My body shone so brightly in the sun that I felt very proud of it and it did not matter now if my axe slipped, for it could not cut me. There was only one danger–that my joints would rust; but I kept an oil-can in my cottage and took care to oil myself whenever I needed it. However, there came a day when I forgot to do this, and, being caught in a rainstorm, before I thought of the danger my joints had rusted, and I was left to stand in the woods until you came to help me. It was a terrible thing to undergo, but during the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart. While I was in love I was the happiest man on earth; but no one can love who has not a heart, and so I am resolved to ask Oz to give me one. If he does, I will go back to the Munchkin maiden and marry her.
Mary Tapogna sold the original of this painting years ago to someone she hasn’t seen since; the subject is very long-time close friend ‘Vati. Out of all the pieces I’ve ever painted, only twice have I ever used a source photo that I myself didn’t take… and this happens to be one of them– so I really feel like I can’t take too much credit for it since it’s essentially a dead copy of an amazing photo by Vati’s brother Kris Locke.
Perhaps a central figure in my small, exclusive pantheon of household gods is Chris Marker, whom no one, I think, should characterize only as “French filmmaker” as is usually done. For me, his Stendhal syndrome inducing film essay Sans Soleil has more in common with The Sagrada Família than with any mere film known to me– its insightfulness, erudition, effortless, uninhibited subjectivist intellectual arabesque, free of pretension, is astounding and overwhelming (for some people apparently, it also takes 144 years to finish). Monique and I hosted a humble Marker film festival at Manette a few years ago, but contemplating this film in particular I find myself falling into a kind of consciousness I only ever experience when waking from the rarest, most disturbing dreams, where, I believe, certain inhibitory faculties of my brain are not online… I’m a different person completely without the cognitive filters of waking life standing guard, thinking and feeling what is normally not possible for me to feel, surveying a vast, hostile existential terrain in all directions.
To others, Sans Soleil is a travelogue. In any case it is a heavy vessel of zeitgeist– the film grain and stock, the confluent imagery of early 1980s Japan, the washes of characteristically dissonant FM synthesis. 1982 now seems very faint– I was only around 8 years old then– this now long-distant realization of futurism (this is an idea desperate for a Markerian neologism) is like an autumnal chill. In the culture of we-who-think-we-understand-a-little-of-Marker’s-work, though we can never be very sure of it, there is a half-joke that he is a time-traveler….
There is a system of synchronicity around Marker. In one of my favorite parts of the film, the protagonist “writes” the narrator that the wild german shepherds frolicking on the beaches of the Cape Verdean Isle of Sal seemed to him to be unusually active… only later does he hear a BBC radio broadcast speaking of this being the first time in 60 years that the Year of the Dog meets the element of water.
(I doubt anyone reading this far will need reminding that something doesn’t have to be “true” to be interesting.)
In the few months before I left Memphis in early 2002, as I was trying to discover as much about Marker as I could, having not seen any of his other work, I began to be included myself in this system of synchronicity. I played much of Sans Soleil on my WEVL radio show Gray December, and looked everywhere I could to find films I hadn’t seen– I found La Joli Mai at the library on VHS tape– but one day I went into an independent video store called Black Lodge to see if I could find the supposedly important film, La Jetée. I walked in and asked one of the two men standing there about it. They looked at each other in disbelief… the store did not have a copy I was told… but a friend of his had been there only five minutes before to loan the store a copy… and he was still holding it…! If this had been a film like Star Wars that he was holding, or a contemporary Hollywood box-office hit, this would not be difficult to imagine. But La Jetée?
But something more wonderful than even this happened not long after. Perhaps a week or two before coming to Portland, Judy, station manager at WEVL in Memphis, forwarded an email to me that was sent by a first time listener to my show, poet and electronic music composer Eric Tessier. We talked a bit about music via email and decided to meet at a restaurant called La Montagne… a former art student and friend tended bar there (search for “Elizabeth S.”). Eric ordered cranberry juice with some difficulty… then we talked about music and film, his wife Michelle being a professor of French New Wave film-making– so I brought up Chris Marker and probably spoke about Sans Soleil much like I have thus far in this post, speaking in particular of the film in a musical context because of my intense feelings for the Isao Tomita soundtrack and audio by Antoine Bonfanti. It was a shock to meet someone who understood what I was talking about. And that was the last time I have ever seen Eric.
