Best Albums of 2010

Nick!

Tallest Man On Earth - The Wild Hunt

Mona!

Kings Of Leon - Come Around Sundown

Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More

Basho!

Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record

Laura Veirs - July Flame

Dizzy!

April Smith - Songs For a Sinking Ship

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record
Jesca Hoop - Hunting My Dress

Jonsi - Go

School of Seven Bells - Disconnect From Desire

Stars - The Five Ghosts

Wolf Parade - Expo 86

Scout!

1. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

-A grower, but the best kind. There's only one song on here that I'm not madly in love with (it's the one that sounds like U2). I love that they've expanded but they keep their elements intact. Mostly I just love that their holding a mirror up to how badly we fucked up. A mirror that happens to be made up of the greatest songs of the year. "Month of May" and "Ready To Start" use guitars and drums like weapons, "Modern Man" is "Downtown Train" by Tom Waits, but sweeter, "Suburban War" is Nebraska by Springsteen, but in the middle it gets 50,000 volts to the heart, "Sprawl II" is like The Human League + New Order, but with humanitarian blood coursing through it's veins, turning them bright, neon red under the skin. Regine Chassagne and Win Butler's voices are still just as important to me as the day I first heard them, at the tail end of 2004. They may be older and wiser, but to have them singing the same blues I have every day is about as close to having them put their hands on my shoulder and saying "keep it up" as I'll come. Their songs have always resonated with me because I feel like they were written about me. Which I think is Win Butler's gift as a songwriter. He's a genius who only ever talks up to the willing in his songs. He and his band beg you to wake up and love each other before it's too late. Standout track: "Empty Room." That rare object of beauty you can blast from car speakers.

2. Holy Fuck - Latin

-Holy Fuck are the only band that could ever deserve the name they chose for themselves. No one ever said that these guys could top their first album, and I definitely thought it impossible. And yet and yet. Latin is, as Brian Borcherdt's video for "Red Lights" suggests, a muscle car that bathes in the morning sun on opener "1MD" then gets into all kinds of fucking trouble for the rest of the album. Whereas LP had hooks that you could shake your ass to, Latin gives them depth, meaning, a backstory. Latin is as imperative as it is unforgettably catchy. It's also so awesome that really there's only one thing to say when you find yourself in the mesmerizing grooves the band creates. And I think you know what that is.

3. Wolf Parade - Expo 86

-Dizzy and I have discussed this album at length and though I agree with her that the first song, "Cloud Shadow On The Mountain" is the best thing ever done by human beings, I still contend that the rest of the album holds enough majesty to serve as a worthy successor to their unparralleled debut album Apologies To The Queen Mary. Still weird and still wonderful, Wolf Parade have honed their skills as rockers and it turns out their instincts as rock gods work nicely with their old baggage, singing dadaistic, avant-garde lyrics about who knows what. Dan Boeckner is the MVP here, making his guitar scream and sing in turn (the man was born to punish six strings) and for the first time since that brilliant first album, he and Spencer Krug sing together perfectly on "Little Golden Age." Boeckner's rockers and Krug's space-age barn-burners are represented here and both are in top form. And of course Arlen Thompson's drumming and Hadji Bakara's squelching keyboards are never at rest; they give Wolf Parade the gown it wears to the wedding, after all. These four work together in perfect harmony and Expo 86 is a rock album for our uncertain times. It's never at rest, it constantly conjures beautiful endless vistas in our minds, it's powerless to the machinations that surround it, but that doesn't stop it from tearing shit up real nice. Standout track: "Cave-O-Sapien"

4. UNKLE - Where Did The Night Fall

-I always liked UNKLE, but more as atmosphere rather than as songsmiths. For the hundreth time I was happily proven wrong about a band's capability this year when UNKLE delivered Where Did The Night Fall which mixes dramatic delivery with beastly choruses. "Follow Me Down" starts things off perfectly, cool and aloof at times, digging into you at others. The choice of guest vocalists was inspired on this outing. Rachel Fannan of Sleepy Sun, The Black Angels, Joel Cadbury, TV On The Radio/Celebration's Katrina Ford, Autolux... There are great, creeping club rockers that would make Portishead happy, but I'm tempted to say that the best song is the slow-burning "Another Night Out" which proves why Mark Lanegan is one of the most sought after vocalists in the game. It's dark, huge and splendid, like the album it closes.

5. The Besnard Lakes - Are The Roaring Night

-Mixing Shoegazing rock with chamber pop, The Besnard Lakes are the greatest band you don't know. Except maybe Holy Fuck. Get on that, reader, you're falling behind! Anyway, this album is everything it promises. Hazy skylines, blurring colours, canon-like bursts of guitar and drums, flying vocals, propulsive pop, rockers like runaway freight trains, the roaring night. Standout track: "And This Is What We Call Progress."

6. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record

-I don't think I even need to go into why I love this. Does anyone question my love of Broken Social Scene at this point? Is anyone surprised when their records show up here year after year? For those who do listen to "Meet Me In The Basement." Yeah, how do you like that? Pretty fucking awesome, yeah? Broken Social Scene are always in my head. They were with me all throughout my teen years and are just always with me. "Art House Director" is a lot of fun, an Andrew Whiteman-penned romp all about authorial vision, getting at the line that separates music and film. "All To All" is just amazing. So is "Sentimental Xs." So is "Chase Scene." So is "World Sick."

7.Laura Jorgensen - Feathered Arms

-Am I perhaps slightly biased when it comes to Laura Jorgensen? We've made four movies together, one of which was an account of her playing a solo concert; I directed the music video for her song "Pulling Strings;" I sat next to her in Intro To Film Scoring. Perhaps. Those who'd believe me incapable of being objective ought to just listen to one of her songs. "Pens" for instance, in which she channels Joanna Newsom, Bjork and Devotchka, all imperatively, all gorgeously, all the while proving herself a talent in need of recognition. Her voice goes from a rousing roar to a breath-taking whisper, all in the name of getting us to realize the joy and stunning life that surrounds us even in squalor. Feathered Arms is like Never Let Me Go, a kind of quiet, post-apocalyptic account of what went wrong at the end of the world. Why didn't we stop cutting down forests? Why didn't we stop fighting wars? Why didn't we hold each other a little closer? Even still, those of us who've survived are privy to a truly excellent party scored by Jorgensen's stunning and reflective old-fashioned pop music. Standout track: "South." Sweet fucking jesus, that song.

8. LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening

-The thing that won me over immediately was the album cover. It all made perfect sense. James Murphy is Bernard Sumner and David Bowie and Peter Murphy and Bryan Ferry and Iggy Pop and Philip Oakey and he had the album cover to prove it. This Is Happening could be the best album of 78-86 were it not for the irony, the foresight James Murphy has looking back at his own behavior, his short but almost unbelievably successful career as the golden boy of self-aware, post-Daft Punk techno. There couldn't have been anyone like Murphy until Murphy. He worked his way up, built an empire in his image, gave the spotlight to like-minded geniuses like Hot Chip, Shit Robot and Black Dice. Bands full of guys just like him except that they're not him. As unlikely rock stars go, paunchy, self-hating James Murphy is at the top of the list, but lo and behold, he not only managed to recreate the noises from his favourite records full of charismatic sex symbols, but he also found his voice. So he can now not only say "Fuck You" to everyone who doubted he was a genius, but he can do it in a really beautiful voice he found in honor of his last album. Dude...fuckin' James Murphy. He wrote a song called "You Wanted A Hit" and then realized his album didn't have a hit, so he wrote "Drunk Girls" which is the greatest song ever written. And it's not even the best song on the album. Standout track: "One Touch" and "I Can Change" because they're both sides of his personality, the hit machine and the insecure pop star who doesn't want the spotlight.

9. The Living Sisters - Love To Live

-Recently I was won over by whimsy, smiles, sunshine and hooks. I blame The Hidden Cameras to a degree and certainly years of listening to Regina Spektor (though her relentless cuteness can be like staring at the sun, you just have to stop before your eyes burn out of your head), but recently I've been totally won over by the bubbly likes of The Secret Sisters, Laura Marling and The Living Sisters, the newest Becky Stark side project, also featuring Inara George from The Bird and The Bee and mutual friend Eleni Mandell. Of the three these girls won me over with their three-part harmonies, plucky subject matter (the opening track is almost too happy), and old-school California melodies. A more easy and pretty listen you won't find this year; the perfect album to put on and pretend you have no troubles. Go on, you know you want to. Standout track: "Double Knots." Like swimming in a shimmering, rainbow-colored pool with your best gal.

