Undulating Ungulate

 

I first saw Inferno on late night TV, maybe somewhere in the 12-14 age bracket. It holds the distinction of being one of the very few films that ever genuinely scared me.

 

 

Later in life I rediscovered it as one of Italian horror legend Dario Argento’s masterpieces, a companion piece to the absolutely sublime Suspiria, one of my all time favourite cinematic experiences. They both feature the same bizarre mythology around the Three Mothers, Mater Suspiriorum, Mater Tenebrarum, and Mater Lachrymarum. They both feature the same insanely lurid colour palette and utterly dreamlike narration. They both use striking music to excellent effect.

 

Along the way I had came to regard Inferno as the lesser of the pair, neglecting its own magnificence, and hadn’t watched it for most of a decade. Rewatching it recently was a real treat.

Gorgeous, incredibly atmospheric and dreamlike. Very little actually happens in the story; it is an intense exercise in style in the telling. The action is simultaneously grounded in simple moments of reality that extend out forever – how can he hold the shots so long, and make them so gripping? – and a surreal inescapable nightmare layer, a world of constant descents into weirdly lit labyrinthine spaces.

What scared the younger me was not being able to work out what was happening. Atmospheric whispers, hooded figures, old books, malevolent cats, strange women, not quite human hands…. It was just so weird. Something is clearly going on, people are being killed horribly, but the motive and murderer is generally unknown; perhaps simply the power of evil itself unleashed.

As an adult the film barely makes sense, even on multiple viewings. It almost coheres, but is most effective on an unconscious, metaphoric and symbolic level. The encounter with a genuine archetypal force beyond us, working through us and the world, will not be a rational one.

And ultimately the forces at work in Inferno are transcendent. Death itself, present as a purposive force. There is no escape. Triumph is an abeyance. The flames change nothing.

Beyond its immediate visceral impact, Inferno remains a work of art with depth that rewards repeated consideration.

 

Filed by billy at 12:53 pm under culture,the moose
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A few years back I had a home studio and did some recording. Naturally, the dozen or so solo tracks I had ready to record didn’t come out at all right on recording.

While I was doing those recordings, I spent some time messing around. I would lay a track of something down, and then improvise over that, laying in new tracks, including vocals on the spot. None of these took more than part of an afternoon, and they were kind of fun experimentation.

Naturally, a handful of those worked out more satisfactorily than the proper songs. These recordings come from those sessions. Stylistically they are all over the place. Experiments is an apt name.

I am under no illusions about their quality; proceed at your own risk. Mostly they are pretty short. The setup was ultra lo-fi (battered old synth, coupla guitars, various hand percussion, one mic) and I was learning how to record. At charitable best they could be considered evidence of some raw musical instincts. I suspect I have enough distance to no longer be actively embarrassed by them. At any rate these are the ones I still listen to sometimes. Now you can too.

If you are interested, you can download/listen free via bandcamp

Track by track comments:

Om Nama Shivaya This phrase is a mantra to Shiva to banish evil, which was written on a square of telephone paper and was lying around the house, so became the (probably mispronounced) lyrics. Easily the most disco and upbeat track, and it is pretty good spirited.

Ghost Harvest Sad, lonely and fragile. Probably the pick of the litter musically.

The Kids Fairly unclassifiable, one line repeats (“Hanging with the kids and they are, so beautiful so damaged”) over a bassline, until it all sort of evaporates in a swirl of digital effects that turn hand drums into weird insects. Mercifully short.

Bears Discover Fire Mysterious lurching bassline, very silly vocals, lots of odd noises. Bears Discover Fire is the name of a famous SF story I never read. (This track is dedicated to Ed, my patron from the Northland era, as it is somehow very Ed. Heh.)

Epic Bass Drone Most genre identifiable piece, ambient experimental weird ass synth drone. Pretty much what it says on the tin. Maybe a bit John Carpenter on this listening.

For Reasons Unknown Easily the most normal and songlike of them, which makes the haphazardness of the recording all the more obvious. The one I would most like to rerecord the vocals to.

( Tinekaamos is a word that came to me in a dream. No idea what it means.)

 

Filed by billy at 4:32 pm under culture,the moose
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Two random talks I watched the other day from TEDxSF. Very different, but both pretty fascinating.

