R.I.P. Karlheinz Stockhausen

1928 - 2007

Internet Irritations #1: Mediafire

I would say "for some reason, everyone has decided to adopt Mediafire as their online file storage facility of choice" but in this case, that "some reason" is simply because the site offers hosting and recipient downloads for free (no sign up is necessary though if you want to create an account, you can).
I'll admit, when Mediafire first appeared, it was robust, offering maximum download speeds for a single download, with justified fluctuation on each subsequent acquisition (don't get greedy, yo), now however; its position as a decent alternative to some of the more well known sites ceases to be. In the last few months, I've been lucky to breach 6 or 7kb/s and as the modem seems almost inactive, the download decides to give up after no more than 10%. Unfortunately, the trend continues and every fucker has embraced Mediafire like flies to shit.

Hey, look people, today I made it to 11.4kb/s.
This cap was taken before overall failure at 4%. Kewl.

Don't Look Back In Anger

Sent a week before its release date (2nd Oct 2007) but only received this morning, after having to pay an £11+ custom charge (enjoy your money for nothing, bastards), I now have the pleasure of upscaling this R0 beauty, courtesy of an artist who, along with Terence Davies, should be funded by some rich, gay connoisseur before their productive life completely wanes.

...Will Become Tomorrow's Memory.

Harmony Korine Masterclass: NFT1, London Film Festival, 28th October 2007 (pic slightly blurry as I was some distance away and he's allowed to move).

Gotta love the casual nature of "celebrity" watching that goes on at these events. There I was, standing opposite the entrance to door 4, patiently awaiting the already running late Harmony Korine masterclass, when, much to my shock, out walks Mike Leigh and friend. Leigh positions himself less than half a meter from me whilst he and his pal begin to discuss the pros of the film they'd just witnessed (just looked at the LFF website and it appears to be The Strange One (1957); Ben Gazzara's debut acting role). I, of course, wasn't paying much attention, instead, had those nasty "fan boy" thoughts circulating; the subtle butting in with any random question that would spring to mind. It wasn't until another shifty-looking fellow beat me to it, causing Leigh to retort "excuse me but I'm having a conversation with my friend here" that I figured, well, I like Leigh but he's not in my Top 50 favourite directors, so I can hold out.

Harmony Korine, however, is! and I was grateful for the relaxed tone of the afternoon (on the back of drowsy medication). You never know when you attend these masterclasses whether the artist is prepared for serious, intellectual stimuli or, as was the case with Chris Cooper (at the Edinburgh Film Festival this year), restrained and seemingly unwilling to expand on even the most simple points (think The Office-type intensity for the audience). That's not to fault the man's acting abilities but in terms of public speaking and subject matter, you'd be better off reading basic coffee table books on 'performance'.

I could go through the event, piece by piece (as, for the first time, I actually made notes) but that would end up as bullet point information to which not everything is relevant or necessary; instead, I shall mention one of the more comical moments (certainly, in telling these stories, Korine broke from the curse of his nervous interviewer, who constantly said "ya know", and was able to come to life in an unrestrained way; much akin to his fragmented film making).

Ok, on the set of Julien-Donkey Boy (1999), during the family dinner sequence in which Ewan Bremner's character recites a "chaotic" poem, causing his father (fantastically played by Werner Herzog), to retaliate with "I don't like all that artsy-fartsy stuff", before himself describing the "go ahead punk, make my day" reference from Dirty Harry (1971) as something that is "unpretentious" and "good", we might notice a simple detail such as the grandmother (Harmony Korine's actual grandmother), appearing to be constantly staring at her glass (in the film, this type of reaction would seem commonplace). The reason for this reaction as it turns out, was because prior to shooting, Harmony's grandmother's hearing aid had fallen out and ended up in her cleavage but, unable to speak fluent English, there was a commotion as to its where-abouts. As the sound emitting from the device was a loud 'ringing', the first person to cotton on was Herzog, who (and this was best described by Korine - I'm paraphrasing here), "lunged himself at my grandmother, literally grabbing at her titties; his hand was right down the parting until he pulled out the hearing aid. From that point on, my grandmother couldn't look at Herzog without feeling total embarrassment." Haha!