10. Stars - The Five Ghosts

-Stars have yet to write an album that maintains the kind of mood that makes for a single listen. "Genova Heights" and "Today Will Be Better" are too definitive in opposite directions to be cohesive together. They're both great songs, indeed Stars write some of the best rock/theatrical pop music of the last decade, but I tend to do a lot of skipping depending on whether I'm feeling down or romantic or in the mood for a lot of headbanging and air guitar. The Five Ghosts is the closest thematically they've done since Heart and contains some of their best songs to date. Listen to Amy Millan's voice on the seemingly ordinary "Changes." What begins in that breathy, sweet way of hers morphs slowly into an impossibly beautiful plea. "Changes" has maybe her greatest vocal performance to date. Goddamn can Amy Millan sing. Like their previous albums The Five Ghosts also has some pretty massive personal significance for me and someone who will remain nameless (you know who you are!). These guys write songs that lend themselves well to soundtrack-of-your-life type situations, which really puts them in their own league as far as pop is concerned. A lot of pop music sounds like it's supposed to play during the end credits of a movie. Stars write songs that turn your life into a living film that you want desperately to have a happy ending. Standout: "Wasted Daylight." That song is fucking awesome.

11.The Hot Rats - Turn Ons

-I shouldn't count this as it's all covers but seriously this record rocks. As much as it grieves me to learnt that my favourite bands have broken up (this year I found out that Ambulance LTD. may have finally thrown in the towel, as well as French Kicks and World Leader Pretend) when I learned that Supergrass has called it quits, the blow was softened somewhat by the release of The Hot Rats' Turn Ons. Produced by Radiohead's angel-on-the-shoulder Nigel Godrich, Hot Rats is really just Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffy from Supergrass doing the work of three men and playing some of their (and mine) favourite songs and doing just as good or better a job as the fellas who penned them. I always thought that "Big Sky" by The Kinks could have used a harder edge, for instance. Apparently so did Coombes. I also thought that The Velvet Underground's "Can't Stand It' was a bit aimless; Coombes and Goffy give it a pulse and a purpose. I hate The Doors and never really thought I'd like anything of theirs that didn't open Apocalypse Now. Point Coombes. Their version of "The Crystal Ship" makes sense of Jim Morrison's formerly incoherent vision and brings a soaring chorus to life. Even songs I didn't really think deserved the Hot Rats treatment come away lively and catchy. Gang of Four's "Damaged Goods" and Beastie Boys' "Fight For Your Right To Party" are given such a nifty acoustic guitar treatment resulting in the kind of indefatigable kookiness that only hindsight can produce. The best of the 60s, 70s and 80s with a little of each thrown into the mix in the production, with Nigel Godrich's work almost akin to building a cabin around these songs and keeping a roaring fire going while Coombes and Goffy have a singsong. I'm just glad they invited everyone. Usually this tasteful experimentation winds up on the cutting room floor. But they enlivened the best of Elvis Costello, Pink Floyd and Sex Pistols in a way that I didn't know needed doing. Standout track: "Up The Junction," originally by Squeeze. Heartbreaking.

12. Jesca Hoop - Hunting My Dress

-Tom Waits called Jesca Hoop's music akin to "swimming at night." Having only heard one song "Four Dreams" I didn't quite get it. Now that I've got her excellent third album, Hunting My Dress, I get it. Managing to out-Brian Deck Brian Deck with her quirky production, Hoop doesn't create songs so much as she does little worlds with hierarchies, characters and dangers. Like Waits' newer albums, Hunting My Dress is at once a showcase for her unique voice and also a new and exciting endeavour every track. It doesn't make for cohesion, but it does make for an experience that's like reading a different novel every time the song changes. "Whispering Light" is a dark ugly place where the locals'd kill you as soon as look at you, "Angel Mom" is elegiac and fragile, fraught with loss, "Tulip" is hot, full of high-contrast light and sideways glances from nervous travelers. As for "Four Dreams," it's very nearly the best song of the year. A clicking, clacking deep and wonderful place that works like a clock. And at the end of the hour, more amazing music.

13. School of Seven Bells - Disconnect From Desire

-I have KCRW's Top Tune to thank for a lot of the albums on here (Jesca Hoop, Living Sisters, Joanna Newsom) including this, which introduced me to the best song on the album, the buzzing, expansive "Dust Devil." It showed me that School of Seven Bells have grown as a band, even if their favourite influences have stuck around. There's still plenty of My Bloody Valentine on Disconnect From Desire and Brian Eno, to be sure, but they've found a sound that extends past their ability to find a wavy, fuzzy groove. "Dust Devil" is School of Seven Bells conquering their influences and standing over top of them victorious. The twin vocals of twin sisters Deheza and the propulsive backing of Benjamin Curtis show a mastery of the kind of thing they did in their previous bands and showing what they've discovered on the trail they're currently blazing. There are hills and valleys to get lost in and if you're looking for a hiding place, an environment to discover yourself do what they did, Disconnect From Desire. Also, listen to this album cause it's pretty great.

14. Land of Talk - Cloak And Cypher

-Liz Powell has always been super impressive. I've seen her do two sets in a night, as opener and headliner, and she kept playing when the power went out onstage. Her albums until now have been mostly momentary distraction types. I need a song to rock out to between work and home? "Young Bridge" will do the job. But I never though her sweltering guitar and lazy vocals were never quite as imperative as her peers. Well, I take back my apathy. Land of Talk have proven themselves a band of amazing depth and incredible songwriting skill with Cloak And Cypher, an icy cool post-punk album that makes Powell's voice a deep and powerful force and puts her detuned guitar to work beneath layers of drums and hefty production. Cloak and Cypher sounds like The Pretenders produced by Martin Hannett. It's catchy and dark and detached and in-your-face at once. The choruses of "Goaltime Exposure" and "Color Me Badd" are monumental and will stay with you long after the album's finished spinning.

15. J Tillman - Singing Ax

-Like a wind kicked up a hundred years ago that's only just blown through your hair. You might know him as the guy who drums for Fleet Foxes but he deserves to be known as the guy whose aching, sweet voice, Cormac McCarthy-esque country songs and his distant lonely guitar will bring you to tears in the right mindset. This is isn't even as good as his previous records but this is still a haunting and winning record and better than most musicians that purport to be modern country. His voice melts in your ears and his songs will live for centuries; they already sound like they have.

16. Nels Cline Singers - Initiate

-Much more overtly jazzy than Draw Breath, a previous favourite around these parts, and much more spacious and psychedelic, too. Nels has been around long enough that when he experiments, it really sounds as vital as it ought to. After all, are there many jazz guitar players with his resume? He's played with Thurston Moore, Wilco, Mike Watt, Zach Hill and Charlie Haden. Anyway, Initiate straddles psych-rock and spacey, thoughtful jazz. "Red Line To Greenland" is way fucking awesome, loaded with instantly memorable riffs and burning theatrics, while "Scissor/Saw" is all experimental percussion and detuned disturbances. He still finds something exciting to say with the most over-used instrument on the planet and he's got a band that can keep up with him, too.

17. Lullabye Arkestra - Threats/Worship

-I love Lullabye Arkestra because they constantly remind me that even with the simplest formula (one bass, one drum kit, two Canadian spouses with indie rock credentials) something new can come bursting out. Like a charging bull, Threats/Worship takes a harder edge than their debut Ampgrave, and the soul influence is a little less prominent, but what these two do with a lot of distortion is like alchemy. Kat Taylor-Small's voice is soulful even when in the throes of a screaming fit and this time she even allows herself a moment of reverby cool on the album's best track, the sexy "Fog Machine." It's not easy to do something new with bass and drums and even harder to swim the waters between metal and soul but Lullabye do it with panache. "Sad Sad Story" sounds like it could have been written for someone on Deep City Records, while "Get Nervous" and "We Fuck The Night" are more punishing and cool than the best on Relapse Records. I'm always glad to see something totally unique spring to life when lovers make music.

18. Eric Chenaux & Ryan Driver - Warm Weather

-It doesn't quite compare to their otherworldly live show, but this collection of collaborative tracks does hint at the mysterious majesty of their harmonizing. The two men compliment each other with their wonderfully human voices and rambling guitars. Constellation Records' secret weapon for some time, Chenaux mixes the likes of Ohad Benchetrit's guitar and Vic Chesnutt's lonely singing. A fall day living room record.

