Xan Cassavetes: 'Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession' (2004)

Xan Cassavetes: Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004). 

This is an alluring documentary that dives back into the 1970s and 1980s, beginning as an origin story and ending with the collapse of Los Angeles-based Z Channel (1974-1989), after a murder-suicide perpetrated by its talented, mentally ill main programmer, Jerry Harvey (1949-1988).

Subscription TV (now streaming, too) began in earnest with the likes of Home Box Office (HBO) in 1972, The Green Channel in 1973 -- which morphed into The Movie Channel (TMC) in 1979 -- and Z Channel. The latter included an influential sampling of international movies with subtitles, director's cuts, B movies and independent films. 

Z Channel had a profound impact on its market, especially among directors, writers, and other "creatives." Xan Cassavetes gives us a taste of representatives from this class, ranging from Penelope Spheeris to Jim Jarmusch. 

When a cool movie or director was featured on Z Channel, this was an event that could be shared in "real time," not just recorded for later, or plucked out of the ethersphere at will, or binge-watched down the pike.  

We may well wonder about delivery and recording systems now vs. then, and now vs. in the future. In those years, battle was also joined globally in the videotaping field between Sony's Betamax (Beta) and JVC's Video Home System (VHS) tapes, with Beta starting in 1975, VHS in 1976, and both lines ceasing production only in 2016.

Digital services now available dwarf what was around in the 1970s. All you need is money, access and time!

In 1975, the global human population was about 4.079 billion, 38% of it urbanized. As of 2018, it has already jumped to 7.633 billion, with 55% urbanized. What do you suppose those numbers will be in 2060?  Imagine the delivery systems forty-two years from now, when handheld devices, streaming services, driverless cars and delivery drones are old hat?  

Today's Rune: Movement.  

Robert M. Young: '¡Alambrista!' (1977, 2004, 2012)

Robert M. Young's ¡Alambrista! ["tightrope walker" aka "The Illegal"] (1977, 2004, 2012), originally shot on a shoestring budget and later re-edited by the director, follows young and inexperienced Alberto (Domingo Ambriz) as he crosses into the USA from Mexico, seeking work in order to help provide for his wife and new child back home. His adventures, sometimes humorous, are more often harrowing, for all the while he is being hunted.

¡Alambrista! is similar to Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette / Bicycle Thieves (1948), but the issues at hand are more open-ended. 

Very little, it seems, has changed in the American desire for migrant labor as of the early 21st century, nor in rough, chaotic conditions for those who are able to make the initial crossing to fill demand.  

"Much like the Italian neorealists, Young discovered the effectiveness of using documentary techniques to tell fictional stories. But the Italians—De Sica, Rossellini, and Visconti, for instance—were experienced narrative filmmakers who appropriated documentary techniques to lend a sense of authenticity and immediacy to their contemporary tales of ordinary people. Young was coming from the opposite end of the filmmaking spectrum.

Steeped in the documentary tradition of journalistic objectivity, he wrestled with a paradox then slowly dawning on him: fiction could be truer than reportage."  

~ Charles Ramírez Berg, "¡Alambrista!: Inside the Undocumented Experience," The Criterion Collection (2012). Here's a link to Berg's full essay.

Another great film, proving yet again that a big budget is not necessary to make effective movies.

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.   

Alaa Al Aswany: 'The Yacoubian Building' (2004)

Allaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2004. Originally published in 2002 as 'Imarat Ya'qubyan.

Egypt is in "the news" every single day, usually a piece about some violent incident presented with little context. The Yacoubian Building goes a long way in providing a better context to understand what's going on -- historically and socially. (It was, by the way, an international best-seller and has been made into a movie and TV series.) 

The novel's interweaving plot is cleverly constructed around a building in Cairo financed by an Armenian and completed in 1937 (eighty years ago), giving Aswany, a dentist originally, a literal architectural framework with which to consider changes in time, socio-economic structure, and individual arcs. 

Egyptian society (the "present" being mostly during the Gulf War, 1990-1991) is depicted as corrupt and rough, with huge disparities between the super-rich and powerful and the vast majority of Egyptians. It is a police state with some freedoms, but not many. There is an Islamist alternative that is pitted against the generally Islamic status quo, providing a tight, competing structure for the down and out.

The rich use their power to get their way with luxuries, people and property. The military and police enforce the status quo, using violent suppressive force, including torture and intimidation. Islamist militants counter in kind. 

