https://open.spotify.com/track/4vF8NQlomHxVFWqVcijgfD?si=558afc2b444345d3
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Teenage Fanclub
my bloody valentine
Kevin Shields
Loveless
Mercury Rev
Flaming Lips
Clouds Taste Metallic
Wayne Coyne
Primal Scream
Bobby Gillespie
Glasgow
Grinderman
T. Rex
Marc Bolan
Oasis
Jesus and Mary Chain
Keith Richards
A silver mt. zion.
Montreal.
Hotel tango.
Sighing synths.
Leonard Cohen.
Getting cold.
Lee Hazlewood.
Arizona into the Rockies.
Wyoming.
Road music.
Music of wide open spaces.
Charles Mingus checks in.
Bob Dylan.
Tumbleweeds.
Was QAnon bullshit?
WFMU seems to think so.
And all their hipster listeners.
Missing the Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Chris Isaak.
My Bloody Valentine.
R.E.M.
Automatic for the people.
Rightly asking if this guy, Pauly Deathwish, is Borat.
Elvis working at the truck stop.
Nevada.
New Mexico.
Into French philosophy at a Barnes & Noble.
Film criticism.
Cinematic music.
The great philosophers.
Taking on Philip Glass.
Rachmaninoff.
Swedish version.
Poor girl with grey teeth.
Dirty bra.
Addicted to Kardashians.
And meth.
Smoking candy cigarettes.
Brutal, cold world.
No fall back.
Withdrawal back.
Wanna lock me for blood pressure.
It ain’t no cakewalk.
Ripoff.
Tech moves fast.
Write anything.
Better than nothing.
Bad press.
No press.
You have a printing press.
The Innocence Mission.
Miles.
Porgy and Bess.
A thousand planes.
Two ambient instrumentals to start this album.
Setting an amber tone.
Pensive.
Ex-pensive.
Time is a luxury.
And Miles comes in.
Bending notes.
Sighing again.
Like music from Big Pink.
John Simon.
Leonard Cohen.
Very much of the Deserter’s Songs type.
Song cycle.
Van Dyke.
And Coltrane leaps in.
No bends.
Solid sax.
Honky.
Low mids.
Leaping up.
Transposition.
A little noodling.
And WHAT THE FUCK.
Now we are in Blue Hawaii.
On a jukebox in Nashville.
Sawdust on the floor.
Just spit that tabaccy anywheres.
It really is Elvis.
Loaded.
Lou Reed.
Doo-wop.
We’re in east Texas with George Jones.
Straight country.
Classic country.
Bona fide redneck interpolation.
“Daisies on Your Doorstep”.
Troubled relationship.
Robert Altman.
Nashville.
Hitchcock.
Traut.
Birds.
Grandaddy invades!
Modesto!!
And back to EXPANSIVE verb.
Cathedral.
Serious shit.
Country gothic.
Phil Spector would have loved this.
The plandemic that killed Phil Spector.
Biggest celebrity to buy the farm.
Buy the farm?
Or sell the farm?
During this whole plandemic.
Write copy.
Boilerplate.
You have no publicity.
I block all reposts.
I wanna EARN it.
Organic.
Diminished 7th.
Dissolve into what?
More Mercury Rev homage.
Drums from “Desperado”.
Another lonely bloke ended by “Holes”.
Favorite song ever.
Happy end.
Drunk room.
Tom Waits.
The chord.
Spring.
Le Sacre.
Back to regularly scheduled programming.
Knife in the Water.
Austin.
R.E.M. again.
Big Star.
John Cale droning away on the viola.
No tremolo.
Swing it.
Ragged time.
Texarkana.
Arkansas.
And Texas.
Definite Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci nod.
Nick Drake.
Again The Innocence Mission.
Birds.
Pink Floyd.
Fairport Convention.
Psych barn.
The Byrds.
Gram Parsons.
Neil Young big time.
Stooges meet Beach Boys meet Messiaen.
But the Bowie knife is orange.
Made in Germany.
Kanye West and Wayne Coyne drop in.
An anti-hit.
When you can sing, but you get raped by auto-tune.
Loosen that shit up.
Going all Arabic on me.
Raga.
Spinal Tap.
Clouds of sound on almost every track.
A very ambient album.
Mood set.
Mood retained.
Mature.
Duran Duran.
Peaches DJ Berlin.
Where’s Warhol?
Nigel Godrich.
Jonny Greenwood.
Thom Yorke.
Grinderman.
Roger Waters again.
Microtonal blues.
Straight into Bjork.
Does she umlaut?
