RIP Ken Russell

Thanks, you big-hearted, wide-eyed bastard.

Funeral note: The narratives about the "stuffiness" of British cinema - which Russell allegedly and actually helped rupture - are largely a consequence of people who have actually watched very little of that cinema.  See here three of my loves - Gainsborough melodramas, Ealing comedies, and Hammer horror - as prime counter-evidence to a story about the alleged dominance of kitchen sink realism.  That tale of dominance has about as much truth as declaring Italian neorealism as the primary touchstone/inspiration/wet blanket against which Italian cinema responded: it is true for certain audiences (such as the kind who think that directors like Russell "cheapen everything they touch", as Pauline Kael put it) and it structurally reinforces itself as such over time, but it has never actually been the case.

What someone like Russell did - and does, because films do not become past tense because their director dies - was to make the kind of films that had been made before but to take off their blinders and belts, to give them the full room to breathe that they had long been panting toward.  To peel back the wet blanket veil and not restrict ornate set pieces to a space through which one passes, but to hang out in them, to scream and make a racket, to wrestle with it and get sweat on the carpet, to let the eyes embedded in the breasts glance around, to stand shoulder to shoulder with Witchfinder General and declare that if one wants to make a historical film about a dark past, one better make damn sure that film is as darkly ornamented, lurid, and self-contradictory as the very history it faces then and now.

RIP GSH

RIP Nate Dogg

Always underrated, always a path not quite taken (a tracking out of gangsta R & B past the Bone Thugs terrain, carrying that torch West), always more than just hook-voice there to bail out others (Warren G, we're looking at you), always one of my favorites.  The sinister fact of being smooth.

[By the way, the moment with the cops - where they bow down by popping up on lifts -  in the video cannot be missed.  It sums up.  The whole world, from the shirts of the kids to the on-time stutter of going backwards and forwards with equal ease, falls beneath the swaying rule of the voice and its refusal to hurry.]

I first listened to Music & Me - his solo album, that flowering of a single backing hook into patterns of insane jazz flute, the un-vocoded plateau pitch shifts stepping down the scale, the recurrent effect of a chorus of an echoing, supporting cast of Nates, an echo chamber of the one and only, such that he's almost an orchestra himself, such that he is now getting his own back, even as he takes the lead for once - around the time that a long relationship of mine ended.  At that time, at that mood, it sounded just right.  It was the sound of a collision that doesn't lose the thread of a beat.  It was pitch perfect then and now.  A whole crowd of voices boiled down into one that didn't waver.  The stroke that ended his life is the first time the surface buckled.  And that's more than can be said.

RIP, Leslie Nielsen

Goodbye to one of the greatest actors, comic or otherwise, of the second half of the 20th century.

I'm sorry I can't be more optimistic, Doctor, but we've got a long road ahead of us. It's like having sex. It's a painstaking and arduous task that seems to go on and on forever, and just when you think things are going your way, nothing happens.

Saramago dies

Goodbye to a damn good one.  Saramago was one of the first novelists I read in that way when you start searching out novels as a young teenager, when they start forming some nebulous constellation of taste and perspective around you, pointing you down trails your assigned reading in middle school English class simply won't.  (It's not the most immediate transition from Avi's Nothing But the Truth to Bataille's Blue of Noon.)   It was The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.  It floored me, hadn't read anything like it.  And it led me to Pessoa, who had the same effect.

(On top of it, Saramago was a Communist, an atheist, an anti-fascist, and a hater of bullshit.  He'll be missed.)

Fake wood grain door, spider carrying a web-covered sucked-dry fly

What I awoke to this morning.

The installment plan takes revenge on the gratuitous

In short it reduced survival to a fundamental nullity; it proposed, in a condensed version, the long-term plan that the Church had drawn unconsciously from the economic model of survival on credit. Faced with this impatience to empty life of its substance, Catholicism sent out its soldiers of deferred death until confidence in its enterprise was restored. Bloodthirsty repression by the northern crusaders lay waste to a civilization that had been on the verge of finding their own approach to happiness. The victory was a matter of real profits over the rarefied abstraction of exchange; and so, paradoxically, a slow death on the installment plan took revenge on immediate, gratuitous death.

Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit

"we endeavor to have our products used wherever precision aiming solutions are required to protect individual freedom."

One of those things that is, sadly, far less surprising than it should be, an instance of total, flawless integration that, were it fiction, we would rightly mock as cut-rate lefty post-Vonnegut political surrealism. Turns out a U.S. military arms supplier has been selling them rifle scopes with coded Bible verses on them.

"Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they've told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as "spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ."

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of "those who are calling this a Crusade."

RIP, Rohmer

Rohmer, director of the perhaps greatest movies of minor difference, films in which people did very little but talk and muse on possibilities not taken, the very talking about and circling back upon makes them sadly hypnotic, died today. Perhaps time for a collective repassage through the Six Moral Tales...

DIY Death

Saw this when I was in Des Moines: Joe Scanlan's DIY yuppie death kit, (of course, able to be bought in very expensive, pre-assembled, art world sanctioned form) titled: "DIY, or How to kill yourself anywhere in the world for under $399." Yes, those are indeed IKEA bookshelves and nightstands reconfigured into a white laminated chipboard coffin and flower stands. (Should be called Nekrö.) No, it isn't that different from the umlaut-filled necropolis that is IKEA , that odd site of both the knowing-better-than of responsible Scandinavianism and the fact of actual affordability (cheaper than Wal-Mart). However, we can rest easy knowing that somewhere in northern Sweden, trolls once named Tromsö and Sniglar are furious at those who stole their accursed birth-right names in order to sub-name metal bunk-beds and unstained pine diaper changing tables. And they are coming for their revenge, back to a world where they don't belong. Armed with ancient fury and weird aluminum wrenches that don't fit anything else other than one set of bolts that don't fit where they should, that is to say, that don't fit into the world designed for and against them.

“like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them”

RIP, George Brecht.