The Burnt Sight

I wanted to like them. And, really, what subject is more perfect for a subjective study than an inkblot? Last night, at the closing program for Anthology Film Archive’s ‘The Walking Picture Palace’ series, new abstract works by Luther Price came alive upon the screen. The idea is simple enough and in-no-way unprecedented within Avant-Garde film. Price’s hand painted works, not prints but each unique objects, run before the beam, casting amorphous shapes onto the screen: seething, creeping, flashing, the cinematic durations manage to somehow capture the unfathomable dread upon which Price has constructed a career.

(Portrait of Luther Price, 1992) Luther Price’s cinema is a nightmare dreamscape of melancholia and turmoil. In the past, I have written of the slippage his dirtied film-images encounter; through his unnerving juxtapositions of sight and sound and in the degraded or abjected appearance of his early, Super8 films, his loaded signifiers (ice cream cones, floral bouquets, birthday cakes and clown poppets) buckle, transform and access a less tidy or familiar space of emotions, distinct from the cliché nature of many of these images. In the Inkblot series, the iconography is gone (mostly) and all that remains are the abstract hints at horror that traditionally elude representation.

Price's tremendous variation in the timing of this series allows for periods of languor and those of assault. Being inkblots, of course, they are what you make of them. In the hurling frenzy of the strongest film (The Burnt Night, I believe) I found myself reminded of the ticky-tacky possession scenes of typical Hollywood fare. The brown ink on the leader seemed poetically reminiscent of the brown and golden CG clouds that fog up the screen when contemporary hack horror maestros can’t think of any better imagery to hurl at its game audience than a dervish of Sanskrit scribblings and barely glimpsed beasties. Contemporary horror makes these flaccid scenes affective merely for their frenzied and unintelligible nature. Here, that sensation takes on an elegiac organicalness; glimpsing the fleeting and intangible celluloid images that must have been pressed into a mere two frames of this reel (or were they even?), the result implicates the privatized thoughts in which we conceive abstract sensations. Synesthesia is a de rigueur word that is happily thrown about in similar cinematic experiences, as is haptic. But Price’s blots transcend the tactile nature of these bodily centered phenomena. They access, like his degenerated film-images, states and forms of psychosis, here physically transcending the bodily altogether.

Curator Mark McElhatten told of the obsessive nature in which Price has produced these works. 40 or so currently exist. With each pass through the projector gate, the pocked strip is marred, tugged, torn and flayed. Each screening is a singular experience and shapes the film for future screenings. The projector too takes a reciprocal beating as the ink bleeds and chips off, staining the apparatus, making the nightmare job of projection that Price’s assemblage films have constantly proposed even messier as now they involve an elaborate clean-up process.

I wanted to like them. But, in truth, I only really liked one. The second black-and-white film (The Night Before, perhaps – there are no title cards and the screening took place out of sequence) seemed more a formalist experience. The indexical nature of the drafting process presupposed any of the fecund naturalness of the former film. In The Night Before, the reduced and (ultimately) modernist nature of the palette was a stumbling block the adept editing could not transcend. The umber hues of The Burnt Night intoned the putrid state typical of Price’s films. Decay, decomposition, the runes of this celluloid permitted a haunting suggestion beyond the compositional patterning of these swirling stamps and glops. Or, perhaps these inkblots functioned as inkblots should. These amorphous forms merely reflected the thoughts I threw into them. I wanted to like them, and so Price created a space for that desire to be repeatedly fulfilled.

I think not. I think that the uncertain shapes that writhed and pulsed within the murky whorls of ink contained filmic images, interlayed by Price. Abstracted. Obscured. I saw things in there moving. Objects and figures with matter and form. But then, these personal takes - subjective psychological reactions to the images on display - have always ultimately been the objects of Price’s films. Do these Rorschach films offer the absolute ideal to this filmic tendency? Your view is as good as mine.

My Boyfriend is Right

All of my recent buys and reads have had purple covers with white font (mostly). What does that say, I wonder?

I have not neglected this page. I have been sweating and toiling over a thesis. Perhaps portions of it will appear here later. There's a Whitney Houston article that's half finished and looks at the haters surrounding her comeback - everyone who mentions the crack when listening to her new, bawdy ballads fearing the outmoded. Hopefully that will post soon.

Terse Round-up

10 things I think about recent developments

1. Little Boots – Hands Wow, This was a sure thing, I thought. I was wrong. Forgettable and a strange blend of over and under-produced. That the killer ‘Stuck On Repeat’ is featured in an amended 3-minute version when the brilliance of the song is that it needs to be long and… well… repetitive really shows a lack of smarts on LB’s part. To quote Pitchfork, “Songs don’t get stuck on repeat unless people can’t get them out of their heads.”

2. La Roux (Self Titled)That fragile voice and the same 80s tinge on the synths become slightly grating by track 8, but I’ll be damned if those in the La Roux camp didn’t steal the hype torch right out from under Little Boots’s… hands. (Sorry) The singles are storming the UK charts (the best of which, Bulletproof, may very well be their number 1, though it hasn’t officially been called yet) but the strength of songs like ‘Cover My Eyes’, which features a full choir to lilt over Elly Jackson’s brittle voice, and ‘Fascination’ which has been a killer since its free issue from the band in demo form, make ‘La Roux’ a contender for the soundtrack to steamy summer-trouble.

3. Terminator Salvation Sucked. Give me some piece of the dream to chew on please; I need at least one syrupy flashback of Sarah Conner (who had her own show, by the by) and a land where all is innocent and fallible. No such luck. Instead we got Transforminators.

4. Drag Me To HellGross fun. All though, I really jump a lot and was slightly hung-over when I saw this. My nerves were beyond rattled. Still, it has a talking goat.

5. Broken EmbracesGranted, I saw the film in Paris with French subtitles and my French is less than polished, but this is very much minor Pedro. Appealing breadth of storyline is bypassed here for a very particular tale of lust and deceit. Some enticing narrative retreading (Women on the Verge) lends more want of reflection than actual reflection, per se. Plus a single scene (and thus underused) Rossi De Palma made me yearn for more.

6. Star TrekWas fun.

7. Tiga – ShoesThe song is a duet with (from what I can tell) a recording made by Tiga then sped up to sound like a woman. The blogosphere seems to think it’s Madonna which reads a more like an accidental insult to Madonna than anything else. Instead, the song becomes a successful version of ‘Luxury’ from his recent Ciao! – a beautifully convincing narcissism for the so-shallow-there-could-almost-be-depth contemporary listener.

8. Pet Shop Boys at the O2 ArenaThough their amenable stage was devoured by the 16,000 seater (their largest “indoor” concert, the website exclaims) the ingenious use of throw-away moving boxes as cheap looking projection screens (‘Love Etc.’), then a tumbling Berlin wall (‘Building a Wall’ / ‘Go West), then NYC skyline costumes for some rather embarrassed looking dancers (‘Why Don’t We Love Together?’), then thrashable objects for the seemingly requisite interpretive dance numbers (‘Jealousy’) and finally, levitating cubes whisked into the sky for some encore joie de vivre (‘It’s A Sin’) proved as rigorous an artful gesture as anything the troupe offered in their fiscal peak. The sequencing was rather wonky and the setlist depended more on newcomers from their recent Brits appearance than those returning for the fleshing out of ‘Yes’. But by the end of the night, everyone seemed thoroughly convinced that Pet Shop Boys have defined smart pop in their 25+ career and carved out a rather large niche for themselves in their waning years.

