A lot of times I think about how great it would be to move back to an urban area, how much I miss the big city. But then, I’ll have a brutal pummeling week, like I’m having this week, and this desert saves my ass from self-destructive self-cannibalizing psychotic explosions. Sometimes it feels like it saves my life. I’ll get home and wonder how I am ever going to resurrect any sense of self out of the shredded remains of my body and mind, and instead of falling headfirst into a bottle (like I did in the old days when life was brutalizing me), I put on my running shoes and hit the road. Or, in the case of last night, I hop on my bike and ride through the desert until I erase everything but the moment.

Living in a place that looks like this is my saving grace this week. I’m going through one of those times that most humans go through more than once in our lives – you know when the stress seems almost insurmountable, when you’re standing at a crossroads and don’t know which way to turn, when there are so many forces colliding inside yourself and pummeling you from outside that you don’t know how you can possibly endure five more minutes of it. Well, that’s me this week. I’ve been getting home from work and feeling like a beaten dog. Absolutely shredded to the bone and beyond exhausted. I can’t write because I’m feeling all fucked up about my writing. In fact, I don’t feel like I have the capacity to communicate in any method right now, even with myself. So last night, I got home and felt like I wanted to bury myself under the covers and hide. Instead, I climbed on my bike, plugged into my headphones and rode. I pedaled and pedaled through the open desert roads. I looped through fields of dirt, rock, cactus, and blooming palo verdes. The mountains and blood stained horizon wiped away my exhaustion. With each mile and each minute that passed and each song that poured through my ears, I felt better. The gutted Pontiac in a field of cholla cactus was a beauty to behold. The gutted lizard and the ants eating its dead body was telling me something profound. Every rock, every crack in the road, every horse running in a field of dirt set me free. I thought how much I need this emptiness. I thought of giving up everything – writing, art, all this shit that screams at me to do something and be something – and to just climb in this dirt for the rest of my life. To lose myself forever in these empty roads that go on and on. To get lost inside this place that’s not paved, where there are no sidewalks to tell me where to go. After an hour of pedaling, I felt I could resume life, but I still couldn’t communicate. So I didn’t.

Got up this morning and started all over again. The same things – preparing the breakfast, making the lunch, taking a shower, getting dressed, rushing out the door, wondering what I remembered and what I forgot. Then I dropped my daughter off at school and went running before I went to work. I ran up this hill. This is the hill I run in the mornings. I run straight up this hill and then I loop through the desert going up and down and up and down the hills until I feel that moment click when the endorphins set me free. Usually when I run, I think. I get some of my best writing done when I’m running. Not this morning. This morning I forced my mind to empty itself. I let the music completely take over my brain and lost myself inside every detail of the desert. No thoughts. Just legs moving, music pouring, and the desert wiping me away because I needed to be wiped away.

I’m still wiped. I’m glad that I have this desert to empty me out, so I’m not doing it with the needle or the bottle. Sure, I love the ocean. I love the city. But there is something about a long stretch of rugged empty road that takes me away like nothing else. And right now, I need to be taken away. I’m taking myself away from here right now.

Here’s some music off my current iPod shuffle mix that I’ve been riding/running to. Bye.

I haven’t looked at the photos I took since I returned to Tucson. Looking at them, I realize the photos themselves say more than I can possibly muster right now about where I am. All those intersecting lines of unmovable concrete and the network of empty spaces, voids, and shadow. And running down the middle of the whole thing – the clear fluid leak of water.

I wrote my thing on Steven Shearer very quickly and didn’t really formulate my thoughts very thoroughly or very well. Anyway, a whole other train of thought came crashing into my brain regarding the long hair thing. I’ve never really given the history of hair any deep consideration, but dang when thinking about it, I realize that hair is critical to understanding the history of rock. Hair itself is another instrument musicians play as an act of gender defiance and sexual deconstruction. I was thinking how the whole men with long hair thing was a physical act of rebelling against traditional cultural definitions of masculinity. By growing their hair long, men were physically transforming their bodies as an act of social-sexual transgression. They were saying that they would not be contained within the box of the masculine status quo. Nevertheless, they may have grown their hair long, but at the end of the day most of the men proved to really just be boys all along (but that is a whole other digression which I’ll save for a later date).

