Songs That Should Be Films #7

As ever, there are songs that are, for me, more cinematic than most cinema I see; that evoke stories and emotions and characters that I want to live on screen somewhere; places I'd rather spend a couple of hours of my life, sitting in the dark, senses, heart and mind alive, fucked up, yearning, celebrating and desiring. 

"The Healing" - Bloc Party
"Born into a Mess" - International Noise Conspiracy
"Lover I Don't Have To Love" - Bright Eyes
"Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" - Public Enemy
"While You Wait For The Others" - Grizzly Bear
"Coattails" - Low
"Trouble Man" - Marvin Gaye
"Breathless" - Nick Cave as sung by Cat Power
"Save Me" - Tea Party
"Güero Canelo" - Calexico
"Rewind" - Nas
"Anthems for a 17 Year Old Girl" - Broken Social Scene
"Christmas in New York" - The Pogues
"Folsom Prison Blues" (obviously!) - Johnny Cash

and, always, always, forever:

"Sweet Thing" - Van Morrison

Because:

And I shall drive my chariot
Down your streets and cry
Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite
And I don't know why

A Touch of Sadness in Her Fingers

Holy hell. I love this song so much. It's the most fragile, epic, powerful and tragic thing. I play it several times a week and never tire of it. I'd write a film about it if I could. I listen to the original Highwaymen version, then the Cat Power version, repeat, repeat, ad infinitum. And, more than anything, I cherish the "with just a touch of sadness in her/his fingers" as one of the greatest song lines ever.

A list, of Sorts

The end of the year is always spilling over with dozens of film, music and literary critics listing their top tens/twenties/fifties/hundreds. These kids have time on their hands and a year full of notes and knowledge with which to create their lists. I only wish that I felt that, in any given year, I had seen enough or read enough or listened to enough to feel like I was anywhere near an authoritative position to foist a list on an unsuspecting overfed public who spend a week over the new year getting drowned with righteous compilations of 'can't believe you never copped this slept on work of genius' type lists.

But, lists, in themselves, like blogs, are basically self-serving affirmations of taste and authority. Having said that, I do always scour the lists of the critics I dig and make little reminders to myself of albums to buy, books to read, films to watch - so there is a little bit of froth with the fat. So, in the interests of self-service, and given my already declared preference for Borgesian lists, here is my overdue list of 'tops' for 2011. It's late, I know, but sheesh, I had waves to catch and sand to conceal in my folds. Many of these things are not necessarily 'of' 2011 (I am still catching up on lists from the mid 2000s). Many were made before. But for me the things below began to exist in 2011 when I got them in my fat little hands and they burnt my eyeballs, or broke my heart, or made me weak, or despair, or inflate, or run.

•

Hail. One of the few things on this list that was actually made in 2011. I wrote about this film already. Directed by local bru' Amiel Courtin-Wilson, in collaboration with a bunch of folks who are equally responsible for the film's creation, this is one of my favourite film things of the year. It is a beautiful, pristine, messy, reckless film that was also made with a spirit of genuine adventure. It is wildly ambitious, mythic, violent, lovelorn and more interesting than the sum of most other local films that came out. 


La Teta Asustada. XXY. Alamar. Madeinusa. Los Viajes Del Viento. El Vuelco del Cangrejo. La Niña Santa. Watched in 2011. This was my year of trying desperately to catch up on the crazy riches of recent Latin American film. I loved each of the listed films - coming from places as varied as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru - for different reasons, but what they have in common is a love for cinema that doesn't resound with the dull thud of cause/effect storytelling, and which allows for the reveling in detail, in atmosphere, in character and in place, for the sheer love, spectacle, wonder, beauty or terror of it. La Teta Asustada by Claudia Llosa and La Niña Santa by Lucrecia Martel, in particular, still haunt me and make me realise that you can keep loving cinema, even as so many national film cultures seem to be intent on beating the life out of it. It makes me proud to be a film nerd because the riches are still there to be mined for unashamed cinephiles.


