Tag Archives: sounds

MZFPK [2021)

Breakfast cereal video game.

Pauly Deathwish’s 3rd album.

I am behind.

I can’t keep up with this guy.

Out of the gates like Flaming Lips.

30,000 feel of despair.

The gash.

Right into Isao Tomita.

Doing Debussy.

Marching.

Martial.

Fantastic noises.

Like first Stereolab album.

Here Come the Warm Jets.

Cheyenne Mountain jams.

I can no longer see what I’m typing.

  • What if I type in white?  Ahh, yes.  That does the trick.  But it ruins my style.  Louis-Ferdinand would not be happy.  Totally Air.  Pocket Symphony.  Who is Kevin?  Shields?  Ayers?  Fairlight.  Synth clouds.  Rich chords.  Very sophisticated harmonies and arrangements.  Cornelius from Japan.  This sounds very modern.  OH FUCK!  Groove is in the motherfucking heart.  Vogue!  So on track two, we are straight up on a catwalk.  But it could be Alan Vega or Martin Rev.  Kinda Sun City Girls.  Zoviet France.  Fridmann never gets this crazy with bass.  Wayne is driving it weirder.  This was, from what I hear, done with ZERO budget.  Is this a dance album?  First you have poetry.  Then you are prose.  Amateurs.  Into Odelay.  That was a good drum break.  The Strokes.  Fuzzy vocals.  Paliament/Funkadelic.  Sly Stone!  Later Stereolab.  Tim Gane processing.  Counter melody!  For fuck’s sake.  Somebody listen to this bloke.  Whoa.  What is up with this chorus?  Roland Kirk?  Like in Switzerland?  Definitely hitting some Os Mutantes twee.  Lo-fi as fuck.  Great Godard tongue in cheek.  Apparently about Neil Young and Rick James being in a band together when they were young and still in Canada.  Yonge Street?  Beats.  Drake needs to hear this.  Bit crusher lisp.  Spiritualized at the grocery store.  Swipe barcode.  Song peaks at end.  Masterful mix.  A true climax.  Savage mastering on every album.  Whole mix jumps.  It works.  Needle skipping.  American Supreme.  Claustrophobic.  COVID.  Sad.  Scared.  Apocalyptic.  The concept of the gaze in cinema.  Bass drops in.  Feel it in your sex organs.  A sexy song.  “Cobra Strike”.  This is unequivocally a dance album.  EDM all up in here.  Lots of panning.  Spliff it.  Micro gestures.  Pandemic planning.  How long will it last?  Soul-crushing.  Zombie metaphor.  Shaun of the Dead.  Masterpiece.  Beatle drums.  First Velvets album.  Rat trails.  “Black Angel’s Death Song”.  “The New Pollution”.  Dr. No.  Walther PPK.  What does this kid know?  He can’t possibly know, can he?  Pure phase.  Visconti.  Lanois.  Acid jazz.  Nick Cave.  Montage, mon beau souci.  Flaming Lips.  Jeff Tweedy drawl.  Jesus and Mary Chain team up with The Cure.  Disintegration.  Heartbreak here.  Who broke his heart?  Bleeps and bloops.  Robot noises.  Heartbeeps.  Jazz funk ’70s experimental upright.  Great lyrics.  Superimposition.  Steenbeck!  Fucking great lyrics on “Snip Snip”.  Oh, damn.  Glockenspiel at just the right time!  Icy.  Air.  Virgin suicides.  Dazed and confused.  Blonde.  Braids.  Like glazed bread.  German.  Texas.  Floating world.  Old world.  No one to smoke a doobie with and stare up at green trees.  No tits.  What is wrong with this world?  Rambo.  Fort Bragg.  Delta.  Boykin.  Intelligence Support Activity.  Send me.  George Crumb.  Black angels.  Jungle echoes.  4thPOG.  Ghosts.  PSYWAR op.  Make it loud.  Romeo foxtrot.  Shall we dance?  Charlie don’t surf.  Death on the dance floor.  Public Image Ltd.  Modes of limited transposition.  Messiaen.  Primal Scream.  Standing with Johnny Rotten.  #Trump2021 .  But this is more about big tits.  Giant opals.  Garth Hudson.  Telegraph.  Total loss.  Persona non grata.  Window still missing.  Swastika eyes.  Paul Weller.  XTRMNTR.  Shoot speed.  Kill light.  Eyes owned 2020.  The ugly had a chance.  Masks work…if you’re ugly and need to get laid.  Back with another block rocking’ beat.  Private psychedelic reel.  War metaphor.  Is this about election?  No.  Too early.  Look at liner notes.  Living in COVID times was like a world war.  War just beginning?  Got my pina colada.  Fuck it!  Arizona.  Living boldly.  Masks have lost.  Two weeks.  Could have been a contender.  Circuit bending.  Talking about big titty schizophrenic.  All footwork ruined.  Toys.  Falling apart gremlin workmanship.  Awkward line about Thora Birch.  Explicit warnings a little lazy.  Getting a bit Lenny Bruce up in here.  Russ Meyer.  Second line.  Double time.  Crazy drums.  Smooth as Sade.  Tambourine is the star.   One organic element.  Wrote a song.  She didn’t care.  Wrote her 200 songs.  She didn’t care.  One has zero plays globally.  She never bothered listening to it.  Some things not meant to be.  Liberals and conservatives.  Go and create.  Lobster.  Work wasn’t.  Bought her every flower imaginable.  Thousands of dollars on flowers.  Yoshimi laser warfare.  A piano not standard.  Some Tori Amos bullshit.  Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.  Only the finest pianos.  Internationally famous.  Neither deserve it.  Pulled the plug at the wrong time.  Would he have still kept the same track listing?  Maybe so.  Heartbreak to rehash.  Goes by quick.  Good drum programming.  James Bond future theme.  Brian Wilson.  Phil Spector.  Absolute Nigel Godrich.  Cinematic.  The album that never was.  But this one is worldwide, motherfuckers.  Third this summer.  And a fourth already out.  I can hardly keep up.  I need to review movies.  Doesn’t Pauly Deathwish know I don’t have time for Galaga?  Falling apart.  Short-circuit.  Charlotte Gainsbourg.  Flashback to Bucolic.  
  • -PD