I’m thinking specifically about how this long hair feminized masculinity manifested itself in rock and roll. Take Robert Plant and Led Zeppelin. I always thought of Led Zeppelin as this total Male Rock Thing and rebuked them as being just big dicks with long hair. But then in the last couple of years (namely thanks to Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods album which completely and self-consciously plays off of everything Led Zeppelin stands for musically, ideologically, and sexually), I realized that Robert Plant is totally a girl in Led Zeppelin. When he wails and moans, he pretty much sounds like a girl being fucked. What makes Led Zeppelin interesting to me now (besides the fact that I’ve learned to just completely rock out to classic hard rock) is the tension between the overt machismo of this power rock band and the total female sexualization of Robert Plant who manages to both be “girled” sexually but maintain his total masculine presence. In other words, I’ve learned to understand the tension between Robert Plant’s performed femininity and the ultimate machismo of rock music.

When I was a kid, I consciously rebelled against the music of Led Zeppelin because I was the only girl and the youngest child in a house where I was dominated by two guitar playing older brothers who played their guitars with the fury of flying fists battling for authority in the house. At times, they literally fought each other with their guitars. So I remained firmly rooted in my Motown and soul as a rebellion against my two white boy guitar playing older brothers. It wasn’t really until I made my way to the punk scene in 1977 that I began to embrace the noisy sounds of hard rock. While punk certainly was a massive influence and major outlet in my life, I wasn’t really drawn to heavy guitar driven music until bands like L7 and Sleater-Kinney took Male Power Rock into their female hands and gave it a big hard girl punk thrust. That’s when I suddenly began to appreciate the legacy of classic rock and appreciate bands like Led Zeppelin. I needed to digest them through a new sound (with some girl and some punk) to understand the value of what they were doing and the role they played in the music I listen to now. I needed to experience its female post-punk counterpart before I could embrace the sheer Male Rock of the 70’s. Sure, there were plenty of female rock archetypes to match Robert Plant (think Stevie Nicks and the Wilson sisters), and, in fact, they shared Robert’s hair. But the girls were girls acting like girls, and the boys were boys acting like girls but who were ultimately still boys. Bands like Sleater-Kinney changed that.


That whole long hair thing died out when punk slammed into the picture and everyone cut off their hair. Punk made an attempt at real gender neutrality but never quite achieved it given how quickly punk was adopted by the male-dominated hardcore music scene. In my current line of thinking, it wasn’t until we reached a post-punk place in music – where punk rock and classic rock joined hands – that the complexities of gender and rock music could be dissected and played for a new kind of rock power. It is bands like Sleater-Kinney who put the cunt into electric guitar and were juxtaposed to the poetic feminine brutality of Kurt Cobain’s tortured soul that brought us to a new place in rock, and hair was all over the place – long, short, and in between.


But all of that was way back in the 20th century. It seems so long ago and mired in the vault of history. Now I have to ask where the fuck we are now with rock music and hair? And the truth of the matter is that I have no fucking idea. Do you?

PS: I should add a disclaimer here. I have had such a slam  fuck of a work week (and it’s only Tuesday), so I’m just pulling this shit out of my ass. I'm way too fried to do anything else. So excuse my random ramble. This is the kind of thing I do to chill out. Think about rock and hair.

PSS: Just fixed a shitload of TYPOS. So freaking embarrassing.

 

I’m stoked. Oh yes, indeed I am. I found another artist to adore. I’m talking about Steven Shearer who I learned about in this article from last Friday’s New York Times arts section. Shearer does collages (which of course I like) and sculptures (which are okay but don’t scream my name), but what I really love and am totally gaga over are his paintings and drawings of long-haired adolescent boys – emphasis on long hair. These works are a rebellious phenomenon of unabashed and unashamed reverence for that sweet, complex, and rude edge that is the adolescent rocker boy, whose essence and entire universe is represented by his long locks of rocker hair. They are also brilliant rebel yells aimed at an art world populated by the culturally and theoretically elite.

