Things were improving.
Windom, the master of disguise.
Information supremacy.
Deep intelligence.
Billy Zane charming enough to make you sick.
But likable.
Because he’s an actor.
Accomplished.
More intriguing is Heather Graham.
Hotter than a nun’s habit.
Pete with many chessboards.
Infinitely likable.
We like the underdog here at paulydeathwish.com
And codes.
Radioactive. Two peaks.
Piqued thrice.
The Cyclops of Redon.
Stalemate.
Historically.
-PD
[IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART II: THE BOYARS’ PLOT (1958)]
заговор.
It gets many people in trouble.
In Stalinist Amerika.
We don’t know what list we’re on.
We don’t know when our identity has been appropriated.
Or misappropriated.
No man can be prepared for such a state of techno-terror.
And so we clap together our stones of flint.
We eat what we have caught.
We waste nothing.
Because we have offended the great dictator.
14 years in the desert ye must wander.
40? No, fourteen.
This was The Empire Strikes Back.
There would be no Return of the Jedi.
[and certainly none of the other rubbish]
THis was when intercutting between BW and color was bleeding edge.
And only in the hands of Eisenstein did it work.
This was a voice crying out in the wilderness.
Eisenstein the prophet, predicting.
But a voice as cryptic as Shostakovich.
Today.
We might see the propagandists with their unenforceable contracts give the game away in little breadcrumb details.
To let us know that certain “realities” have been faked.
For our benefit.
And it was ever the same.
That Stalin needed a role to play.
That of Ivan IV.
But what he saw in the mirror displeased him.
And so he smashed that mirror.
Seven years of oprichniki.
1947.
Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.
Houellebecq. Perec. Borges.
Finally we get Lithuania.
And Mikhail Zharov with his Elvis eye.
Wasn’t nothing but a hound dog.
An absolutely devastating chess move.
And again.
And again.
Blitzkrieg.
Hansa. Livonia.
And now the Poles in NATO.
Ah! …
Always a new wrinkle of literary ingenuity.
Disruptive innovation, gentlemen.
Cheap cheap cheap (funding) ECLIPSE.
<laurels Laurel (MD) laurels CHECK MATE>
I would really like to help you out, but I fear I’m too dumb to do that.
I’m certainly too old.
Because cost accounting must be strictly observed.
And local efficiencies must trump complete conception.
I understand.
It takes many losses to understand the causal mechanism.
The unclaimed coins will indicate our casualties.
And so we finally see that, historically, the CIA has been a crystallization of class warfare.
Operatives, analysts, technicians…were not the dogs of the upper crust.
They were not slaves.
But perhaps now there is a difference.
Not all Harvard grads are created equally.
Epic breaking of the fourth wall.
Brechtian epic.
Identify, friend or foe?
I’m an American.
I like our military.
I respect them.
I like our intelligence professionals.
I look up to them.
I loathe whomever is pulling the really nasty levers.
Whomever is giving the orders.
It’s only natural to look to the top.
And over their shoulders.
Beware of the researchers.
Brothers, do not kill your own.
Sisters, we might not have your erudition and immaculate logic.
Our rhetoric may be daft.
But do not reject us.
-PD
Television doesn’t get any better than this.
We all want to be Sherlock Holmes.
We all want to be James Bond.
The analytical in the United States might gravitate towards the FBI.
And the adventurous towards the CIA.
And why would a director of the stature of David Lynch (a true auteur) ever lower himself to doing TV?
Money.
The film studios won’t support a crackpot genius.
Because his whims will be their asses (come annual board meeting time).
And so film’s loss is TV’s gain.
Television is the most disposable medium of all.
It’s like air. Constantly flowing. Into every stop on this highline hell.
There are precedents.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents is the direct ancestor.
But the greatest film of all time was made for TV.
And so we must give credit to Canal+, France 3, the late La Sept, and the late Télévision Suisse Romande. You see what supporting genius gets you. You might just cease to exist!
But La Sept and Télévision Suisse Romande never did anything more important and timeless than supporting Histoire(s) du cinema.
Perhaps we could count Gaumont as a television player (they deserve thanks regardless).
Likewise, there was the French CNC.
What the fuck does any of this have to do with Twin Peaks?
It’s the red drapes. The big rig. The details.
The myna bird. The poker chip. The cuckoo clock.