Sounds of a Mac.
Swan.
Alarm clock.
Gentle waking.
Paganini.
Rachmaninoff.
Elton John.
Stevie Wonder.
Sly Stone.
James Bond in Rio.
Drax.
Os Mutantes.
Jobim.
Korean frogs.
Shinto.
Spy guitar for reprise.
Tom Verlaine.
Richard Lloyd.
Paul Simon.
Rhythm of the saints.
Graceland.
Beethoven emperor concerto.
Slow.
Beloved.
Tokyo.
Press roll.
Sushi.
Kill bounce.
Phil Selway.
Colin Greenwood?
A masterful track.
“Icelandic Pastiche”.
NOW WE’RE TALKING.
Papa Trump back in the house.
For the apocalypse.
Rocky Balboa.
L.L. Cool J.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Second coming.
To save.
Vengeance is his.
Everyone given a chance.
A fair chance.
NASA.
I hear a single.
“Landslide”.
Wisconsin decertified.
Ramthun came through.
About fucking time.
There’s a riot goin’ on.
Paperclip Nazis.
Eric Carmen.
Smokey Robinson.
Tears of a motherfucking clown.
Oboe.
Michael Stipe.
Gil Evans.
Having the French horns get groovy.
Amelie.
Sketches of Spain.
Sunday morning.
Loveless.
Kevin Shields.
Belinda.
The Soft Bulletin.
Christ coming down from the clouds.
Like a ton of bricks.
Anvil.
Don’t call it a comeback.
Not all the way.
Staple Singers.
Rick Danko.
Rocket pans across stereo field.
Jesus talkin’.
Crucified.
Died.
Buried.
AND ROSE AGAIN, MOTHERFUCKERS.
Jesus more space than NASA.
Really a masterpiece of sample placement.
Crystal-clear mix.
Clouseau.
Peter Sellers.
Bass solo.
Absolute Mingus.
Bloody jaw-dropping.
This is like a fucking lost Roland Kirk album.
This track!
Concerto for Booty and Orchestra.
Montreux.
Can never spell.
System hacked.
No more spelling.
Adieu au langage.
Flute loops.
Cocteau Twins.
Ties together album.
Last track coming on like Faust.
Built to Spill.
Silver Apples.
In memory of a bloke who bit it.
End of Night on Earth.
Real recorder.
Charity.
You will live forever, my friend.
I never knew you.
You aren’t forgotten.
Thought of you put in this track.
Catharsis.
Yerself is steam.
Smashing Pumpkins.
Siamese.
Great album by Pauly Deathwish.
Spotify.
iTunes.
Solid.
-PD
Cris et Chuchotements.
…et Chuchotements.
This horribly powerful film.
No light reading.
From the lips.
Fumbling big-hand thoughts.
Like Brice Parain said, inseparable from language.
We can see this fount at which Godard drank.
We can see the borrowing of von Trier.
We can see the fealty of Wes Anderson.
It is Cries and Whispers of Ingmar Bergman.
Tired, aging Bergman.
Clear as a bell.
Static shots which must be achieved through moving pictures.
Just stop moving for a moment.
And be quiet.
That microphone.
Just out of sight.
No B-movie swoop-downs.
But absolute perfection throughout.
And yet the message is dark.
No hope.
Cathartic, maybe.
Always fade to red.
And reemerge through the color spectrum.
Yellow to white light.
Four women.
Three sisters and a zaftig maid.
Someone’s crying Lord…
Come by here. In a dream. See their lips move.
We should love the coquette. The redhead. Liv Ullmann.
She should dominate us like a Renoir painting.
A madder rose cinema has known not.
But is she not a fake, Maria?
Is she not just a color palette towards which we gravitate?
What worth in the façade when the heart is empty?
It had been a long time since Summer with Monika, but Harriet Andersson was here.
And yet, it is Liv Ullmann who gets the plastic surgeon insults of the doctor (Erland Josephson).
But Harriet Andersson has enough grief with which to deal.
No no, I have gotten mixed up with all these actresses of Bergman. And don’t even mention Ingrid!
We will come back to poor, sweet Harriet.
But we must first deal with the witch: Ingrid Thulin.
What kind of misery makes such a witch?
A tissue of lies (reads the subtitles).
I believe Thierry Meyssan had to deal with such proclamations (though I read them in translation).
What kind of lies here, though…specifically?
Loveless marriage.
Probably even more empty than simply.
Loveless.
No creative punctuation. No flirtatious commas or semicolons.
But simply poetry written like a telegraph dispatch.