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Poto and Cabengo [1980)

This is the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen.

16 ways to say potato.

Eclipses Ira Gershwin by 14.

George and Ira.

Grace and Virginia.

Poto and Cabengo.

Godard and Gorin.

It’s maddening.

That time has forgotten the most beautiful girls ever.

Wild and free.

The playful sounds of Poto and Cabengo.

Maybe there’s no finding them.

And that’s the message.

That they disappeared like their ephemeral language.

But I want to know.

What happened to the most beautiful girls ever?

We want to capture the past.

We can’t let it get away.

Because we are so moved by the images and the sounds.

What if I lost my language?

This language I have worked so hard to develop.

Science would call me a sophist.

Stylometry might have something to say about how developed my idiom is.

I cannot tell you, people, how much this movie moved me.

Napoleon Dynamite is like Shaft in comparison to the realness herein.

Intelligent Dasein.

I can’t possibly be the first to that pun.

But we wonder:

who will be the first blogger to win a Nobel in literature?

[surely not me]

Putting aside the auto-response for a moment…

Because it is bound to happen.

Writer started as blogger and progressed to…what.

Books?

Folio.  Quarto.  Octavo.

Potato.

1 patata 2 petata 3 pitata 4

5 potata 6 putata 7 pateta more

Abandoned in your own home.

The wild child and her double.

Theater of cruaute.  Crunchy crouton vegetables 🙂

And the zoo!

The San Diego Zoo.  So that you can love your city.  San Antonio.

“People say we got it made/Don’t they know we’re so afraid?”

…think we don’t know what staccato means.  Shit…

It’s our secret language.

As if the Navajo code talkers had dwindled down to two.

Pound would write a much more erudite version of this.

So much so that it was completely unintelligible.  And brilliant.

Have I mentioned Jean-Pierre Gorin?

Because he’s a genius.

The only collaborator through whom Godard’s name was subsumed.

Their language became strictly verboten.

They weren’t sent back into the forest.

We welcomed them.  To mop floors at a McDonald’s.

And work on an assembly line.

And I love them.

Because that’s what America sends its geniuses to do.

Wipe up fast-food fry grease.  And God knows what kind of menial work.

There are no more worthy stars in the history of film than

Grace and Virginia (“Ginny”) Kennedy.

Beauty is forever.

 

-PD

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Playtime [1967)

This took a lot of watching.  Rewatching.

Last night…so tired.

Watched half.  Then rewind.  Dozed off.  Watch same half again.

First time I saw this (years ago) was on the big screen.

It really makes a difference.

That janitor at the beginning.  His strange pause and crouch.  His peering left and right.  His broom and dustpan.

Very little sweeping.  Just clanking.

Yes.  Sounds.  Sounds.  Sounds.  (Zounds!)

