Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Wales


An actual henge. 
Inner yard of Beaumaris Castle
Braced against the wind at Colwyn Bay.
That which covered the hedgerows and hillsides.
A view of the gardens at my sister-in-law's.
The view from the top of the hill.



Three Kenneth Anger films I hadn't seen

Demon brother, invoked.
Esquire has up a great long interview with my favorite experimental film-maker and goat-footed prince of the bon vivants, Kenneth Anger. You should go read it, and then watch Invocation of my Demon Brother, his best film, in my opinion.


Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969)

I thought I'd seen all his films, but here are three more that sprang up from the article.


Brush of Baphomet (2009)

This is a wade through details of murals painted by Aleister Crowley at his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, where he and acolytes gained his reputation for excess. Using Morton Subotnik's Silver Apples on the Moon as its jarring soundtrack is a curious choice; it creates the orgiastic anxiety of Crowley's murals, but never relents. Unrelentingness is the great thing about Subotnik, but is rigor is scientific and mathematical; Crowley's (and Anger's) are intrinsically tied to the mysteries of the flesh.


Ich Will! (2008)

This mystic collage of Hitler Youth footage was mentioned in the Esquire piece.  It is long by Anger standards at 35 minutes (Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is longer by 3 minutes.) The blood sepia coloring and romantic Bruckner soundtrack add some sinew to the frolicky idylls of Aryan scamps. It culminates in a night rally with lines of soldiers bearing torches, marching in swastika formation. The presence of fireworks point back to one of his first films, Fireworks, where Anger was the youth being antagonized by the military. The torches echo Anger's career-wide cast of Lucifer as the Bringer of Light. What that light reveals is up to those casting shadows under it.


The Man We Want to Hang (2002)

Another love letter to Crowley's paintings, this calmer and more pastoral, lending the old monster a bit of cozy charm. You'd need charm to host the kind of orgies that would get you kicked out of the country by Mussolini. Maybe it's that Il Duce wasn't invited.

Friday, January 3, 2014

Paris



We first saw the top of the Eiffel Tower from street-level at the Arc de Triomphe, poking the tip over the rooftops and thought, that can't be it. It doesn't look like it. Then we saw the thing we've seen our whole lives.

Right up on it.
We were taking an open-top bus tour, the drivers of which were on strike though we noticed that our driver one day was a striker the other day, so how does that work? Basically it meant that there were people in bright jackets blowing whistles at the buses, letting us know where the stop was among the millions of people just like us, gawking at Paris' wonder.

Statue on the Pont Alexandre III, near the Grand Palais
Christmas decorations on Champs de Elysees
Plant shop near Notre Dame
Foyatier's Cincinnatus (1834) swingin' it in the Jardin des Tuileirs
Museum-wise, the Centre G. Pompidou and the Louvre were hit. So many things I've seen before but never seen up close. For instance, (left) Matisse's Figure decorative sur fond ornemental (1926)



has never personally had anywhere the impact on me that (right) Man Ray's Ingre's Violin (1924) has until I saw them in person. There, breathing the same air as stupid old me, Matisse crams the whole world of pleasures into a frame and sets it on fire, altering the atmosphere with its frgrance. Man Ray's photo looks like a cute tattoo idea.

The sunset view from the Pompidou escalators is maybe the most profound thing I saw there, starting at the rarefied heights and sinking to where the pipes come up from the ground. You want to hold your breath, like going through a tunnel.



Inside the pyramid at the Louvre
You know what's in the Louvre so I'll spare you except to say Mona and Venus are both very special, deserving the gravitational pull they possess. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

A thing I didn't expect to be as thrilling were Robert Wilson's video portraits of Lady Gaga installed throughout the museum.


I am already a big fan of Robert Wilson and I'll give Gaga her props, but I really did not expect that these pieces would hold up against the greatest of antiquity, and they do. This is actually a video. A crane flies by every once in a while and she closes her eyes and when she opens them, like you know she will, your heart stops like you just kissed someone you aren't supposed to.

We did Paris on a budget so we had to suffer the charms of the neighborhood boulangerie for nearly every meal.

I don't even know it's name but if you find yourself at the Best Western near the Arc de Triomphe,  turn right out the door and then left.
One evening the boulangerie was closed and I stumbled onto the quintessential Paris market street.



Like I said, magical. Paris lives up to every breathless statement made about it. It is crowded as an ant pile, but when you are the ant, you are only interested in the queen before you.

From the Centre G. Pompidou escalator


New Year's resolution dashed by missing Robot

I read this tweet


and thought, "Great idea for a resolution!" and then felt immediately disappointed in myself for making a resolution because they are foolish things and, even if I were to keep true to such a fire, I should resolve something more practical or useful. But here we are. I thought, "OK....Moldova! Go!"


Moldova is my favorite European country no American has ever heard of. A cursory search through their celebrated authors led me to a name I wish was my own.



An avant-garde poet from the 1930s and author of a single novel titled Music-hall, Robot was swept up in Soviet fervor during Romania's cessation into the Soviet Union. From a weirdly exhaustive Wikipedia article, the sole source of info on Mr. Robot:

This, Iurie Colesnic suggests, was "a conscious choice", and justified by Robot's belief that avant-garde poetry was well-appreciated by the Soviet administration (making him "the most obvious intellectual victim of Soviet propaganda").[3] 

No, Robot. No regime appreciates the avant-garde. That's what makes it avant-garde.

I was ready to jump head on in this resolution but the LSU Library shockingly in its 2 trillion books has nothing by Alexandru Robot, or even by his cooler secondary nom-de-plume Al. Robot. All I have is one of the little poem snippets plugged into the Wikipedia article, thus plugged here.

Şi luna care cată piciorul tău în iarbă,
Un fund amar de cupă întinde ca s-o soarbă,
Efebul care strânge metafore şi fluturi.[17]
And the moon, searching for your foot in the grass,
Presents for sipping the bitter bottom of a cup,
To the ephebe who gathers metaphors and butterflies.

Robot was still an ephebe ("young man") when in 1940 he had a row with the other Moldovan poet of note, the fascist leaning Ion Barbu (for which the library has a sole volume in Romanian.) All I'm saying is, Al. Robot vs. Ion Barbu is a great matchup of names. A year later, the Nazis occupied Bessarabia and Robot was on a refugee boat that sunk in the Black Sea. It is presumed by most who presume such that Robot drowned, though there are some reports he died in battle as a conscripted member of the Red Army.

All this is from Wikipedia, so take it as you will. I'll let Ol' Robot go as I will this resolution that led me here, but I'll raise a first workday coffee to our friend Robot and endeavor to gather metaphors and butterflies myself in this glorious new year.