James Dean and Lois Smith: screen test for East of Eden.
Nancy Sinatra – “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” – piano remix.
Category Archives: remix
erica jong – becoming a nun
“La Sucette” – Cherry Bomb, 2007
Digital photograph manipulated with Microsoft Photo Editor
On cold days
it is easy to be reasonable,
to button the mouth against kisses,
dust the breasts
with talcum powder
& forget
the red pulp meat
of the heart.
On those days
it beats
like a digital clock–
not a beat at all
but a steady whirring
chilly as green neon,
luminous as numerals in the dark,
cool as electricity.
& I think:
I can live without it all–
love with its blood pump,
sex with its messy hungers,
men with their peacock strutting,
their silly sexual baggage,
their wet tongues in my ear
& their words like little sugar suckers
with sour centers.
On such days
I am zipped in my body suit,
I am wearing seven league red suede boots,
I am marching over the cobblestones
as if they were the heads of men,
& I am happy
as a seven-year-old virgin
holding Daddy’s hand.
Don’t touch.
Don’t try to tempt me with your ripe persimmons.
Don’t threaten me with your volcano.
The sky is clearer when I’m not in heat,
& the poems
are colder.
Poem © Erica Mann Jong
“La Sucette” by Rosemary Lombard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
fiona apple with maud maggart – hot knife
A sizzling mash-up!
Song from Fiona Apple’s 2012 album The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do.
Video excerpted from Fritz’s Lang’s 1926 sci-fi masterpiece, Metropolis.
radiohead – exit music for a film (zeffirelli’s romeo and juliet)
pablo neruda – too many names
Albane Simon – ‘Eruption’
Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night.
No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it is without a name.
When I lived amongst the roots
they pleased me more than flowers did,
and when I spoke to a stone
it rang like a bell.
It is so long, the spring
which goes on all winter.
Time lost its shoes.
A year lasts four centuries.
When I sleep every night,
what am I called or not called?
And when I wake, who am I
if I was not I while I slept?
This means to say that scarcely
have we landed into life
than we come as if new-born;
let us not fill our mouths
with so many faltering names,
with so many sad formalities,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much of yours and mine,
with so much signing of papers.
I have a mind to confuse things,
unite them, bring them to birth,
mix them up, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the oneness of the ocean,
a generous, vast wholeness,
a crackling, living fragrance.
after magritte
glenda kemp and “oupa”
Glenda Kemp’s blog is HERE. Also check out this fascinating interview that Genevieve Louw did with her in 2008.
passing stones – **** me up
Immoral, indecent, obscene, lewd, utterly hilarious. Jawohl.
That is the motto of the group Passing Stones, which is also referred to as “the most offensive musician’s group of the 20th century.” or “The MOMsGOT20THC”.
this mortal coil – waves become wings/ barramundi
“Wave Become Wings” and “Barramundi” from It’ll End in Tears, an album released in 1984 by the label 4AD, using the name “This Mortal Coil” as an umbrella title for a loose grouping of guest musicians and vocalists brought together by label boss Ivo Watts-Russell.
Images taken from Baraka (directed by Ron Fricke).
clock dva – the sensual engine
From the album Buried Dreams (1988).
Clips used for video: L’Eden et Après (1970), Glissements Progressifs du Plaisir (1974), La Belle Captive (1983) – Alain Robbe-Grillet
gr†llgr†ll – if u cAn dR3Am – pRinc3ss3s
more HERE.
hana-bi/maxence cyrin
Images from the film Hana-Bi (Takeshi Kitano, 1997)
Music from Maxence Cyrin – a piano cover of Arcade Fire’s “No Cars Go” (2010).
dennis hopper
Here I was, planning a nice, lengthy post about Marjorie Cameron and her art. What an amazing woman/artist/actress/occultist/ collaborator. While searching all kinds of wonderful material I came across Curtis Harrington’s 1961 psychological thriller “Night tide” where Cameron plays the Water Witch alongside Dennis Hopper (great stuff, great jazz.) Thing is, I got totally distracted by images of Dennis Hopper. <3
remixed from “adaptation” (2002)
JOHN LAROCHE:
You know why I like plants?
SUSAN ORLEAN:
Nuh uh.
JOHN LAROCHE:
Because they’re so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world.
SUSAN ORLEAN:
[pause] Yeah but it’s easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They just move on to whatever’s next. With a person though, adapting’s almost shameful. It’s like running away.
___
CHARLIE KAUFMAN: [voice-over]
I am pathetic, I am a loser…
ROBERT MCKEE:
So what is the substance of writing?
CHARLIE KAUFMAN: [voice-over]
I have failed, I am panicked. I’ve sold out, I am worthless, I… What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here? Fuck. It is my weakness, my ultimate lack of conviction that brings me here… And here I am because my jump into the abysmal well – isn’t that just a risk one takes when attempting something new? I should leave here right now. I’ll start over. I need to face this project head on and…
ROBERT MCKEE:
…and God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That’s flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.
___
SUSAN ORLEAN:
There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.
___
SUSAN ORLEAN:
Do you ever get lonely sometimes, Johnny?
JOHN LAROCHE:
Well, I was a weird kid. Nobody liked me. But I had this idea. If I waited long enough, someone would come around and just, you know… understand me. Like my mom, except someone else. She’d look at me and quietly say: “Yes.” Just like that. And I wouldn’t be alone anymore.
