Thursday, August 28, 2003
This is shit. Too long, too fond of itself, too precious and wordy. I covered the same release in 100 words on Stylus a couple of weeks ago for The Rubber Room, and, even if I say so myself, did a much better job. I'd link it up so you can see for yourself, but Stylus is only semi-functional this week as we gear up for Monday's relaunch.
8/28/2003 11:41:00 am
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
The Mars Vaulted…
10.51pm, Wednesday August the 27th 2003. Mars is the closest to Earth that it’s been for 60,000 years, and with a good telescope you can see as much detail on it’s surface as you can normally see on the Moon with the naked eye (how come all the other planets’ moons get given proper good names like ‘Ganymede’, and ours is just called ‘Moon’?). Since Friday when I read the article in The Independent’s Mars Special I’ve been excited about seeing this swollen orange rock. But when I actually saw it tonight… It’s just an orange dot, brighter than the other stars. Pretty cool.
Likewise The Mars Volta; since I read Sam’s excitable surge of sensation captured on paper (by anyone else it would just be a ‘review’) I’ve been looking forward to hearing it, expecting it to be insanity and excess captured on CD. In actual fact it’s just… Pretty cool. I saw At The Drive In’s last ever UK gig at the tail-end of 2000, in a sweaty Camden basement, and it’s safe to say they were fucking monstrous. The Mars Volta push things out that little bit further, and it’s impressive, cinemascope stuff, invigorating and inextricable, but… OH! The thrill of “Enfilade” from Relationship Of Command, bound to the tracks, explosions of noise, incoming, incoming, that floating, almost dub section, replete with melodica hovering just above the railway line, the stupid heaviosity of “Arcarsenal”, the fractured dynamics of “Pattern Against User”… You can only hear it first once, I guess.
When you turn around and see how faint and shimmering all those other stars are though, and turn back to Mars… It really is fucking bright and clear. Rock on, Mars.
8/27/2003 11:14:00 pm
Solaris
Steven Soderburgh and George Clooney’s remake of Andrei Tarkovski’s legendary Solaris dispenses with almost the entire first half of the original film, cutting the running time in the process from 3+ hours to just less than two and removing whole layers of personality development from the lead character, psychologist Chris Kelvin (played in the new version by Clooney). The dizzying car journey through a starkly de-colorized urban Russia of the future is lost. Kelvin’s contextualising interaction with his father and son is lost. The beautiful opening shot of soft green reeds gently rippled underwater is lost. Friends of mine have suggested that the spirit of the film is lost too, that the original’s slow, ruminative beauty and austere philosophy is diluted, ignored even, by Soderburgh’s stylish treatment and Clooney’s star power. I’m not so sure though.
The updated Solaris moves fast; barely ten minutes in and Kelvin is already on his way to the space station orbiting the strange planet of iridescent seas and luminescent mists. Tarkovski’s version took an hour to get this far. While I may defend the right of an artist to use slowness, stillness and length in a piece, understanding and appreciating the cathartic powers of near-hypnotic repetition and stasis as well as the alluring intricacies of vastness and the unashamedly widescreen imagination, from 20-minute jams by Miles Davis or Can to three hour cinematic masterpieces like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia or Amadeus by Milos Forman, I also love brevity. Directness. Focus. Some things need three hours to unfurl, others barely quarter that time (Spielberg’s recent AI would have made a wonderful 30-minute short, but became an endurance test after 60-minutes; by the two-and-a-half-hour mark I was cursing him). Most things would benefit from the sympathetic touch of a good editor (Auspicious Fish included!). As such the new Solaris is now a manageable length (the DVD of the original is split between two discs, meaning you have to change them halfway through, and although it was always intended as a two-part affair this is still incredibly frustrating in the digital age), much less daunting and wearisome.
Tarkovski can’t compete for simple visual sumptuousness either; he may frame every shot like a beautiful still-life but budgetary and technological limitations meant that the planet Solaris itself, supposedly shrouded in swirling, spectrum-ranging mists, was nothing but an indistinct grey blur 30 years ago. Today it is a shimmering, translucent aura of red and blue, rendered digitally with beautiful, mesmeric precision. The space station in Clooney’s homage also looks like an actual space station (or at least like a mimetic Hollywood vision of one) rather than a hastily-evacuated Soviet boiler room (one thing capitalism does best is special effects!).