Anyone who knows me knows I love a Metal Boy. And surely I love Shearer’s work because he strikes deep into my own KDD Metal Boy fetishism. But I am not the first queer to fetishize a rocker boy and his long hair. No surprise that I am also a huge fan of Dennis Cooper’s novels and Gus Van Sant’s films – two cultural icons who take adolescent boy fetishism to a sublime pinnacle of aesthetic worship. Given my own overwhelming sexual ambiguity and that I'm a girl queer who is also a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, it's no wonder I love a Metal Boy. The thing about adolescent rocker boys is that, regardless of their ultimate sexual orientation (and I doubt if many actually know what that orientation is at this point in their lives), they beautifully embody the slippery sharp edge between the feminine and the masculine. They exhibit such gorgeous tension between trying to assert the masculinity of their impending adulthood yet still clinging to the soft feminine residue of their youth. Certainly their long hair exhibits this tension beautifully in its raw physical form. Given my inherent sexual ambiguity and my unquenchable love for rock and roll, it is no wonder that I fetishize young metal guys and, in turn, love Steven Shearer’s art. After all, isn’t identification at the heart of all festishization? Ultimately, I am and always will be a rock boy in girl’s clothing, so when I’m waxing poetic over the long-haired rockers in Shearer’s art or the slacker boys in a Dennis Cooper novel or a young skateboarder in a Gus Van Sant movie, I’m really waxing poetic about my own reflection (and, admittedly, my own incessant clinging to some kind of adolescent state of mind and personal aesthetic). Certainly, I should stop and ask myself why the adolescent boy bridging the feminine and the masculine is infinitely more seductive and interesting to me than the adolescent girl. I think the answer is that girls are culturally conditioned to be “girled” from the beginning, so when they become adolescents, they often just become girl-squared. Only “dykes” or “tom boys” affect the masculine, and they’re kind of like their own “sub-species.” On the other hand, all adolescent boys seem to struggle with a feminine side of their masculinity. (I'm writing this very quickly so please don't take offense.)


The funny thing is that the New York Times review actually wasn’t a favorable one, but all the reasons why critics don’t like Shearer’s work make me adore it. I love that Shearer’s art affects an awkward style and makes us uncomfortable with its crude and earnest simplicity. And Shearer’s unashamed use of color is something to behold. He is unrestrained, raw and rooted in the working class aesthetic that is the backbone of rock music. The fact that his style and his content make us feel uncomfortable and embarrassed for him, like we’re looking at some kind of unrefined adolescent secret diary, is what’s brilliant about this work. He uses the aesthetic of adolescence to make us question the hierarchy of culture. Fuck refined aesthetics. Fuck the cultural elite. Let’s show how we can intimately love and carve beauty from adolescent awkwardness, and let’s give it rock power via color and expressionistic force.

Needless to say, given my proclivities in art, I feel totally validated seeing Shearer’s artwork. I’ve even been criticized by more than one person in my life for the “adolescent approach and content” of my work – in both my art and my writing. Well yeah, that adolescent bridge that we all occupy at one time in our lives is an uncomfortable place, a place most of us would like to leave behind as we develop our adult sensibilities loaded with refined tastes and theoretical meat on our brain bones. But that does not mean that the awkward adolescent place isn’t still part of us. We may think we’ve risen above it with years and education and culture, but it’s still there. We’re just too ashamed to go there. Shearer brings the shame home.