Birds in general.
[meant in all possible ways]
Two eyelids? Per side? Red light was my baby? Blue light was my mind?
BBC 1? BBC 2?
Television can’t possibly get any better than this.
Episode 5. Season 1.
We talk about David Lynch.
And we should.
He’s the big gun.
But we don’t mention Mark Frost.
Genius needs organization.
Who’s who?
And who reeled it in (fishy coffee)?
A: Lesli Linka Glatter.
Director.
We’re all Icelanders.
“Ich bin ein Berliner.” [with Addison’s disease]
And just as he reaches for the jelly donut (lots of donuts [my favorite])…no, a strudel. No. A sort of maple syrup concoction. Brisk? Bisque? Bris?
Long John! [I was way off]
Just as he reaches…no-look…opening the cabinet…a little secret altar…all with secret places…false bottoms (and real fronts).-
We see the joy of mental activity.
Of solving a puzzle.
Of feeling the brain cells (all two in my case) rub up against one another.
Many problems we have.
This would be a good point to end. Poorly.
Ms. Glatter’s fine direction brings authorship (in the auteurist sense) into question.
Was Lynch too busy?
Was he deemed unqualified for network work? Work.
I can’t answer all that.
Not right now.
Gather and interpret.
Orlando looks as fake as a three-dollar bill.
“reality erupts within the spectacle”
“and the spectacle is real”
There’s more than one way to pretend to skin a cat.
And the same venal studio system. The same generally repugnant mass media.
Which pipes digital air (pollution) into your home.
Only needs to be controlled at the choke points.
Yale. Princeton. You know.
Like the Strait of Malacca.
-PD
Science thinks it knows what religion doesn’t.
Religion thinks it knows what science doesn’t.
Science thinks.
Religion feels.
Romance is a sort of religion.
Unthinking.
But beautiful.
These are the issues in this rather unremarkable episode of Twin Peaks.
The romance of film criticism seeks to give no spoilers.
Break the code, solve the case.
Handwriting analysis…seems as old and mystical as phrenology.
Because today it is stylometry.
Were it not for Snowden, we’d still be in the dark.
ABSENCE OF LIGHT.
Hoping David Sanborn makes an album called Kryptos.
Or not.
I INSERTED THE CANDLE.
CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER.
EMERGED FROM THE MIST.
There’s easier ways to get jobs.
To make verb tenses agree.
And to verb agreements tense.
Word pie lay.
The fragments are essential.
Each piece.
Piece by piece.
With ice cream on the side.
Huckleberry H.
Scalia was whisked off.
Like a broom.
He had been a jack of one-eyed secret society. Guest. SS.
Pound’s poetry didn’t go this deep.
But deeper.
To Colombian hell.
It’s trying to think.
Puttin’ on the Ritz.
I thought it was her.
A cipher.
Shame on me.
Eric Da Re. Doremi Fasol Latido.
Rest in pain.
Jawohl.
The biggest asshole in television history.
Vs. a perception sharpest blade mind ever.
Even for an actor.
Kyle MacLachlan.
Sherlock Holmes.
A perverse sense of knowing.
Raymond Chandler.
Several stops and starts to get here.
Like the end of Vivre sa vie.
And like the beginning.
Michel Legrand subject to the most genius whims ever.
Lynch is our Godard.
Where the Germans have Schoenberg, we have Ives.
Not the best metaphor.
But perfect.
Length trying your patience.
I know.
Like the end of Vivre sa vie.
Where we don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
That is the bathos of mechanical mayhem. Haywire sob hiccups.
G’uh g’uh g’uh.
Over and over and over and over and over again.
The Vladimir Poutine syndicate have goldBRICked with the Meow Zedong overseas intelligence amoeba to form a truly Quebecois brand of! Godspeed.
Kinda like that hockey scene from Strange Brew.
Messiaen at the organ.
ils.
Sont. Hellfire. Bohemian.
No Moloch or Moulouk can do it justice.
Moulouk vs. Bébert.
Oui. C’est Ça.
There’s always two sets of books.
-PD
[CLOSE-UP (1990)]
In the name of Allah…
We enter the courtroom of the world.
Cinema.
To be judged on our veracity.
But also to be judged for our passion.
Hossain Sabzian had passion.
Here.
And his story is so similar to mine.
Maybe you feel it too?