The first is virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier talking about all kinds of stuff and managing to be interesting the whole time. He starts by blowing some ancient weird instrument and then explaining how it created the computer maybe, and from there goes all over the place, the unexpected possibilities of avatars, and man who knows what. An interesting mind.

The second is Nicole Daedone talking about orgasms. First encountered this lady and her work via Tim Ferriss talking about 15 minute female orgasms. Here she talks about her work and what it means.

Somehow I feel like this blog’s audience is people who will find both of these talks interesting.

 

Filed by billy at 11:46 pm under consciousness,culture,technology
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You can now watch Combust in Unity free online at www.combustinunity.com

Where you can also buy the DVD for cost price, US $1.75 + post to wherever you are in the world.

 

It has been a long strange ride.

Filed by billy at 10:38 am under culture,new zealand,the moose  Tagged combust in unity, kiwiburn
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A few months back I had a weird hankering to revisit Total Recall. Shortly after, posters appeared for the remake. Thus, inevitably, we get a head to head review.

 

Total Recall (1990)

I liked this at the time, but suspect some of its reality-questioning nuance went over my early teenage head. Having since read a heckuva lot of Philip K Dick, I now appreciate how true it is to the mentality of his world-view, even while departing from what is an excellent short story. It plays as sort of a combination of the gist of lots of PKD’s message about the unreliability of our reality and the inhumanity of our technology. Mostly it makes sense, and does effectively pose the question what if any of what occurs is real.

The most bizarre thing is Schwarzenegger. The guy can almost act, but not really. (Though one can see how he can act just enough to be a politician – he can do dumb, genuine, and asshole.) Mostly he is a giant muscle-bound guy, and the story is written for him. Key moments only work because he is giant muscle-bound guy, and can do things a normal guy can’t. This brings a cartoonish veneer to proceedings, which suits Paul Verhoeven’s lurid and absurdist tendencies; oddly makes me want to revisit his unstinting oeuvre.

Really fun. Late 80′s punk apocalypse mutants. Those same corridors that are the future in every sci-fi movie. Whatever happened to Rachel Ticotin? Amazing how much of the visual side of things stayed with me across the decades. Ridiculous deus ex machina ending.

They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

 

Total Recall (2012)

Short version: watch the original.

There will probably be spoilers in what follows. So it goes. Watch the original instead.

That was weird to watch close to back to back, and the remake suffers for it. The basic framework is there, but the veneer of ideas has worn away.

The remake is not about the ideas. The main thing added is lots of action sequences that are tolerable if uninspired. The nature of the world is… unconvincing. Some nice tech design amidst lots of very busy and incoherent CGI. (This in contrast to the dirt and tactility of Verhoeven’s Mars.)

The absence of feel for the material is evident. The palette and tone of the film is inhuman. We never get a feel for the stakes; there is no human face to the Colony. Farrell is oddly charmless.

None of the characters are characters. This is startling, given how closely it follows the original in many ways, and how the characters from the original stick with us (particularly the mutants). But it is true. Here they are just roles. No one is memorable. No one is worth caring about. Kate Beckinsdale’s role compresses Sharon Stone and Michael Ironside’s roles into one, yet has less character than either. There is no supporting cast; just a series of poorly fleshed out main roles.

The extent to which it is a straight remake is interesting, given how they changed it. However, many of those changes meant they should have kept changing things, and the bits that are kept make less sense in their new context. Probably the best moment in the film is a riff on a thing they have done differently – the fat woman at the scanner, who reminds us of the fat woman Schwarzenegger was disguised as.

Cohaagen’s motives are uninspiring. Matthias/Quato doesn’t exist long enough for us to care about him. He is reduced a cypher to deliver a key piece of thematic information, which while acted on is never given any significance by the acting or direction. Sub-Matrix-sequel philosophizing.

The overall difference in tone is striking. Verhoeven’s film is definitely fun; the remake is never fun. Verhoeven’s is openly surreal and human; the remake is neither.

Ach. On some level it saddens me that it is easier to criticise its failings than praise the original. I also think it is weird that it is easy to talk about pop culture when it doesn’t matter. Or at least I realise that this doesn’t matter, yet it is easy to blog about.

 

 

 

Filed by billy at 10:51 pm under culture
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We of the dancing moose have been tracking the fucked-up-ness of the pharmaceutical industry for quite a while, and even blogged some of it over the last six or seven years. For instance, the inappropriate medicalisation of minor conditions and attendant hard-sell of prescription remedies, manipulating lawmaking, the general desire to screen and drug the whole population, the corrupt links between drug-makers and the psychiatric experts who determine what drug shall be the default prescription, their insane profit driven priorities (erection pills over medicines), noting that legal drugs kill more than illegal, the insane PR lengths the industry goes to, and so forth.

