I am a pathological reader. I must admit as much with a great deal of regret. For in admitting this compulsion to you I also must face the fact myself and am forced to confront the awful truth of the toll this has taken on my psyche, my vitality and perhaps my life.
Black Hole by Charles Burns... Click to enlarge.
Dancin’, The Tubes contribution to the Xanadu soundtrack is either a parody of or the pinnacle expression of male sexual aggression and female-as-property mentality inherent in popular music. Though we may be disgusted by the deranged sentiments of the lyrics of Dancin’ we can at least applaud the frankness of the brutality. The song is unreserved and unapologetic in its overt adolescent male demands and its masturbatory uses of a partner it praises implicates the entire American music industry in the collective psychic rape of the feminine in our culture.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hcd02rr-1I[/youtube]
Dreams are the corridors from the conscious to the primal stew of images, sounds and sensations of beautiful madness. As a fascist elite presides over the voracious will of a market that is rapidly spinning beyond all control; we are consigned to the reality-nightmare of holding labor and consumption as our ultimate gods. We live our lives enclosed within the cages of clock time and the Gregorian calendar and move like pre-programmed robots who have lost all autonomy through our days, weeks, months, years, within the clock-like precision of the logic of Newtonian-Cartesian order.
Would You read Murakami if She Did???
A few years ago a friend started reading Murakami. About half way through Norwegian Wood, she started singing Murakami’s praises and violently demanding that I begin reading one of his books immediately. I refused. Out of spite. I will not be coerced into reading fiction.
I WILL NOT BE COERCED!
However, the impression Murakami made upon my friend in turn made such an impression upon me that after cutting this person out of my life completely, due in large part to the changes that took place in her personality during the period in which she was devoutly reading Murakami, I decided finally to read him for myself to see what the stink was about. Though I was wary, as she had gone from being one of my good friends and close confidant to being a shallow, materialistic and slightly senile airhead.
Murkami was here...
This is not a top ten divas of disco. This is about the goddesses of disco- the shakti engine that fueled and sustained all the coked out nights of orgy and excess. There were plenty of gorgeous and talented divas who rocked the 4/4 time signature until America puked white Nordic fury but what concerns us here now is that feminine wrath that either continued to burn America’s soul in the fires of the raw passion of disco or whose one hit wonderdom left the planet indelibly scarred for all eternity.
No questions asked. She was the divine mother that drove all the madness and pushed half the country into the pit of glorious hellfire. She writhed, she screamed. Her passion was our passion. No one since has had access to the hidden erotic energies or perhaps she laid them bare for us to see for all time so that there are no longer any mysteries but in our cowardice we have become impotent and refuse to partake of these powerful transforming obscenities. Praise her.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFox61M_0Fw[/youtube]
I watched Cabin Fever while I ate breakfast. I watched Audition while I ate lunch. I watched Inside while I ate dinner. Maybe I am some sort of cannibal or something but I’ve been at this horror thing now since I was a little kid. Nothing phases me. I am more grossed out by seeing someone put ketchup on a hot dog than have ever been by anything in a horror movie. Ketchup on a hot dog is a gourmet faux pas; not to mention the Freudian implications. There could never be a movie made that would freak me out. Under the pressure of the spectacle my psyche was invincible. I really believed this. And then I saw Dans Ma Peau (US title: In My Skin). I have never squirmed and cringed as much watching a movie as I did watching this. What a glorious experience. What an insane and all around gloriously brilliant movie. What an insanely amazing performance by Marina de Van (who also directed). Will you marry me, Marina? You sick goddess!
Marina de Van
If we’re all going crazy we should at least have a little fun along the way…
Contemporary Japanese cinema has fallen flat with its cardboard surrealism, assembly line horror and banal historical romances. Of course there are always exceptions and for the most part Japan can be proud it has a few talented and seriously disturbed quacks in its film industry. But there certainly was a time when the films produced in Japan were dripping with that brain sauce that oozes out of the ear of the truly mad. These were not mere movies but rich tasty desserts of poison lovingly baked in the ovens of hell. This was the Japan of the 1960s.
Matango is one of my all time favorite films. The film is based on a short story by the sadly neglected turn of the century horror writer William Hope Hodgson and directed by Ishiro Honda, who directed the first Godzilla movie as well as the insanely good Godzilla Versus Mothra, which introduced the Shobijin, the tiny twins that sing to Mothra. Matango is literally Gilligan’s Island on mushrooms; a group of castaways find themselves on an island where all they can find to eat is a resilient mushroom that has taken over the island. What follows is a fun descent into madness and terror.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q40cvm0Fwc[/youtube]
Hold it right there hippy...
Aside from some of these great films being vehicles for bible thumping, NRA pimping Charlton Heston, the amazing sci-fi films of the 70s were largely a conservative Hollywood’s reaction to the peace and love culture explosion of the 60s; a paranoid response to the experimentation, exploration and radical questioning of traditional American values by the Vietnam war generation. Sci-fi authors and filmmakers seemed to be ‘working for the man’ and sought to paint a future gone mad should the new values of this young generation become idealized and realized.