Dear cinema friend.
Because I will have to invent a new category for this movie.
Loneliness.
Hardship.
Woody Guthrie woe.
Hossain Sabzian plays himself in this story.
It is the truth.
At least as truthful as the novels of Henry Miller.
Real life.
کلوزآپ ، نمای نزدیک
The world is under the microscope.
How would Debord start his bible about the spectacle?
With that quote from Feuerbach.
A preface as preface.
From Das Wesen des Christentums.
It deserves to be repeated in its entirety.
“But certainly for THE PRESENT AGE, which PREFERS THE SIGN to the thing signified, the COPY to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence…ILLUSION ONLY IS SACRED, TRUTH PROFANE. Nay, sacredness is be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that [*] the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. [*]”
Those are my notes.
My copy.
My marginalia.
I could autograph it for you.
But the words are by Ludwig Feuerbach.
Having gone through translation from German to English by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
So what?
I haven’t even named the film yet.
Or the director.
Rather, I haven’t named the film in English.
Substance has been subjected to style.
Style has no translation.
Close-Up.
By Abbas Kiarostami.
One of the few geniuses in the world.
You will find on my site the review for طعم گيلاس
Who’s reading?
Taste of Cherry.
I thought that surely no film by this auteur could top that, but I was wrong.
The depth of Close-Up completely defies what I thought was possible with cinema.
It is a shock.
I am at a loss for words regarding how much this film affected me.
It is as beautiful as a bus stop.
As poor as a paper bag.
The roses from the leaf pile are a good start.
All over the world.
We play “kick the can”.
Don’t ever let people lie to you about Iran.
What is the truth?
The truth is that there is a genius there who speaks directly to my heart…like no other.
That genius is Abbas Kiarostami.
But we must mention Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
He is perfect.
It is unbelievable.
Do you know how I would feel to meet Jean-Luc Godard?
Hossain Sabzian knows.
To meet the person who gave us hope…who depicted our suffering.
Bicycleran.
بايسيكلران
Or the blessed marriage promised long ago.
We, are on the outside looking in.
Farsi mocks us.
With its beauty.
There is a lump in my throat like a piece of coal.
Do we really care about Oriana Fallaci?
Or rather Peter Bogdanovich?
Interesting that you should ask.
At first we see Haj Ali Reza Ahmadi annoyed, but later we see him as remarkably humane.
This is the Iranian legal system.
We are told it is a civil law system.
In the name of Allah.
How does a country produce such beauty?
Hossain Farazmand.
Everyone wants to be on TV.
It must be difficult to read my writing.
Who cares if you listen?
Now that IS a quote (or misquote).
Milton Babbitt.
Twelve-tone prose.
My beloved concision.
Fighting my windbag tendencies.
It is supposed to be funny.
Like Mauricio Kagel. Or Francis Poulenc. Or Conlon Nancarrow.
Must I mention Satie?
Yes, I must.
In the name of Hossain Sabzian.
détournement
Making the job of the DGSE almost impossible.
Ever since the Place de la Contrescarpe.
Les moineaux? Chez Moineaux?
Trouble makers.
Like the glorious Kiarostami.
But he left us this document.
And he lives at the young age of 75.
Yet, the Situationist is Hossain Sabzian.
Like Arthur Cravan.
But more like Erik Satie.
Life?
Life is hard.
Is it like Film International?
Or like Massoud Mehrabi?
I don’t know.
But I know someone was on the same page mentally.
Because F for Fake (my second most favorite film of all time).
That is the language of cinephiles.
We’ve lost the sound.
Fifteen years ago.
-PD
I wanted to not like this film.
For some reason.
Because it wasn’t my first love.
That would be Popiół i diament.
But Knife in the Water is as good a place as any to start.
Poland.
Quite frankly, this film blew my socks off.
Nóż w wodzie is a strange little masterpiece.
Truly.
On this day when Paris burns.
Appropriate.
That we get to a Parisian director named Roman Polański.
Yes, this film is like the day.
Today.
Yesterday.
All along we are afraid that someone is going to kill someone.
We suspect the vagrant. The migrant.
But we find out that the real asshole is the yachtsman.
That shouldn’t have been hard to guess, but for some it takes a moment.
I first suspected the yachtsman thanks to Thierry Meyssan.
A couple of his books.
9/11: The Big Lie. And another called Pentagate.