19. Holly Miranda - The Magicians Private Library

-Brilliant, almost industrial post-pop that soothes and cuts in equal measure. Miranda's voice is just as interesting as her compositions; a sort of smoky, jazzy thing complimented by Dave Sitek's keyboards and Eno-like repetition and ethereal orchestration. There are sun-drenched highs ("Sweet Dreams") and noisy lows ("No One Just Is") and it all makes sense. Standout: the Kyp Malone-assisted "Slow Burn Treason." Simply astonishing!

20. Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me

-Previous albums have alienated me with their sheer outre cuteness, but this is the first album where her mammoth, baroque vision has seeped into my brain. I'm a recent convert but I really do think that this is the one record of hers that everyone could enjoy. Some really beautiful compositions that she finally does herself the favour of singing clearly on. A beautiful, beautiful collection of songs.

I'd just like to POINT out

 

*congretates, congegates.. hunkie-dorie.

my dream

I had this dream last night that while I was sleeping on the couch downstairs, my mom filled my bedroom up with cages of exotic animals and aquariums of fish, and that my plants were growing out of control- huge! Blocking out the window and covering my bed with leaves.

And at first I was really mad, but then I saw that there were some seahorses in one of the tanks and I was just so amazed and couldn't even believe it, and I wasn't annoyed or upset anymore.

So I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that my mom kept a bunch of cats in my room when I was away at college, and that my new morning glories are just starting to sprout, and that I had a fever at the time.

Home feels different to me after being away from it. Even though ten weeks isn't all that long, especially compared to the ten or so years that I've lived in this house, it's more of the fact that it's becoming less of a home to me. Most of my stuff is still here, but I've sort of already started to put my roots down somewhere else, in Bar Harbor. And I really like it there, but I was also pretty homesick at times there too. But I think that's okay?

So I'm struggling with this idea of "home" or even just my room, which, after sharing one with a roommate, seems oddly empty and inhospitable.

People move from place to place, and children have to grow up and find their own way somehow, but it all seems very big to me still, and I miss people who are in Boston and Montreal and California. And one of my one good friends from school might not be coming back next trimester, which I don't really know how to cope with.

But I'm glad that I'm not sick anymore, and that I've figured a few things out. And I'll get to see a few more people soon. My big sister, who I haven't seen in probably a year and a half, is flying here from Texas tonight. It will only take her about three hours. Doesn't that seem impossible?

I watched an episode of House where he was on a plane and someone got really, really sick and then all the passengers started getting all of the symptoms too, and they all thought they were all going to die and they were flying over the south pole, but then it turned out that it was just all just hysteria and it was only the one guy in the first place who was sick, and he wasn't even really all that sick, he was just a scuba diver or whatever. In the end it all turned out okay.

ok?

My Favourite Film Volume 18

If I had to pick one film to show to an alien race to try and explain the concept of horror, specifically the horror film, I think I’d pick John Carpenter’s The Thing. It can be understood without any significant reading into the zeitgeist that produced it. You don’t need to be an American or have much understanding of the political climate of the early 1980s, you don’t need to have seen the Howard Hawks produced The Thing From Another World, of which Carpenter’s film was an ostensible remake, nor do you have to have read Who Goes There? the story by John Campbell, which both films take inspiration from. In fact you don’t need to know much at all. I was maybe 5 or 6 when I first saw The Thing and I connected immediately with its desperate characters and thoroughly enjoyed repeat visits to the cold Antarctic setting. As with Aliens, another childhood favorite, I could follow the action, enjoyed the brutality of both the heroes and the villain(s), the blunt poetry of the dialogue (casual swearing, a 6 year old's delight), the creature design, the relentlessness of the story and as I got older came to see it as a film so carefully designed and meticulously constructed that the idea of calling it a horror film doesn’t really do it justice. It is a story of paranoia, of loss, of Lovecraftian terror, of man’s multifaceted struggle with things he can only attempt to comprehend, of men trying to apply science, reason and finally common sense to the unexplainable. Though to be fair it is first and foremost the story of an alien lifeform that really wants to take over the bodies of twelve men trapped in an isolated location who in return really want to kill it. Because it is such a simple story, it’s possible to scour it for subtext (Vietnam, Reagan, AIDS and socio-feminist-related readings have all been offered) and while I think that’s a valuable and telling exercise, I’m going to simply judge it in terms of its place in the genre because it is in many ways the ultimate genre film.

The Thing

by John Carpenter

In the endless expanse of the Antarctic landscape, a helicopter and its two occupants chase after a dog. The dog looks back at them as they unload bullets and grenades feebly; it seems to be knowingly outfoxing them. The dog makes it to United States National Science Institute Station 4 before the two men can do much damage. The pilot accidentally blows himself and the chopper up with a grenade and though the survivor tries to explain himself to the Americans at Station 4. The only problem is he’s Norwegian and they don't understand a word he says. They understand when they’re being shot at however. When the Norwegian misfires and hits Bennings the meteorologist in the leg while aiming for the dog, Garry, the camp's lone military man. The guys take the dog in and begin wondering what it is that would have caused two men to want to kill a dog so badly. The men, besides Garry and Bennings, are Norris the geologist, Childs the mechanic, helicopter pilots MacReady and Palmer, physicians and biologists Fuchs, Blair and Copper, radio operator Windows, Nauls the cook and Clark the veterinarian. After stitching up Bennings’ leg, Copper opts to go find the Norwegian camp and gets MacReady to take him there. What they find is chilling, in every sense of the word. Looks like the fellow with one of Garry’s bullets in his crown got off easy - one of the men has cut his own throat with a straight-razor (but seems to have frozen to death before he finished bleeding) and another looks to have been burnt alive, though he doesn’t look all human either. They also find a big block of ice that looks to have lately held something big. They bring back the burnt man-like mass to camp where Blair attempts to perform an autopsy. Everyone watches in shock and horror as new discoveries are made but no one is more shaken than the dog. It’s almost as if he recognizes that burnt-up mass of flesh. When Clark the vet puts him in with the camp's other sleigh dogs that night, something rather unexpected happens. The dog quickly sheds it’s skin and becomes something unspeakably hideous and gooey and starts wrapping tentacles around the other dogs. The men burn it before it can lift itself into the rafters with the giant fists it sprouted from its back.

It takes some imagination on Blair’s part to discern what went on but considering that every man in the camp saw the transformation with their own eyes they’re willing to buy just about anything. Blair pulls the creature apart and finds evidence of it trying to look like a dog, like it was in the middle of imitating the camp dogs when they killed it. After inspecting some tapes they collected from the Norwegian base, MacReady and Norris head to the spot where they pulled the block of ice from the snow. Not only do they find where it was pulled out, they find the charred remains of a gigantic spacecraft buried beneath a hundred thousand years worth of ice. MacReady draws a timeline which the guys take with a grain of salt. He’s no scientist after all. The Norwegians thaw the thing out, it gets to some of their bodies, they try to contain it by killing whomever it touches (and themselves to prevent being taken over), but it gets out in the body of one their dogs, which tries to occupy other dogs. Though that makes a kind of sense, it’s hardly a comfort to the men at Station 4. How long before the man-thing defrosts and decides it would prefer, as the film’s slogan promises, a nice warm-blooded body to inhabit? And if it can imitate any organism it wants to, how will anyone know who’s human and who’s not? It’s either going to be a very long or a very short winter.

