Pantha du Prince - Asha

I only discovered Pantha du Prince recently. Addicted to his second album This Bliss. If you have spotify check it out. He's influenced by an avant-garde musical tradition, heralded largely by Cage, based around the idea  that all sounds are music. His particular sound gives pride of place to negative space, his songs seem to drift, musical structures are held together by a relentless beat, which orders chaos. It's really beautiful stuff, and inspires me to start making my own minimal, avant-garde electronic music. Perhaps that's something to start doing over summer.

"[The writer] knows that words, as Brice-Parrain says, are 'loaded pistols'. If he speaks, he fires. He may be silent, but since he has chosen to fire, he must do it like a man, by aiming at targets, and not like a child, at random, by shutting his eyes and firing merely for the pleasure of hearing the shot go off"

Jean-Paul Sartre - What is Literature?

スポンジ・ボブ

Every week I find about 10 new reasons why I love Japan. This is just one of them.

You know what...?

You know what? Every time I lapse back into the terrifying and consuming realm of 'reality', this blog goes out of the window. Every time I come back to it with a half-arsed intention of re-kindling it from the embers, I make grand promises regarding its longevity, even if only for myself, then reality takes over again, and out of the window it goes. 

So this time there will be no grand promises, and for the record I don't intend to narrativise the past year of my life. In fact, the reason I came back here is because it's formidably enjoyable to fellate your own ego. It's good having something to read over. I feel like Krapp. I keep my blog for the sole reason of being able to rouse myself to nostalgia in the future. A future in which I can damn whatever I write and sneer at my past thoughts and (re)actions. No doubt that use of pretentious deconstructive brackets will be one of the first things that comes under fire when my identity has shifted again.

Despite my remark that there will be no grand promises, I would sincerely like to keep this going. I think that once I have graduated, in about two months time, I'll miss writing. I mean both in an academic and journalistic way. With Nouse gone and no more essays to write, I can see myself feeling lost. So yes, this blog will continue, as long as I do, but whether it is regularly updated or not, I can't tell. It all depends on states of mind. This blog is all based on a state of mind. I am also battling with the dilemma of whether to switch over to tumblr/wordpress or not. Blogger has always seemed sterile to me. There are better blogging formats out there, and blogger just seems old. So I think, in the back of my mind, I am planning a move. We'll see. 

Before I graduate, however, there is plenty to be getting on with. In fact, it is in some ways a surprise that a desire to begin writing this again has struck me now. With 13,000 words of essay to write and a newspaper to keep alive my words should perhaps be going to a more noble cause. I am currently writing an essay on McCarthy's The Road. A novel which, incidentally, I reviewed on this blog about nine months ago. It was the first novel in a while that I'd really stayed up all night to finish. That made it special in its own rite. However, despite its status as a kind of (post)modern American classic, it's interesting how much perspective 9 months of close-reading can give you. The novel, though thoroughly enjoyable, is constructed over a series of logistical fault-lines which make its very fabric kind of crooked in the first place. I mean, this is where my present idea has been born from. Focusing in on these fault-lines, and looking at the way they can be exploited, by the inquisitive reader, and with McCarthy himself. 

During the research for this essay I've been able to read so much that I've needed to for a long time. That includes Derrida, Zizek, Fukuyama, Marx. I think that perhaps it has been the most stretching essay I've written yet, both with regards to what I've read and how much I've read. It has also been ego-boosting, which is both a good and a bad thing. To have actually read the whole of Jacques Derrida's Spectres de Marx and understood it is something I could never have done three years ago. Much of my essay on The Road centres around Derrida's concept of the specter as a deconstructive entity, and his term hauntology. In fact, in the next couple of weeks I intend to write an extended post on the spectral and hauntological aspects of a number of texts and albums which have come to my attention. In conducting my research I found that very little has been written on the two terms with respect to popular and postmodern culture. The most informing texts I found happened to be on blogs (like this), where the terms could be applied instead of defined. The terms specter and hauntology elude ontologically stable definitions expressly by being ontologically unstable terms, making them formidably difficult to understand in the first place. So in some ways I want to share what I've learnt, and to perhaps help others who are interested in hauntology and spectrality get a grip on what they actually mean by using examples. 

But for now I will continue trundling along with the essay itself. And until that is finished there will be no blog post on the subject I can assure you. It's pretty much finished, but of course I have the long editing process and numerous confidence crises ahead of me. Wish me luck!  

Burke and Hare

Burke and Hare
Director: John Landis
Starring: Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis, Jessica Hynes
Runtime: 91 minutes
Rating: ***

John Landis is perhaps best known for formidable cult classics The Blues Brothers, and An American Werewolf in London, as well as a stream of commercial movies in the seventies and eighties. Burke and Hare, however, is the first film he has directed in twelve years. He seems to have gotten a little rusty . . .

Burke and Hare (Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis respectively) are a pair of penniless Irish opportunists looking to get rich quick in Victorian Edinburgh. After their initial venture fails (selling mould to the naive by claiming it has omnipotent healing properties!?), the duo resort to less respectable (and less legal) means of procuring an income. The twosome realise there is a gap in the market selling corpses to professors for use in medical experiments, but they soon find themselves faced with a dilemma. Where to get the corpses from? Pegg and Serkis rapidly win themselves a small fortune murdering those unfortunate enough to cross paths with them. However, the pair’s success is short-lived as suspicion begins to grow in the city.

