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5.17.2005

jean vigo, taris 

most film footage involving athletes-- whether narrarated by bob costas or directed by kon ichikawa-- tends to focus on ideal forms and circumstances. the athlete is typically an exhalted "everyman," directing his or her physicality towards an unforseen "natural" union. the inhumanity of the performance is, in fact, a superhumanity. the athlete brings to life the imagined blossoming of his/her audience. a person's prime-of-life becomes a cinematic artifact.

in jean vigo's short film taris (1931), which i had the great pleasure of seeing (alongside all three of his other completed films) this weekend at the international house, something of a different character occurs. french swimming champion jean taris, whose bodily feats determine the form and content of the film, is the typical ideal performer one would expect from such a thing. but vigo's glance into his daily routines bears the mark of a more peculiar observer.

we see feet flap and water splash... we watch taris' head in slo-mo, twisting to the right and to the left, his mouth breaking open like the blow-hole of a whale... we see him strike poses on dry land... we watch bubbles shoot out of his nose... and all the while, taris remains the conventional, extraordinary performer. but despite this miraculous display, one begins to get the sense that a human being does not belong underwater. and it's true... water is literally a danger to us. there's no air in there.

still, vigo's film is not an angry inversion of athletic expectations. he has a better time than that. instead, he glorifies the absurdity of being underwater. taris becomes a homely but lovable creature-- a hairless, flapping mammmal making the best of a strange situation. he is not at war with the pool, either. his ordeal is no hemingway-style test-of-strength. the film is, instead, an appreciation of the odd places humans stick themselves-- how they adapt to their chosen situations, how they excel within them, and how they remain radically and wonderfully at odds with them nonetheless.

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return of the ten good things 

haven't done one of these in a while...

ten good things for the springtime ("the only pretty ring time")

10. led zeppelin's "custard pie" sounded every bit as good to me in my mother's car last weekend as it did when i was twelve years old. "custard pie" is the first track from physical graffiti, an album which-- to this day-- remains my all time favorite summer record. the perfect soundtrack to the atmosphere of ease that has risen across my city as a miserable and seemingly-endless winter finally makes its exit. good fucking riddance.

9. i've been working the occasional shift at the museum, and putting the non-eating fifteen minutes of my lunch break to good use. a quick detour to gawk at henri rousseau's carnival evening, for example, becomes not only the high point of my day, but also a valueable reminder of why i took the damn job in the first place...

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8. my grandmother is awesome. she's a half a year away from turning eighty, and hasn't a trace of the grumpiness that's become my bread-and-butter at 28. she's the most light-hearted totally neurotic person i know. a rare mix. my grandmother's ability to fear the tiniest nuances of her daily routine is matched only by her uncompromising ability to laugh at herself. i don't take after my grandmother much, but if there's one thing we have in common, it's a sense that the idea of "ourselves" is funny. meaning that we both consider that if the cosmos is capable of creating a specimen as peculiar as the one we each have to look at in the mirror each day, then the cosmos must have a sense of humor. and it's a damn good sense of humor sometimes.

7. last plane to jakarta is the blog of john darnielle, main dude from the mountain goats. in addition to making good music (his new record has some fantastic shit on it), he also writes well and thoughtfully about music.

6.

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... fat, born-again stephen baldwin, while not by any means a "good thing," is at least a pleasant reminder that-- though they elected our president and have their hungry eyes on our courts-- the religious right of this country remain deeply, miserably, insufferably lame.

5. and on that note, you might want to take a look at this. (thanks carl.)

(...sorry my blog is turning into VH-1 lately...)

4. for whatever reason, it's taken me 28 years to look into the films of jean renoir. but i'm glad i finally did. most of the criterion re-issues of his films include introductions by him, and he seems like an awfully nice person. and even better-- his films seem to draw much of their power from this very nice-ness-- in their ensemble nature, their ambivalent power dynamics, their deceptive light-heartedness, etc. how many "great artists" can you say that about???

3. the CVS pharmacy at 15th and chestnut is emblematic of the clashing aesthetics of philadelphia, as well as the all-around omnipotence of corporate culture. but there's something so shockingly "off" about it i can't help having a bit of a soft spot for it. being located literally a block-and-a-half from city hall, the pharmacy was basically plopped into the bottom floor of a gorgeous, 19th century building structure. this is not uncommon in center city, and i usually hate it when this shit happens (the neon signage adorning the ross dept. store now occupying the historical "litt bros." building a few blocks down is a particularly blasphemous example). but the CVS ups-the-ante a bit, in that the room it occupies is at least two storeys high, and the top half of it inculdes the preserved original woodwork. accordingly, the pharmacy appears half finished-- it's crappy pharmacy for the first ten feet and victorian fantasy from there on out. it's like catching corporate take-over "in the act." a weird, amusing feeling.