The Thing is John Carpenter’s best film, it is one of the best remakes of all time, one of the best genre movies of all time, features some of the best special effects of all time and one of the most terrifying and interesting premises of all time. Not bad for a little sci-fi/horror movie with three locations, is it? It is superbly crafted to ensure that every scene shocks and surprises and to make sure you never feel at ease. It is only on second viewing do you understand how loaded every gesture is (even the simple act of a dog licking your face becomes foreshadowing in the take-no-prisoner’s world of Bill Lancaster’s script and John Carpenter's direction). Every element that would ordinarily damn a film like this (simple sets, the odd bout of pseudo-science, the lack of female characters, the no-nonsense direction, a seeming reliance on effects over characterization [though under scrutiny this turns out to be false]) becomes a strength. The film had few allies upon its first release. If the critics of 1982 could see just what’s happened to some of the classics since Carpenter’s film, they’d perhaps have kept their mouths shut instead of trashing a film they didn’t understand. The problem was they were not willing to play The Thing’s game. They wanted a film that showed respect to them and to Howard Hawks’ original; Carpenter’s film does neither on its face. The Thing’s atmosphere is built in to every frame, the performances are invisible, everyone taking a backseat to the crisis on their hands, and the effects are quite gruesome. Carpenter’s characters are not exactly charismatic (though most are likable) and it's only when he kills them off at times you least expect it that you realize how much you like and depend on them. In some regards it seems like we have the makings of an Italian horror film. The scenes at the Norwegian camp resemble some gory painting halfway between Fulci and Argento, the Ennio Morricone music beautifully underscoring the action (of all his film scores that simple ‘dun dun’ theme gets the most impact with the least movement), even the characters seem drawn from an Italian film (Windows looks a touch like some Italian character actor, Fuchs like Richard Dreyfuss by way of Al Cliver in The Beyond, Bobby Rhodes made his career pretending to be as naturally cool as Keith David is here and thanks to all that hair Kurt Russell looks like a cross between make-up man Rob Bottin and Ray Lovelock in Let Sleeping Corpses Lie). Carpenter had shown his affinity for Italianate visuals and atmosphere in his previous film, The Fog, but The Thing manages to synthesize the visuals of his and his crew’s inspiration (Argento, EC comics, Lovecraft, Hawks, I detect shades of Jaws, but that could be because Spielberg and Carpenter were both students of first generation of film schools) and craft a language all its own.

Bottin’s visual effects are unrivaled, even today. He and Carpenter were both wary of staying away from H.R. Giger’s designs for Alien, still fresh in their minds when they began planning the film in 1981. I think it speaks volumes about their various successes that not only does The Thing not resemble Alien in anyway, it completely avoids seeming like a sci-fi movie. I for one have never really thought of it as anything in the universe of Alien as it speaks a different language (though check out the extra appendages on the queen at the end of James Camerson’s sequel; they’ve got Bottin’s signature writ large. That Stan Winston worked on the scenes with the dog thing I think could be seen as pre-proudction on Aliens). The stories have a lot in common, though Campbell covered the ground in Who Goes There? before Ridley Scott had ever read Dan O’Bannon’s script. First of all, Dean Cundey’s widescreen cinematography is half-business, half-mood, all great. The gorgeous snowy landscapes and the scenes of the camp at night have a kind of blue-collar poetry about them; this is truly the end of the world. And what was Ridley Scott trying to achieve with his space ship if not the kind of broken down and hopelessly average interiors that Carpenter’s characters dwell in? Also I think that Bottin’s creatures avoid looking earthly in a way no one’s ever seconded. For all the genius behind the design of Giger's titular Alien (of which there was plenty), it does retain a humanoid shape. The only thing human about Bottin’s creations is in their feeble attempt at looking human. The rest is so far from normal, so freakish and distorted that they become works of art in their own right. Everyone from Stuart Gordon to James Gunn has tried their hand at copying Carpenter’s work with Bottin but no one’s come close. The Thing was by Carpenter’s own admission all about the monsters. If they weren’t the most fucking awesome monsters you’d ever seen, the film wouldn’t have worked.

The reason I think that The Thing manages to be unnerving when we aren’t staring down the snout of some hoary beast, is because for the first and last time Carpenter and co. had total control over the look of the film; he had it once again on Ghosts of Mars but that film wound up a pale imitation in this and every other regard. Your average cinemagoer in the early 80s had no clue what an Antartic research station looked like so both the drab interiors (with their indefinably spooky corridors and maw-like doors) and the frozen exteriors all set the viewer on edge. The outside looks like a jagged and macabre ice castle in the thick of the weather conditions and the effective but natural lighting design is all manufactured blues and oranges. The frame jumps with strange colours once the action picks up and never rests. The film’s final location, the generator room is a special creation, the camp’s own inferno where the final and most terrible monster of all dwells. It is here that Carpenter and Botton hark back to Harryhausen as well as every creature we’ve seen thus far. The lighting, all hellish chiaroscuro, compliments the final clash with the unknown perfectly just in time for Russell’s final put-down. The blue-collar angle I mentioned before is most evident in the dialogue. When not in Hawksian rapid-fire-yet-lackadaisacal conversation, the men sound conspicuously like a couple of bored, stir-crazy working stiffs. How often do people attempt and fail at that sort of thing? I think Lancaster understood that when ordinary people take on something, their fight becomes your fight in a way it doesn’t if you’re watching he-men or detectives or gladiators taking on something supernatural. Those characters are more likely to rise to the occasion because they've been written to do so. Carpenter’s guys don’t want the beast to win but mostly they don’t want to get killed. An impulse I think we can all understand. Even as paranoia mounts and no one’s sure about anything, their dialogue remains refreshingly human. The film’s best lines are gut reactions to some pretty horrifying images; I don’t know whether Keith David's Childs, Richard Masur’s Clark or David Clennon’s Palmer has the film’s best line, but almost everyone gets an instantly quotable zinger that would just be so much swearing in any other film. What’s more, upon further inspection, you realize that no line gets wasted. Take the petty argument about who’s going to search for Fuchs with whom. Knowing what we do about everyone involved and who turns out to be a thing, it makes perfect sense. The dialogue and Carpenter’s camera miss nothing. In other words the film wastes no time, no words, no glances and no energy. Everything helps the action along, everything contributes to the miasma of mistrust and the end soon comes hurdling at us at lightspeed. It is efficient, grisly and creepy, like the organism at the core of the story. And just like the thing of the title it gets under your skin. In other words, it is a horror film par excellence, full of writhing shocks and spider-legged creatures from another world. Like the best of Lovecraft it knows no master, plays by no rules and scares you to death, but in the end I keep coming back for more.

Pulling Strings

First music video I've directed.

Pulling Strings from Scout Tafoya on Vimeo.

We're Still Screaming

A few years ago I made some snide comment about music videos on this very blog. In the comment section, I believe. Anyway, I've been made a fool of several times since then. I've even made a music video. So that in it of itself would be enough reason to feel I spoke rashly. I certainly don't need anyone else making a music video that obfuscates most of my unseen creative output. Well Goddamn Spike Jonze and Arcade Fire. I've been writing fiction and screenplays and this and that and the other thing for roughly eight years and everything I wanted to say is pretty succinctly presented in the music video for "The Suburbs." Not that it - the song, the video, both parties - aren't great, but it's a little aggravating to see one shot in a music video tell a story better than a hundred and twenty page script does. Anyway, enjoy this video, it's fucking amazing, the best of it's kind since "Black & White Town" by Doves.

Still the greatest band on earth

Thank you to Erica Bruce for pointing this out!

A Dream I Had

I dreamed that there was a ladybug sleeping in the corner of a dusty windowsill. Upon waking up, she began to scurry to the other side of it. But draped down from the frame of the window were spiderwebs. So she got tangled in one, and I had to brush it away from her. And so it happened again, and at this point the tiny spider in his web was looking quite content. But, as the ladybug made progress past him, he became frustrated when he realised she was bound to get away. And eventually she did, crossing to the other side of the webbing. But just then, a much bigger spider--the size of my outspread hand--caught the poor ladybug in his thick ropey net and devoured her in a moment.

one more bittersweet song

Though it isn't Hazards of Love. Hmph..

"O, Dear, I don't know, I have to go and put my head to rest"

My Favourite Films Volume 17

Horror movies have always had champions over the years. In the 1960s small-time filmmakers like Roman Polanski and George A. Romero changed the discourse on the possibilities of the horror film. In the 1980 and 90s, all the taboos were shattered and the realm of post-modernism was opened up. In the 1920s, the makers of German Expressionism broke the mold but in the 1940s, horror had one innovator, one man who refused to make every other kind of ghost story or monster flick. Val Lewton and his division at RKO Radio Pictures turned American horror, which had already started to get stale by 1941, into something imaginative and artistic, akin to the work of Robert Weine and F.W. Murnau. With his protégés Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark Robson, he crafted some of the most compelling fright films the world had ever seen. The first of his nine horror films is his best and remains one of the most daring and beautifully told stories we have.