Korine's advice to aspiring film makers was (based on his own method, of course): "watch a lot of films and live your life. Get involved in petit crimes..." (he was definitely serious about the last comment too).

Finally, as a cinephile, I should mention his influences: Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers (Gummo being the name of the "failed" Marx brother) and of course, Werner Herzog. On a more contemporary basis, Carlos Reygadas was the only name to emerge, whilst he briefly panned Kevin Smith as an (obvious) example of why his peers provide no interest. In fact, he said he was more in line with contemporary artists such as Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley than film makers.

Fuck it! I ended the night as a total "fan boy"; getting my DVD of Gummo signed and having my picture taken with the man. I shook his hand and wished him all the best. A good night, overall.

PS. For an excellent article on Harmony Korine, I recommend reading Benjamin Halligan's chapter from New Punk Cinema (Edited by Nicholas Rombes), entitled: What Was the Neo-Underground and What Wasn't: A First Reconsideration of Harmony Korine.

Today's Harmony...

At 4.15pm today I'll be in the same room as the director of these contemporary masterworks:


Unfortunately, time has not permitted me from seeing his latest offering, Mister Lonely (the premise reminds me a little of Roeg's Insignificance (1985) but I'm positive the execution will be immensely different), but it'll be definitely something I pick up on DVD as soon as released. Korine is one of the few American directors working today whom I have utmost respect for.

(Slow) Recovery / Brighter Day

To cut a long story short, when I was at secondary school, I suffered from what I called "unprescribed insomnia", that is, I never felt the need to see a doctor to explain my consistent sleeping defects, some nights two hours, other times 72 hour blocks, the situation was insane but I felt it worked to my advantage by allowing me extra time to watch so many films (maybe 6 a night). The situation changed when I became employed, with 6am wake-ups, 9 hour days, by the time I got home (whether that would be through lifts or its alternate, a lengthy bicycle ride), I had no stamina to, for example, last through a 90 minute film without falling asleep before the halfway mark (in this case, it could be days before watching anything again, which, in my view constitutes a non-productive existence). After 2 years and 3 months in the 8 - 5 routine, I then became a "mature" (22 or 23) student at University and that's where my sleeping patterns began to become erratic. In social terms, a typical university student (aka. Nosferatu) sleeps during the day and arises at night whereby sleep might come into play sometime between 2 - 8am... this is a problem for me as I pretty much awake between 6 and 7am every morning (force of habit), regardless of what time I go to bed the night/morning before. Bed at 10pm, awake at 6. Bed at 4am, awake at 6. A built in alarm clock with unalterable factory default. So, I tended to swing between the two states of (un)conscious (insomnia and narcolepsy).

Fast forward to Monday's screening of the new Rivette film and by the time I had reached the cinema (film started at 4pm), I was absolutely exhausted, almost to the point of delirium. Prior to the film's opening credits, I spent the time trying to find a comfortable position in a part of the cinema where the seats are only OK, suffice to say, I thought I had found it slightly outstretched with my head resting against the back of the chair (no headrests). Not good. A day later I suffered the consequences and through a combination of fatigue (which I had gone to see the doctor about - looking like a leftover from a Romero film), and the evils of a stinking cold, it seemed my body couldn't repair the damage my "sitting" position had caused a few days before. Drowsy, passive and any movement around the lower back region ready to cause disembowelment have meant my incapacitation for the last three days. So rarely do I get ill, the last trip to the doctor was for the rare condition amongst healthy young people known as pneumothorax (aka collapsed lung), that was a year ago and before that, must be something like 3-4 years... up to 5 year increments.