9. 35 RhumsThe “new” Claire Denis offering was a startlingly beautiful and quiet chamber piece of dormant desires. All that goes unspoken is never truly absent and Denis’ sumptuously (if restrained) probing camera find the strange, yet right angles to flesh out all the yearning and corporeal frankness which is seldom caught in cinema. From a kiss to a fart, the film is startlingly simple and affective. An Ozu remake, you get the sense that Denis knows far more than she’s let on in her past cinema (and that’s quite a lot) about melodrama and the woman’s picture.

10. Eaten Alive (Featuring Michael Jackson) – Diana Ross Everyone’s gotta remember in their own special way.

Plaster and Pearl (excerpt)

This is a fragment of a new, lengthy work on Dominican Starlet Maria Montez, matriarch of Universal's war-year sarong epics, and her baroque stylizations.

Maria Montez’s first leading role, Arabian Nights also marked Universal’s first use of the new, 3-strip Technicolor process. The new color film was an ocular sensation both in the emblazoned color stock and the plastic potential for world creation. This technology enabled the emphasis of film to rest on the visual construction of the fantastical scene, more than mere documents of lands and people. Like religious art of the baroque, images told their tales, but also served as a promise of feats to come, the 1,001 tales yet to be told – which can now be told, thanks to this new method of wondrous rendering. These colorful tableaus were awash in formal hysterics of blazing turbans and flowing veils whose hues ranked in significance with plot development and storyline. Narrative concerns in this flagship title waned in importance to the visual spectacle and the mythological basis of the plot suggests less inventive plotline than historical testament. Such bald emphasis on visual construction and the particulars of the plastic form echoed the tendency towards externalization in baroque aesthetics.

Following the Renaissance cult of antiquity, art of the baroque period still found use for the pagan gods of prior celebration. Yet due to the reified religious order, the gods persisted in an allegorical province. Through this plasticization process, the figural body of the god is stripped of his mythological power. He exists for his allusive, no longer mystical, purpose. As Walter Benjamin writes, “There is not the faintest sense of spiritualization in the physical.” The allegorical tendency towards personification strips all mystical functions of the spiritual by enshrining it within the aesthetic, the physical. “The whole of nature is personalized, not so as to be made more inwards, but, on the contrary – so as to be deprived of soul.” Similarly, abstract and unrepresentable tropes and concepts begin to become personified through plastic objects, in an attempt at signification.

That such sites of Orientalist depiction would be Universal’s first choice for imagistic referent speaks to the newness (and exoticism) of such visual sensations. The ethnic and mythic content of these “exotic” films too is shelled of any heritage to ebb instead a purely referential relation to Otherness. Shari Roberts observes, “The scenario established here was a falsely simplistic us/them, United States versus the foreign Other, dichotomy.” This allegorical fashioning allowed for escapist narratives to incorporate aspects of warfront tension and the “Good Neighbor” policy that Roosevelt was promoting at the time. To broach these issues, they become invested in suggestive aesthetics (which in this instance, function narratively). They are meant to provoke with their pertinence as crude reflections, accounting for the manner by which these past vogues today, out of their originary context, seem blatant or “heavy-handed”. Further, Michael Moon’s observes how the mere focus on material qualities, like 1910’s cult of “voluptuous fringe,” can lead to frivolous role play, enabling mass fantasies of ethnic mastery. The emphasis on and donning of these emblematic garments permitted an imaginary escapism, to “the other side of the looking glass from their wearers’ ordinary lives, a phantasmagoric ‘oriental’ margin…” Too, Roberts points that, “this masquerade performed by consuming fans was also perhaps enacted during individual film-viewing experiences.” In this capacity, Montez’s films expanded beyond a locational tourism and allowed a disquieting form of mimicry in audience reception. Such distillations of ethnic and gendered otherness fold in on themselves as spectacle, however and Montez’s ecstatic conviction bores through the generic text; Shari Robert notes similarly on the reception of Montez’s progenitor, Carmen Miranda “she was able to create through her performance of her own character as both feminine and ethnic excess, a spectacle that ultimately puts into question both feminine and foreign stereotyping.”

Maria Montez’s power is dialectic, exposing the constructedness of her figural roles through her transparent performance style and in her ecstatic reverie amid the lavish plaster settings. As Roberts further writes, “her persona also reveals these images as stereotypes, allowing negotiated readings by fans.” In Gore Vidal’s follow-up to Myra Breckinridge, Myron, the since-remasculated namesake character catches sight of Montez on late night T.V. Myron becomes possessed by the diva through her mixture of play and being. Reverting to his prior, flamboyant persona, Myron becomes an admix of Myra and Maria. Montez both embodied her roles and clung to her star image, narcissistically entranced by the spectacle. “She gave the films a conviction which was a fabulous quality,” Charles Ludlam continues. “The things those movies have that today’s movies don’t have is actors sort of winking at you from behind their masks…” Jack Smith’s entire article, ‘The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez’ is a testimony to the star’s reflexive quality. “If something genuine got on film why carp about acting – which HAS to be phony anyway…Acting to Maria Montez was hoodwinking.” Beauty and aesthetic perfection, Smith argues, were the foremost of her concerns, hence her famous claim, to look at the screen and “I am so beautiful I scream with joy.” The films were “a medium for her beliefs” and the intensity of these beliefs tends to subsume all of the diegetic causality. The ceremonial dance in White Savage depicts a plethora of “natives” worshipping an effigy of their god, Tangora. Upon a pedestal, however, between the dancers and this god, Montez is perched and beams out at the procession in honor of their worship. This religious ritual becomes a devotional to her white-clad form. So too do the natives fear her in Cobra Woman where she acts as intermediary between the people and King Cobra. Her zealous and crazed dance, which defaults to a frenzied selection of sacrificial maidens, is so possessed in its place of power that the viewer momentarily loses track of the narrative circumstance that resulted in the movement. The discordant rapture Montez evinces in these sequences transgresses socially acceptable behavior in civilized society. What might have initially been intended as transgresses from American sociality into a wild “native” land is swept up in larger, normative and gendered issues of transgression as the narrative melts away in the whirring frenzy of the scene.

For many period cinemagoers (Ludlam and Smith obviously among them), such posturing served to dash the conventions of generic roles, parodying their constructedness through direct, viewer address. Montez’s fiery performances convince of her convictions but are unconvincing in their intended diegesis. In this manner, they frustrate the space between her star persona and the narratives in which she partakes. These were “flaming images,” defiantly visual vehicles wrought for a new screen and a new Queen, too immersed in the performance to partake in numbing convention. Montez inadvertently opened a doorway for others to a space beyond this genre, which could only contain and constrain its figures. Framed in the edifice of her plaster palace, the vibrancy and conviction of her performance shed new light on that concrete space and intoned and impressionistic life overtook the façade of that fake decor. Speaking to a far more classical model, John Rupert Martin does justice to this sensation in describing how “the observer experiences something of the thrill of release from the narrow confines of the material world, by subconsciously identifying himself with the figures who are represented as being swept upward into the celestial glory.”

