Cartography

Three thoughts from my personal cartographer Roberto Bolaño​ to guide me through the wilderness.

One. 

“While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.” 

Two.

“Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.” 

Three.

“What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.” 

Intelligence #2

Cinema in this country is dumbing down. Novels in this country, with some notable exceptions, are dumbing down. Music, strangely, is doing the opposite and is becoming more intelligent and mysterious and sophisticated and the evidence is profound, that audiences are responding as they cherish and obsess and curate and promote Australian musicians who, in turn, are becoming world beaters. I'm no musician. I write imitative prose. I write screenplays. And I die to make films. So, my reminder is always to avoid the dumb shit (which I do with marginal success) and watch and listen and read those who are dizzying in their intellect and skill and ambition.

The smart ones. The crazy ones. The inventive ones. I want them to drag me along in their wake and confuse me and make me feel like I am speaking another language and that I urgently need to study and learn that beautiful, mysterious language with which they are speaking and laughing and singing.

A writer like Roberto Bolaño does that to me. I read his words and reel at the intelligence and fire and wit and aggression. Yet I also know I am in the hands of someone who is trying to nurture me with the brilliance of their own insight and knowledge. Something the rest of us can only dream of and, more importantly, aspire to. Filmmakers like Claire Denis and Nuri Bilge Ceylan do that to me. The mystery of their images, rhythms and narratives makes me surrender my laziness in listening and open my senses, pores and unconscious to another way of seeing.

These are celebrated names yet a wise filmmaker in Australia never mentions names like these when looking for support or financing. A wise filmmaker mentions the populists or the pragmatic ideologues. But why? Populism has become a violent dogma in our art and politics. Yet populism, having conservatism at it's core, diminishes us. Stories, art, words (as with dance and song) have sustained us since forever with their ability to guide us and provide us with transcendence. Yet, they are not expected to be a fleeting experience. With mystery and intelligence and riddles within riddles at their core, they are designed to be retold, reread, reviewed, rethought over and over. The populists demand neatness, explicitness, resolution, clarity. All things which allow us to watch, forget and never learn. Why? Because the populists live off the culture of consumption. A film is just another product. Why are so many filmmakers now straddling advertising and filmmaking. Yes, you make a living. But it's more sinister than that. The filmmakers are no longer having to disappear into bravery, audacity and adventure. They no longer bring stories back from the brink. They sell us stories already told. And, for me, I could care less. Our films now sells us values just as ads sell us products. The films I watch that sell the inflated myth of Australian hypermasculinity or anglo mateship or feminine romanticism are just as much bullshit and fiction as an ad that sells me a deodorant the use of which will wash me like an ocean wave.

It's not that I wasn't made for these times. I don't harken back to any glory days of cinema, as much as I might cherish films of those eras. I am more excited by the speed with which words, images, rhythms, wit and intelligence are used, recycled and reused in contemporary times. Yet, the populist dogmatics (most easily identified as those who can recite certain books of 'how to write a screenplay' but also disguised in the form of many more apparently forward thinking filmmakers with a dark heart of fear of failure or commercial (!) irrelevance lurking beneath the skin) don't see the sinister and retrogressive conservatism that lies at the heart of their desire to push a 'way of telling'. They don't see that this anti-intellectualism, this fear of the new, is just as phony and dangerous as that espoused by the maniac conservatives running our country. There should no longer be a way of telling. These should be set free. The dogmatics talk lies. They are nostalgics afraid to let stories embody the recklessness and progressiveness of youth, the intelligence of the young women and men beating down the doors of the ways we speak and think and the implicit violence that lies at their heart. They should be run out of the institutions and off the film sets. Let them face the insecurity of those others who have no choice but to find a new way to speak because, outside of the institutions and off the sets, the language of life is changing and accelerating all the time. All the time.

Intelligence #1

reblog from Biblioklept

Time Unfolds Us: Palenque. Day.

"Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving.” 

Roberto Bolaño, Amulet

Time Unfolds Us: Bolaño

“I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion.” 

Roberto Bolaño

Courage

So what did Amalfitano's students learn? They learned to recite aloud. They memorised two or three poems they loved most in order to remember them and recite them at the proper times: funerals, weddings, moments of solitude. They learned that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing. That when books were read, writers were released from the souls of stones, which is where they went to live after they died, and they moved into the souls of readers as if into a soft prison cell, a cell that later swelled or burst. That all writing systems are frauds. That true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune and that the grand highway of selfless acts, of the elegance of eyes and the fate of Marcabrú, passes near its abode. That the main lesson of literature was courage, a rare courage like a stone well in the middle of a lake district, like a whirlwind and a mirror. That reading wasn't more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love.

 'Woes of the True Policeman'/'Los sinsabores del verdadero policía'
Roberto Bolaño

I'm Trying

“You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.” 

words: Roberto Bolaño

image: Maxime Ballesteros

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.

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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."

Hiding

“We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?”

Roberto Bolaño, "The Savage Detectives"

Reality

"A week later, López Azcárate hanged himself from a tree and the news ran through the university like a terrified, fleet-footed animal. And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, you silly girl, you and everyone else; I can still move heaven and earth for love."

Roberto Bolaño, Amuleto

Full Speed

"Experience at full speed, self-consuming structures, crazy contradictions ... Never too long in the same place, like guerrillas, like UFOs, like the white eyes of life prisoners ...

Make new sensations appear—Subvert daily life.

LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND AGAIN. GO OUT ON THE ROADS."

Roberto Bolaño
Excerpts from the First Infrarealist Manifesto
Mexico 1976

Tremors #1

"Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada. The idea that some places are the same as others is a lie. The world is a kind of tremor."

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

The Desert #1

"We have to give it our all. We have to squeeze water from the rocks and from the desert too."

Roberto Bolaño, '2666'