The Savage Detectives, a novel by Roberto Bolaño. Read in 2011. In mid 2010 I read 2666. This book by Roberto Bolaño blew my mind a thousand times over. I have since read just about everything else he has written (well, at least, most of his novels and some of the poetry... the guy wrote a hell of a lot of stuff!). It is, for me, thrilling to read something that conceals the secrets of the world in all its brutality, and, in an age of lazy writers and dumb artists who proudly profess to ignore the work of those that has come before, it is a wild ride to be immersed in something written by someone who has an intellect and a lyricism that is beyond anything most writers can ever hope to be, touch or know. The Savage Detectives contains, to my mind, more heart and beauty than his other work. Listless and romantic but still full of madness and violence and countries imploding with political chaos. And lots and lots and lots of talk of poets and poetry. 


Pedro Costa's Fontainhas triology - Ossos, In Vanda's Room, Colossal Youth. Watched in 2011. Because it kicks ass, has balls of steel and is bolshy as hell. It doesn't give a fuck about what film should be and is true only to the spirit of the director and his relationship to the place and people he is filming. Amazing, searing. Also, it is pretty hard damned work. And, sometimes, that is a good, honest thing.


Mono. Live at The Forum Theatre. I got to film it... it was amazing. I watched as one young guy dropped his head and wept for minutes and minutes as final chords surged and swelled into a massive roar of feedback. Epic.

Loves of a Blonde by Miloš Forman. Watched in 2011. Made in 1965. Somehow I missed this in my voyages of film nerddom until January of this year. Sexy, funny, bold and brilliant. Wish someone would make a film like this around about now.


Cat Power. Live at the Theatre Royal in Castlemaine. One of the better concerts and weekends of my life. A few months later, we got to show our film 'murundak' and stage a live show at this incredible theatre and I swear it still hummed with the joy and beauty of that night. Cat Power is what a musician should be. Breakable, soulful, brilliant, batshit crazy and beautiful as hell. Like a star. An actual star. Not some paperweight face/talent with nice skin and no ballast.

Encounter - Essays by Milan Kundera. Incredible. In particular, Kundera's essay The Painter's Brutal Gesture - On Francis Bacon was my piece of writing for the year, although it had been published in other forms before. More on this essay in a post to come about humiliation and performance (don't be scared). I can think of very few pieces of writing that have taken me apart from the very first passages. This is an amazing exploration of a painter I love by a writer I love. Neither emerge unscathed by this messy confessional essay that is equal parts brutal and beautiful.

Jersey Shore seasons 1-3. Watched in 2011. Yes. Screw you all. I loved it. I am not much of a reality TV guy, but if I am going to watch people humiliate themselves, I want them to be kids who embody more contradictions than seems possible. Family values co-existing with complete emotional apocalypse. If I have to watch housemates get into fistfights over loyalty and lies, I want to see them then sit down to a Sunday roast and tell each other how much they love and care for the other. I saw more genuine human drama and learned more about the human condition (I. Am. Serious.) in this car-wreck of a show than in ninety percent of the films I saw this year. Plus, they all get paid a mint, so I don't feel so horrible about the wildly exploitative nature of the show. My appreciation for this is not ironic or token, by the way. I really do love it in a life-deprived art guy kinda way.


Wuthering Heights. Andrea Arnold destroys all with her new film. I had only just seen Fish Tank, which is even higher on my list, a few months earlier, so I was floored by this brutal, witheringly harsh and impossibly beautiful period re-telling of the canonical tale in a taut, 4:3 frame. I watched this in a stunning cinema in Valladolid and walked out a different person. Love and class war are both infinitely brutal.


Crazy, Stupid Love. Romantic comedies are the vicar's nuts. Or whatever the expression is. I love them. When they're good. When they suck, they actually steal a little piece of your soul and deposit it inside Katherine Heigl's soiled smalls for her underpaid housekeeper to launder. I loved this film. Sure, I was hungover as hell when I watched it, but it's a) funny, b) charming, c) big-hearted and d) cynical as hell. People seem to have forgotten that for a romantic comedy to work, it has to be cynical and it has to be charming. The leads have to have charisma (note to Australian rom-com directors) and the romance has to flail with futility in the face of the overwhelming impossibility of love. We know the relationships are never gonna last until after the final credits so it was kinda lovely to see the filmmakers pre-empt that.