But these considerations are neither here nor there if the essence of the film is lost. Is it? Solaris is a treatise on the nature of personality, on the question of what makes us human. The planet Solaris creates facsimiles of people from the memories of those sentient beings in its orbit, that is those upon the space station circling and studying the planet. Hence Chris Kelvin is confronted with the all-too-physically-solid spectre of his dead wife Reya, and his (dead, by the time Kelvin arrives) friend Galbarian is visited by his infant son (daughter in the original). The crew of the space station understandably react negatively to the arrival of these doppelgangers; are they ‘real’? Are they human? Are they dangerous? How is one meant to feel about and towards them? What value is the simulacra, even if it is so perfect as to be indistinguishable; how can you love something, someone, when you irrefutably know they are not ‘real’? (It is unconfirmed in both versions of the film whether or not all the doppelgangers are of dead people; whether the book both films are based on states this concretely I do not know.) The question for Kelvin is does he love this new ‘copy’ of Reya or does he love her memory? Is this new Reya a ‘copy’ anyway? Her personality and memories are created from reflections of Kelvin’s own memory of his wife, hence the new Reya is an incomplete person, a Golem with the looks, voice, gestures and demeanour approximate of the ‘real’ Reya (exact of Kelvin’s memory of her), but sans the dasein. A notion I have long been intrigued by is that we are as other people perceive us to be, that our objective, definable personalities are relative to how we are perceived by those around us, that our intentions and feelings matter not until they are understood. Indeed, our misapprehended and falsely inferred thoughts, feelings and intentions are much more important in terms of our identity. What use is the ‘real you’ if no one but yourself ever encounters it? The ‘real you’ is the you that people deal with everyday.
Clooney’s Kelvin is a blank slate. We are given little or no family information or background for him, and the film only portrays him in unusual, stressful conditions and in flashback, thus only giving us a picture of Kelvin under extreme duress and in the past, and leaving him as a two-dimensional vessel for the projection of our associations and memories. We think of other things we know about Clooney, of his private life, of ER, of Oh Brother Where Art Thou, of Out Of Sight and of Ocean’s Eleven. We think of the original actor who played Kelvin in Tarkovski’s version. Likewise the film itself is a blank slate emotionally. Too many questions are raised and too many images unexplained for it to be fully emotionally engaging, and likewise it is too emotionally confused for it to be a reasoned academic philosophy. But this is the point. The planet Solaris creates blank vessels for the projection of desires and loves, confusions and memories, and by giving our subconscious free-reign over the design of these resultant simulacrum stretches the limits of our consciousness and our conscience. Confronted by our impossible and unreasoned memories given physical reality, we short-circuit mentally and emotionally; when Kelvin is first met by the projected Reya of his memories he is so confused, disgusted and tortured that he lures her into an airlock and blasts her into space. When the subsequent Reya discovers this act of betrayal she breaks down. Much like Mary Shelley’s monster of Frankenstein’s creation, or Pinocchio, or Buzz Lightyear, the simulacra Reya wishes to be real, to be human, to be more than just spectacle and projected, redirected fantasy, memory and misremembrance. Clooney’s hollow Kelvin becomes like the heroes of Jorge Luis Borges' meta-fiction at this point, aware of his fictionality; Reya is constructed from his memories but he in turn is but a character, and a poorly drawn, unrounded character at that, hence she is an echo of an echo. His fictional nature is accentuated, doubling the falseness of the simulacra Reya in turn. The boundaries of reality and fiction, of story and history, of empathy and antipathy, become blurred to the point where they don’t exist. At the end of the film it is made explicit that they're works of fiction when Reya states "we don't need to think about it anymore", the inferrence being that once they assume control of their own fictional context they can be happy by guiding their own narrative. If Kelvin can project positive thoughts onto Reya, consciously assume control of how he perceives her (indeed, of who he perceives), then he can control his own responses to her by influencing her character, who in turn can influence him until the issue of who is real and who created who is dispensed with as they become symbiotic.
