What I Was Digging 8/26/24
We're trying something new
Music
I've been trying to get into death and black metal for half a decade now, and after years of it being to absolutely no avail, I'm finally starting to actually enjoy and appreciate it for the first time in my life (I was a metal head in my youth, but it was more alt-metal and metalcore). Blackgaze, sludge, industrial, and hardcore punk have been effective transitions. This album rips.
Notable track: "The Helm and the Bow"
A buoyant electronic odyssey [found via nina].
Film
Brewster McCloud (1970)
Directed by: Robert Altman
Cinematography by: Lamar Boren & Jordan Cronenweth
Country: United States
Young Brewster McCloud lives in the Astrodome in Texas, where he's attempting to build a wingsuit to escape his trapped existence, but when the cops start eyeing him for a series of strangulation bird poo murders, the clock starts ticking.
I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream: The Harlan Ellison Collection
Thoughts:
A real irreverent oddball dark comedy in which Altman is cutting his teeth as one of the U.S.'s most innovative and unpredictable filmmakers of the 1970s, unable to be categorized, constantly erasing the lines of genre or moving them into unseen, often surreal territories. This is a wildly ADD comedy flick that seems to predict the type of random, crass, absurdist, self-reflexive humor favored by Adult Swim and contemporary sketch comedy. Its inability to sit still translates to some choppy pacing, but it's worth watching just for how patently weird it is. Renowned New Hollywood actress Shelley Duvall also makes her first onscreen appearance in Brewster McCloud, and while she isn't mindblowing, the flashes of brilliance are apparent.
Currently reading
-Current short story: "World of the Myth"
What's going on: A three-person spaceship crew just crash-landed on an alien planet, and there may or may not be something in the sand.
Opening lines: "Dragon's breath! Fire split up the night sky; and out of the darkness silence a screaming erupted across the blue-black heavens." [p 74]
The Oxford History of World Cinema
-Current section: "The Silent Film: Cinema and the Avant-Garde"
Rad passage: "The oblique title of Chien andalou asserts its independence and intransigence. Arguably its major film and certainly its most influential, this stray dog of Surrealism was in fact made before its young Spanish director joined the official movement. A razor slicing an eye acts as an emblem for the attack on normative vision and the comfort of the spectator whose surrogate screen-eye is here assaulted. Painterly abstraction is undermined by the objective realism of the static, eye-level camera, while poetic-lyrical film is mocked by furiously dislocated and mismatched cuts which fracture space and time, a post-cubist montage style which questions the certainty of seeing. The film is punctuated by craftily inane intertitles to aim a further blow at the 'silent' cinema, mainstream or avant-garde, by a reduction to absurdity." [p 100]
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