2. i'm making this new drawing, and i can sincerely say it has been "inspired" (awful word) by the work i've read of octavia butler. maybe it's just that i'm getting older and more comfortable with my own sensibilities, but it feels really legitimate to make a drawing based on a novel (or, more accurately, a series of novels). i don't feel obligated to whip up a bunch of referential nonsense to justify what i'm doing anymore (at least not in my brain), so when i actually want to draw from something it feels fresh and natural, i guess.

1. flowers are in bloom on trees in the city. seven solid years of art school and i still love flowers. but i guess all my aesthetic training has at least made me more alert to the presence of flowers, even if it hasn't replaced my affection for them with something more sexy and controversial.

the street of crocodiles by bruno schulz 

at the store, we're selling a mounted print of this salvador dali painting. the museum is coming to the end of a major dali exhibition, and i've been immersed in dali commodities for several months. it gets you thinking...

surrealism, for better or worse, is not only one of my biggest preoccupations, but also perhaps the most fitting adjective for my artwork (feel free to throw "neo" in there if you'd like). and dali's above-mentioned painting is emblematic of everything i don't like about surrealism. it reduces one's unconscious to a hodge-podge of flashy commodities, its "unleashed desires" are dull and chauvinistic, and it's rendered with dali's typical fussy classicism. an uninspired nosedive into his well-worn bag-of-tricks; "weird" in the same way that hugh grant is "british."

with things like this in mind, it seems strange to me that the surreal would still be relevant. it's refreshing and inspiring, in our universe of computer-generated spectacles, that a film by kiyoshi kurosawa or an object by robert gober, or even a dance track by missy elliot can still be meaningfully weird. and i'm happy to say that bruno schulz' the street of crocodiles is one of the most meaningfully weird novels i've ever read.

the story is told in short passages concerning the author's childhood. it's a nostalgic and detail-oriented memoir of sorts (i'd call it "proustian," but that would imply that i've made it through swann's way during one of my several stabs at it). most of the episodes circulate around the author's father-- an eccentric shopkeeper who spews quasi-pantheistic philosophy, hatches exotic birds, obsesses over cockroaches and mannequins, and essentially bewilders all those around him.

but this bewilderment has none of the bloated showboating of dali. schulz is more concerned with texture than with spectacle. his descriptions are as uncanny as the objects he depicts. his approach is polite, in the way that one of joseph cornell's boxes is polite. a sophisticated sense of wonder replaces the carnival of authorial id. it's not a prudish book by any means, it's just indifferent to shock value. like a thick fog, it is slow and romantic and lingering.

the most impressive aspect of the street of crocodiles is how it seems to occupy a world of its own making. an odd and occasionally frightening world, but one that seduces and invites you as well. it is both child-like and well-spoken, eccentric in a manner not unlike raymond roussel. but unlike roussel's writing, it is also personal and affectionate. it warms you up as it weirds you out. it's one of the finest surreal novels i've ever read, a perfect literary companion to my all time favorite surreal piece of film-making, jean vigo's l'atalante.

a valuable reminder of the rich, radical foreign-ness of the everyday world.

in the airport... 

... there's a corridor i find myself gravitating towards. it's a glass connector path, very well lit, with rocking chairs for watching the planes move about.

the airport is aesthetically interesting on account of its awfulness. it's an empty vessel, characterized only by the corporate and bureaucratic signifiers of its purpose-- to move people, to move capital. an antfarm of suspended desire and simmering panic. a space of heartfelt detachment, always indeterminate, a not-yet-vacation. an experience doubled by its structural geometry and array of commanding indexes-- a living (corny) sci-fi distopia, however anemic. its fantasy is made of the dual tremblings of technology and terror-- the plane crash, the jihad, and so forth. remedied, hopefully, in rest and relaxation. in the ornaments cast out by the everyday.

the airport is the canvas of the tourist's experience. the space of leaving-the-home, and little else. a hollow pit-stop to remember and desire within. today. april 24th. 4:30 pm in philadelphia. krispy kreme coffee in hand, i look out that star-wars-window. enjoying the icy resonance of the airport and the chill of not traveling. i work here. i am having an ordinary day.

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