Christine Buci-Glucksman reads the abound baroque iconography of angels drifting into the abyss, elaborating upon Martin’s description. Through the simultaneity of allegory, those angels function in their plasticity as jouissance; their ascension, a means by which to show the “baroque conversion, [how] this ‘nothing of being’ changes into an infinity of ecstatic delight…a plethora of forms” These angels, for Gluckman, are the feverous vie to envision that unrepresentable form. Excess, ecstasy, jouissance. They give figurative and narrative presence to abstract, conceptual space. “Here, the angels’ aura forces us to look, to lift our eyes, to desire the impossible spiral of an ascending desire foredoomed to the earthly representation of appearances…” Montez’s conviction, too, gave way to such illusionism. As Jack Smith famously writes,

The vast machinery of a movie company worked overtime to make her visions into sets. They achieved only inept approximations. But one of her atrocious acting sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with imaginative life and truth.

These gaudy approximations cannot convey Montez’s passions, but are faulty forms that can only suggest as enigmatic allusions. The objects fail. Their rudimentary quality testifies to the boundlessness of that Other space of allegory that Montez personifies and conceals. This space is indiscernible, only glimpsed or sensed, broached only through reference. What they vie for and what Montez brought to them, of course, were two separate things, but a fantastical convergence on the Universal lots so many years ago gives way to a peculiar baroque anomaly in cinematic history that attests to their endurance.

Haunted

I’m very afraid. I love a good horror flic – in fact, I love a bad one even more perhaps. And though I’ve had my hands full these past couple years, something does concern me greatly. I’m just home from The Haunting in Connecticut and just getting over the sustained trauma of The Unborn and I want to shore some things up for the record:

We’ve had some rehashings. Still are, I suppose, what with Jackie Earl Haley just cast as the new Freddie Kreuger. And I think in these pages I’ve bemoaned the absolute unscariness at the root of these new retellings – I can speak directly for The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, When A Stranger Calls (at least these are the ones that come immediately to mind). With those pictures, in an attempt to revitalize a franchise (or make a few bucks, in any event) the best course of action seemed a remythologization of the original yarn with exhaustive backstories. An unnamed demon reflection in a seventies hell/basement becomes a possessed laboratory where an evil Quaker tortured native Americans. We get names, dates, elaborations and gritty flashback sequences to seat the scary in a story. What was once quipped a doorway to hell now in fact is. Leatherface now kills people because he has facial cancer and yearns to cover his deformity with the faces of others. If that’s not narcissism, I don’t know what is. It seems as though the current filmmakers are far more interested in gussying up a plotline so convoluted (or hackneyed) that we forgo and just invest in the new, neo-baroque digi-pale, CGcrumble and DVrot. In mining these popular stories, the filmmakers (well, more the producers, I would argue) are a) playing party to a common trend of reexploring past narratives to breathe a post-modern life into them b) reanimating dead tales to enact a strange narrative nostalgia c) remaking old movies because more people will see that which they already know than take a chance on the new. These figures (Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, the Amittyhouse) are popular icons with bankable reputations. Of course these are archetypical figures of allegory and all have rather distinct MOs. Nathan Lee has made some interesting observations on these remakes and it’s not my desire to go into them here.

What scares me more than anything that whirs past mirrors and suddenly exposes its rotting flesh is what happens when this elaborate mythology looks towards other horrors, escapes from haunted relics of popular narratology and roams about other mortal ground for its spooks. The Unborn (which I thought was a remake of Roger Corman's 90's killer genetics baby movie of the same name) deals with senility, pregnancy and, yes, Auschwitz to tell its tale of an unborn demon. Sorry, a creature from Jewish mythology called a dybbuk. You see, while experimenting on the eyecolor of children in Auschwitz, the Nazis found their perfect subjects in twins. Trouble is “what is a twin if not a mirror and mirrors are doorways to other worlds.” One such utterance from a fragile concentration camp survivor is accepted, wide-eyed by a protagonist so (rightly) terrified that they’ve got to believe it. Perhaps we are in a manner as well, so jolted by lurching demo… dybbuks from every medicine cabinet, bedsheet and rear-view mirror.

The Haunting in Connecticut starts off with a bang, locating its scary in corpse photography that would make Dana Luciano sit up and smile (if it wasn’t so iPhoto) and gurgling with rivets of black and white gore. But then we’re displaced onto a real horror story. (Poor) Virginia Madsen is taking care of her dying teenage son as he goes through exhaustive chemotherapy sessions. The car ride home to father, (poor) Martin Donavan, is so intense that he stops every mile or so to vomit. One such mile, Virginia stops in the middle of the night, by a house they were considering renting and does so on a whim (to relieve the child of torment, of course). There’s ghosties galore in this new old funeral home, which was the site of séances so intense that ectoplasm was produced. This was effected by carving up the dead, cutting off their eyelids (so that they remain unseen, not to be confused with cannot rest/sleep – eyelids, get it) and burying them in the walls of the house. Of course no one asks how they prepared the séance-goers noses, though I suppose that’s missing the point (beside which, they’re burned to a crisp in the key scene). That the teenage son’s otherworldly torment is muddled with some heinous cancer medications and trés-chic chemo procedures starts to make you cringe in all the wrong ways. These sequences incorporate into the narrative schema and introduce aspects of faith though a faithful Madsen and (the scariest thing the film holds on offer), a befuddled (but game) preacher, Elias Coteas. As the charred skulls of the dead dribble in chunks down a storm drain at the film’s close and through voice over we are treated to Miss Madsen’s appeal that “God works in mysterious ways.” (which is nothing on The Unborn’s line “It is up to you to finish what was started in Auschwitz!”) the fluffy content suddenly takes on a grimly propagandistic tone.

Such shelled narratologies of quite real issues are of course nothing new. Adam Lowenstein’s book, Shocking Representation deals with allegorical use of pop cultural traumas like Vietnam through the very guise of B horror. These present dealings, however, seem to shed no light on the events they address even in the most allegorical of fashions, instead milking them for thrills and for (in the case of The Haunting) reifications of faith. Allowing the post-modern plotlines that unfold la Lord of á the Rings, with their twisting plotturns and tremendous leaps of disbelief might just cuddle some of these issues addressed into the narrative fold, in lieu of using such genre fare to address the mor(t)al issues at hand. But that's not what's going on here and the complex narratives which push the spectator away from their convolution might just inspire the same response to the gravity of pertinent subjects like Cancer or the Holocaust. Then there’s the shelling allegory of faith and Christ to consider that the Haunting takes as its grand prototype. But that’s one embrace that sure won’t see the light of day in these pages…

Merely 'Flesh'-y?

I remember standing in line to buy the issue of Art Forum containing James Quandt’s article "Flesh & Blood" on what he terms, the New French Extremity. I was a fan of much of this new wave of auteur film practice and was glad it was getting its fair dues. An entire article! I was giddy.

I was then disgruntled after reading Quandt’s brutal attack. Of particular insult were Quandt’s indebtedness to a “classical” mode of filmmaking as sort of urtext and that his terminology spoke so personally and derisively against this body. I’d like to look very closely at this text – in which Quandt’s arguments neatly fold in on themselves – and expand outward to investigate more thoroughly a now defunct cinematic French movement.

