Alcofribas

i've been thinking about this little curtis convo for a few months now but haven't taken the time to really organize my thoughts. i don't intend to dive deep here but i do want to say that i think the "loose with the facts" criticism is quite overblown. i think there is a tendency to privilege a notion of an academic relationship to facts because his movies are "documentaries" which are popularly believed to be a kind of objective, historical medium. i see curtis' project differently. he is using the medium to tell stories, taking this massive archive of bbc footage to tell quite different versions of "reality" than that footage was ever meant to tell. naturally, he has to maintain a certain minimum friendliness to the bbc to be allowed to do this, which i think is reflected in his overall project in certain ways. my own feeling about his work is that he manages to diagnose and incriminate the power structures of the 20th century without ever making them feel like the only reality. the overall feeling at the end of one of his films is not helplessness, cynicism, or the feeling that power is unchangeable. he is able to lay out the massive corruption at the heart of power and the consistent failure of resistance while somehow also creating this mood where you somehow feel that nevertheless, these things actually aren't inescapable conditions of reality and that we can change this. i don't quite know how to describe how he does this. i think part of it is that he has this tendency (for which he is often criticized) of repeating these themes and examples of certain things that he will just leave open-ended. i think part of it is the way he uses musical motifs which create these eery moods over which he speaks in a frank and friendly way. i think part of this is also that he is using these objects of facts (archival footage) in a new way, creating something new from them. all this has an interesting psychological effect imo. i want to be clear i think he has a lot of the facts absolutely right and a lot of the criticisms i've encountered seem overstated and inappropriately academic. he is a popular filmmaker using the bbc to tell what for many viewers are radical stories about global power. to me, it's very cool stuff. the left needs more shit like this, without question. too much leftist art is either liberalism with radical feathers or dull, sanctimonious school lessons. a lot more people are going to become interested in radical thinking, or just possibly look beyond corporate propaganda, if they see movies like this than if they are given das kapital or whatever. i personally quite like his movies, they're thought-provoking, sincere (no idea what was meant by "stolen political posturing" itt), and really pack a lot of interesting history and ideas into an enjoyable, flowing narrative. i also think he's a funny guy. for several years now he's talked about how the age of individualism is an error, how collective movements have been corrupted by it, how the most "radical" thing you could do today is experience and do things without telling the world...and this mofo is out there making 8 hour films where he just riffs his ideas about society and culture. gotta love it

one more thing i have to add about civil war that stuck with me

not so. you can read what he initially said about this here where he claimed he's focused on screenwriting and stepping back from directing "for the foreseeable future" bc it's stressful ("This is the deep sense of responsibility to cast and crew that “literally keeps me awake at night”. He is less burdened by the controversies that have been swirling around Civil War"). here he again clarified he's taking a break and "stressed that his comments have nothing to do with his feelings about how “Civil War” [...] played out." anyway, i thought this movie was a very visceral and engrossing film (some truly excellent action scenes) with almost no substance whatsoever. like many of the trendy movies of our era, we are shown some problematic stuff without any analysis. this is the perfect movie of our time: a film about american civil war with zero politics, a total absence of anything but the most superficial points. there is no explanation, everything just is. i could of course be interested in such an ambivalent movie if it was interesting but i'm afraid this is kind of just a walking dead episode but...politics. in interviews with garland he's said he "wanted to put the press as heroes" of the film, yet the journalist heroes of the film are anything but. we're shown that they want to get to dc "first" to get an exclusive interview with the president (the president has not done an interview in 14 months and their plan is to go to dc and...? just go to the white house? or?). they spend the entire movie driving around, occasionally taking photos (two of the journalists actually don't do any journalism whatsoever, they're just driving around and looking at stuff? journalism must be to witness, privately), and basically doing nothing (dunst almost finishes uploading...something...to...where?). the clips we see of their journalism are just horrifying shots of conflict and death. there's no context for any of this other than "civil war" and there is no justification for why these journalists are special or heroic in any way. they are basically thrill-seeking cynics who are portrayed as having no impact on the situation of the war in any way. they follow fighters, snap a few pics, drive to next location. bc the war is in full effect from the start of the movie, we cannot even know what role the media is playing in the conflict. two random disparaging comments about the new york times and embedded journalism. if anything, i'd think the film is an indictment of journalists as totally aloof and uninvolved, with no sense of their responsibility other than to take photos of war. which is fine i guess but what is the point of this? in the end we are treated to a series of contextless violence with no attempt to analyze how we got here or what we can do to get out of it. so maybe garland is being ironic when he says he wants to make the press heroes bc this contextless barrage of conflict images is everything wrong with the media. we are never told why anything happens, we are never given history, we are never allowed to see who is really responsible, we are presented with a version of reality that is meant to feel inescapable. this is true of both the media and garland's film.