But the latest revelation is actually beyond the fucking pale.

The Guardian’s piece from last week, The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal is a really extraordinary expose of big pharmaceutical companies’ practices.

Essentially, those psychiatric drugs that are tested and proven effective? That testing process is dodgy. Intentionally, consciously.

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug’s life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.

The pharmaceutical companies exercise controls over the process, so that they can kill studies that aren’t going the way they want. They engage in selective reporting – just plain not reporting studies (often larger and more significant than those on which the effectiveness is claimed) which fail to show positive effects.

How broken is this? Industry funded studies are four times more likely to report positive results. This is a total rape of scientific methodology for financial gain. This is dishonesty leading directly to suffering so fucking corporations can make money.

I did everything a doctor is supposed to do. I read all the papers, I critically appraised them, I understood them, I discussed them with the patient and we made a decision together, based on the evidence. In the published data, reboxetine was a safe and effective drug. In reality, it was no better than a sugar pill and, worse, it does more harm than good. As a doctor, I did something that, on the balance of all the evidence, harmed my patient, simply because unflattering data was left unpublished.

Nobody broke any law in that situation, reboxetine is still on the market and the system that allowed all this to happen is still in play, for all drugs, in all countries in the world.

The author goes on to examine the systemic failings of the system of drug testing and prescription. It is hella worth reading.

 

 

What particularly gets me angry is the misapplication of the disease model of mental illness. We are being lied to about our nature, about our minds, and being drugged with horrible shit that has hideous side effects and often doesn’t help – and this is being done knowingly.

What goes on in our heads is not just a question of brain chemistry; our brain chemistry, and our general state of being, is a result of being human beings embedded in the world, acting and receiving feedback from those actions. Our troubles and their solutions are both to be found in that same domain, not a pill.

-=-=-

Bonus note: most of our drugs are synthesised from plants. The general reductionist belief in isolating a single active ingredient from a plant itself is largely driven by profit, and to make researcher’s lives easy. However, we are complex beings, and plants are complex, and the interactions between them are complex. See this article from Dr Andrew Weil: Why Plants are (usually) better than drugs for some examples of how whole plant remedies work.

Filed by billy at 2:07 pm under consciousness,culture,oblivion,politics  Tagged freedom, pharmaceutical
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War is a force that gives us meaning is an extraordinary book. While simply told, it is a complex and deep meditation on the nature of war and humanity. I have never read anything remotely like it, and it feels important. It is all signal, no noise. Ultimately it is a plea to engage with and understand war and what it does to us.

Pulitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges spent 20 years reporting from war zones in Africa, the Middle East, South America and Europe (including 15 years working for the New York Times, which he was fired from for speaking out against the war in Iraq). He has a Masters in Divinity, and brings an unflinching moral gaze. He has seen much of the worst of humanity.

Perhaps most shockingly, he is not anti-war. War may sometimes be necessary, but war does not absolve us of responsibility for our acts.

Easy takeaways: the myths we are told of war are lies. The representations in film are lies. The version of war we get in the media is a lie, one which the media is complicit in, caught up in the madness, willingly servicing the myth. Hedges describes the working and importance of those myths, about war, sacrifice and glory, and about nations; how authentic culture is destroyed and replaced by myths, the destruction of memory and reality to allow war to flourish; how those lonely voice that speak out will be ostracised and suffer for it.

The experience of war is both hideous and an ongoing peak experience, for combatants and victims alike. Facing ourselves through the experience of fear and horror reveals how little we are and grants life intensity and meaning. A madness descends as the moral norms of reality are lifted. He writes of the will to die, of reconciling oneself to a senseless death, and the struggle to operate in the normal world afterwards. This is why so many returned soldiers kill themselves. This is why so many war reporters keep going back to war, chasing their own death.

Those who rise to prominence in war are the thugs, criminals and psychos, let loose in the name of a myth, who inevitably turn from the ideal and abuse their power in the most heinous ways.

In particular he confronts that this is in all of us. That when the event descends, those with the moral character to resist are very few and far between. Normal people do unspeakable things, but the aftermath for many is being psychologically and spiritually broken. The worst crimes are often committed by the militias rather than the trained soldiers.