Tarkovski’s original Solaris may have more completely involved the audience by painting a fuller picture of Chris Kelvin, by drawing the viewers in through sheer length of involvement with the film, but for my money Soderburgh and Clooney’s version tells the story and emphasises the philosophy better. The glossiness of the digital effects and CGI of their version add to the sense of unreal which is the essence of the film; the appearance of reality is so sharp and luminous that we know it must be false, the space station so perfect and detailed and Hollywood in its facades that we know that too is not real, is hyperreal. We’ve all seen what the inside of an actual space shuttle looks like and this is not it, but we know instantly that it symbolises the space station at one further remove; a signifier that only signifies another signifier in turn. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein concealed the its heart and meaning in multiple-layers of remove, telling the story at a further distance with each further onion-skin of narrative until the essence of it is told in something like the 7th person, the characters becoming so false and one-sided that all which can exist is the story and the meaning without distractions.
The new Solaris asks us what defines us, how people perceive us, asks us to think about what composes and creates ourselves, and demands to know if we love actual real people, or merely the impressions of people that we choose to avail ourselves of. Is it a better film than Tarkovski’s? I couldn’t say; but I certainly don’t think it’s any worse. And I shall definitely be watching Tarkovski's version again over the weekend.
8/27/2003 09:25:00 pm
Monday, August 25, 2003
Black Stones
fist-sized to twice that size, taken from the river bed about half a mile out of town
softened by the flow of water
but still quite a harsh and unnatural colour
i've got about a dozen but i'm gonna need at least three times that many
8/25/2003 10:50:00 am
Sunday, August 24, 2003
The death of the author, the birth of meaning, intention, acceleration, expression and why bears shit in the woods…
“If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” If the tree isn’t falling on me, I don’t give a shit. As for the bears man, they don’t leave the forest for bowel movements, do they? They just don’t shit in their own beds.
I don’t mean a single word of it. Some of you are pinning significance to these lines, finding profundity in the colons and the html coding and the occasional bursts of profanity, feeling passion and belief and a definite sense of purpose, and the simple fact is that I’m sitting here, for the most part, with a bottle of Nastro Azzurro or whatever next to me, and I’m just writing, like it’s a job or a chore or a reflex action. This isn’t poetry, this isn’t my deepest darkest thoughts and fears. I don’t have deepest darkest thoughts and fears. I’m not the fire-spitting, intense young man given to bouts of solipsistic existential angst that you might think I am. In real life I’m the most laid-back man in the world. I don’t feel half the sensations I describe; I just know the tricks, the metaphysical hyperlinks that tap directly into the mimetic associations of love, hate, fear, pain, joy, loss of control; I learnt the buttons years ago that I can press to make someone go ‘ah’ or ‘oh’ and make them feel as if I know exactly how they feel. I’m not a tortured soul released to the anarchy of pure expression of sensation. I don’t believe that we’re all linked by some kind of universal thread of energy and super-consciousness. As nice as that sounds. I don’t even believe in the existence of a human soul. Sorry.
Sam gives the impression that music is a totally visceral and occupying force for him at every moment he’s involved with it, dancing in his bedroom, feeling the thrill of arousal playing a show, however small, moonwalking across the kitchen floor to the fridge humming Outkast couplets with desperate, joyous intention, and this is probably largely true. Cozen I imagine beneath oily Scottish skies, dissolved into the mist and rain and The Associates, a seldom tear and a complex rumination noted on the back of a train ticket with a chewed-up pencil. But this is true, if it is true, probably only once in a while. I get the idea that Marcello might sit down with a record and a glass of wine and a furrowed brow, focused like a heron on point for shimmering silver fish beneath the surface of the sound, synapses stretched to the point of receptiveness, ready to pounce on the ontology and capture the meaning of any given piece and cage it in words more beautiful than its previous freedom. But I suspect the reality is far from this. Likewise I’m not raging and sweating and firing off missives loaded with bellyache and sputum.
“Anyone who writes about music the way you do must invest a lot of emotional time and weight in it, whereas for me it’s a distraction at most.” So said Leon the other night in a brief AIM. And what was my reaction? I invest probably a hell of a lot less than you think. “So you’re a fake then?” No. I’m wracked with spiritual catharsis and projected into transcendental arias of azure sublimation much less often than I give the impression of being. And that’s fine with me. Anybody who actually lived the amount of passion and intensity that I project would find themselves quickly going mad. I know because I’ve seen it happen to friends who lost sense of (or were never told about) the difference between art and artist (artisan, for me, I fear), craft and craftsman, people who thought they had to live it like they love it and who ended up on medication, in counselling, or worse. This is something I do because I know how, because I don’t know how to do anything else, because Yes, at times I love it. Not because I think it’s the most important thing in the world, but because sometimes I think it’s the best thing in the world.