Even though it's now 2017, the basic dynamic of Egypt today seems about the same as when The Yacoubian Building first came out, despite the fifteen intervening years of upheaval.

One thing has changed, adding more pressure to all systems. If in 1991 Egypt had a population of about 59 million people, as of this post, it has risen to 98 million! Median age in Egypt is about 25 years old. By comparison, the median age in the USA is about 38. Think about the implications.

Another interesting facet: Egypt is socially conservative by layers. The dominant society looks askance at alcohol, recreational sex, etcetera, and Islamists are even stricter and more Puritanical. The layered culture is riddled with hypocrisy and most "non-conformist" activities continue, albeit often in a distorted way, underground, in the shadows or under cover of the night. The richest and most conservative are, not surprisingly, usually among the biggest hypocrites. Within this framework, what hope for the average person?

Curious about modern Egypt? Check it out!

Today's Rune: Strength. 

'Thérèse: The Story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux' (2004)

Thérèse: The Story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (2004): directed by Leonardo Defilippis. I am hoping to see the critically acclaimed 1986 French language film directed by Alain Cavalier that's also called Thérèse, but in the meantime, I enjoyed this English language biopic that seems to have come in mostly under the radar.

Thérèse is a sweet, straightforward movie. The most interesting thing to me is seeing how Marie Françoise-Thérèse Martin (1873-1897) -- Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, The Little Flower -- made her way within the Martin family system, and within the Barefoot Carmelites order of nuns. Her parents were serious Catholics. They had nine children, four of whom died in infancy or at a very young age. Thérèse's mother died when she was four years old. All four of her remaining siblings became nuns. Thérèse herself died of consumption / tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. From the perspective of the Twenty-first century, the whole arc of the story is astonishing to me. I really like this movie version.

Today's Rune:  Wholeness. 

Monique Truong's 'The Book of Salt:' Take Two

Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003, 2004): a few pinches more.

“’I left Vietnam when I was twenty-two,’” said the man whose eyes were again back on the Seine. ‘I haven’t been back since.’ His voice trailed off, his words taking a quiet leap into the water below" (pages 91-92).  

Exile. Hasn't been back since. Because he can't, because of the danger or expense, or because he chooses not to? Questions for all exiles, expatriates, refugees and immigrants. In this case, the scene is from a bridge over the River Seine in Paris. 

“'He will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world'” (page 99). Sounds like a good idea to me.

“Men, believe me, are fragile in unexpected ways. Weak is another way of putting it” (page 125). 

“She is French, after all. Madame is a snob but not a prude” (page 132). 

“They promised her the words to an opera and the history of everyone who has ever lived” (page 181). 

“. . . the first thing Miss Toklas asked me was whether I had a recipe for gazpacho.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you learn it in Spain?’

‘No.’

‘Then it is best to forget it.’

‘Oh'" (page 211). 

Today's Rune: Signals.

Monique Truong's 'The Book of Salt:' Take One

Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003, 2004) takes her readers into the 1920s and 1930s milieu of French Indochina (Indochine française) and France through the eyes of a gay Vietnamese cook working in three spheres: the Governor-General's house, on board ocean-crossing ships, and in the service of two Americans-in-France -- Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. A novel that is both absorbing and consciousness-raising, The Book of Salt delivers.

Truong writes in vivid detail of both food and social relationships. We see Binh's family system (particularly his place in relation to his father, mother, and brother Minh), Binh's friendships with fellow travelers, and his arc of time working for the intense and fussy Stein and Toklas.  

Several characters tell stories, usually short ones, throughout the novel, with Binh commenting upon their style and manner. "That, for Bão, was of course the whole point of telling the basket weaver’s story. No matter who else may be present, Bão was the hero in all of his stories" (page 56). Don't we all know storytellers who put themselves in the starring role as hero?

Binh enjoyed, as a kid, his mother's creativity in storytelling; her tales rarely remained the same over time:  “While my mother’s hands followed a set routine, her stories never did. They were free to roam, to consider alternative routes, to invent their own ways home, especially in the retelling" (page 81). And: "For my mother and me, the story of Father Augustine was like any other, a thing to be repeated and retold. A story, after all, is best when shared, a gift in the truest sense of the word" (page 165). The Book of Salt is such a gift. 

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Andrew Dalby's 'Bacchus: A Biography' (2003)

While still slowly going through a hefty book on Mary and her many manifestations, I finished two nifty books by Andrew Dalby, one on Venus / Aphrodite here and here, and one on Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus: Bacchus: A Biography (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004). There's intertwining of content in all three. An important shared element is wine.  

Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus has a rich life story throughout the Mediterranean regions that is depicted widely in art and text. Dalby shows how the Macedonians took this mythology with them through the Middle East and all the way to India, breathing new wine into old wineskin, as it were. 

The origins of Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus proceed backward from the present through artists, poets, philosophers, dramatists and various other types of writers, through the Romans and Greeks to at least 3200 years ago -- probably further back than that. 

What is the origin of Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus? As Dalby succinctly puts it: "You can try to find the original story, but there is no original story." (Bacchus: A Biography, p. 146). That's daunting, haunting, mysterious -- and cool. 

The mythology of Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus was well-known to early Christians, and to observant later Christians, too.  One of the more interesting connections is through "The Marriage of Cana" in the Bible (Book of John 2: lines 1-11). This scene is discussed in the Mary book, too, because Mary inspires the action. When the wedding party runs out of wine, Mary makes note of it, and Jesus performs the miracle of turning water into wine.

Which makes me wonder how some later Christian sects could ever justify their rejection of wine or any other spirits in their formal gatherings or even at home. Jesus didn't turn wine into water, he turned water into wine. But these eccentric sects reject drinking completely. For instance, the Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints); Methodists (traditionally); Southern Baptists; "Dunkers" (at least the Dunker from Maryland I once knew); Seventh-day Adventists (Ben Carson is a member, and Mitt Romney is a Mormon); certain Evangelicals; and so on. 

Islam is against wine and spirits in principle, although Sufis and various artist and mystic types have demonstrated different interpretations that allow and celebrate it. 

Finally, Jains and Sikhs shun wine and all spirits. 

Personally, I can't become too excited about any religion or sect that shuns wine or its alternatives, nor would I want to join them -- any of them.  

And so, back to Bacchus / Dionysos / Dionysus: a salute, with wine, is in the offing. 

Today's Rune: Joy.      

The Essence of Sufism

John Baldock's Essence of Sufism (Edison, New Jersey: Chartwell Books, 2004) is a primer on Sufi mysticism that includes historical context and discussions of Sufi texts and ideas under the general umbrella of Islam. Sufism is of interest to various seekers and poets, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. 

Rather than summarize, I'll roll out examples.

"All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop" ~ (page 77) ~ Kabir of India, circa 1140-1518.

At another point, the Persian Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur (or Farīd ud-Dīn Attar, circa 1145-1220 A.D.) describes a question and answer session with Rabi'ah al-Basri (of Basra, Iraq, circa 715-800 A.D.), one of many Sufi mystics who were (and are) women. 

Rabi'ah is asked over several lines (to adopt the Joyce Carol Oates title), where are you going, where have you been?

She states that she has come from and will go to "the other world."

'"Then what are you doing in this world?'

'I am making a game of it.'" (page 94). 

Pictured Here: the cover of a version of Farīd ud-Dīn Attar's The Conference of the Birds (1177 A.D.). I love the images and have often imagined a "Court of the Birds." Baldock notes that Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1342-1400 A.D.) wrote a somewhat comparable, if much shorter, poem sometimes named "The Parliament of Birds" and "The Parlement of Foules," circa 1382.

Later, Baldock gives us these lines: "[T]hey have become a mirror in which nothing is seen but the reflection of another . . . They are a mirror in which all we see is an image of ourselves" (page 110). 

Paraphrasing the Persian Sufi Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273 A.D.):

"If you are a traveller, it's best to take counsel with fellow travellers rather than stay-at-homes" (page 190).

This barely touches the surface of The Essence of Sufism, let alone the full range of the mystical Sufi worldview. But it's better than a stick in the eye, I hope! 

Later, perhaps, something about Fatima of Nishapur and Nunah Fatima bint ibn al-Muthanna, i.e. Fátima de Córdoba, among others ~ ranging from India to Persia to Iraq to North Africa to Spain ~ and more in between ~ and without ~ and within. 

Today's Rune: Fertility. 

Pedro Almodóvar: La mala educación / Bad Education (2004)

The plot structure of Pedro Almodóvar's La mala educación / Bad Education (2004) is tricky, including a film within a film based on a story that is based on actual (or are they fictional?) events. The film-within-a-film trope doesn't always work very well, but Almodóvar is good at it. The story-within-a-story based on another story allows time travel, promoting occasional disorientation as to what makes a person a person, while asking: what makes people change in time? Or do people change? That's ultimately the complex gist of persona and identity. These insistent questions are themes constantly explored by Almodóvar.   