The sheer number and nature of the examples which casually illustrate the book is where much of the force comes in. It is genuinely disturbing. We have an educated guide through hell, who quotes the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare as readily as those who have filled mass graves.

He also speaks of how we come to terms with war and heal from it; how we wake from the madness and resume normality. The process of confronting the past, and memory, and what really happened, and digging up the mass graves which reveal the atrocities we committed. In his experience, nearly everyone in wartime is complicit.

He speaks of the way we project meaning onto conflict, pick sides, and ascribe the side we support our own image and qualities, regardless of the truth of it. He speaks of the frenetic empty sex.

The only solution, of course, is love, the dance between eros and thanatos; but most crucially, to see love in our enemy, and recognise it as the same as the love in ourselves.

Incredible, complex, powerful. A deep meditation on humanity, life, and the capacity for horror in all of us. He speaks of so much more than I have covered here.

This is a book we should all be aware of, and I suspect from this review you will know if you need to read it. If you feel the call, I recommend it extremely highly.

Hedges wrote this book in response to 9-11, a warning to his nation as it entered the madness of war. He has gone on over the last decade to write a whole bunch of really right-on seeming books dealing with the contemporary issues that need to be addressed yet which rarely are spoken of at all. Check him out.

 

 

 

Filed by billy at 1:09 pm under culture,oblivion,politics,reading,the world
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used up the rest of my 10-trip on:

 

Existence

Low budget post-apocalyptic sci-fi filmed in Makara. Slow, atmospheric, better than I would have expected. At times the lack of budget was palpable – had randomly caught part of a Q&A with the director on another day, and the difficulties they had in filming made sense in the final result – and much that was left ambiguous felt like budget concerns, but on the whole cool, and well worth a look. Good proof of concept that you can make a decent low end SF film here.

 

Sound Of My Voice

I think I am basically in love with Brit Marling, co-writer, producer and star of this film. Gorgeous, talented and smart, and into making awesome lo fi metaphysical science fiction movies. Yes, please.

Tighter and more ambitious than her excellent previous outing (Another Earth), SOMV is a really smart tale of a young couple infiltrating a cult headed by someone who claims to come from the future. All is not what it appears in the film, and all the unanswered questions are implicit and damn clever. Both films are extremely emotionally smart, and focus mostly on the character’s emotional journeys and decisions, which grants the films’s strength and grounding. Hugely recommended, and inspiring in terms of what you can do with good ideas and writing rather than special effects.

 

Holy Motors

WTF. Possibly the weirdest film I have ever seen, certainly the most expensive weirdest film. I have no idea what it was trying to communicate, if anything. Sections of it are amazing, and really fun; it looks amazing, and most of the performances are really good, and the lead is certainly a very talented physical actor. But overall I found it very disengaging and distancing, and I really have no idea what I just watched. Uber-french-art-house-madness, genuinely surreal and incomprehensible. (The gist, briefly, is a guy travels around in a stretch limo going to various appointments which require him to dress and act differently and perform different roles. Exactly why, or even the reality or otherwise of any of what is happening, is never really nailed down.)

 

 

Filed by billy at 7:53 pm under culture
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Allowed myself a somewhat extravagant indulgence and bought a 10-trip to the film festival.

Here’s what I saw in the first week:

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

Hands down my pick of the festival so far.

Abramovic is a 60 year old performance artist with a fairly insane back-catalog of work. (I blogged about her back here.) The documentary follows her preparing for a career retrospective show at MoMA, at which she will perform a new piece (the artist is present) which features simply her sitting unmoving on a chair facing a chair which any member of the public can sit on and look at her. She does this for three months during opening hours. The results are incredible.

An excellent portrait of an extraordinary artist, her loves and life, and an examination of what art is, what it is to be an artist, the artistic process, and by extension life itself. Exceptional, powerful, hugely recommended.

It screens twice more, once each on Saturday and Sunday this weekend. See it.

 

Caesar Must Die

Film of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. All the actors are inmates in an Italian maximum security jail, the idea being guys who have been involved in bloodshed and power, loyalty and treachery will bring something to a play about those themes. The film also has a meta-level of them in jail rehearsing, but is not a documentary, which makes for some weird moments. Many of the performances are excellent. Won the Golden Bear at Berlin. It was cool, but am slightly surprised at that.