Quandt can see little more in “the drastic tactics of these directors” than “an attempt to meet (and perchance defeat) Hollywood and Asian filmmaking on their own Kill Bill terms or to secure distributors and audiences in a market disinclined towards foreign films.” While I would certainly entertain the second portion of this claim as a driving factor for these films (for what is film if not a business), but some 40 years ago, would Quandt have not claimed the same of Bardot, who his precious Goddard would use to High Art ends in Les Mepris?

Lisa Downing acutely blows the first part of Quandt’s claim out of the water in discussing Baise-Moi and Irreversible. She first notes that the former incorporates scenes from Noe’s prior film into its text as well as narratively referring to Quentin Tarantino (who is, of course, always gesturing elsewhere). “The Film’s dialogue is very self-aware as it reflects openly on the constructedness of the convention of characterization and on the kinds of subjectivity that given generic models presuppose”[1] This cinema uses the narrative elements of horror cinema or pornography to envision figures and scenarios “not in terms that suggest the concerns of well-rounded psychological characters of a realist cinematic mode with whom the viewers are encouraged to identify – but rather as textual effects, devices used to reveal the self-reflexivity of their own construction.”

Let us consider the language Quandt employs to discuss this “growing vogue for shock tactics” produced by “Francois Ozon, Gaspard Noé, Catherine Breillat, Phillippe Grandrieux – and now, alas, Dumont.” Bruno Dumont, whose work is now “subject to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement. Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn – gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of come and gore – proliferate the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical.”

Quandt denigrates the “faux philosophy” that such filmmakers deploy, citing Breillat, Noé, Grandrieux as the worst of the lot. In Anatomy of Hell, Breillat cast pornstar Rocco Siffredi and Chanel model Amira Casara. The heady dialogue they spew emerges distant from the social function of their forms. They deliver dialogue that the speakers themselves do not seem privy to, formally becoming talking heads.

Ginette Vincendeau has placed Romance in the tradition of Sade, Apollinaire, bataille, Klossowski and Pauline Réage. Still, for Lisa Downing these writers maintained their texts as inseparable to the erotic as the sex act. “Breillat, by contrast, uses the voiceover and dialogue [and in Fat Girl, I would argue these reaction shots of Anaïs in the adjacent bed] to discourse upon the discontents of sexuality, from the point of view of the female located in the heterosexual economy.”[2] Porn is a language that many of these films take up to destabilize the patriarchal gaze it establishes. The body is the playing field of these films and language, most often, the tools of trade.

These loose narratives that Quandt bemoans as “indecipherable” askews focus to a more formally based investigation of subjecthood. The details which clutter generic structure (particulars of the film “shoot” they are scouting for in Twentynine Palms or the genetics experiment in Trouble Every Day matter less than the charged symbolism of the Hummer, a pitchfork or Beatrice Dalle’s whetted lips. As Williams states of Breillat, her “films have ellipses of plot where other films have ellipses of sex.”[3]

This loose story structure and focus on the formal quality of the scene also gives rise to a more quotidian method of looking which at times seems somnambulistic. Almost all of Twentynine Palms occurs in very long sequences which take in the landscape. It is the landscape which will eventually consume our couple – quite contrary to Quandt’s yearning for Dumont’s prior L’Humanité, “a film about the body in the landscape and the landscape of the body.” The film becomes trance-like. In one haunting sequence, the couple stop to regard the large industrial windmills which hum and whirl. The buzz of street lamps and the incessant passing of violent trucks punctuate the later soundtrack. Are these not the Formal and Philosophical provocations Quandt warned these works as lacking. Vincent Gallo is the zombie to Beatrice Dalle’s vampire in Trouble Every Day and complains about the industrial light in his eyes or enacts in a covertly, social violence as he endlessly caresses a woman mid-public transit, while pressing a recently purchased puppy between them.

We have seen a similar sort of durational somnambulism at play in Fat Girl during the seemingly endless seduction scene. As Linda Williams writes, “…Explicit sexual action, along with uncommon duration, allows the battle over the loss of virginity to become a more psychologically and emotionally accurate ordeal, both immediate and powerful in its effects on Elena, and distanced and refracted through the eyes of an empathetic, jealous, and sorrowing Anaïs.”[4]

Such moments of somnambulistic duration also leave us all the more stunned when the narrative delivers these films’ famed shock sequences. Such moments of shock alarm at a level of unconscious and can momentarily jar the viewer, calling into question the reality status of that object. And further, after the shock is quickly recalled as fiction, the lingering image can call into question the generic, social or narrative structuration of that figure or event.

In Fat Girl, there is no denying the 12 year old Anaïs’ age and weight. Anaïs' body, Breillat has claimed, “protects her from becoming a product of society’s norms.”[5] When she is attacked in the final sequence, she does not acknowledge this assault as rape because this is the mandate of the social in which she refuses to enact. Placed in an impossible situation, many viewers side with the social in viewing the character Anais’s narrative plight, since we are also aware of our watching actress Anaïs Reboux perform in this harrowing scenario. But the shock has a freeing capacity, also.

Like Emma Wilson writes on Romance: “Here the scene makes us uncertain of further boundaries between the ‘real’ and the staged. As Marie is untied, it has suddenly become too much for her, we witness what seems the literal untying of Caroline Ducey [the actress]”[6] or, to again quote Williams “The question arises then: How do viewers’ own bodies engage with the sex acts of these scenes? If the films are not ‘only’ pornography, by which we mean not ‘only’ designed to arouse us, then what is the role of our own bodily engagement with the aroused, desiring, but not always pornographically satisfied, bodies on the screen?”[7]

These are art films made to resemble genre films so as to deracinate the very ideology at the latter’s core. These films look to the basest of genres (be it porn or slasher) to submit a bodily appeal. They shock the viewer – like horror. But their shock is lasting as it seeks to destabilize the convention of its lineage.

Quandt goes on to argue that the films are too disparate to be classified as a movement. In this way he is somewhat correct. It was never a conscious ship that anyone jumped aboard, for which anyone penned manifestos. I myself hold the contributions by Denis, Dumont, and Breillat in far higher regard than I do Noé’s and of Baise-Moi. I disagree completely with Quandt’s listing of Ozon here, as Ozon’s influences arise as much from melodrama as they do from horror. And Breillat, who has been working in this capacity for the 40 years? It would be crude to label her as partaking in a trend when, in 1968 she wrote these words:

That is the solemn difficult moment when his hands take out his heart During the infinite shortness he has left to die in he places it slowly and with devotion between her legs The last throbbings in her organ make sumptuous delicate love to it that becomes violent when the final jerks become synchronized with his own; Then everything grows calm again and his heart takes its place for ever in her vagina which itself has found its final place after having experienced the most marvelous of orgasms).[8]

[1]Lisa Downing. "French Cinema's New 'Sexual Revolution': Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre", French Cultural Studies 15(3): 274

[2] Downing: 270

[3] Linda Williams. (2001) 'Cinema and the Sex Act', Sight and Sound 27(1): 25

[4] Williams (2001): 24

[5] Criterion (2004)

[6] Emma Wilson (2001) 'Deforming Femininity: Catherine Breillat's Romance', in Lucy Mazdon (ed.) France On Film, London, Wallflower Press, 154

[7] Williams (2001): 22

[8] Catherine Breillat, A Man for the Asking, trans Harold . Salemson (Morrow: New York, 1969), 127-128.