In other news: I received Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (1991) on a dual layer DVD+R from AsiaFilm, this film has no official distribution in any English speaking country (or, to my knowledge, *any* country as an official release). Sadly, on the reverse is written:

This Brighter Summer Day DVD is published by Asiafilm.com
This masterpiece film is not currently being distributed in any video format worldwide, so we are making this available as a service to film lovers. If you know how we can contact Edward Yang to try to distribute BSD on DVD in North America, please contact us at (940) 497-FILM. Thank you and enjoy!

Unfortunately, as of 29th June 2007, there was no way of reaching Mr. Yang. R.I.P.

[with thanks to Jonathan Rosenbaum for pointing me out to this DVD via his page on the cinemascope website]

Goatfucker Grierson on MySpace

Completely forgot that I'd set up a MySpace profile for my new harsh Noise project, certainly feels very strange listening to VBR(V2) rips streamed (doesn't sound nearly as good but hey).
Only two non-album tracks up at the moment, both of which have fuller titles than displayed on the page (it's odd, you can write a long album title but the song name is restricted character-wise).

For reference, the track titles actually are:

- Circumcision: Rabbi's Excuse To Suck A Little Boy's Cock
- 14th October 1981: Birth of a Holy Cunt

Government Alpha is listed as an inspiration (probably the biggest) and he's accepted my friend request... wonder if he's heard my material, though!

Goatfucker Grierson @ MySpace

In other news: Today I head off to the London Film Festival on the back of Friday's screening of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Le Voyage du ballon rouge and catch Jacques Rivette's new mini-mammoth, Ne touchez pas la hache.

"These are great times we live in, bro, we're jolly green giants walking the earth... with guns"

The Cost of Happiness

I've been giving demonstrations using, so far, the only three HD DVDs I own (The Searchers, Mad Max 2 and La Haine) but the difference between watching a standard DVD on a 37" Widescreen TV designed for 1080p output and a HD DVD is enormous. The image is so alive in terms of detail that what initially seemed beautifully rendered by its predecessor now pales in comparison; imagine if practically every film could not only have "the Criterion treatment" but go that much further and surpass to the point where I very nearly lose track of my senses and want to buy films I have no time for (I haven't, luckily).

That moment toward the beginning of John Ford's The Searchers (1956) where we move from darkness into light by means of a door opening, revealing, quite overwhelmingly, the weight of the Grand Canyon's presence; vast open spaces obstructed by towers of natural rock forms, harsh and impenetrable by design and whose existence is juxtaposed by the surrounding wasteland, awash in infinite golden sunlight. A form of beauty and the beast but whose visual serenity harbours no remorse or sympathy for those who tread its path. During this sequence (and throughout the film), Ford uses landscape as a means for us to understand the conflicting nature of human psychology and he does so by using deep focus so that his characters (and us) are constantly reminded of their bitter, beautiful companion. Short of a remastered 35mm print, the HD DVD/Blu Ray captures this feeling as I've never seen before, no longer do the textures of Monument Valley seem "blurred" or lacking true definition, finally; it's now able to breathe through its almost three-dimensional representation.

A few other interesting things about the next generation's properties (that I'm sure you can find all over the net):

- HD DVD is *completely* region-free (its rival, Blu Ray, has 3 regions as opposed to current standard DVD's 6 zones).
- HD DVD/Blu Ray no longer present problems with regard to issues of PAL/NTSC because they utilise film's standard of 24fps (which, Studio Canal aside means that "pitching" errors present on PAL discs shouldn't occur as the length of the film is now universal as opposed to a 4% speedup currently employed on PAL discs).
- HD DVD/Blu Ray is backward compatible with standard DVDs and does this neat thing called "upscaling" which actually increases the resolution slightly (I've definitely noticed a difference). The only pitfall at the moment is that the players on either camp aren't SD-DVD regionless so you're best off using your old players for playback in that respect.

Currently on order: 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Big Lebowski, The Wild Bunch, Total Recall and Out of Sight.
I also got to choose 5 free titles from 13 options and these should arrive in the next two weeks: Children of Men, Serenity, Black Rain, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and The Prestige (options were, er, yeah).