These were among the first books to take aim at the fraudulent War on Terror by questioning the foundational event which birthed the current pall hovering over humanity.
“…an attack on humanity,” President Obama? No. YOU are an affront to humanity. With your sullied Peace Prize.
Only fitting…considering Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.
Et allors…a Frenchman showed the way.
Meyssan.
The U.S. State Department branded his books as anti-American black propaganda.
In other words, they were claiming that the books stemmed from a foreign government’s attempt at geopolitical destabilization.
And you would know, State Department…because that is your specialty.
And so, as always, in the midst of my more adrift reviews the question arises as to the pertinence of my diatribe to said filmic document under consideration.
Nóż w wodzie is a political statement. The bourgeois couple out for a day of leisurely sailing as pitted against the nature-boy tramp.
Salt in the wounds vs. salt of the earth.
I will leave it up to the reader to connect certain unspoken dots.
But, frankly, the spectacle I saw on 24-hour-news television tonight screamed false-flag terror to me.
What do I know?
I’m merely a boy with a rucksack and a couple of black radishes.
Far be it from me to discern real from fake.
As Guy Debord said (and I paraphrase), “Reality erupts within the spectacle.”
C’est-à-dire, it is very likely that many innocent people lost their lives tonight in Paris.
Therefore, the equation would be: real death amidst fake terror.
It is the narrative which is fake.
Playing cui bono pretty quickly gets us from Islamic terrorists (who do not stand to benefit) to Western intelligence agencies (including possibly Israel) who very much stand to gain from tonight’s deadly shenanigans.
It is sad.
We don’t want it to be true.
You didn’t really cheat on me with the wanderer, did you?
And yet, the yachtsman’s wife is mostly innocent.
Sometimes it takes a miracle to realize that our lives suck. Our life sucks. We are living a sham.
That is the miracle which the yachtsman’s wife finds in a stolen kiss.
A moment of tenderness. A reminder of what real life was like.
But Roman Polanski succeeds most of all (with the help of writer Jerzy Skolimowski) in showing us that we’re all guilty as hell.
Yeah.
That’s about right.
I’m no saint.
We’re no saints.
And so false-flag terror mostly annoys us at this point.
Every time an incident “erupts” we’re not sure whether anyone died whatsoever (to begin with).
As I said, things look very grave indeed tonight in Paris.
We mourn those 100 or so young people who died at Le Bataclan…sacrificed on the altar of war profits.
It is truly Satanic (if such things exist).
A very dark ritual which terrorizes the planet.
And so the only hope for the suspect intelligence agencies is to present us with the heads of their masters.
Call them the New World Order. Call them SPECTRE.
Just call them and notify them that you will no longer be their whipping boys.
No doubt, the majority of intelligence agency employees are good, decent people.
That is why they should put their butts on the line to end this endless War on Terror charade.
Yesterday was all about sufficiently shocking the masses so as to regain control of the inhumane war against Syria from the leveling presence of Russia.
We know the equation.
Putin will never call out 9/11 as false-flag terror because he does the same thing to his people.
Just like Nóż w wodzie. No one is really innocent here (myself included). We’re all just trying to show off. And on the world stage, it is truly a deadly game.
The NWO (let’s call them) seemingly has but one trick in their bag: false-flag terrorism. 15 years of the same tune. A one-trick pony.
And how do we know this? Because of Operation Gladio. Because of revelations gleaned over the years.
The CIA is tasked with this kind of stuff. Doesn’t mean they get a whole lot of enjoyment out of it.
No, dear friends…I can’t give you the exact names–the exact chain of command, but someone can.
And maybe they are reading this and on the fence regarding their messy role in destabilizing the world.
But let’s be simple.
I can give you the name Jolanta Umecka. What a beauty! With her kitty-cat glasses. Early-60s. 1950s. The lagging fashion of the Eastern Bloc.
It’s not much.
I can give you a film review. I can put myself out on the line as the village idiot.
It is both the least and the most I can do.
I may be mistaken about everything.
Like Thoreau, I will admit when I was in error. In strong words. Tomorrow. Just as strong as those I used today.
Dear friends. What a pity that these proxy games must go on.
We are above such machinations.
There is great art to be appreciated.
Great art teaches the way.
Great art like Nóż w wodzie.
-PD
paulydeathwish 