If  a picture is worth a thousand words, what's this one saying?

Closeup of Diego Velázquez' Las Meninas (1656), on display in Madrid's Prado. This painting is very similar to what Almodóvar is doing on film.  

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Michael Winterbottom: Nine Songs

Michael Winerbottom has made a variety of films, experimenting as he goes. One of my favorites of his remains 24 Hour Party People (2002), both for its wit and recreation of the Manchester music scene beginning with a visit by the Sex Pistols in 1976 and starring Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson; a lot of that one revolves around Joy Division and New Order.

Winterbottom's Nine Songs (2004) is a more stripped-down film -- literally and figuratively -- about a man and a woman who "see" each other in London, spend a lot of time at his flat, and see a lot of live music (quite a bit of it at Brixton Academy). Sex, drugs and rock and roll, more or less. Told from Englishman Matt's (Kieran O'Brien) point of view, the film is intercut with brief scenes from his later working life in Antarctica. His American paramour Lisa (North Carolina-born Margo Stilley) comes and goes as she wishes, while his attachment to her seems to grow. Dialogue is sparse, leaving the audience to connect the dots about their larger lives.

Upon its release, 9 Songs was the most sexually frank British movie ever shown on the big screen (outside of "blue" theatres, I suppose).  In context, you can see it as the culmination of an arc that begins with the controversial reception of Louis Malle's  Les Amants / The Lovers (1958), proceeds through Bernardo Bertolucci's Ultimo tango a Parigi / Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Wayne Wang's The Center of the World (2001) and arrives at 9 Songs.

Today's Rune: Signals. p.s. music by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and others is cool for context.
 

Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

This will be the last post inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique (2004) -- for now.

In panning for more gold, another found nugget is Jean Racine's Phèdre (1677). This connects to contemplation of suicide by a main character in Godard's film. "Suicide is the only truly serious philosophical problem" - derived from a statement by Albert Camus (1913-1960): "Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c'est le suicide" -- from Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) / The Myth of Sisyphus (1955). And then there's this eerie announcement: “Tonight I will be in heaven.”

Claude Lefort (1924-2010), a social-political theorist like Hannah Arendt, also pops up. Lefort wrote about, among other topics, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), the butt of many pot jokes in American high school classes. I'm not sure if this is from Lefort, but around this time in Notre Musique, the following statement is made: "The life of man is but a battle for existence with being vanquished the only certainty . . .”  How will each person conduct that battle in the meantime?

Finally, there's Palestinian poet-writer Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), born in Palestine, died in Texas. Given his arc, the title Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003) makes perfect sense. Displaced, exiled, with no hope of return, in Notre Musique, he speaks of being a Poet of Troy, the city overrun near the end of the Trojan War. The thorny Palestinian-Israeli relationship has been at the heart of many a Middle Eastern dilemma for as long as I can remember, with no out in sight. 

  















Mahmoud Darwish discussing poetry and life in Bosnia links to the arrival of American Indians (aka Native Americans) at the Mostar Bridge, pointing to a feeling of similar displacements in North America. It could be that reconstruction of the bridge after the Bosnian War will parallel reconstruction and reconciliation for "First Nations" here in the 21st century.

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).
 

Street of No Return

In connecting more of the dots observed throughout Jean-Luc Godard's conciousness-raising Notre Musique (2004), the coherence of content in the film becomes increasingly evident. There's Janus again. A Jewish character is compared to Hannah Arendt -- Arendt (1906-1975), the Jewish social theorist who left Germany during the rise of the Nazi menace, then left Vichy France, resettled in the USA and after the Second World War, became a US citizen. Arendt wrote many books dealing with human relationships within the framework of a larger society that out of necessity included politics. From Between Past and Future (1961, 1968): "Humans . . . must permanently think to exist, and each [individual person] is required to learn thinking."

I remember while in graduate school at Temple University in Philadelphia twenty years ago, playing chess with Café Diva owner and "serial entrepreneur" Nga Mai  -- who was born in Vietnam during the US-Vietnam War -- discussing Hannah Arendt for the first time. It makes even more sense now than it did then.

Arendt's The Human Condition was first published in 1958. It focuses on ancient Greek social and philosophical concepts and contrasts their mind-body-society balance to the way of the modern world.