Full stop.
Desperate.
Depression unto madness. That is Ingrid Thulin here as Karin.
But then we must come back to our sickness.
A true physical ailment.
A patient.
Bedridden.
Patience.
It is Agnes. Painful. Wheezing. Horrible. Ghastly.
A high-water mark of art films.
Top that, motherfucker.
Jerry Lee to Chuck Berry. Worse than an expletive.
But what brings this whole film together? Who holds this house against her bosom?
It is none other than Kari Sylwan.
Yes, there are no important male characters within.
Georg Årlin chews his fish like someone in the diplomatic service should.
And expects “a little consensual rape in the evening” (to quote the Nick Cave of Grinderman).
But such petty existence boils the madness.
The glass.
Shards of light.
Smeared with lunacy.
Against all this is Kari Sylwan as Anna.
The maid.
The help.
Priceless.
Humanist.
A believer. As the sick believed more than the priest.
No real important male characters here.
But Anders Ek is the voice of reason. The voice of poetry. For a moment. Touching.
Don’t touch me.
Don’t touch me.
Such damage in the world.
And Anna bears it all.
The only true hero.
Meek.
Equally tormented.
But strong.
Annas make the world go round. Deliver the medicine. Keep the world from splitting open. Make sure the trains are on time. Hugs.
The history of cinema is littered with sad brilliance.
Strewn with fictional corpses.
Troubled directors trying to come to terms with their own fears of death.
And in the end, such creations loom large because they closest resemble the art of the ancient world and the itch of the Renaissance.
Storm on! And write all night long!!
Someone has stolen my beard, but my mustache is plenty weird.
We shall live to see Nietzsche bitch-slap Hitler.
And Tarantino will again work at a video store. Where he belongs. A very able clerk. Like me.
-PD
Throughout human history, many strands of activity have intertwined.
Let us take but two and ponder them for a moment: romance and war.
Ah, romance…
What is romance nowadays? Is it a glossy paperback with dog-eared corners? Is there a mane of red hair? A swelling bosom?
Or is romance chivalry?
After you. Je vous en prie.
No.
Romance has not survived.
Who are we kidding?
For romance to have survived, love would also have had to survive.
But wait…
I see…here and there. Is that not love?
Ah…romantic love. A different thing.
I assure you, dear reader, if you have made it this far into my ridiculous litany of theses that you shall be rewarded for your efforts.
What we have here is the final film by the great Max Ophüls.
I have heard this picture described as a flawed masterpiece.
Pay no mind to such estimations.
This is the product of a genius spilling his guts onto the celluloid canvas.
Film. Celluloid. When did it start? When did it end?
Once upon a time, film was flammable.
And our film is certainly flammable.
Martine Carol, who plays Lola Montès, is one of a kind.
This particular performance…I must admit, this is one of my favorite films…such a powerful experience.
But Carol is not alone on the grand stage. No… This production would not be the breathtaking spectacle it is without the incomparable Peter Ustinov.
Ustinov is the ringmaster. As in circus.
The important point to note is that Ophüls made a psychological metaphor of the circus…and created a film which is probably the longest extended metaphor ever captured by motion picture cameras.
But it is not a typical circus.
It is a nightmare circus. A cusp-of-dream circus.
Every shot is effused with symbolism.
The little people…haunting Oompa Loompas…little firemen from a Fahrenheit 451 yet to be filmed. Bradbury had published in 1953. But it would necessitate Truffaut in 1966 to make the thing so eerie. It is that specific vision…the firemen on their futuristic trucks…which Lola Montès prefigures. The little people. From Freaks by Tod Browning through Lola Montès to the cinematography of Nicolas Roeg. And the tension of Bernard Herrmann. From Psycho to Fahrenheit 451. And even Oskar Werner (who plays a sizable role in Lola Montès). From here to Truffaut.
But the nightmares are only horrible because her life was so vivid…Lola Montès. First with Franz Liszt. And then with mentions of Chopin and Wagner. Even Mozart…
This was romance. A different time.
What love would sustain a warrior in battle?
Simple love. Honest love.
And yet, what love drives a man to the edge?
Romantic love. The femme fatale. Why is it that we never hear of the homme fatal?
All kidding aside, I want to make a very serious point about Lola Montès. It is my belief that this film represents an admirably feminist perspective the intensity of which I have seen nowhere else than in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile).
For 1955, Lola Montès was a harrowing epic. Because Max Ophüls was a true auteur, it has lost none of its wonder…even in our loveless, edgy world.
-PD
paulydeathwish 