The Quandt article in question: was published in the February 2004 issue of Art Forum.

And, by the by, there's a rather good new book on Breillat published out of Manchester press by Douglas Keesey.

Picking out 2008

Without much to go on (personally, I was rather underwhelmed this year) here are Being Boring's top 11 medial events of 2008 in no particular order. It felt like it was a very good year for the smaller pictures. All the big "important" films were startlingly lackluster, leaving the indie and genre films to work their own brand of cinematic magic. And they did...

Rambo and In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale - I have to tie these because my ardor is aroused from the same space. Stallone’s redonning of the bandana and Jason Statham’s cerebral CG swordfights with Ray Liotta conjure different cultural associations and come from rather different narrative places but their desire for audience involvement is couched in the same space. I’ve watched Rambo a few times since that fateful first encounter, but every time, in that blood drenched denoument, I swear to god, I throw up my hands and shriek, lost for any other apt response to this grotesque form of spectacle. It’s sublime. I’m confused and agitated… and I love it…

Un Conte De Noël – A veritable who’s who of French cinema, Arnaud Desplechin’s newest offering was certainly the best title I watched at this year’s London film festival. Amassing a formidable body of French talent (Deneuve, Almaric, Poupaud, Mastroianni, Consigny) the film becomes a bit of a meta-Christmas gathering, allowing this “family” to spar in their strange familiar arrangements centered not around love but direct communication and (at times) respect. The film is best when allowing Almaric and Deneuve to deliver matter-of-fact below the belts about death and dispassion. Almaric, in particular, displays his signature verve and, colliding with family members on this would-be festive occasion, forces the secrets to bleed through that pulsate beneath any gathering of this sort. Mostrioanni and Devos are masters of there craft here, suggesting with the slightest glances the dialogue that is all-too-frequently reserved for the male family members.

Une Vieille Maitresse - Now, of course I would include the new Breillat film here and, in truth, I’m a bit of a cheat. I saw it in 2007 at the AFI fest, but, for some reason, didn’t see fit to include it in the 2008 round up. I revise this misstep with its existence here. The fright conjured when some heard that Breillat’s next film was to be a costume drama was paralleled only by my fright that it was to star Asia Argento. I do not like Asia, but I forget that Breillat is a far smarter person than I (and Asia, thankfully) and uses Argento’s star persona to expert means. When Velini arrives on the scene sucking on an ice cream cone and Fu’ad Ait Aattou grunts at her vulgar appearance, there’s a fantastic filmic double entendre that Breillat is too well aware of. The games that ensue might have taken place in Anatomie De L’enfer’s beach house or the summer spot of Fat Girl, but gussied up with the frocks and pretense of this nouvelle morality is a clever way of speaking to the present state of sexual politics. Let’s hope Breillat puts this knowledge to good use when she sets her lens on Naomi Campbell in her next film, Bad Love.

The Wrestler - If Barthes were alive, he might have made an addendum for the mug of Mickey Rourke. Sure there’s a parallel between wrestlers and film stars, whores and film stars, but the mere use of the body in Darren Aronofsky’s film makes it worthy for inclusion in these ubiquitous year-end list things. As staples are ripped from Rourke’s leathery flesh – or more subtly, tears stream the tanned and botoxed face – the viewer builds a sense of the sensorial bodily experience I have not witnessed in the cinema in a great while. That it melds this with a brilliant brand of American old-school melodrama, more power to it. When this bulbous body of masculine fantasy begins to fail, we understand a tried and true cinematic formula that actually does the film more favors than most of its artistic or narrative flourishes. Much of Aronofsky’s deliberate techniques are tad clunky, but it makes little difference in the face of such inertia that the film has (like that body) build to.

Mother of Tears - Asia again. This film was a bit like the Rambo/Statham inclusion in its total embrace of excess. When the first murder involves an archaic device which smashes out the victims' teeth, disembowelment and strangulation using the entrails procured by step number two of this dispatch (the poor girl, all the while, moans in a post-pain form of disbelief that any scene can last this long), you know you’re in for it. Nothing is sacred in Dario Argento’s grisly no holds barred grotesquerie. Not babies or even Udo Kier, who all but smirks as his likeness is pummeled into mere memory by a large piece of cutlery. The witch orgy that closes the film really must be seen to be believed and we’re with the leads at the film’s close as they double over in laughter in horror and, yes, abject disbelief at these narrative absurdities.

The scene in which Brendan Fraser brushes his teeth in Journey To The Center of the Earth in 3-D. There’s all of this talk lately as to whether or not 3D was a bankable idea with many theaters not being able to make the 100,000 switch to digital 3D in time for (the dreadful sounding) Aliens vs. Monsters and the new James Cameron film, Avatar. What foolishness! If one only looks to the past, it is apparent that such films have always been produced in times of desperation as pure novelty. I say, watch Brendan Fraser brush his teeth in 3D. This is the best use I have seen these silly glasses put to! We’ve seen great big dinosaurs. I yawned as he careened towards me. To duck as the water flows from Fraser’s chiseled face into the sink/camera! This IS spectacle in a profound way that makes us see things anew. And you don’t need a team of CG specialists to do sometime Brendan does twice a day.

The return of Grace Jones (of course!) - “Pleased to (re)meet you,” she purrs from her youtube viral and my lifelong love affair is vindicated. Jones made a splash last summer at festivals across the UK using her video for ‘Corporate Cannibal’ as the opening number. A shoddy, handheld copy showed up online days later and Jones gave us a July 4th gift of the actual video shortly thereafter. Perfectly employing her self-mythos, the video breathed life into a song which could have been seriously mishandled. Her Dazed spread with Chris Cunningham threw her naked, 60 year-old body into the face of its 20-something readers with a voraciousness we’ve forgotten to ask for in our performers. Grace is always quite careful of her self-presentation and these two gestures – Corporate Cannibal and the nude Dazed spread – harked her return in a brilliantly provocative manner. Keep it up! Keep it up!

Les Chansons D’Amour – we’re all subject to moments of emotional folly. I sense that perhaps this isn’t one of the best films of the year, but Christophe Honore‘s film, for me, possessed an emotional resonance that sided quite well with his (mostly unnecessary) songs. The one truly needed number found the second great use for Chiara Mastroianni this year, singing one of the saddest songs you’ve ever heard in a frigid park. But the film harbors the potential to bounce back and the warm and loving close finds me returning to the film for repeat sessions of les chanson. Of course, it never hurts to look at either Ludivine Sagnier or Louis Garrell. Now, if only Honore can let go of those New Wave nods which hinder his work with their weak forms of retro-pastiche.

Savage Grace – I didn’t like Savage Grace, at first. I’m always searching for reasons to maintain my love for Julianne Moore however hard she makes it for me. Over time, those such-drenched beach scenes of erotic fecundity kept creeping through my mind and that final scene of incest is SO memorable in its absolute uneasiness that I wonder if I granted Tom Kahlin’s too-long in the making follow-up to Swoon too little consideration. Moore’s performance is flawless and Eddy Redmayne’s startling face sculpts the narrative around this rotten familial/erotic theorem. Not sure if this really deserves it’s place here, but with the dull flicks that this year has offered, Savage Grace showed what provocative works can still grace on screen (however brief the stint).