The vinyl chairs which return to their shape after you sit and dent.  The strange sound.  The strange quality.

“Quality”

Tradition of quality.

It might lead you to ask:  what was Jacques Tati trying to say with this film?

Answering that is no easy task.

Sure, this seems like a simple, lightweight film.  In some ways it is.

It’s enjoyable.  It’s lighthearted.  And yet…

There is more than a smidgen of Modern Times here.  And Tati, with his pipe…  More than a pipe-full of Sartre.  Sartre with his publication Les Temps modernes.  Even Sartre apparently thought highly enough of Chaplin to work under an homage headline.

And so, Tati…lost in the supermarket.  Lost in the buildings from 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle.  Same year.  1967.  Paris.  In the banlieues.

And very few words.

As I said.

A movie of sounds.

Yes.

But images.

Reflections.

Illusions.

It appears.

Optical.

Illusion.

And its reflection.

Double.

Mirror image.

Flipped.

Paris.

It appears that the buttons have been switched.  Very nice, WordPress.  Now I am “publishing” every time I intend to merely “save” (and vice versa).

That is the theme of the film.

Thingamajigs.

No no no.  Take your time.  Uh uh uh…hold on.  [click click click click]  Ok, now rise.

We wait for the entire hallway to be traversed in an absurd observation of ritual.

And from above…the cubicles.

One needs must occupy higher ground to see the big picture.  All of these busy bees become lost in the fray.

Afraid.

True.

And so it is not farfetched to guess that Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards were influenced in their masterpiece The Party (1968) by Tati’s Playtime (1967).

But with Tati there is even more.  An industrial ballet.  The poise of the service industry (and its opposite).  [Both]

A constant counterpoint like a comic Górecki.

Perhaps I have been hitting the wrong button all along.

Have I been saying these things out loud?

Yes, we wonder.

Technology.

We grew up in a different time.

The chairs were different.

The doors were different.

And since we are quiet and meek we spend an eternity in the antechamber.  In the darkened hallway.

How do we get out?

Yes, Paris…even then, perhaps?  A drugstore?  Yes.  Too depressing for anyone to look each other in the eyes.

The hum.  The constant hum.  Like Alphaville.  Like Oskar Sala’s Trautonium.  The Birds.  Bernard Herrmann as musical consultant.  But those noises.  Mixtur.

And several waiters will salt the troutonium…and grind pepper…and spread the sauce…and the couple has moved.

The main course has stayed behind.

Heated.  Reheated.  Set on fire.  Jubilee.

Turbot.

And lobster boy just cares about his hair.

Nerval.  Hugo Ball.

But that humming…like Metal Machine Music way ahead of time.  But creepier.  Like Raymond Scott’s music for babies crossed with Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement.

Waiting waiting.  That’s a theme.  And all the illustrious portraits of CEOs past.

Is it a job interview?

And that’s Orly?  It seems more like a hospital.  Little hummingbird nuns and swaddled kids.

But we shall always live in Barbara Dennek’s dimples.  It sounds weird to say.

But it is luck.  Bad luck.  And then good luck.

And random error.  Entropy.

Chaos.

Can anyone here play the piano?

Yes.  Yes I can!

And some half-rate Edith Piaf gets up to sing her long-forgotten hit.

Except no one has forgotten it.  Once a hit, always a hit.

More or less.

The new religion.

The hum of neon.

All the desserts look sickly.  Even to the “chef.”  Must hide his mystère.  An apple with some sputtery whip?  An upside-down coffee mug?

Mmmm…

William S. Burroughs would doubtless have approved.  The man in the gray flannel suit (book).  But taken to theatrical limits.  Choreography of male primping.  Like Cary Grant on hallucinogens.  A surreal ritual.

Ritual.

This is sociology.

Anthropology.

Paris.  The modern man.

See him in his natural habitat.

See her shop.  See her sell.

See him work.  See him drink.

If you travel, you will see the tourist side.

On a trip.

With a group.

Activities planned.

Like a cruise.

And God forbid you become separated from the group.

Yes.

That is our little romance.

And Tati is meek enough to barely suggest to suggest (x2).

That M. Hulot might find love.

It would be a random day.

He would get pulled this way and that.

And winding up in some crazy, unplanned situation he would become sweet on dimples.

See him in his fishbowl.

Before there was Mr. Bean, there was Monsieur Hulot.

Before there was Forrest Gump.

Tell me…where are the “fancy goods”?  Perhaps silk.  Hermès.

Always caught at the turnstiles of life…

-PD

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