A few months later I had been in Portland for some time… he wrote me he had returned to La Montagne one night and overheard French being spoken at a nearby table– so he introduced himself and fell into discussion with these travelers: they were filmmakers in town making the documentary By the Ways: A Journey with William Eggleston…. Eric was in fact that very night conversing with Antoine Bonfanti’s son Francis!
(Warning— Spoiler regarding the picture above: Take it from a portrait painter… don’t you think her eyes look crossed? They aren’t… but it’s an illusion one can’t un-see.)
This is slightly modified version of the statement I wrote for this piece when I first showed it at Splendorporium in August 2010:
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is Picasso’s portrait of his own preoccupation with Eros and Thanatos. Here is the original picture, transfigured into a realistic domain, where hopefully some original motifs become apparent in a different way.
From one of the many preliminary sketches for Picasso’s final painting, I restored for inclusion in this piece a window, which was an unfortunate omission from his finished work, since it has been thought by some scholars that the explanation for the disturbing physiognomies of the two right-most demoiselles is that, during his time working on the painting, Picasso had been horrified by the cases of congenital syphilis in children he saw around this time at a private tour of Saint-Lazare Prison Hospital in Paris– the medical term for the characteristic gaping facial disfigurement that afflicts its sufferers is fenestration, which is derived from the Latin fenestra, meaning window. In this version it seemed important to present decayed fruit, fenestrated also, because of its implications of fecundity and determinism.
A window also supports the main idea of the piece because it is a metaphor for revelation– we are revealed the contents of Picasso’s mind, from the inside looking out, the demoiselles and apotropaic masks looking inward toward the artist’s homunculus.
These images are cropped from the original, almost square, full-size version I did (~2.4m x 2.4m), because I didn’t like the way I did the seated figure, and of course because the painting was just too big the way it was. Also, I was getting too many obnoxious comments about the upper-right figure’s “tits”.
FFWD is an eponymous album by FFWD – Robert Fripp, Thomas Fehlmann, Kris Weston, and Alex Duncan Paterson released in 1994. All files are full quality aiff’s.
This is one of my favourite productions. Its mostly Robert Fripp’s guitar work and my production, keyboards and computer tweakery. Fripp said at the time it was the best thing hes ever worked on – which is not true, but still was a great compliment :) Thomas Fehlmann and Alex Patterson were also involved, mostly in a sort of consulting role, however I’ve read things on the internet which say the exact opposite and that I did almost nothing on it – [rolls eyes]. Alex contributed some BBC sound effects records as was his usual modus operandi and Thomas didn’t do much apart from moral support and the occasional production opinion. Andy Hughes, the now deceased engineer who stole my delay unit (karma?) also did a sort of high bleepy sound in one of these tunes. He looked like he was bored so I let him. Should have sacked him there and then, hindsight is a bitch though.
…The rest of the post is very interesting for anyone who has ever wondered why the character of The Orb’s music changed so dramatically not long after this recording (the subject usually makes Kris’ flesh crawl).
The album title is an acronym for the artists, but a self deprecating joke at the ambient approach too– though this album is extremely engaging and far from ambient– as if to say, “Well, as soon as you philistines get a hold of this CD, you should probably just hold down the fast forward button.” I don’t know what the symbol in the upper left means, but it is surely alluding to the e:mit album art glyph.
FFWD has been, for the ten years or so I’ve known of its existence, my absolutely most prized album– I bought a copy of the CD from eBay for $39 immediately after finding out about it and borrowing it from another DJ back when I was doing my late-night ambient and experimental radio broadcast, Gray December, at WEVL FM 89.9 in Memphis. I have it on vinyl too. I dislike talking about music or telling anyone what to think, but I will say that it is essential listening for the genre, and like a lot of what Orb produced during this time… I will go so far as to say a high-point of all early-21st music “Buckwheat & Grits” is one of the most gorgeous pieces of music I’ve ever heard. I wore it out playing it on Gray December (and the following piece, “Klangtest”), and it defined for me those strange last few years in Memphis. I completely stole this name to use for my website, but what it exactly meant has always been known only to me.
…was a visual art gallery and atelier Monique and I created in July 2006 as a way of bringing a different art scene to northwest Portland’s Pearl and Nob Hill area, formerly located at 820 NW 21st Ave.
