Chris Knox

Not film, but music. After all the internet talk about and to Chris Knox this week, I decided to go back to the records. In my view, the first five or six years of the Tall Dwarfs is the peak of what Chris has done musically: organic and intuitive experimentalism in the noises and soundtracks, all startlingly original in the New Zealand of 1981-86 (indeed, in the wider world of ...), and Lennon-like levels of self and social criticism in the lyrics. He turned disillusionment with the music business -- the Toy Love experience -- into something other than bitterness, which is the usual response. And I've always been struck by these lyrics from the first Tall Dwarfs song, "Nothing's Going to Happen"; lines that the Situationist International could have come up with:

maybe all the children in small rooms will fall silent at a wall or window and forget to breathe for just one minute because of some beauty that has not been altered, damned or pointed out by the clumsy dark oafs that train them.

Time changes everything. A Knox listener who had fallen asleep then and woke up now would find greater, stranger surprises in the world than a song on a Vogel's commercial or a long-running comic in a daily newspaper or their hero's presentation of arts shows on television or even a song written for a Labour Party election campaign -- there is the offer made, while I double-checked those lyrics online, to "send 'Nothing's Going to Happen' ringtone to your cell".

Good news for a change

Birds ... What do they do? They peck and poke ... And poop ... So there's not a lot of variety as to what can happen.

You couldn't find a better way to summarise the idiocy and emptiness of contemporary American commercial horror than this: Michael Bay's producers don't know how to make birds scary. Chainsaws, knives and hockey masks? A little bit easier. That good news? The remake's on hold.

The salvation army

There are parts of Salvation that "bad" would be too good a descriptor for, and some of the sins committed here are unforgivable.

-- Robert Humanick (apt name!) at the House Next Door pokes a stick into the smouldering ruin that is Terminator: Salvation. Let's see: two superb dystopian-future time-travel movies followed by two dreary efforts to keep a sci-fi franchise on life support. And a TV spin-off in there too. Admit it: we're really at Conquest of the Planet of the Apes now, aren't we?

The need for censorship reform

Very good essays from Gordon Campbell and Aro St Video's Andrew Armitage on the urgent need for censorship law reform, specifically around the labelling of DVDs for home rental. As they explain, the regime is much tougher on arthouse video stores -- such as the excellent Alice in Videoland here in Christchurch -- than on broadcasters or film festivals. A simple but not complete solution might be to duplicate the Australian ratings. The still above is from Wong Kar-Wai's 1988 debut As Tears Go By, one of the many films and TV shows that have been pegged for DVD release until distributors figured that the costs of censorship made the release uneconomic (this is Armitage's list). Hoberman reviewed the Wong Kar-Wai film that New Zealanders can't rent here.

Kubrick and murder

As the only human in the film HAL proves a greater murderer than any of the men.

-- The Harvard Crimson review of 2001, by Tim Hunter, with Stephen Kaplan and Peter Jaszi, 1968.

Now he seems to have gone back to his view at the beginning of 2001: man is a murderer, throughout eternity. The bone that was high in the air has turned into Jack's axe, held aloft, and Jack, crouched over, making wild, inarticulate sounds as he staggers in the maze, has become the ape.

-- Pauline Kael on The Shining, the New Yorker, 1980.

Finally, the question must be considered whether Rousseau's view of man as a fallen angel is not really the most pessimistic and hopeless of philosophies. It leaves man a monster who has gone steadily away from his nobility. It is, I am convinced, more optimistic to accept [Robert] Ardrey's view that, "...we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles and our irreconcilable regiments?
"Or our treaties, whatever they may be worth; our symphonies, however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams, however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses."

-- Stanley Kubrick, a letter to the New York Times, 1972.

Been getting into the Kubrick Site this week. Inexhaustible.

Coil/Derek Jarman: pastoral psychedelia

Coil's "Journey to Avebury" was a ten-minute soundtrack made for a pre-existing Derek Jarman film, recorded in the early-mid 90s and never officially released; call it electronic-pastoral psychedelia, the flickering and hypnotic missing link between Tangerine Dream and Boards of Canada and an anomaly even within the collection of anomalies that constituted Coil's "songs of the week". You can see the music matched to Jarman's film here. The short film doesn't just record a visit to a historical (indeed, pre-historical) site; it is a piece of history itself, shot on Super 8 within Jarman's first year of film-making (1971) and an obvious product of the period's counter-cultural interest in occult secrets and mystical traditions. This is a film about the English countryside that seems rapturous in its appreciation, and it reminds you that for all of Jarman's antagonism to the dominant British culture -- especially during that grim stretch known as Thatcherism -- it's easy to put him within a group of ultra-English artists and mystics: your William Blakes, your John Dees, your Peter Ackroyds. See also his appropriation of Shakespeare in the similarly Coil-soundtracked The Angelic Conversation. Which is why we get this nicely paradoxical description: "radical traditionalist".