Cat People

by Jacques Tourneur

Irena Dubrovna is a Serbian expatriate living on her own in New York City. She sketches a panther in the zoo but isn’t happy with the end result. When she throws her scraps away but misses the trashcan she hits the shoes of Oliver Reed. Oliver, a lonely young ship designer, approaches her and sweet-talks his way into an invitation back to her brown stone; Irena for her part seems more than happy to entertain the handsome Reed. She doesn’t have many friends in the city, in fact she insists on that isolation but Reed is different. He doesn’t demand anything from her is more than courteous and seems genuinely interested in spending time with the beautiful young Irena. A little time passes and Oliver and Irena are in love, but as Oliver is want to point out, they’ve never become intimate, they’ve never even kissed. Irena is grateful for the space Oliver has given her, but she insists she has her reasons. In fact the first time they met she outlined her fears in the abstract. Irena comes from a village that was raided long ago by King John, who threw out the Mameluks. The people in her village resisted Christianity and embraced devil worship so that when John showed up, he engaged in full-scale slaughter. Irena, though she’s reticent at first to talk about it, believes that she’s been cursed by her homeland, that she’s descended from said devil worshipers and that grave things await her should she succumb to her urges. The history is patently false but it’s exoticism was enough for audiences at the time to believe her inherited evil, and I surmise the story had more to do with Lewton and Tourneur’s own exile from Europe than anything else.

Oliver thinks its nonsense but he loves his wife dearly and a month of sleeping in different rooms after his marriage notwithstanding he’s going to help his beloved. His closest friend and co-worker Alice Moore suggests a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd, to help Irena work out her beliefs and feelings. Irena only goes to one session before she starts questioning whether she wants the curse lifted or not. Judd thinks she ought to seek professional help following the revelation that Irena seriously believes that she’ll turn into a predatory cat if she’s aroused, Oliver is worried sick about his bride, and Alice is brought to tears when her friend confesses how sad he is. When Alice lets slip one day that she has more than friendly feelings for Oliver, things take an ugly turn. Oliver, conflicted about his feelings and the state of his marriage, does not tell Irena, but instead spends more platonic time with Alice. Irena stops working altogether and begins following her husband around growing more suspicious and paranoid by the day. Soon it seems the only thing that brings her comfort is visiting the panther in the zoo. It comes as little shock when Alice begins having run-ins with what appears to be a large jungle cat that always disappears before light can find it.

Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton were kindred spirits. Both were expatriates, like Irena and Tourneur did his best work for Lewton as both saw the dramatic potential of shadow, light and insinuation. The first thing to notice about Cat People, before you’ve sided with anybody or got wind of the direction the plot will move is how deliciously stylized it is, but Lewton and Tourneur worked in an era before a fuss was made over these sorts of things. Lewton had very little money and the film is full of budget-conscious trickery that squeezes the most from its design. There’s the decision to make Reed a designer to make way for an endgame strategy (which, of course, relies on shadows). Tourneur and Lewton loaded every frame with feline likenesses and other strange objects. Then there’s the way the two men play with light. Take the first session between Irena and Judd; the way in which Tourneur frames her face is brilliant, if a bit unrealistic. Irena’s hair always sparkles with fill light and her face is never less than beautiful. Though she, like the audience, infers things that may or may not be true, she is still the victim and we must be able to sympathize with her. Enter the stalking scenes. A woman walks alone on a sidewalk at night. Suddenly, something horrifying lurking in the shadows jumps out at her…or does it. The scenes with Alice and Irena aptly playing a cat-and-mouse game set the standard for horror films for a half-century. When Alice starts suspecting that something is watching her, Tourneur works wonders by relying on the viewer’s imagination. Through expert sound design and, of course, those bold shadows some giddily frightening cinema results. The stalking scenes were copied by Mario Bava and Dario Argento, who then inspired hundreds of other filmmakers like Bob Clark and John Carpenter, who are still being copied today. Argento even ‘pioneered’ having a female antagonist in gialli, the genre he worked in at the start of his career. Lewton’s films, with their contrasting light and dark and heavy echoing footsteps, can also seen as brothers to American film noir (I’ve taken to calling them ‘noirror films’), except that they prefigure the majority of those films by a number of years. Tourneur himself would go on to contribute one of the best of the kind, Out of the Past in 1947 (he knew that the sight of a lot of swishing overcoats just made things more gripping). Cat People pre-dates the best-known examples of the genre making its creators all the more innovative.

It would be one thing if the horror and stylistic presentation were all that worked but Cat People is more than ominous sound effects. Dewitt Bodeen’s screenplay is even-handed and resists many of the temptations of horror films of the period. The dialogue is nicely downplayed so that the horrific moments really do come as a jolt. Though Cat People could be seen as an inversion of Curt Siodmak’s script for The Wolfman (the movie started as a title, after all, and there’s even a sly silver bullet joke in there), it also uses those elements it cribs in a much smarter fashion. Lawrence Talbot’s curse is always out in the open for us to see; Irena’s is, until more than two thirds of the way through the movie, uncertain. She also has emotion on her side. Simone Simon gives the performance of her life as Irena; if she weren’t so absolutely appealing, her descent into homicidal jealousy would not be nearly the blow to our expectations that it is. Cat People is one of the only films I’ve seen with the nerve to make their villain so patently adorable, but Simone Simon is so masterfully understated that everything she does works. She has a terrifically expressive face that expresses quiet menace or deep emotional wounds equally well. If she were not someone you wanted to take care of, this film would have fallen flat. Imagine if they’d used Jane Randolph in the lead instead of relegating her to the straight woman.

Then there are the other players. As leading men go, Kent Smith as Reed is actually quite impressive. As a doggedly patient husband, conflicted friend and cowering victim, he does great things. When he and Jane Randolph’s Alice are cornered in their office by a black panther, the fear in his voice is real. And then there’s Tom Conway. Conway is one of my favorite character actors and Louis Judd is easily his best role. He sinks his teeth into the part of sleazy confessor and sells it with everything he has; his elegant voice, his devilish facial features and finally his feline physicality; he leers like a housecat when probing Irena about the nature of her condition. Incidentally, Bodeen’s decision to make psychiatry just as large an evil as old religious beliefs is characteristic of both Lewton and Tourneur films, but consider that these are the days of the Hays Code and Bodeen’s script seems a trifle more scandalous. Similarly shocking is that bare shoulder when Irena cries in the bath after her first transformation and that our heroes are in love out of, in fact in direct opposition to, wedlock. That scene in the bathtub, that moment of vulnerability is rare in portraits of villains (especially in the 40s), but Cat People is about transformation and defying expectations. Irena may be the villain but she has tradition and new-age approaches to wellbeing to blame for her undoing. She has first her fears of a curse to contend with, then her husband’s abandonment and finally the rapacious lust of her psychiatrist. She is a victim as much as the people she terrorizes and I don’t mind admitting that I find her easier to sympathize with than the people she terrorizes. I think maybe it’s the combined effect of Lewton’s design, the acting and the set design. Knowing that sets were re-used from The Magnificent Ambersons and that the team working here would work together nearly a dozen more times, makes the whole thing feel like the work of a family (the lighting in the film also reminds me very much of my own home, or at least the one in my memory – this wonderful movie has a way of making itself a part of your unconscious). The thing about Cat People is that it has the look and feel of familiarity. The lighting and Nicholas Musuraca's camera remind us of noir and so the film already feels lived-in, though crucially not tired - after all, what other horror film could lay claim to such a clear-headed narrative and such style at the time? Lewton was a master stylist and the effect is that you feel you've known the film a lot longer than you have. I know that this film has worked it's way into my brain and is now as comforting to me as Christmas; it's a memory you never made but has always been there. Cat People is not average by any standards; its semi-gothic design, grim sweetness, subtle yet poignant style, believably ordinary (and lovable) protagonists, unique approach to horror and villainy, and story wrought with preternaturally complex emotional underpinnings are all the sort of thing that horror films as a genre never receive the proper recognition for. Between you and me, sometimes it’s fun to be one of the few people in the know.

So this one doesn't really count...

But I just found it on my computer and thought I should share! and get people excited and hopefully record some of their own stuff.

I made this one night right after I got home from Nick teaching it to me a few months ago. But I'm trying to learn another song now and besides, he's much better at it than I am. but I thought it was funny anyway, and look! my purple room!

First draft of presidential speech circa Spring, 2009

Sarah: hello, I'm Sarah Duff or "Dizzy Puff", depending on your mood, and this is Rachel "The Tiger Tafoya", and we have come up here to preach to you about how to save the environment while still supporting democracy (we may look like communists, but I promise you, we just like the color red). I assure you!

Rachel: Now, Sarah came here last year, and that may not seem like a long time, but she really liked what Solebury was about. She saw the heart of this place a-pounding with love and compassion and the desire to help everyone. She wants to help this place become a great forest of creativity. She is beautiful dancer and she can talk to animals. She is basically a mature version of Eliza Thornberry and who doesn't want to be lead by Eliza Thornberry. Come on.