I like everything about Shearer’s long-hair art. I love the subject matter, how it’s executed, how it’s a real in-your-face rebuttal to elitist concepts of art. I like how the aesthetic and content is rooted in the working class roots of rock music. And yes, I love how they make us feel uncomfortable and embarrassed for the artist’s audacity in showing such crude works, and for asking us what value there could be in this parade of long-haired metal boys. Well, in my KDD Opinion, the long-haired metal boy should be added to the list of universal archetypes that reside in all of us, whether you want to admit it or not. And regarding his excessive and psychedelic use of color? FUCK YEAH. Bring on the color. KDD never shies away from color and excess. I will not live a muted life nor deny color because it is crude. The fact that I’m posting this many images of Shearer’s work is a testament to my love of unadulterated, uncensored excess in art and expression.

I’ll end this ramble with my favorite quote from the NYT review:

Mr. Shearer's most convincing works are his small, finely drawn portraits of men and boys with long rocker-style hair. They are affecting, subtly comical meditations on archaic fantasies of archetypal masculinity purveyed by the heavy-metal music industry.
Also striking are Mr. Shearer's recent paintings of long-haired youths made in a canny imitation of Edvard Munch's Symbolist style. Softly painted in feverish colors, these woozy visions of androgynous, shirtless boys are like views into the hormone-addled mind of a lovesick teenage narcissist.

I’ll end my ramble here, but on the final note I’ll add that this book is VERY HIGH on my current KDD Wish List:

I am beyond excessively busy and stressed right now, but I will momentarily interrupt my stress to post a favorite recent quote. Richard Serra has a new installation in Paris which is discussed in this New York Times article. I just love this quote from Serra:

People don't perceive the art but the surplus value of art — art as photographs, as J-PEGs. People talk of art and ask: 'How much does it cost? What's its pedigree?' But people don't go to see the work in place."

He wants people to experience the art in a particular time and
setting: "It's about apprehension, how you apprehend the space and the piece," he said. "It's part of the experience of walking around the space in which the art appears — you implicate yourself in the space, and the experience is in you, not in the frame or on the wall.
--Richard Serra

As anyone who knows me knows, I am a firm believer of the power of art in its actual physical 3-dimensional form. No way you can experience the “aura” of art via a reproduction. Certainly it is nice to have so much access to art via the internet, etc, but there is no adequate substitute for actually seeing a piece of art in its original form crafted by the artist. Also, I like what Serra says here about the tension between the piece of art, the space it inhabits, and the viewer. All of those elements coming together are part of the art experience, something you cannot “feel” if you do not visit the art in its actual form. Installation art is particularly noteworthy for this effect, but really all art has the power to transform the way we experience space. I’m thinking about when we went to the NYMOMA, and Bean was so excited to see Van Gough’s Starry Night in person. We got to the room next to the room where the Van Gough was, and the presence of that painting in the adjacent room totally changed the way we experienced the art in that space. Bean intentionally avoided looking at the painting because she was “saving it,” so it’s presence was huge in our desire to make it absent until we were “ready” for it.

Regarding aura, If there is any artist on the planet whose art possesses MONUMENTAL aura, it is Richard Serra’s. I have been lucky enough to experience his Torqued Ellipses in person, and his monumental structures are profoundly energized and mystical. How much I would love to see his newest installation “Promenade” in its original home at the Grand Palais in Paris. It won’t happen, so this is a case where a newspaper article and some words from Serra will have to suffice.


Back to Stress Day. Coming up next: art, adolescence, and metal boys and maybe something on the power of reading out loud.

I will very briefly write on two Mommy Movies I saw and post my extremely condensed reviews in honor of Mother’s Day. Interestingly, I saw three movies while I was in California, and all three were French and all three had female protagonists. This seemed particularly timely after reading Manohla Dargis’s very well written rant in last Sunday’s NY Times about the dearth of female leads in Hollywood cinema.

Anyway, given how much media I have backlogged to write about, all I can give you is the short KDD reviews of these two films. I also should note that I wrote my Demonlover review very quickly because if I torture myself about writing long and thorough reviews, I’ll never get caught up on my media writing. As always, it's better to write something than nothing.