Cruising With Turturro (Useless Observation of the Day)

I received the newly remastered DVD of William Friedkin's Cruising today and at first glance; on the rear* cover there is picture of Al Pacino that immediately made me think of John Turturro (excuse the poor scan):


*no pun intended

Urban Discovery

Urban Trad have got to be one of the best Eurovision Song Contest artists of all time!! (and it helps that Veronica Codesal is unbelievably gorgeous -- Ok, ok, she's the reason I started listening). Folk/Pop at its finest...

That is all.

On Route To Chris Cooper...

Cairns (right) and his producer caught in a Utopian fairytale.

Sunset Stripped

A letter published in the October 2007 edition of Sight & Sound:

Sunset Stripped

With the DVD edition of David Lynch's Inland Empire looming, it seems appropriate to point out one of its film connections that has remained (at least to my knowledge) unmentioned.
At one point the character played by Karolina Gruszka is shown praying, wearing a black veil and looking towards the right of the frame, saying the words: "Cast out that wicked dream which has seized my heart." This is an exact quotation not only from Erich Von Stroheim's Queen Kelly (1931) but also from the film Lynch named as one of his major influences, Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. (1950), in which the same scene from Stroheim's movie is watched by Norma Desmond. Just think how rich a point Lynch is making here!
Norma Desmond is Gloria Swanson, who watches herself as a young woman and - according to Sunset Blvd.'s narrator - is "excited about that actress up there on the screen." Add to that the extraordinary scene from Inland Empire in which Laura Dern sees herself on the movie-theatre screen and feels something entirely different from excitement: repulsion, fear, anxiety.
We end up with yet another complex existential conundrum of the kind that Lynch crafts like no other director. Indeed, he knows (more than any other film-maker) one's "wicked dreams" and "seizures of the heart".

Michal Oleszczyk
Krakow, Poland

Happy Birthday!

To the most beautiful woman I've never met!

Technical Travesty: MIP Screenings 2007

Me, Ed Malcomson and Tab at the 2nd screening of 'Relative Silence'

Seriously, how difficult is it to project a film in the correct aspect ratio? I expect technical glitches every now and then, after all, you're dealing with imperfect machines designed and maintained by imperfect beings, or, shall we call it, 'human error', but still, the screening was not at some local multiplex where Truffaut may have had good cause to retitle his second film 'Shoot The Projectionist', this was at an established and well-respected 'art-house' cinema where they cater for films shot in the (1.37:1) academy ratio. As far as I can recall, all eight films on the billing were shot in square 4x3 (ours most definitely was and also the one where I have a cameo role), so what did they project at? Seemed like 1.77:1 to me, whoops, there goes people's heads. What's doubly irritating is that after the premiere, we made note of the technical problems and went back to the editing room to rectify them so as not to suffer the humiliation in front of a larger audience, it felt like old times as we were fiddling with our piece for what seemed like seven hours (in fact, it may well have been that long), but sure enough, we washed our hands of it for good... Only to get butchered by an idiot who not only managed to lob of heads/objects but due to the nature of the medium (i.e. miniDV), what already possesses a deteriorated quality was made far worse by the zoom "to suit a widescreen audience". I honestly think the best thing to do is not attend your own screenings or, if you're due to give a talk, arrive later, because to watch something you've put a lot of time and effort into and have it ruined by general incompetence is a fucking travesty.

In other news, I heard that Béla Tarr's new film The Man From London is receiving boos from the Cannes' audience, no surprise from a group of rich, capitalist pricks who have no concept of cinema beyond the wank that comes from the anus of Steven Soderbergh.

I'm not smiling today but at least Inland Empire is coming my way this Wednesday and Thursday.