So, now, confessions. I basically didn't see any of the other films that made people's top tens. I seem to have managed to go 12 months without seeing just about anything new. La Quattro Volte, Tree of Life, Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene? Haven't seem 'em yet. Le Havre, Turin Horse, Certified Copy, Drive, Beginners. Nup. So, take this all with a massive mound of salt. And as for new books, forget it. But I did finally read Anna Karenina this year and it blew my mind. And Levin, man, did he lead me down a merry path of Marxist disillusionment, heartbreak and failed ambition. Thanks for reading. This self service is now complete.

Love Letter

Dear Middle Aged Couple Kissing On The Park Bench,

thank you for making out like lusty teenagers, legs entwined and hooked over each other. As I rode past on my way home, I felt like everything was right in the world.

Dear Tash and Amiel,

thanks for getting stupidly drunk with me last night and talking about the joy of those films that feel like they are about to fall apart with urgency; that have a heart visible and beating in them, and which have not had all traces of intuition, dreams and mystery beaten out of them by the forensic rationalising of script doctors. It was great, although my sweat smells like Romanian moonshine.

Dear Carlos Reygadas,

thank you for your austerity and rigour, for your ability to create violence from stillness, and for your explosions of visceral humanism, sexual transgression and hybrid bodies at rest and motion. I love you, man, and I think about your films all the time. Thanks also for these sane words:

 "We are all naked when we go to the shower. At least twice or three times a day we are naked. And most of us have sex, once a week or more. It's a thing that occurs often. But it's not represented ever on film. So the normal thing to do would be to ask every other director why they don't have sex in their film and not ask me about it. I am the only normal one."

Dear Justin Timberlake,

thanks for 'Señorita'. It is the greatest single song to select in a closed booth Karaoke session.

Dear Roberto Bolaño,

thanks for writing "Prosa del otoño en Verona". It is sublime, like just about every damned thing you write. I scribbled a dozen pages of swirling, poorly formed prose, inspired like a lovelorn high school poet, after the thrill of reading those few sparse pages.

Dear Cat Power,

thank you for covering 'Silver Stallion'.

Dear Salvador Dali,

thanks for painting this beautiful and strange self portrait and for all those mysterious, labyrinthine sketches that you created years before you painted all that other bloated shit that people go crazy for.

Dear Patricia Clarkson,

you really are great.

Dear Eldest Brother,

thanks for taking it upon yourself to fix my bike on the weekend. To grease the chain, tighten the brake lines, fix the seat and do all the man-shaped things that I refused to do while sitting in front of a random Spanish-themed bar staring at my hands and wondering when a finished film would magically appear in them.

Dear Friends, 

who came across me while sitting in front of a random Spanish-themed bar staring at my hands and wondering when a finished film would magically appear in them. Thanks for coming along when you did, sitting with me, having a drink and talking about weird sexual proclivities. It was getting embarrassing.

Dear Bruce Davidson, Mary Ellen Mark, Abbas, Laura El-Tanawy, Maya Goded, Patrick Zachmann, Jacob Aue Sobol, Joseph Szabo, Jim Goldberg, Jason Nocito, Rachael Cassells, Stuart Franklin et al.

thank you for taking the photographs that I look at most days. They are an epic film of lost love, madness, dawn light, tenderness and burnt fingers that spirals through my mind from one week to the next.

Dear Magaly Solier,

thanks for haunting the recesses of my mind with your strange, piercing eyes and otherworldly presence.

Dear Internet,

thanks for giving me Drunk History, Rick Ross music videos, pictures of giraffes in akward poses, explorations of weird sexual proclivities, PDFs of anarchist treatises and endless videos of cats falling off ledges and people landing on their face. It makes the days and nights float past like a dream. It also allows small moments of transcendental confluence like that which came to pass this morning when I looked at the blog - http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com - and then hours later read of the passing of Kim Jong-Il.