Pegg and Serkis star alongside a host of British stars including Bill Bailey, Stephen Merchant, and an aging Ronnie Corbett in this blacker than black comedy. The slapstick Laurel and Hardy-esque humour of the film combines itself with a graphic violence, which ultimately manifests itself in an unsettling dark humour. Although this violent, deadpan humour is in many places effective, the film always feels somewhat awkward, in that it threatens to overstep the mark of what seems acceptable. Part of me, for instance, still cannot decide whether making the viewer sit through the four minute ‘burking’ (forcible asphyxiation) of an elderly woman is just a bit too much? Needless to say, this is not a comedy for the faint-hearted. Saying this though, where the comedy can be dubious, the script is for the most part punchy and well written. The playful relationship between Pegg and Serkis is often a pleasure to watch. It is only during the final thirty minutes that one can’t help feeling that (not just the script), but the denouement lets the viewer down, playing itself out with the type of cliché that has long come to be expected of Hollywood.

It seems that Burke and Hare is a movie which relies a little too much on its big names rather than its actual content. There is no doubt that the inclusion of Simon Pegg alone will bring many to the cinemas. Although his performance is really very good and the set-pieces of a bustling Victorian Edinburgh are truly impressive, the film lacks a general cohesiveness which makes it seem somewhat rushed and incomplete. I can’t help thinking that the tagline to the movie seems coincidentally appropriate: “They’re making a killing”. No doubt they are in the box office but those expecting the next Shaun of the Dead, or Hot Fuzz should be warned. Despite being rife with cliche Burke and Hare is overall an enjoyable watch, as long as you are content not to expect too much from it.

Post-October Catch-up!

Hey guys!

I've been absent from this blog for far too long. I really mean that. It's been a ridiculous amount of time. Since coming back to university this has become somewhat a secondary.... okay maybe tertiary concern (as it always threatens to). It is only in the last week that an internet connection has actually been established in my house! It's great. And means that unlike last year, I have no reason NOT to be blogging regularly.

In an attempt to make a final leap into student societies (almost too late), I ran for Nouse film editor with my friend Michael. Nouse, for those who don't know is the university's student run newspaper. So I'll also be writing regular film reviews and features. Oh, I also get my own web based blog on the site to review/rant about surreal, weird, underground films. I'm pretty damn excited about that. Anyway, all of my posts for Nouse will eventually be fed through here anyway, so as to make a secondary 'catalogue' of my writing!

Adieu!

p.s. my author page (with very little on it at the moment)
https://www.nouse.co.uk/author/gareth-davies/

Idi I Smotri (Come and See) 1985

Critically acclaimed upon its release, and clocking over 25 million admissions in the Soviet Union alone, is Come and See, the tale of a child soldier, Florya, and his fight for survival in Nazi occupied Belarus. Despite its formidable success at the box office, Come and See is a film which has managed to glide under the radar into relative obscurity. It has, however gained a strong cult following, and for good reasons. Finding that his village and home has been raided, and all its inhabitants, including his family murdered, the young Florya finds himself alone in a desperate struggle for survival. As we follow Florya through war-stricken Belarus we bear witness, on the one hand, to the systematic genocidal activities of the Nazi troops, and on the other, to the misery of displaced communities of starving, homeless, Belarusian civilians. A distressing mask of anguish begins to replace Florya’s once pure and youthful visage. His innocence is stripped from him, revealing to the child a grim and premature knowledge of the horrors of war. Whilst with each successive scene of misery and terror, we share in this knowledge, and our senses are assaulted. Any fleeting glimpses of hope given to the viewer are quickly stolen away from us, presenting a view of war which is unflinching, shocking, traumatic. Horrific as it may be though, the film exudes an eerie and indefinable beauty. Klimov creates an emotional landscape which leaves the viewer so wrought with tension and sorrow that its climax becomes dizzying and euphoric in its intensity. Filmed using live ammunition, and portraying Nazi war crimes with graphic brutality, this film is not for the faint hearted, but those daring enough to sit through it will certainly reap the rewards, being presented with a depiction of war “as Hollywood could never portray it”.

http://www.nouse.co.uk/2010/10/27/come-and-see-1985/

Decadence

'It is the difference between the raw, white and direct light of a midday sun beating down on all things equally, and the horizontal light of evening, firing the strange clouds with reflections . . . Does the setting sun of decadence deserve our contempt and anathema for being less simple in tone than the rising sun of morning?

Theophile Gautier

Beirette

My new baby. £12 in an antique shop. Seems to be working. Loaded a black and white film, and just going to see what happens. I can't stop looking at it though, and carrying it around everywhere with me. It is such a cute little camera! Can't wait to see how these photos come out!

I need to stop buying and using film cameras. It's an expensive hobby.

*Tumbleweed*

Normal service will resume shortly


yrs, Gareth.