In the Paradise section of Notre Musique, someone reads David Goodis' Sans espir du retour (literally "Without Hope of Return"). Goodis (1917-1967), another graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, wrote a slew of noir novels, several that have been adapted into movies. Titles include: Retreat from Oblivion (1937), Street of the Lost (1952), Street of No Return (1954) and Dark Passage (1946). Not coincidentally for the purposes of Godard's film, Goodis, like Arendt, was Jewish.

Today's Rune: Gateway.

Of What Do You Dream?

Here are four more images, people and texts touched upon in Jean-Luc Godard's conciousness-raising film Notre Musique (2004). The Cuban poet-writer José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), author of Paradiso (1966) and "Muerte de Narciso" / "Death of Narcissus" (1937).

Notre Musique / Our Music is divided into three simple divisions: Hell (War), Purgatory (Life Between Wars) and Paradise.

The Roman God Janus looks both to the past and the future. Janus Films preserves past movies for the future, often coordinating efforts with the Criterion Collection. In Notre Musique, Godard speaks of camera images and reverse images, angles and reverse angles. It's also noted that in a lexicon prior to ancient Sumer, the word for After = Past and for Before = Future. In a dreamy observation of social reconcilation/paradise, “It is like an image but a distant one. It must be far from here or later on."

The ghost of André Malraux weaves its way more than once through Notre Musique. From the Malraux book  La Tete d'obsidienne  / Picasso's Mask (1974) comes Picasso's story of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes. When Bernadette was asked by Catholic authorities how the image of Mary appeared to her, she came to an icon of Our Lady of Cambrai.

As artists, Picasso (and Malraux) interpreted Bernadette's choice as affirmation of something transcendent -- the evident presence of divine energy. The iconic image of Notre Dame de Grâce / Our Lady of Cambrai counters the hellish energies of war, providing a real alternative to violence in the way of love and compassion. For cigar-smoking free thinker Godard, that's a sweet dream, indeed.  

Today's Rune: Signals.    

Behind Every Word is Another Word

Still thinking about Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique (2004). The film, set in and around Sarajevo and Mostar less than a decade after the Bosnian War ended, embeds the equivalent of a blizzard of hyperlinks in many directions. There's enough to keep one making connections and musing for quite a little while.

Godard delves into numerous (somehow) interconnected topics and themes. These include war (Hell), with specific examples drawn from Homer and Euripides (the Trojan War), plus the American Civil War and just about anything you can imagine from the 20th century.

In one scene, Godard (as Godard) shows students in Sarajevo a projection of a photograph depicting urban ruins. He asks if anyone can identify the geographic or temporal location of this destruction. Some try. Stalingrad? Sarajevo? No, Godard says. Richmond, Virginia, 1865.

  

Godard is in a taxi cab, answering someone's question from offscreen: "Humane people don’t start revolutions. They start libraries." Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo (b. 1931), accompanying him, quips: ". . . and cemeteries." The source for this banter? A novel by Andre Malraux set during the Spanish Civil War, L'Espoir (aka Hope, The Hope, Man's Hope, Days of Hope, first published in 1937).

Godard: As our age has endless destructive force,
it . . . needs a revolution of a comparable creative force that reinforces memory, clarifies dreams and gives substance to images.

Which is exactly what Godard is hoping to underscore through the entirety of Notre Musique. 

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Had A Dream Last Night

I. I had a dream last Saturday night. Really it was early Sunday, after the time change, when the clocks rolled forward two hours. And it was one of several dreams, no doubt, but the clearest of them all, a particular one that stuck in mind.

I dreamt about a poem. Each word was formed with large letters. Each word was perched on top of its own boldly colored folder. Each folder contained corresponding words in many languages and alternate words in all languages. This was quite visual, though how the actual poem read I could not tell you.

II. I seem to remember dreams more vividly after watching films in other languages. Have you ever tried it? Has this happened to you?

III. The Godard film Notre Musique had a direct imagist impact on "the poem" dream. Or put another way, certain apsects of the film seem to have inspired its main elements.

In Notre Musique, there is a tracking shot of several international multilingual newspapers stacked in tidy, uniform piles, for instance. And various people speak in various languages, some that are subtitled and some that are not.

In sum, these languages range from ones I'm somewhat familiar with to ones I have no clue about, ones meaning about as much to me in their incomprehensibility as speaking in tongues. French, English and Spanish in one ear, Hebrew, Arabic and Serbo-Croatian in the other. Many texts crossing my field of vision in blinks of an eye. 

And there you have it: vivid dream, demanding and strange dream source. The mind-imagination at work, creating and recreating patterns. 

Today's Rune: Ferility.