypasta.. but we just cant abide lovecrafts political views . that and his grotesque chin. it makes us feel icky if we think about it too much and it makes us feel even ickier when we try and overlook it. who knows. maybe the right wing will be the ones to embrace lovecraft for all he was. . Azathoth shrugged. make america eldritch again.
COME INTO MY PARLOUR
“Organisms actively interpret their surroundings as replete with meaningful signs. They are not merely passive instruments or message bearers, but actively engaged in the creation of a significant environment. While it may be tempting to suggest that this is merely instinctual, this reductionist account does not take seriously the interpretive act on the part of the organism. The creation of the Umwelt occurs through the interpretative work of the organism, whereby the organism responds to certain signs that are significant to it, and likewise creates signs for others […] The spider’s web is certainly formed in a ‘fly-like’ manner, because the spider itself is ‘fly-like.’ To be ‘fly-like’ means that the body structure of the spider has taken on certain of the fly’s characteristics—not from a specific fly, but rather from the fly’s archetype. To express it more accurately, the spider’s ‘fly-likeness’ comes about when its body structure has adopted certain themes
from the fly’s melody […] The web is truly a refined work of art that the spider has painted of the fly’
Brett Buchanan