Otto; or Up With Dead People – Oh, Bruce La Bruce. Leaving behind the blatancy of The Raspberry Reich (a blatancy which worked, considering the content) La Bruce mines the Zombie film’s ever-referenced sociopolitical critical potential for his Otto, a gay vegan zombie going through an identity crisis. When Goth indie filmmaker, Medea Yarn, posts a flyer calling for actors in her politico zombie porn, Otto answers, hoping to find guidance and meaning in this crew. Of course, he finds imposters and a rather flaccid political extremism that accomplishes precious little in Yarn’s rantings (though such verboseness does yield my favorite line of the year; after spouting off a statistic of how much waste America produces a year, enough to fit in X amount of football fields, she rolls her head to the other side and sighs, “and though I can think of now better use for football fields…”) La Bruce takes the content to more meaningful terrain as the film progresses and it’s surprising how much emotional content he is able to fit in this punk gay horror porn. Otto is a treat to look at, but there’s something lurking underneath that surface and La Bruce, thankfully, never lets us forget it.

Sarah Palin v. Katie Couric - Truly a landmark moment in television history. I can say little more. I heard the disastrous rumors about this speech and watched, only to find that the hopeful was far more hopeless than I could have ever imagined. Watching this moment of self-destruction was a medial event that only comes once in a lifetime.

Blood for Blood

In The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston is cast as a superstarlet, good enough at acting to win Academy gold. In that film, considering Houston’s limited thespian range, the gesture was assuredly an affirmation of performative prowess, despite the action on screen. These 16 years later, a like shadow runs over Clint Eastwood’s latest bleakie, The Changeling. Before one frame of the pic was shot, there was Oscar speak of Jolie’s turn in this missing children (melo)drama. And sure enough, before venturing off to the cinema today, I was on the phone with a friend. “Oh, she’s supposed to take home an Oscar for that.” Well, the film deigns to think so too. There’s a completely throw-away scene so-near the denoument in which the girls at her office beg Jolie to attend an Oscar party. She cannot oblige them as there’s entirely too much work to be done, but she still listens over the radio. Cleopatra is up against It Happened One Night and Jolie waits with her hands wrung over her chest as they choose her preferred feature. Our alignment with her character (and knowledge of Cleopatra’s dubious reign over film history) congratulates the Academy for their sound choice and… perhaps appeals that the wisdom echo in the 21st century? As the crane scales over the scene of the final shot, we reregister the title on the marquee down the road.

Clint Eastwood has joined the ranks of the Hollywood “stuff of legends” department here. Every moment of the film ebbs a bankroll of studio confidence and Eastwood delivers manipulative moments of duress on par with the likes of Spielberg. All the chips are stacked against our heroine and we/she are put through the debilitating motions of denial, tears, even grimy institutionalization (yes, replete with scenes of electroshock therapy). All of this with one hand on the Art dial to make these utter 50s claims at genre trickery seem required, justified and adding to the auteurist necessities of Eastwood’s vision. Anyone who has read this blog more than once should know that I mean no good on this claim. I’ve been infrequent in posts here as I’ve revisited some old friends in recent weeks. There was a trend of missing children films that I took to writing of first on these “pages” with Panic Room, The Forgotten, Flightplan, Freedomland and The Invasion and have been recently developed a second academic analysis. The Changeling was required reading, as it were. It’s all there, part and parcel, but blended with a vaguely Chinatown vie at credibility. We’ve even got the dirty police cover-up and an actress who, at her toughest, could perhaps get Faye Dunaway to give that flawed retina an awesome tremble.

The missing child film speaks nothing to missing children, but to the horrors latent in the heart of contemporary culture. Emma Wilson’s lovely book, Cinema’s Missing Children goes so far as the venture that the 1990s abduction/murder narratives were attempts at representing the horror and abject despair which is all but representable. They functioned as meditations on the space of complete loss. After 9/11, these dialogues assumed a more patriotic purpose and the child came to figure as the social as these structural figures vanished on that day. The child is both the social order that seemed to evaporate until Bush sounded the war horns and the security which felt similarly abused, rotten from the outside. When the child is returned in most of these pictures, the symbolic/political structure which seems to have toppled is now in full form again, bathed in the golden lights of the films’ reunion scenes.

So why does mister Eastwood find it necessary to tell this tale now? After the infamous flop of The Invasion, it would seem child abduction narratives are on the wane. Nor does he allow the moments of raw emotion to erupt and address the true horror of the scene (sorry Joles, that fantastic lip tremble just don’t cut it). To attest that this sort of missing child narrative has always existed is not quite it, either. Perhaps the nostalgia of “better” times (certainly better clothes) functions to suggest that even our vies for pre-Nam ideals for “the family” are not as sound as they appear. There’s not even much sense of family even in Eastwood’s world, just justice and vengence. When the child finds its parent (there are a few gone missing here) they are whisked from the narrative toute suite. No, this is about vengeance. This is a re-jigged, Dirty Harry appeal of eye for eye. Jolie simpers and purges those inexhaustible aquaducts, but quickly flips the switch and sneers on, through many trial sequences. This is not Wanted, dear, though you’d never know it from the gratuitous and gleeful hanging scene (which recalls the scene from Capote which, umm… got an Oscar) and the Hills Have Eyes-eque Riverside farm house with whirring old fans and Texas Chainsaw style rusted blades scattered about.

Not much adds up and you feel really toyed with. But you feel justified through Jolie’s successes, which you knew were coming from the start. But those successes somewhere lose track of what they were aiming for. Unless they were aiming at impeccable wardrobe design, because, however much I sneered at this grisly film’s emotional assaults, I did gasp at all the great cowl necks, flapper suits and fur lined coats. Jolie certainly found the right role in terms of lipstick shades, but it would be nice if it went beyond that.

Elegy

I recently had my ipod stolen at some dreary Soho gaybar. In truth, it was getting old. I bought it 3 or so years back following the introduction of video capabilities (which I used as a tax write off, being a student of video art, and all). Blemished with more than a few traces of battery, the gadget was additionally beginning to show internal signs of fatigue. When playing 'Sensitized' off Kylie Minogue's X album, for instance, Bjork's face peered from the cover representation instead of Kylie's; instead of Saint Etienne's Boxette cover art, I was treated to the Future Bible Heroes' Memories of Love. Apart from this the trusty little player was in near-top form.

I bemoaned its girth, having recently moved to London and counting regular tube rides on my day-to-day. The now-bulky device was too large to slip into any pants' pocket. I cursed it at the time but was surprised by the ways in which I miss it now.