Sarah: Oh ho ho ho (hug) you're too kind.

That right there is a difficult act to follow indulging laugh

Now, please allow me to introduce, Rachel, Tafoya, a truly beautiful soul and a role model for orphaned pandas everywhere. Seriously, I know. We both took ethics last year. Did you all know she’s the current junior class pre- cough cough CO president? I think she’s doing a GRRREeat job. She’s a writer, did you know that? Any of you read those twilight books? Hm? Hm? For realsies guys, who could take a pipe to that face?

Rachel, goddess, oceanographer, destroyer of worlds has been here at Solebury since the dawn of time. She knows what's what, yall.

Henri, our lovely companion, is part three of our ménage à trois. We are conducting a speeding train towards victory. Just make sure you're on board.

Rachel: Henri is really the backbone of this organization; we couldn't do it without him.

He has a perfect attendance record and he's gotten the Nobel peace prize (Sarah: Three times!) and he's been in the lead role of every play since he's been here.

Sarah: Henri gives me a reason to get up in the morning and really just motivates me day to day.

Rachel, while Sarah plays guitar: So, we gathered you all here to this assembly today because...well...we just really think you're all beautiful and we just love to look at you. We're just going to take a moment...to...aw look you at you all....

Anyway, we really think the environment is uhm quite the thing, ya know? We want to bring it to you all, in high DEF. we’re thinkin’ more trees, little bit more of that uh green stuffs. How bout one them compostes? Yeah you like that? Kyle rossi likes it. We like books, do you like books? Of course you like books, how about we get more books in that big building on the hill where hanna works? Wanna get more books?? Eh? Huh? Yeah? We should doooit. Let’s work on our…veganism because that’s a growing trend. We like our vegans, we like ‘em healthy. But we don’t wanna upset all the carnivores, YEAH YOU LIKE MEAT!

How many of you out there like cookies? Though we love cookies and wish to see the triumphant return of cookie day…

We don’t do those bribes.

We support magic of both the harry potter and the gathering variety (Sarah: we’re going to bring you magic) Hand motions.

In conclusions: vote for us and we’ll save all the polar bears.

Happy Birthday Dušan Makavejev!

Today is Dušan Makavejev's birthday. He directed Sweet Movie one of my all time favourite films, as well as Innocence Unprotected, one of the greatest movies about filmmaking ever made, as well as the charming Manifesto in the late 80s, the semi-autobiographical A Hole In The Soul in the mid-90s, and a number of excellent narrative films with documentary elements: Man is not a Bird, Love Affair or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and finally W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, the film that got him effectively banned from his home country of Yugoslavia in 1971. He was a giant of cinema who has since fallen out of the spotlight, first because he was unable to secure financing for his ambitious political films (which is perhaps why Gorilla Bathes At Noon was made for so little money and was almost instantly forgotten), next because he often had to compromise and movies that veered toward commercial projects (both Montenegro and The Coca-Cola Kid started as loftier message films that were dulled into more general romantic fare, though there's a still a few great bits of surrealism and the director's own political imagination). He remains a giant to me and I wish to some day have a film an eighth as good as one of his. And even if people can't agree about his talent, they'll never deny his power: his movies have been banned, censored and cut worldwide and some people consider them truly monstrous. That doesn't happen to just anyone, especially when the opposition isn't nearly so articulate as his defenders. Sweet Movie is a film that changed the way I think about film, about the insignificance of the word obscenity and that sexuality can always be explored in new, challenging and beautiful ways. He is a hero of mine and I'd like very much to meet him if only to tell him that in person. His films made a difference.

To The Commenter Below

For a while I've tried to make it a point to answer every comment made on any piece of writing I've submitted here or elsewhere. I've had my say and you've been good enough to let me know how you feel and it's only right that I leave nothing unanswered if I can help it. Not too long ago an anonymous (semi-anonymous) comment was left under my story entitled ....then. It's still there if anyone wants to read it. And I just want to say right away that if anyone at all for any reason is offended by it, let me know right away and I'll take it down. I mean that seriously, not a joke or sarcasm, just let me know, leave a comment below this post, anything unambiguous and I'll remove it. This goes for any writer on the site or follower or anyone. The purpose of the piece was not to offend anyone and if you were offended by any one aspect I'm very, very sorry; you don't have to tell me your reason, just let me know if it's caused you anything resembling harm and I'll remove it immediately. You don't have to read any further if you don't want to but I wish you would. As I'll explain in a minute, any harm that was caused was completely accidental.

The story was written in two pieces, the first when I was in high school when everything was fresh in my memory and I went around feeling persecuted and more than a little superior. I was at war with everyone for reasons beyond their control. I disliked wealth, I disliked anyone as pretentious as me and I drew lines where there needn't have been any. Maybe some people helped me draw them but I blame no one but myself for my anger and bloated sense of self-importance; it'd be ridiculous to think anyone could have made me act that way. So when I began writing it, it was just an extension of the self-important cloud I walked around in. I felt like lashing out and this was my way of doing it. Then when I saw what it had turned into, the first half of the story, I put it away and didn't touch it for nearly three years. Then, in a time of emotional turmoil I pulled it out again because once again I was angry and alone and afraid and felt like lashing out. It was either go back and finish the story or cut off all my hair. I think the commenter would have preferred the latter of the two but anyone who has to spend time with me should be glad I finished the story. They can choose not to read it but they would have had to look at my giant mohawked head for the months it took for my hair to grow out again. I can assure you this was the less painful way. Not because I don't think that someone could read it and think I was taking potshots at them, but because it's fiction, by this point, all of it and you can choose to not read it and I beg you not to take it seriously as it's not meant to be. The idea that I remember anything clearly enough to pass off as something that happened in high school is fantasy. I couldn't if I wanted to and I don't want to. The people in this story are not anyone I know; they're fictional constructs that my angry, confused and shallow brain created. It's arrogant, it's angry, it's hateful, it's pretentious and overall it's dreadful, and I know it's all fake. Anyone who thinks they recognize themselves in this story didn't do anything that happens here. It's nonsense, a farce; just look at the ending. It's all fiction. I'd never dream of calling it anything else. I didn't hold grudges in between starting and finishing the story; by the time I finished it these were no longer people I knew, they were overblown caricatures all from my fevered ego, but all the same if I've offended you, please, please, please just tell me.

One word below and I'll remove it because I intended this as something for the ten people who come here regularly to laugh at or sympathize with or critique or talk about. It's not meant as a condemnation of any one person or group, nor is meant to retroactively win arguments I had with the world while I was in high school. That would be counter-productive. The story is a purgation of violent feelings inside me brought out by a bad time in my life that passed in a shorter time than it takes to read this nonsense. We all have them and this was how I responded. I then let it sit for almost another year before cleaning it up, taking out the grammatical mistakes and putting it online to get it off my harddrive and out for people to read and judge so that it wasn't sitting around reminding me of its constant presence. I didn't hide it but all the same I didn't expect any but maybe the seven followers on the sidebar to read it. As I'm sure you know, blogs don't exactly come with world-wide readership. But I'm not married to the piece. It means so little because it's simply a work of delirious pretend. The things I am proud of are the thousands of references to works of fiction, films, obscure historical events & figures, paintings and pieces of music, but I'm not so proud that I can't see how insignificant this is. After all the moral of the story is not to be small-minded but the story itself is also small-minded in that it presents a right and a wrong viewpoint and places cartoonish personas on one side and slightly more developed characters on another. Frankly the people I depict as heroic are too short-sighted and cynical to be so entirely, anyway. And furthermore even if you, commenter, are someone who thinks that the story is one long slight (presumably you know exactly who I am based on the temporary name you chose) I don't want at all to chastise you for things I think you may have done. If you hadn't done something that my brain turned huge in imagining, I wouldn't be me, would I? We're all shaped by our experiences and my grossly overreacting and invention in response to your behavior made me in part who I am. I know you might not but I rather like who I am and I owe it to anyone and everyone who's ever made me angry, even if you've done nothing wrong. There are hundreds of people I've been angry with for no reason at all and everyone in this story is one of them and I don't suggest that you're monstrous or evil or cartoonish. You are not in this story, there's only me in this story. I'm only railing against myself and I owe you a great deal of thanks for continuing to be yourself so that I could evolve and get over myself and be able to purge all of my vicious and nasty feelings out in one long rambling story that makes sense to maybe three people. If many of my close friends don't understand half of what goes in there, what chance did I think someone who I never really connected with (for lack of trying on my part, admittedly) would get them. I'm not trying to sound condescending but this story is the contents of my brain fired against a wall and no one should feel offended or hurt because I needed to pull the trigger. Not that I consider your pain or offense minor or insignificant because they're not.