South Stoke #2

Žižek on A Short Film About Love

How does he [Tomek] capture Maria's desire? The answer, of course, resides in the very purity and absolute intensity of his love: he acts as the pure S*, the subject whose desire is so burning that it cannot be translated into any concrete demand - this very intensity, because of which his desire can only express itself in the guise of a refusal of any demand ('I want nothing from you'), is what makes him irresistible. This second metaphoric substitution is not simply symmetrical to the first one: their difference hinges on the opposition of 'to have' and 'to be'. In the first case, we are in the dimension of having (the loved one doesn't know what he has in himself that makes him worthy of the other's love, so, in order to escape this deadlock, he returns love), whereas in the second case, the loving is (becomes) the beloved object on account of the sheer intensity of the love.
What one has to reject here is the notion that Tomek's love for Maria is authentic and pure, spiritual, elevated above vulgar sensuality, whereas Maria, disturbed by this purity, intends to humiliate him and later changes her attitude out of a feeling of guilt. It is, on the contrary, Tomek's love that is fundamentally false, a narcissistic attitude of idealization whose necessary obverse is a barely concieved lethal dimension. That is to say, A Short Film About Love should be read against the background of slasher films, in which a man observes and harasses a woman who traumatizes him, finally attacking her with a knife: it is a kind of introverted slasher in which the man, instead of striking at the woman, deals a blow to himself. The reason his love for Maria is not genuine does not reside in its 'impure' character: the murderous burst of self-inflicted violence is the inherent obverse of its very 'purity'. This inauthenticity of his love is corroborated by his inability to undergo the experience of desublimation, of the splitting between the woman qua impossible-idealized Thing and the flesh-and-blood woman who offers herself to him - that is, by the way this experience sets in motion the murderous passage à l'acte: the measure of true love is precisely the capacity to withstand such a splitting. Maria's love for him, in contrast, is fully authentic: from the moment Tomek tells her he wants nothing from her, true love - which, as Lacan points out, is always a love returned - is here, and her humiliation of Tomek is merely a desperate attempt to disavow this fact.

* This S has a line running through it from top right to bottom left although I can't find the symbol on my keyboard or in Word.

~ from The Žižek Reader, Chapter 8: There is No Sexual Relationship (p. 197 - 198)
[edited by Elizabeth and Edmond Wright]

Street of Competition

-----------------------------
1 May 2007

Dear Christopher

Congratulations! You are a winner in the recent competition in Vertigo and have won a copy of our fantastic DVD Quay Brothers: The Short Films 1979-2003.

Please find enclosed your prize, which I do hope you enjoy watching. If you would like to find out more about BFI DVDs, please go to our website.

Best regards

Jill Reading
BFI Press Officer
-----------------------------
1. I have never bought a copy of Vertigo magazine in my life and the only time I've taken a glimpse through its pages was when one of our lecturers brought in her own copy to class. After spotting an easy question about the Quays pictorial appearance in The Falls (Name the director? answer: 'Peter Greenaway'), I e-mailed the answer (so much easier and cheaper than the old snail mail system) to the good ole BFI, and voila...
2. ...I won a DVD I already own! If only I had waited, but then, this is me we're talking about, the world's greatest anti-capitalist-capitalist, condemn the ethics, buy the products! Although I consider my material being to be a little more productive than merely buying redundant items, after all, film is my research.

Who's complaining though, it's a freebie!

Edit Post

Using the debatable editing resource Adobe Premiere 6.5, me and a friend (picture left) composited a short 8 minute presentation piece due for a company recruitment screening tomorrow evening, nothing of any real interest to those not applying (or to those who are), this film functions as a witty induction on the topic of "dealing with customers" (to quote Randal from Kevin Smith's Clerks: "This job would be alright if it weren't for the fucking customers").

A simple task? (interaction between staff and customer comprised of long takes so editing images would take less time and the soundtrack, far from needing a Godardian makeover, included a voice-over and mildly manipulated "on location" sound, which in hindsight, was poorly captured in the first place) Three problems attempted to thwart our efforts...