[The only image I have of my dear ipod, bottom right-hand corner]

We are a commodity culture through and through, and no matter how much Baudrillard I can consume, the pangs and effects of this comsumptive drive cannot be displaced. Apart from missing my daily soundtrack (and embarrassed by my penchant for strolling about, unconsciously mumbling, quietly orating my own), I began to consider the memory data that was lost in this theft. 'How many times did I listen to X?' I caught myself wondering. An ipod keeps track of play count. I can joke that I've played the album 800 times, but is it really 37 or 62? These bits of info, unimportant as they seem, appeal to my analytic practice -- this diminutive machinery was a form of bibliography [Kylie cited 53 times], now lost. And what of the innumerable playlists? The litany of tracks carefully assembled for listening over the past three years erased in a single, selfish act.

Of course, what is perhaps more pertinent the question is, 'How could I forge such a sensitive attachment to plastic bits of gadgetry in the first place?' What privileges this machine? Well, it is day to day. And to this extent, it could acquire religious purportions. In my prior life, commuting by car in Los Angeles, this little guy (who, I should mentioned, bore the name Gratuitous in my itunes) was my daily conduit to joissance via Pet Shop Boys, Sally Shapiro, Grace Jones, and, of course, Kylie Mingoue. Losing him is a bit like those scenes in ghost films when the kooky medium suddenly lowers her hands and loses that glazed look in her eyes. She's no longer tapped into that disembodied ether, she's no longer special. Just a person. She loses definition.

I'm over it. Since the thing is ultimately a toy, its replacement is in that corporeal ether right now, cradled in the caring arms of a FedEx worker. Poised for me to bring it life. But the sensations of loss that swam through my mind when I was distanced from this thing were really strange, unexpected. The importance we bestow onto our objects is a key and yet entirely perplexing fact of our contemporary life. Goodbye Gratuitous. I hope that, where ever you are, whatever you're playing, your life is just as sweet. And whoever you happen to be podding, may he love Kylie.

Oh, silly me, it was a Soho gaybar...

The Bodyguard Feature-length Commentary

In an attempt to enter into the digital age, I have started exploring alternative technologies for the dissemination of Film Criticism and Theory. Or, in another turn of phrase, click below to download my feature length mp3 commentary of The Bodyguard.

Click here to hear me talk for 2+ hours about Whitney Houston

I'm hoping that it's fun. I must apologize forthright for the somewhat lackluster quality of the sound recording. I'm working with a limited means (eg, a 4-year-old laptop) but I hope you'll find the observations insightful. There are excepts taken from Lynn Tillman's essay Looking for Trouble - or Privileging the Subtext which can be found in her book The Broad Picture, Ann Friedberg's 'A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification’ reproduced in Psychoanalysis & Cinema, portions of 'Trying to Hear "I Will Always Love You"' from my book FEVER PITCH and an essay, 'The Cinema of Whitney Houston' that I have written with Kevin Killian and will appear in Kevin's new cinema book published by FANZINE press and in a slightly different altered version in Hedi El Kholti's new magazine, Animal Shelter later this year.

oh, heather...

Girl, don't let the bad press bring you down. You're still royalty and we're here for you, should you need to talk it out...

Torpid

Call it the heightened sense of awareness brought on by... trauma, is it?

I moved to London 10 days ago and things have been a whirring combination of quite smooth and harried. My general temperament has been rather introspective (as behooves a move, I suppose). Moving to a foreign land is like work travel, where you may know a few people, but lose the daily routines which lend life structure. I've been quite reclusive and my bouts of nonpragmatism have all been very hermetic. I've been blowing through the back catalogue of Chris Kraus (Aliens and Anorexia and Torpor, thus far), a writer I adore -- who, though eloquent and painstakingly irreverent, does nothing to mollify this self-analysis. Instead, Kraus' critical prose invades my thoughts as she drifts from Berlin to New Zealand, Romania to the Hamptons. I find myself near tears at the purchase of candied peanuts on the South bank, in part some Kundera-esque revelry in Kitsch and because, on my second day of reading on a parkbench before the South Bank Center, killing time before yet another orientation seminar, I'm upwind from the mediocre cellist who plays for the tourists (daily, I've gleaned) and downwind from the candied peanut fellow. I love that smell, though I'd never purchased the things at any of their urban incarnations. This moment, between these two vendors, was perfect. I welled up. I took it too far by buying some, though. Half way through a mouthwash cup of them, I wanted to throw up.

But this is a film blog (can't you tell from all of the Kylie posts?!) and I must report on the newest Ozon offering (speaking of sugar coating). It's the only cinematic outing I've made so far. It did nothing to dissuade any of this intense interiority. You see, the eponymous Angel lives a life entirely in her head. The goings on around her are all filtered through the escapist fantasy any child reared above a grocery would invent. She writes hopelessly florid texts -- enough to make Charlotte Rampling squirm -- and becomes the Queen's favorite author. But she briskly drowns in her own denial of (real) world events.

It's a hopelessly wrong film; none of the embellishes Ozon heaps onto Angel ever truly amount to much, and though we're given glimpses at lovely "what could have been"s, were left with this bulbous costume drama and a completely uncompelling, disdainful lead. I saw the film at the ICA and, eating a sandwich on the grass of Mall park, in a state of vague homelessness offered me rather succinctly to the desperate fantasies of the film. I'm empathetic to the teeth and Angel speaks aloud a similar self-narrativization that ran through my head. But this pipsqueak who writes trivial literature ultimately drove me back to Chris Kraus (with anything but torpor).

This has been my vicious cycle, one which the mammoth Film Studies readers stacked beside me in bed will assuredly cure.

From Torpor:"Tenses situate events relative to their closeness or their distance from the speaker. Rules of grammer give the empty space of human speech some shape. The simple past We left. In more complex tenses, "have" and "had," the helping verbs, help to separate the speaker form the immediacy of events. We had left. Had forms a little step between what happened and the moment when you're telling it."

R.I.P. Kylie Ann Minogue

No, Kylie is not dead. Though some, if you were to ask, would argue that her career is. The online world was abuzz with discontent for this last outing. X, as it were, did not mark the spot. And neither did KYLIEX2008.

No, Kylie is not dead. But this post is to serve as an epitaph. This is the clincher to a love affair. The goodbye letter. 'No More Rain'. 'Bittersweet Goodbye'.

I was just in San Francisco and saw Kevin Killian read from his delicious new collection of poetry, Action Kylie and I knew it marked the end. In the infancy of my Kylie obsession, a peer and close friend told me of Kevin's work. Our conversational, dish methodology was similar -- though Kevin is far superior and insanely more well read than I. Eagerly awaiting this forthcoming, "1,000 page KylieTheory tome" that my friend (who is admittedly prone to intense exaggeration) relayed to me, I emailed Mr. Killian and we met on several occasions. We met and discussed Whitney Houston, Lele Sobieski and, of course, Kylie. His first correspondence, dated February 21, 2007 09:47:50 PM PST read: "I disagree violently with *some* of your opinions, but you're a contrarian, like I am, and we have to stick together shoulder to shoulder" We got along best when just earnestly fawning over recent Kylie developments. Holding the copy of his poetry book in my hand -- a traded copy for my recently published theory book -- a beautiful moment of closure overtook me. Kevin's wonderful poems speak in lyric, far more succinctly than most ruminations of fandom. It's felt and loving. My work on the Impossible Princess was an affair, a blissful passing through; Kevin's fever is more epically impassioned, intransigent.