I totally get you, brother. I was just laughing at the degeneracy of decimating urban areas and being like “I’M veGaN” Too few have the courage to condemn Hamas for using feline shields

Don’t even have to talk about “dehumanizing” in this instance bc indiscriminate bombing obviously kills animals. In past conflict the IDF have even targeted zoos. Pathetic!

lmao

Gantz Gramps

lol

the Persistence of Vision thread is archived so i'll just put this here: i was watching some movies today and came across this source for "Camera Eyes" at 13:30

“Siri, increase fuckery of the beats” ”pads must be more emotional, send command”

Perfect Days 10/10

dude he was mad for so long

i couldn't get through a single track. legit bad imo

this one kinda fucks with me. when the first crow movie came out in 94 it lead to my first huge step into new musical worlds. i was 12 years old and i was intensely drawn to nin's rendition of "dead souls" on the crow soundtrack and the downward spiral had just come out and nin was about to explode into fame. this nin album became an obsession and directly lead me to get into artists like mbm, coil, spacetime continuum, aphex. it was a paradigm shift, from childhood to youth. anyway, the crow was this very specific little gem of a movie that moved me in a new way, sort of like an initiation into this new youth where darker themes flourished, angst developed, an aesthetic of suffering and moody musical worlds enveloped me. and of course it had this tragic allure. the comic was born out of the many years of suffering o'barr experienced after losing his girlfriend to a drunk driver. and while the film ought to have been a kind of triumph for him artistically and personally, brandon lee's death on the set just deepened the tragedy. it almost feels impossible it all went down like that, like some kind of inescapable web of suffering. i can't imagine how he must have felt. he created a story born of senseless death and loss where he could seek justice in art, only to be delivered another fateful blow like that. imo it feels senseless to approach this material for another film - what could ever be achieved? the original film is it, lee lost his life making that character. it's singular. and of course, the soundtrack was a crucial part of the story. o'barr was listening to some of the original songs while he was writing the book. he personally reached out to certain artists to ask them to contribute to the film. and the artists were part of the zeitgeist, as well. growing up during this mtv/radio era, this was the music of the time if you were listening to popular "rock" or whatever. these artists were inescapable. they were in our tvs, in our cars, in our walkmen, all around us. there was a sense of a moment, like this is all happening NOW. so it was like, o'barr was listening to all this dark music while writing the crow and then a number of the most prominent artists of the time recorded new versions for the new film being made from this book. some of the og artists he was listening to while making the book made new music for the film and even covered their own songs for him. it was clearly this unique, layered event linking all this art together into something new and unique. when i see this new trailer, it just seems completely senseless. it makes me feel like our culture is so degraded. there is nothing compelling about this remake, no reason for it to exist. throwing post malone or fka twigs into the mix just accentuates its emptiness compared to the original where the music was born from the book's creation. the original experience had depth and relevance. how can this remake do anything like that? it's just gonna be another reboot that can't hold a candle to the original. and our culture is awash with this kind of thing, just worse versions of experiences we've already had. so much endless reproduction, replication. it's maddening. i realize this might come across as old man back in my day type stuff. i will say i do not think the 90s was some pinnacle of pop culture or anything. and i have not seen the original crow in decades so i'm not speaking to its significance as a work of art per se. more as an original pop cultural artwork with layers of comic, film, music. but i absolutely think contemporary culture is really crude and degenerate and this obsession with remakes and rebuying the same "content" that just fils space in a senseless way is quite depressing. i'm sure the new one is great, 10/10

You’ve wolfed out to the album art, that’s all that matters

i'm pretty sure we're over-thinking this release, which i imagine is part of the point he's making. i mean, this is the same guy who made an album called "music is better than pussy" with a nude chick on the cover with speakers covering her breasts and crotch and a microphone between her legs.

booba

our crew came through on this one

i learned about this album on watmm, various people singing its praises in the AOTY 2023 thread.

his use of stereo in this era (~94-95) is very unique. in addition to Ondas, albums like Silver Sound, Semiacoustic Nature, and BASS have really cool stereo production, sometimes with such different things happening in each side of stereo you can listen to the channels independent from each other (the BASS album is the best example of this) . if this is not to your liking he did an entire album in mono in 96 lol. he has such an insanely creative catalogue.

i definitely think the first on these mpu101 releases it the best by far. it's a concise expression of the mpu101 project at it's best but it's diminished returns after that. i think this guy should take some time off of releasing and let something new cook, there isn't 4 albums worth of idea here. "sunset memories" is just "olson"-lite come on now.

IDM or IDW? you decide

uwe on Rogan when?

I think he’s been flirting with a much deeper cultural critique for several years now. He’s been explicit about his loathing of electronic music culture and I think the conformist trends of social media are absorbed into this disdain. But he hasn’t laid it all out, really. Maybe he won’t ever do so since he’s an artist not a social theorist or smth. I don’t conflate what he’s doing with edgelord shit. I think there’s a lot behind the scenes and he’s presented it in a very typical laconic, goofy visual way. The art is for instance perfectly in keeping with Rather Interesting’s aesthetic. I think the times have changed so it has a different feel, though. I’m hoping for more written stuff from him tbh but I don’t necessarily expect it.

I haven’t quite been able to get a feel for his stuff in the past few years. It seems he’s been exploring a very different technological setup recently and everything coming out feels like experiments of this. Just my guess based on some interviews and stuff. Pop HD seems like a good example of what you’re suggesting tho imo Unsubscribe