Problem #1: VRO is an extension I am none-too-familiar with and after finalising a small DVD (capacity just under 3Gb) that fits nicely in the central groove of your DVD-ROM drive, I copied the files over to my main hard drive so as to claim faster access and not be reliant on secondary or external sources. The VRO file plays in Windows Media Player but in order to convert it to AVI, I would recommend using FlaskMPEG (http://flaskmpeg.sourceforge.net/), unfortunately for us, the original source material was in poor shape meaning through multiple converts, no matter how high the bitrate, the inevitable output file looked like a blown up Youtube video, not exactly what you're looking for when the content of the piece discusses quality of service ("here staff, watch a pirated video on customer relations").

Problem #2: Adobe Premiere on Microsoft Vista tends to crash a fair amount, never forget the cardinal rule of editing: save after almost every move!

Problem #3: Always separate footage into manageable chunks rather than working with one long capture, when you use basic transitions, there's nothing more irritating than having the footage before or after a shot appear no matter how many times you edit it out, unfortunately, in this case, one shot simply couldn't employ our consistent method of emphasising ellipsis through cross dissolve so we had to settle for a hard cut, which up to this point had signified 'real-time' within a sequence.

I've tried installing two versions of Avid but both are not supported by Vista and going for a more elementary editing suite, Windows Movie Maker decided to show footage upside-down!
Still, the day was good practice considering I've never really edited anything at home before (never had a machine powerful enough to do the job until now), oh! and I would definitely recommend NOT using those small DVD camcorders (the discs are about 4" in diameter), the results are appalling.

Earthquake In Kent!!

From the BBC News website:

"An earthquake has shaken parts of Kent, damaging buildings and disrupting electricity supplies.

Homes in five streets in Folkestone had to be evacuated because of structural damage including cracked walls and fallen chimneys.

The tremor measuring 4.3 on the Richter scale struck at 0819 BST and experts said its epicentre was a few miles off the coast in the English Channel.

One woman was taken to hospital with a neck injury."

I had departed for Chessington at 7.35am so was on a train moving directly toward the area supposedly worse effected and yet, I didn't notice a thing! I guess it's difficult to differentiate a seismic shake from a seemingly unstable set of carriages traveling near top speed, that, and my sense of balance would've been distorted by the high-pitched sine waves infiltrating my earlobes (i.e. my music). When I arrived back at the apartment, where our peculiar landing light, which works only during a power cut and never when we actually need it (coming home from a drinking session, trying to find the keyhole? Near impossible), my flatmate informed me that about 35 minutes after I had left, he was sat in the living room watching television when the reality-shifting tremor engaged him a twenty second process of disorientation, existentialism, fear and finally, realisation in the form of a news channel confirming his experience. The other member of this trio managed to sleep through it all and had only awoken about 10 minutes before I arrived home at around 7pm (student life, easy for some). Is this the beginning of the end? Surely, my joke about the end of days can't be coming true (I'm only 25, have five years left and this atheist sure as shit ain't going to die through an "act of god", the irony!).

In other news, I won a shark!

Learning Japanese, I Really Think So!

Why did I have to choose one of the most complex languages to eradicate my monolingual irritation? Well, it was purely by chance that I should be standing in Waterstones with a spare £20 and happened upon the language section offering me a multitude of dialects. The choice has always been between Russian, Polish, Japanese or Chinese (Mandarin), mainly because these are four places I've always wanted to visit but also because I know next to nothing of their vocabulary beyond hearing poetic recitals from films. Japanese happened to come about through a simple process of blind point and purchase meaning, through discipline, I should now pursue so as to profit from my investment.

Have you seen the amount of syllables involved in a sentence, though?? Christ, always good to start with the basics, 1- 10 should suffice for this week:

1. ichi (ee-chee)

2. ni (nee)

3. san (sahn)

4. yon (yohn)

5. go (goh)

6. roku (roh-koo)

7. nana (nah-nah)

8. hachi (hah-chee)

9. kyū (kyoo)

10. jū (jooo)

South Stoke #1

Somewhere in South Stoke lies a world separate from existence.