By this point I'm sure you've thought that I've simply rambled off incoherently again and for that I apologize. I was never very good at making a concise point. But I'll reiterate, don't lose an ounce of sleep over my silly story on some little-read blog. I write about antique sex movies and Filipino women-in-prison films for fun, I have no moral high ground and I don't pretend I'm a better person than anyone else. I'd happily discuss it with anyone (that's why I put it up after all) but if you don't find yourself willing to talk or simply have no desire to, you just need to put the word "Stop" in the comment section on a borrowed screen-name that you can then delete. I won't pursue matters further, I won't try and figure out who wrote it, I'll respect your wishes and remove it. I'm not so proud that my story is worth more than someone else's piece of mind. If you meant your comment as simply a slight and have no intention of coming back or posting again, I can understand that, as well as you most definitely saw the piece as a slight, for which I apologize as it's not. And please understand that I'm being as sincere as I know how to be, and though your memory of me might not allow for that to mean much, I'm trying so hard to be sympathetic and put myself in your shoes, I just ask you to try and do the same for me. I'm not writing to hurt people. I'm not who I was in high school and if you don't want it up it will go down.

My Favourite Films Volume 16

Obscenity is a term that has dogged cinema for a long time. In fact for every development made in technology or form there have been two steps back thanks to religious posturing and political illogic designed to provoke fear and votes. Every country in the world has had, at one time or another, a pretty harsh censorship board in charge of what people see, and I'd put money on all of these people seeking something other than just piece of mind by being there. But what no one has ever been able to define is just what makes something obscene. Never once have I encountered a satisfactory explanation of why and where the line is drawn. In fact there seems to be no rhyme or reason at all. The Hays Code and the Video Nasties Scare (just two of the more famous censorship benchmarks) demanded cuts and considerations left and right but if you look at the films that were altered under each, they have almost nothing in common. If someone were to look at each movie banned by the BBFC in the 80s, you'd be forgiven for thinking that anything scary was pornographic. When lines are drawn only for similar images, forgoing a look at content, what you do is essentially give terrible movies and great ones the same power because they happened to feature naked breasts or a graphic murder or two, the former of which half of every person on the planet has, the latter of which happens everyday. Yet restrictions of realistic depictions of the violence of warfare went uncontested, ditto drug use, misogyny/objectification in films, commercials and music videos, gun violence in westerns, nudity in sex comedies or depictions of racism or homophobia, both unflinching and 'comedically' overblown. Look at it this way, think back to your days on the playground: how many boys said they wanna grow up to be a cowboy/soldier vs. how many say they wanna grow up to be a serial killer based on what they saw on tv? Even someone as impressionable as me didn't identify with the many, many horror films I watched. Sure I may have pretended to combat some of the shit I'd see in horror films (even something as terrible as An American Werewolf in Paris, which I only ever saw the trailer for) but I never identified with the villain. None of us did. Mere exposure taught us that they were not to be identified with. That's why you rarely if ever find kids willing to be the indian. They're the other and movies made us see racism as ok, gun violence, smoking and drinking as necessary and cool, and caused many of us to parrot slurs we didn't understand because we saw them in films. I'm using my own childhood as an example here but it can't be unique. And yet there was never any kind of decree about institutionalized racism (incidentally I'm not for any kind of censorship. I happen to think that extreme cases, like hate speech, should be kept off of screens because of their active violence. It's one thing to depict violence, quite another to call for it against a whole ethnic group or religion). What can't you see on tv? Naked breasts. The very things that nourished you as a child. When you show something, it normalizes it, when you censor it, you give it power it never had before and you make it taboo. Why should all women feel they are born with something indecent on their bodies? And this is all the more jarring when you consider what a splash pornography, both soft and hardcore, made in America and Europe in the early 70s. You can't see women naked on tv, but your parents could go downtown and watch them blowing a guy in Deep Throat, Behind The Green Door or some imported blue film. Today porn makes up so much of the digital cable spectrum it almost outnumbers regular film channels. And yet? You can't say fuck or look at a penis but Pat Robertson's got his own show where he gets to say that feminists make women hate their children. It's exactly this kind of lunacy that Dušan Makavejev was thinking of when he made Sweet Movie in 1974. You like violence and unsimulated fucking, huh? Well, then, this should pose no problem at all. Except it did and he didn't make another film for almost ten years. Let's figure out why.

Sweet Movie
by Dušan Makavejev

The first thing we see is a chair, not unlike the ones you'd find in a dentist's office (or an OB/GYN) as it makes it's way to the Miss World Pageant. Hold on a second because whatever you were thinking that meant is way off. As our TV commentator and host tells us, the purpose of the Miss World competition is to find a wife for the world's richest man Mr. Abdemel (or Mr. Dollars as he's listed in the credits). The winning girl is set to inherit his billion dollar fortune, all she has to do is impress his mother, who's throwing the competition. The criteria for winning is simple. Dr. Littlefingers, a gynecologist and obstetrician, has to examine each girl's hymen and decide whose is the best, for lack of a more descriptive term. Miss Southern Rhodesia seems like a shoo-in, especially after the tawdry display by Miss Yugoslavia, but when Miss Canada walks in, the show's over. To a light and beautiful string arrangement, she walks out in furry knee-high boots and when she reveals that she doesn't have any underwear on, there almost doesn't seem to be any point to examining her, but when he does Littlefingers is confronted with a heavenly, golden glow springing from her loins like the briefcase in Kiss Me, Deadly. Let's meet her new husband.

Mr. Abdemel is a brash, cartoonish billionaire who wants to pay to have Niagara falls shut off and who thinks Karl Marx shot archduke Ferdinand. The reception waiting for them at his house is nice enough, a hippie band bearing flowers, a beautiful estate (for a lout, Dollars has nice taste in homes), and a honeymoon that seems to be ripe for intimacy and genteel married sex. That is until Dollars starts rubbing Miss World down with alcohol and pulls out his gold-plated penis and starts urinating on her. Our heroine draws the line there, even with a billion dollars at stake She wants to escape but that won't look good for the mogul so his mother has her shipped off to France in a suitcase (after an interesting period of naked captivity with Jeremiah Muscle, her gigantic black servant). When she gets there she runs into all kinds of mishigas involving a singing Spanish heart-throb, a tryst on the Eiffel Tower that almost ends in tragedy, a stint in an actionist commune and finally as a model for a chocolate commercial. I should point out that we occasionally flash to Anna Planeta, the captain of a barge headed down the Seine with Karl Marx as the bearded figurehead. She takes on a soldier, a deserter from the battleship Potemkin, as her lover. She welcomes children aboard first enticing them with candy and then appears to seduce them. Before the police raid the boat, you realize that her commitment to an ideological extreme drove her more than a little mad, at least in the eyes of outsiders.

And that incidentally is what most people thought of Makavejev when he released Sweet Movie. They thought that like Anna Planeta, his incendiary brand of socialism had driven him off the deep end and Sweet Movie was just excess unchecked. In one sense he is the captain of a great ship headed through a country that had once held so much promise and now seemed so quiet and conformist. He was looking for survivors and his movie was meant as a kind of password between members of the underground, but it seemed like he stood utterly alone. The most popular response was to simply stand aghast at the things presented, as if there was nothing else to the movie but nudity and baffling set-pieces. It's been described as a love it or hate it movie, though I don't think that's true. I certainly love it but I think that even if you didn't like the things you were being shown you could absolutely love the cinematography, the lush production design and the beautifully underplayed score, just as a for example. Pierre Lhomme's photography really is astonishing. Makavejev had said that he wanted Sweet Movie to be a love letter to colours and Lhomme was only too happy to oblige. Every room and person Miss World encounters has such a well defined and fun palette it's like the movie is set in FAO Schwarz (Otto Muehl, the leader of the commune, later called the movie pure kitsch, but the depiction of his group ought to have shown him otherwise). And because they're so clear, when we enter darker spaces, the colours become textures just like the wood inside the bowels of Anna Planeta's ship or the walls of the Therapie Kommune, when Lhomme's camera is noticeably handheld. There is something almost magical about these scenes and they're certainly ahead of their time. I remember watching these and being totally hypnotized, totally in awe of the fact that so much of this film could have been made yesterday. There are so many scenes that are enchantingly shot, especially when contrasted with the flash of the opening competition or the sight-gags that serve as the introduction to the sailor. The reason I think they work so well is because they make us feel like the cameras are spectators as much as we are; we're just observing this behavior and that's crucial in the Kommune scenes. If he'd properly lit and framed vomit and shit, we'd probably all puke ourselves. Instead the effect is that of a whirlwind of senses and events that no one is in control of and everyone is experiencing like an outsider. It's an intoxicating style that greatly helps one to get lost in this sea of political imagery and strange behavior. In fact it wasn't the revolutionary ideas that initially struck me initially about Sweet Movie. I remember the first thing that stuck out as being completely unforgettable was the song that Ann Lonnberg sings when we first meet Anna Planeta. That's the thing that always grounded every bizarre ass thing that happens in the realm of storytelling and film, rather than of weird-for-the-sake of weird. No one actually depraved could have gone looking for a song as perfect as this. And no one could have found so much beauty in hopelessness.