Dear  David Alan Harvey,

thanks for taking this photograph. It hides a special kind of bliss that never ceases to ruin me.

And finally, Dear Carlos Reygadas, 

I forgot to also thank you for reminding us that:

"Everything is touched with absolute grace and disgrace."

Girls and Cigarettes #5

Songs that should be films #1

"Skeletons" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
"The Summer Ends" - American Football
"Shark Fin Blues" - The Drones
"Silver Stallion" - Cat Power (after The Highwaymen)
"A Little Soul" - Pulp
"Fairytale of New York" - The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl
"Rhine and Courtesan" - Rachel's
"One More Night (Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead)" - Stars

A single song

I'm in a state of perpetual awe and wonder when it comes to music and musicians. You would think it would be easier to learn to play an instrument than try and be a filmmaker but, for me, the attempt to make films is an attempt to get as close as possible to what I imagine - naively? - to be the purity at the heart of music. I don't seem to hear lyrics as easily as many people do and so songs as stories are not as powerful for me as others. But I do love the rhythm, swagger or strut of music and, at it's best, the rhythms of cinema, through editing, performance style, dialogue or movement, hits these rhythms and struts in the same way. Yet, also, like good cinema, a song suspends time, stops that shitty urgent acceleration of life, for a handful of heartbeats and lets you feel stillness in a way that, I think, most closely approximates the immensity of nature. For this reason, I find myself either lured into music that is, in itself, stillness, or music that is so chaotic and urgent that it also stops time in it's midst. One decelerates, the other accelerates, but both take you out of the actual rhythm of life.

One song I return to again and again for deceleration is the song 'Cruiser' by Red House Painters. I've written a scene around this song in one of the films I am labouring away on as the first moment between two lovers unfolds around the duration of the song (8 mins). It is really just one chord progression played over and over (and over) while Mark Kozelek mournfully sings over it, but something about this song is so profoundly cinematic in the way it gently, repetitively, eases you into a dreamstate of narrative. Likewise, the song 'The Way' by Bonnie Prince Billy or any of the late 90s tracks by the Perth band Blue Tile Lounge. There is a gentle violence to these songs that simmers like any good film narrative. They all make me hungry for cinema. And strangely, in the same way, Cat Power's cover of The Highwaymen's 'Silver Stallion' just makes me want to make moofies so bad it hurts.

On the other hand, there is the jagged lilt of songs like 'Pentagram Ring' by Chavez or 'Do You Like Me' by Fugazi or the stupidly youthful joy/melancholy of songs like 'Cute Without The 'E' (Cut From The Team)' by Taking Back Sunday, 'Travel by Telephone' by Rival Schools or 'Not Turning Off' by Spoon. These songs make you want to run with any bolt of energy you can grab hold of... So rarely do you find a similar thing in film - perhaps the aforementioned 'Head On' by Fatih Akin - in which the loud/quiet/loud of these songs and the same pulse-quickening abrasive impulse is translated into cinema.

A band who decelerates through abrasion is My Disco. In my mind, I have an entire film set to their album 'Paradise'. Song by song. I don't quite think it is the kind of film I will be able to get up any time soon, however, so it is sitting very firmly on the backburner.

In the meantime, as I work on the script with 'Cruiser' at it's heart, I can only hope the band will ultimately let me use it in the flick.

A piece of dialogue currently in the script (who knows where it will end up) goes like this:

TOBY
What? Is it a Scottish song?

Shona laughs and shakes her head. She presses play. A slow, plaintive song begins to play. Toby looks at her and adjusts the headphones. He bows his head and listens intently. Shona watches him. A man’s mournful voice sings out in Toby’s ears.

SONG
“Purple nights and yellow days
Neon signs and silver lakes
LA took a part of me
LA gave this gift to me...”

Toby looks up at her.

TOBY
(perplexed)
S'about LA?

MAGGIE
Singers never sing about what they seem
to be singing about. And this song, though
he would have never knew it, is all about
me. Listen...