Icks Cured by Gay Bison

There has not been a lot of activity or interesting activity on the blog recent due to some distractions, also known as chronic, crippling depression. I don't go into those sort of things here and hate too much of vomiting up personal emotions, but I'll just leave it that I've felt there has been so little of value here recently and that I've been leaving sometimes comments on other blogs that border on inappropriate. I have come close to retiring from the blog world and knew I needed something to snap me out of it.

Tonight I went to see Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg which was the perfect downer movie to make me come away feeling healed, restored and ready to return. There is lecherous Mayor Cornish who serves as the only judge to crown the golden boy at the man pageant held on the fifth floor of The Bay department store, a mother that is tortured by her children with a parakeet, gay bison whose lovemaking causes a stampeded on Happyland, homeless people hidden on tops of the city's buildings, horny prepubescent boys who torture the director's eight-year-old self with hairless boners, a sister who hides her sluttiness with deer flesh and blood on the hood of the car. It's all there, and I took summer comfort in the solace of the coldest city in the world. Ninety percent of the film is narration by Maddin himself, his recent narration of The Unkown at the Silent Film Festival echoing in my mind. He uses Winnipeg much the way John Waters uses Baltimore in his films but is much sicker, stranger and creative.

To borrow the catch phrase of a fellow blogger, Maddin is beligerantly nonsensical, mixing fact, fancy and fiction. Did a group of Rotarians actually dress up like Nazis during World War II and stage a mock siege of the city? I don't need to know the "facts" to accept this truth. While I've always loved Maddin short film which I've felt is his best format for his hodge podge of ideas, his manic, surreal narration built like a wacked tone poem that ultimately merged into what was truth rooted in dreams and the haze of memory and was deeply, unexpectedly moving. I am sure I'll end up seeing it again.

Get Up and Make Us a Meatloaf -- NOW

Being just a few inches away from Guy Maddin last night, I wished I'd been brave enough to ask him when My Winnipeg will finally be screened in this cultural backwater that is San Francisco. They're showing it in Palm Springs fro Chrissakes!

I really need to see those Canadian man pageants.

Shh...the Silents Are Coming

Film discovery of the week was the career of Lois Weber whose 1915 The Hypocrites which is credited with being the first mainstream film to feature explicit female nudity, albeit in the Biblical visions of a troubled suburban vicar. Kino is often equal to Criterion of bringing obscure, and especially obscure American silents, to the weary DVD consumer. It's a perfect prelude to the upcoming Silent Film Festival the best of all celluloid gatherings of the year. Tickets bought, research underway. Oh, and Guy Maddin will be there.

When the Future Kisses the Past

I have now managed to catch up with both of the DVD compilations of the films of James Broughton and the first volume of those of Kenneth Anger. Anger, I have known for at least 35 years, mostly for the Hollywood Babylon books and Lucifer Rising and Scorpio Rising. Broughton was more of a vaguely familiar reference, and I'd never seen any of his work. Both, it could be argued, are JunkThieves, Anger in particular, who had no problem of weaving together trashy pop (or porn) images with higher, classical art. (The Rabbit's Moon being the best case of that.) Broughton, on the other hand is at once the worst embodiment of trippy hippie new age nonsense and just plain, childlike nonsense. He's been called the person best qualified to carry on the torch of Walt Whitman, though his "poetry" is more a weird mix of Dr. Seuss, Mother Guess and Dr. Ruth. Some of it is so laugh-out-loud bad that you're not sure if Broughton is in on the joke as he narrates his films like some tripped out kindergarten teacher leading us through an exercise of removing our clothing and consuming Kool Aid last with some mysterious substance. There are both similarities and contradictions in both. Broughton has a lot of nudity but not that much outright sex; Anger has a lot of sex and sexuality but not that much nudity. Both, it also could be argued, are the reason YouTube and its 10 minute limit. Both are masters of the six to eight minute form, but they falter when they opt for longer, near feature length works. (Dreamwood in Broughton's case and Inauguration to the Pleasuredome when it comes to Anger.) If there is anyone out there still doing this type of film (though Anger, at 80 this year is still out there), I would argue that it is Guy Maddin. Though he managed to keep my attention through most of The Saddest Music in the World, the closest he has come to an outright feature with actual stars he too is best in the ten minute or less form. Fun as Music was with an actual narrative of sorts, Maddin seemed to but trying to mesh a dozen or so short films into one big one with so many diverse styles and references that they ultimately overwhelmed whatever narrative or emotional continuity there was beneath his many surfaces. No wonder that Heart of the World, at a mere six jam-packed minutes, is his masterpiece. For all the diverse references and images, it is a coherent, gripping narrative in which the future of the universe is at stake. No wonder that Junk Thief finds all three film makers to be inspiration for their ability to see the past in the future or the future in the past or seeing that the future is actually Narcissus staring back at its reflection, ultimatley realizing that they are one in the same. What has been is what will become. Oops, what, did I lift that line from Broughton?