A question posed in a philosophy lecture in my second year of university; which of these actions is an act of self-expression; painting a picture, painting a living room wall, or tying a shoelace? Being at a substandard university (although this particular philosophy lecturer, John Gingell, was most definitely not substandard) most of the class except me immediately exclaimed “painting a picture”. To which I say bollocks. It’s still you painting the wall or tying the shoelace, you who chooses the colour, the roller, the way your laces move from eyelet to eyelet, the knot you tie. Emma is beautiful. Everything that you do expresses yourself. Certainly some moments and actions are more obviously invested with time and thought and feeling, but why obliterate the significance of the little things? My choice of watch, socks, glasses, lager and crispy fried duck with honey sauce is just as revealing of my personality as the fact that I’m currently listening to Kelis (and before that Stankonia).
So yes, it is about the passion and the moment and the loss of control or self or whatever, but it’s also about what you’re humming along with when you’re doing the washing up. It’s about banging the steering wheel in time to Lumidee as much as it is lighting candles and lying on the floor to Mogwai. About walking down the cliff with Mouse On Mars distracting me from fretting and cursing about the tourists as it is drowning myself in a solitary bottle of shiraz and a Shack album during lonely weekends at university. It’s about sitting with a copy of Encounters and making notes and then sitting at a PC and working them into some kind of workable, concise and vaguely expressive whole that doesn’t embarrass me. It’s about the now but not just the now; it’s about all the nows past and all the nows yet to come, even if the one right at this instant is pretty dull and shallow and superficial. It’s about giving the impression of the amazing nows that might be potential for you, for me, even if I’m not feeling them right at the moment. And generally I’m not, because it’s impossible. So it’s not just puking up the passion when it’s there; it’s remembering how it feels and getting that across as if the remembered is the current. Plus, sometimes, it’s about thinking about something until you feel you’ve got a better grasp of it and can ascertain a further grain of truth that the passion (current or past) missed noticing because it was too busy dancing or fucking or crying or staring in absent bliss at the vapour trails of France-bound Boeings.
I spent this afternoon dancing solo to Justin and N*E*R*D and Kelis, window thrown open, jiving and popping and twisting until I was a sweaty, happy mess. Fucking damn right. Just so you know.
Taking Sides
Beyonce vs. Justin
I used to fancy Beyonce something rotten, something about the thighs and the stridence and the… oooh… you know. But Marcello’s comment about her “dead, shark eyes” seems startlingly on the money now. There’s something about the video to “Crazy In Love” (which is to r’n’b what “Move Your Feet” is to house, surely?- structurally they’re almost identical, built around a chorus and a hook and a horn riff and precious little else) that I find disconcerting to say the least. Even during the ‘uh-oh’ moments, ass-shaking in the street, Beyonce looks incredibly fucking focussed and professional and serious. This is pop music for heaven’s sake woman, and damn fine pop music at that; you’re meant to enjoy it. But no, there’s a shark-like certainty of purpose, ruthlessness and conviction in her eyes that puts me off. Anyone that serious and determined is surely insecure about something along the line somewhere. Justin (fucking Justin!- a distillation of all I love about Stevie and Jacko and The Neptunes’ delicious southern-fried boom-click) on the other hand, in the video for “Senorita”, is cool, in control, and enjoying himself to an impossible degree. Plus, at the moment he sets up the call-and-response finale, when he first sings the female part and pushes his voice suddenly into serious territory and finds it almost breaking with yearning on the words “really leaving witchoo” (emphasis on those final two delicious syllables) I stop jiving and bend over double in complete emotional torment. Verily, the man-boy is a genius and I am a swooning fanboy. Girls want to fuck him, boys want to be him; I’m not fussed either way.
8/24/2003 11:19:00 pm
  is currently £3.99 in WHSmith, which might just be the sale of the fucking century. I suggest you transport yourself down to your local inferior bookseller-cum-newsagent post haste and purchase at least one copy.
8/24/2003 09:20:00 pm
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