Farewell, My Queen

French period piece about the last days of Marie Antoinette, from the point of view of a young woman of the court who is in love with her. Set and filmed largely at Versailles, the whole thing looks lovely. I really enjoyed it; the French seem to bring far greater depth, maturity and intelligence to their historical/period pieces than the americans or english. (Earlier in the year, the standout for me from the Cinema Showcase was House of Tolerance, another french period piece set in a turn of the 20th century brothel.)

 

Cabin in the Woods

Lots of fun Joss Whedon penned post-modern horror-comedy. If you are the kind of person who knows they want to see it based on that sentence, read no further. Ultimately a fun, disposable and relatively forgettable outing – much like most of what it was critiquing, only funnier, with better dialogue and characterisation.

#spoilers#

There were a bunch of moments I loved, chief among them Fran Kranz’s final joint, a perfect Bruce Willis beaten and bloody cigarette moment. And frankly Kranz throughout stole the film.

I didn’t know about the central conceit going in. And on the whole it danced somewhat awkwardly along this level of trying to be a horror and being detached and funny and a reflexive commentary on the genre; a fun ride but something in the combination of humour and gore didn’t sit quite right with me for the first half. The third act saved a lot, though; it was where we finally largely left predictability behind; and the ending itself was amusing; it is not often you get to cheer the apocalypse. Surprised it was a giant human hand.

Occasional plot glitches, which saddened me. (Glaring one being the watchers not noticing Kranz is still alive despite the excessive monitoring showed earlier.)

Random note – it turns out Hemsworth can actually act a bit. This was not apparent from his being Thor.

Don’t have a lot to say, really, and frankly, the internet will doubtless be full of people who care far more about this than me ranting on anyway.

 

Le Tableau

French animation about characters in a painting seeking their painter and travelling between various paintings in search of him. Visually pleasing, narratively slight.

Himizu

Japanese top-shelf nutbar Sono Sion returns.

He was adapting a manga when the tsunami hit Japan, and he changed that movie into a commentary on Japan dealing with it, making for an oddly patriotic film about teen rage and total family breakdown. Emotionally psychotic and very funny (sort of what you wish Lars von Trier would do), utterly unpredictable in his trademark way, it is really a matter of hanging on for the ride and staring in disbelief with an incredulous grin on your face.

Definitely worthwhile, and I will happily watch what he does next, but if you are starting out on him I reckon check out his incredible (and substantially crazier) Love Exposure ahead of this.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Imaginatively told from the point of view of a 6 year old. Peculiar study of eccentrics living in low-lying land beyond the levee who refuse to leave their homes, choosing to living free off the land, works out to be an oddly magical tale on universal themes of love, death and belonging. Moving and enjoyable, it won big at Sundance and Cannes this year (I went in blind other than that fact.) Never seen anything else like it.

 

Planning on filling the rest of the 10-trip with Holy Motors, Sound of My Voice, and maybe Existence.

 

 

Filed by billy at 7:32 pm under culture
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The Farsight Institute are interested in scientifically exploring Remote Viewing, and experimenting with it in a really rigorous way. Almost 20 years ago I read Psychic Warrior by David Morehouse, which is the fascinating account of a soldier inducted into military remote viewing program, and remote viewing seems to have come a long way since then. (The US military spent millions on testing remote viewing, a kind of means of gathering information at a distance.) While it is not something I have personal experience of, the concepts are similar enough to lucid dreams, out of body experiences, and shamanic journeying type things, all of which I have experienced, that I am willing to consider the possibility.

This video, from 2010, presents the summary of their research findings from a remote viewing experiment focused on 2008 and two different future 2013s. From the description, it seems about as sane as you could manage to make research of this kind.

It blows me away that this is a real experiment rather than science fiction. The entire thing is deeply fascinating to me, and frankly kind of exciting.

I think it is worth watching, so I am not going to summarise their theory or results. Go in with an open mind. Hell, go in watching it as a short science fiction movie if you like. It will be a worthwhile 18 minutes either way.

One way or another, it will be worth checking back with the project in mid 2013.

The Farsight Institute are currently trying to get support to “organize a tightly controlled, publicly viewable scientific display of the phenomenon of remote viewing in return for mainstream recognition of the validity of the phenomenon itself”, later this year.

I would support that.

 

Filed by billy at 9:36 pm under culture,oblivion,the world,utopia
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