___
CHARLIE KAUFMAN:
There are no rules, Donald. And anyone who says there are is just, you know…
DONALD KAUFMAN:
Not rules, principles. McKee writes that a rule says you *must* do it this way. A principle says, this *works* and has through all remembered time.
___
JOHN LAROCHE:
Point is, what’s so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There’s a certain orchid looks exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to this flower, its double, its soul mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it. And after the insect flies off, spots another soul-mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they’re designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live – how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.
___
SUSAN ORLEAN:
What I came to understand is that change is not a choice. Not for a species of plant, and not for me.
___
CHARLIE KAUFMAN:
I have to go right home. I know how to finish the script now. It ends with Kaufman driving home after his lunch with Amelia, thinking he knows how to finish the script. Shit, that’s voice-over. McKee would not approve. How else can I show his thoughts? I don’t know. Oh, who cares what McKee says? It feels right. Conclusive. I wonder who’s gonna play me. Someone not too fat. I liked that Gerard Depardieu, but can he not do the accent? Anyway, it’s done. And that’s something. So: “Kaufman drives off from his encounter with Amelia, filled for the first time with hope.” I like this. This is good.
“eye of the sparrow”
A bad lip reading of the first 2012 US presidential debate. Utterly brilliant.
the crazy nastyass honey badger (original narration by randall)
There is no other animal in the kingdom of all animals as fearless as the crazyass Honey Badger. Nasty as hell, it eats practically whatever it wants. Honey Badger don’t care! Randall is disgusted. One of the funniest things on Youtube.
i’ve got that tune
Music: Chinese Man – “I’ve Got That Tune” from The Groove Sessions Vol.1 (2007)
Director: Fred&Annabelle – Ben Le Coq
Label: Chinese Man Records
two inch punch – moonstruck
Taken from Saturn: The Slow Jams EP, released on 16th July 2012 on PMR Records.
Footage of Jane Fonda from Barbarella (1968, directed by Roger Vadim), re-edited by Matt Cronin.
marie chouinard compagnie – bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS
An astonishing piece, created for the Venice Biennale’s International Festival of Contemporary Dance, Italy, 2005 by Canadian dancer, choreographer and dance company director Marie Chouinard, OC (born 14 May 1955). Some excerpts from the performance at Place des Arts, Montreal, 2007:
In this work by Marie Chouinard, the company’s ten dancers execute variations on the exercise of freedom. Often, the dancers appear on points: on one, two, and even four at a time. In a spectroscopy of the gesture, we also see them using different devices – crutches, rope, prostheses, horizontal bars, and harnesses – which at times liberate their movements, at others fetter it, and at still others create it.
This use of accessories gives rise to unusual bodily shapes and gestural dynamics and opens onto a universe of meticulous and playful explorations in which solos, duos, trios and group work, in their labour, pleasure and invention, echo the human condition.
An aesthete beyond norms, Marie Chouinard presents her ideas on the way the indefinableness of the Other and the flagrancy of Beauty brush up against one another through an interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Subtle and extravagant, sumptuous and wild, the work’s movements plumb the insoluble mystery of the body, of the living being.
thoughts on pasolini talking about montage and death
Cinema is identical to life, because each one of us has a virtual and invisible camera which follows us from when we’re born to when we die. In reality, cinema is an infinite film sequence-shot. Each individual film interrupts and rearranges this infinite sequence-shot and thus creates meaning, which is what happens to us when we die. It is only at our moment of death that our life, to that point undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended, acquires a meaning. Montage thus plays the same role in cinema as death does in life.
~ Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Ora tutto è chiaro, voluto, non imposto dal destino”, Cineforum 68 October 1967, p. 609. 
I have been thinking about the similarities between editing and blogging, about how in juxtaposition meaning comes to light, and this comment from Pasolini that I just came across resonated with my thoughts. An online archive of everyday apprehension, a place to pin the things floating amorphous just behind my eyes… It is powerfully transformative to be able to reflect, live, with others, on chains of thoughts, connections, coincidences, concatenations… More powerful for clarity than a diary. Although the public nature of this grappling is uncomfortable for me, it prevents me from dismissing my thoughts as solipsistic delusions, something to which I am prone, especially because sketching them out in a simple A to B trajectory is often impossible, rendering attempts at expression incomprehensible to others in ordinary conversation.
What I like about the montage inherent in blogging, as distinct from other more traditional types of montage, is that the possibilities of hypertext allow me not to foreclose other meanings, not to narrow connections and paths of interpretation down, as is inevitable when making a film, or a music mix, or any object concrete and discrete in itself. The intertextual permeability and wild openness of virtuality is so exciting in this sense… The possibility of creating and reshaping meaning without having to be final or definitive, which necessarily involves the murder of other meanings in the process… This I love, though it makes me dizzy.
spank rock – backyard betty (2007)
albane simon/dyn – police state
Albane Simon/DyN – “Police State”
Collage
More warped collages HERE.
cherry bomb – gouttes mécaniques (mechanical teardrops) – 2008
card on spokes – disguises
New video by Ari Kruger for Shane Cooper’s Card on Spokes project.
the caretaker – we cannot escape the past
Imagery from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
fleurmach 