See, I had already (reticently) decided to move on, and this night was the brilliant send off. I am moving to London this Monday, the 8th of September, and developed my recent diva theory book, FEVER PITCH as an act of LA closure. I wanted to encapsulate the feeling of living here. Pop, as glassy and banal as the Los Angeles street scenes. The feeling of devotion in a town that is both devoid of devotion and exorbitantly drunk on it. And I wanted to move on. I had not yet made peace with this decision, but the three events I will now relate made it possible.

Kylie's new show, KYLIEX2008 was broadcast at 9pm London time on August 16th, 2008. That morning, I had a date to view the newest work by my close friend (and, were I to have one, mentor), experimental filmmaker Lewis Klahr. It was a wonderful piece, though I had to sift through it twice to comprehend the visual narrative. It begins with a vinyl rip of 'Theme from Valley of the Dolls' and closes with one of the Cale pieces on Songs for Drella. We had a long, roundabout conversation where we both toyed with one another's intentions and eventually both conceded, seated at his perfunctory patio furniture. I kept glancing restlessly at his watch. At ten-to-one, (8:50 pm, London time), I urgently informed him that I had to be somewhere and scurried off to view the spectacle.

As the concert was an exclusively British broadcast, there were two, covert online viewing sites, both to be posted on 'Say Hey: The ultimate unofficial Kylie Minogue forum' an hour before the broadcast. I'd had trouble with the forum before and as I breezed into the apartment and threw open my laptop, I was not surprised to find it too populated to gain access. I hit google. Tapping in a series of searches, I finally found one address and leaned in to decode the horribly pixelated livefeed. "Drop your socks and grab your miniboombox..." Kylie crooned mechanically as she was lowered to the stage in a halo of circuitry. I don't like 'Speakerphone', the tune she used to open the tour, but her entrance sure was grand. Midway through the mashup, 'Boombox/Can't Get You Out Of My Head', the feed began rebuffering. I would get snippets, like a scratched CD only I'm also hunched over and attempting to decipher the jumble of pixel squares. Finally, it crashed and I gave up on the affair. My pulse was still quick, but I knew the whole thing would be uploaded onto the forum in high quality later that night. I could wait.

A physical trainer from Columbia Missouri named Yvette watched over my shoulder when I finally watched the download on a plane ride from St. Louis to San Francisco. She liked Kylie because her music was easy to work out to. We took in the rather rote extravaganza. I found myself more curious than exhilarated. I'd invested so much into this. This tour was launched at the peak of my Kylie obsession. I hung on every development that was made. When the tracklists were posted after each of the 53 European gigs, I would read them like poetry (My favorite poem in Action Kylie is the one in which Kevin reproduces, verbatim, the fictitious "leaked" tracklist and author credits for Kylie's Fever follow-up, City Games -- the flop which would truly be titled Body Language). Act after act, my weariness grew. She was not having the slightest bit of fun. She half-heartedly transitions into the single, 'Wow' by addressing the audience, "You all look so... WOW!"

What truly disturbed me was how vulgarly inconsiderate the concert was. In the third song, 'Ruffle My Feathers', Kylie lounges across two dancers, as though they were chairs. They happen to enshrouded in black gauze bags and the scene mirrors those at Abu Ghraib. 10 Million pounds were spent staging this concert and no one noticed the likeness? Later, Minogue -- who was famously diagnosed with breast cancer 3 years back -- is lowered to the stage atop a giant silver skull. This is her first tour of new material since and we find her playing with such iconography devoid of any of its charge? That's pop, I suppose. But this? Finally, no stranger to ethnic generalizations (see the Samsara portion of Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour in which Kylie is cast as a Indian/Middle Eastern goddess), the Naughty Manga Girl section sealed the deal for me. Not since Mulan have I witnessed such an affront of lotus blossom bafoonery. Watching pseudo-Geisha girls and Mongolian warriors divest to the grind of 'Nu-Dit-Ty', I was done.

Kevin's beautiful event reminded me where the resilience of this Aussie princess lay. Kylie's profundity can almost not be credited to her at all, but to all of those who invest in her. His poems use her lyrics to cope with personal traumas and bliss. Bouts of flawless prose weave through the vagueness of these pop lyrics. For Kevin, Kylie is personal. Far more personal, it would seem, than Kylie is to her own craft. His work speaks to pop's true power. Monumental in its interpretive potential, the same song can serve as an anthem to some, an elegy to others.

I'm mid-packing now and have no place to stay in the large city in which I'm soon due to land. Least to say, I'm stressed. As I was divying up the books and socks and shoes into their respective bags, I popped on the supplementary DVD for the recently reissued Criterion edition of Sálo. The doco in which I was interested was Italian with English subtitles. Read, not what one wants for use as a background soundtrack. I collapsed to the floor and burrowed through the spare selection of DVDs that have kept their plastic keep-cases. When I saw Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour, I knew what to do.

In my twilight hours of Kylie Minogue, I watched as the pink feathered showgirl princess is lifted to the stage. I saw the optimal optimism of the show. It's jam packed and truly a celebration. Kylie's so happy to be there, or happy to be looked at, anyway. And her ebullience is gloriously palpable. It's epic in all of the right ways. Giant headdresses and tinsel gowns, feather mowhawks and haute couture. She repeatedly surges with diva delivery that her voice can't actually hold, but that endures you to her more. Hearing her nasally coo through 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', from this current, stress-out and abandoning vantage, I welled up. Later, during a mash-up of her song 'Burning Up' and Madonna's rap in 'Vogue', she's raised to the stage atop a blond white mannequin chair (what's all of this with sitting on people?). "She's rising up on the back of Madonna!" my friend Sigrid observed and the performance which always seemed a misstep to me found fantastic new relevance. I went off to dinner as Kylie was dancing about the stage to 'I Should Be So Lucky'. Sigrid, who hates Kylie, was in the next room singing along "Lucky lucky lucky". This is the greatness of the Homecoming tour. Not only does the grandeur of it all convert the least likely to fans (Metallica records adorn Sig's walls) but, for a moment, my retirement was placed on pause. Like any beneficient, yet failed romance, I placed my hand on my heart and told her "It's all over"... that we're "throuuugh, oooo, Ohh ohh ohh..."and it was all okay.

Farewell my friend.

FEVER PITCH Preview

My book, FEVER PITCH, has gone off to print and is now available for purchase online here. Of course, I would much rather see you at the launch at Peres Projects (969 Chung King Rd) on Thursday, August 7th from 6-9 p.m. but if you're somewhere distant like either Portlands or Australia, I'll understand.

As a bit of a treat, I attached some of page screengrabs below (however hard I try, technology beyond screengrabs is still totally illusive!) The book was illustrated and designed by the brilliant Bay Area artist, Deric Carner. It took an entire week of straight work to lasso the beast and Deric did an AMAZING job. I could not be more pleased. Do take a look at some of the text and image below and I hope to see you next month!

A new essay about Mahogany will be published in the book alongside totally reworked versions of writings from these pages: Afternoon With The Beckhams, Kylie Minogue and Aural Transvestitism, Trying To Hear 'I Will Always Love You' and Grace Jones does 'La Vie En Rose.' And finally, the Kylie tome that I knew I had in me: The Absence of Difference. It ties together some various musings I've posted on Kylie here but in a far more honed capacity.