Sweet Movie as a list of obscene set-pieces dares you to take it seriously, but in practice it's something much different. Sure there's sex, violence, implicit pedophilia, unsimulated pissing, shitting and vomiting but in the proper context, that is to say with an open mind and a little help from a sympathetic political viewpoint, Sweet Movie is more than the sum of its bodily functions. The thing I love about its portrayal of sexuality is that it's so unsexy. There's enough skin to satisfy anyone in a raincoat but not one encounter is without baggage. Take the two stories' climaxes. On board the survival a final tryst takes place in a vat of sugar and ends with a rather sudden burst of violence. It's so conflicting and beautiful and otherworldly that by the time you have a fix on things, it all changes. In Miss World's story, she writhes naked in melted chocolate. It's fascinating as hell but it's far from exploitative and I wouldn't even call it sexy. So, yes, it hits the beats of a sex film but then it runs right past them until 'decency' and 'sexiness' have to be pretty seriously re-evaluated. I love reading negative reviews of this film because their problem stems from their being unwilling to look at things that everyone of us does every day. I admit that the vomiting is the one thing that will occasionally send my eyes to the corner of the room depending what I've just eaten but there is absolutely nothing in this film that I would call obscene or gratuitous. And I can't tell you how important that distinction is in a film like this. Intent is everything and Makavejev wasn't trying to offend anyone (their sensibilities, sure) but he was trying to wake people up and he seemed to know that this was the last chance he'd get to say anything so he made sure to say it all. In fact the movie's reputation became so great that Anna Prucnal, who plays Anna Planeta, was actually banned from her home country, Poland, for so long that she missed the death of her mother. This is why I so love film. What album or book has had this kind of impact in the last fifty years that was also artistically satisfying? People go crazy when confronted with the truth and in the cinema, they can't escape it; Makavejev blocked all the exits and lit the place on fire.

Dušan Makavejev was one of the first generation of Yugoslavians to have access to cameras and film schools and is one of the only people to ever break into the international scene in any meaningful way. He made four films in his native country (the best of them, Innocence Unprotected, is one of the best films about film ever made) before finally getting himself effectively evicted. The film that did it was W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, a kind of slavic I Am Curious that fuses documentary footage of sex therapy and sexual curios with a free-form narrative a la Godard about a woman who takes a break from hammering home Marxist dogma to seduce a figure skater who's the pride of the nation. His movies all drew lines between fascism and modern life and poked fun at Yosip Broz Tito's government with a knife. After W.R. pointed out that in practice nazism, Tito's communism and Nixon's republican government were not really all that dissimilar, the government film board gave him his pink slip and he went looking for money elsewhere. It didn't take him long to find it and before long he was using French, Canadian and English money and a cast of outsiders like Sami Frey, Pierre Clementi and Carol Laure. But needless to say it didn't go down quite so easily. Where W.R. had excited the international film scene and was the reason he so easily secured financing for another film, Sweet Movie made most people avert their eyes out of shame. Reviews were unkind enough that it waited almost thirty years for a DVD release and thanks to its showing the human body doing what the human body does it's still banned in England. Makavejev may have made other films after this, but none so unflinching and none as good (though Manifesto really is quite excellent). The reason no one wanted Sweet Movie is because the spirit of 1968, every new wave the world had produced and all the revolutionary fervour that had so captured the heart of everyone under thirty had failed. It was business as usual as far as everyone was concerned and they didn't need some foreign eccentric shitting all over their blissful conformity. All the strikes and rallies and progressive candidates were dead and Makavejev was one of the few people actively grieving. Hence the film's one foray into documentary footage, that of the Germans discovering the bodies of dead Poles in Katyn forest. You may have moved on, he seems to say, but these people are dead and injustice is still everywhere. Sweet Movie is thus a big, New Orleans-style funeral for idealism. Unsurprisingly attendance was low.

As a statement it's perfect and I couldn't ask for anything more from it. Everything, down to the posters and trinkets that hang on Anna Planeta's boat like some Maoist TGI Friday's, have meaning to them. Nothing was accidental. To look at but a few almost imperceptible things that have no effect on the story. The sailor who boards the Survival is a cast away from the Potemkin. "Isn't that the revolution that failed?" she asks him. It is, but it's also the name of the flagship film of Soviet montage of which Makavejev was a fervent disciple. Soviet Montage influenced his first four films heavily and this is especially fascinating when we realize that Tito's government had broken from the soviets in Makavejev's lifetime. Makavejev went looking for inspiration in the culture of a national antagonist at a time when the man running the country wasn't above burying his enemies in quicklime. It's a small gesture, I suppose considering how new and insignificant the film schools in the country were when Makavejev was starting and by 74 he saw that his revolution, too, had failed and had only managed to get him ejected from his homeland. Battleship Potemkin is about one sailor causing a rebellion on a great ship, Sweet Movie is about the same soldier boarding a smaller one and being eaten alive by his own ideals. The authorities show up at the end of both movies and find revolutions in progress, except one is led by a woman alone surrounded by the bodies of her allies. And again, this is just in one piece of wardrobe and one line of dialogue. When you realize that such things appear every thirty seconds, you see why I'm so in love with this film's theory and design, to say nothing of its assaultive content.

I found Sweet Movie at a crucial time in my life. I'd landed at Temple University after having not been offered enough scholarship money to go to my first choice, Emerson College. I had, however, resolved to get into Emerson again and nothing was going to stop me. My time at Temple was short, cold, lonely and pretty disappointing. I couldn't function there; the classes were huge, no one, least of all the other kids, cared for my anarchic "do whatever feels right" attitude toward filmmaking, everyone was wary of everyone else, and I had few friends but it wasn't without its high points. I had already decided that I needed to be somewhere a little less hostile but I was also going to take advantage of everything here. I got to know Final Cut, the editing software, intimately, I wrote a lot, fine-tuning the script that would grant me entrance into Emerson and also writing a 350 page war film I don't have the heart to look back at. But the thing I'm most grateful for at Temple was their mammoth DVD library. I took out ten films at a time and watched all of them before returning a few days later to get more. I watched nearly everything the Criterion Collection released to date and began exploring the lesser films of some of my favourite directors. They also bought most new films and so when I started reading about Sweet Movie's release I knew I had to see it. And when I did, I instantly fell in love. Along with The Battle of Algiers, Playtime, The Human Condition, Children of Men, Au Revoir Les Enfants and If.... it filled me with contempt at all the broken promises made by past generations. How had we failed so spectacularly? Bush was still president and I was at a school where seeing a stretcher dispatched to collect a rape victim somewhere on campus wasn't uncommon. Where the fuck did the future go? I was filled with indignation and that kept me motivated enough to get out of North Philadelphia and into a school that I thought I deserved to be in. The intervening years have proven Emerson a place just as stubbornly resistant to my attitude as Temple and I'm still a disrespectful malcontent but these films, If...., Children of Men, Sweet Movie, keep me in check when nothing else does. If graduating gets me a step closer to making movies riddled with Sweet Movie's influence, then I'll write anything and happily listen to someone telling me there is one right way to make a movie. Makavejev had so much more to contend with that my problems frankly don't exist in the grand scheme of things and I can't wait to get my chance and blow it by asking just what the fuck happened. Why did the world get together and agree to forget him and his questions. Sweet Movie is a film that to love it means not settling for the violence of the modern world. Not settling for conformism, misogyny, racism and censorship. It means trying to love people and everything they do, committing to revolution so that we can make the world a little nicer, a little more sweet.