Le Voyage De Ballon Rouge (The Flight of the Red Balloon), 2007


Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s latest film The Flight of the Red Balloon is on the surface a tribute to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 The Red Balloon. But to me, it’s primarily a gorgeous exercise in cinematic naturalism that is ultimately a tribute to the feminine and the maternal. Centering on a mother Suzanne (played exquisitely by Juliette Binoche) and her son Simon, this film is a quiet celebration of life as it is for a mother and her son. Like the red balloon that floats in and out of the film, the movie flows as the lives of Suzanne, Simon, and the newly hired nanny named Song go about their daily lives. There is no narrative arc, no great meaning or climax, just a beautifully real portrait of a mother, her son and their life.

What makes this movie so refreshing is that the mother is not reduced to the kind of stereotypes we see in American film. She is not the cookie cutter nurturer or the psychotic abuser. She is just a human who happens to be a mother too, which is basically what all mother’s are. Juliette Binoche’s performance as Suzanne really brings the movie to life. She is the heart and soul of this film, not because she does anything grandiose, huge, monumental or earth shattering but because of the power with which she just IS. She is utterly fabulous and seething with life. She’s worn around the edges yet maintains a seething vibrancy. She is frazzled and inspired, emotional and tired, alive and resigned, frustrated and indulgent. Life happens, and she moves through it. There are elements of crisis and emotion, yet it all flows by and happens in the course of daily life just like eating or sleeping. In a way, this flow is Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Taiwanese/Chinese stamp on the French movie as it shows life as a flow of events tumbling along the Taoist river that is transformed to Paris. Life for Suzanne floats by incident by incident, and she navigates it like water flowing over rocks. Interestingly, this portrait of a mother and her son is witnessed through the eyes of Song, the girl student filmmaker who is Simon’s new nanny. As Song films Simon and documents his and his mother’s life, she becomes a stand-in for the director himself. I find it compelling that Hsiao-Hsien has inserted himself into the film as female. Song’s calm demeanor and even voice steadily flow through the film like the fleshy literalization of a kind of Zen feminism.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s ability to turn cinematic realism into gorgeously layered art makes this movie visually as rich and undulating as the flow itself. Hou Hsiang has beautifully rendered Paris through his Taiwanese eye. The colors simultaneously are muted by grit yet saturated with richness. The exquisitely congested scenes are like luxurious collages of city life. Each shot is layered with life, color, and depth. The things and the people that occupy space are all merged into a gorgeous montage of existence, texture, and being. A red curtain being opened to let in light becomes a profoundly beautiful and simple gesture of light shining on this everyday world. The movie floats in and out with the red balloon, and when we are finished we feel a kind of calm and reverence for both the filmmaker, the film, and the lives of people, particularly the mothers that it represents. What a great Mother’s Day film.

Ils (Them), 2006


The French film Them, set in Romania, is a gorgeous exercise in atmospheric panic and paranoia. It’s also a Mommy Narrative, but unlike Flight of the Red Balloon, the Mommy is punished not revered. The movie opens with a mother and daughter quarreling in the car. The mother crashes her van into a telephone pole. When she tries to fix the car, she gets abducted by something evil in the woods. The daughter is then strangled since he mother has crashed the car and abandoned her daughter to the evil abominations that lurk in the woods. The movie then cuts to the female protagonist – a tightly controlled school teacher – and her husband. While the female is completely in control and obviously wears the pants in the house, the male is an impotent feminized abomination of masculinity. He ultimately has his feminine weakness carved into his body when his leg is cut open by a giant piece of glass, and he spends the rest of the movie hobbling around with his bleeding gaping wound (a.k.a. Bloody Vagina) dripping from his leg.

The couple – Women in Pants and Man with Vagina Leg – then spend a good chunk of the film being terrorized in their own home by an unseen presence. Their home also happens to be an old aristocratic house that they obviously got on the cheap after the fall of communism in Romania (BLOODY OPPORTUNISTS). Eventually the couple descends into an underground tunnel that leads through a seemingly endless network of tunnels and caverns and chambers. In other words, they enter the rigid concrete female reproductive system which should be soft and fleshy and bearing children and nurturing them and SHOULD NOT BE WEARING PANTS. No surprise that we discover that the evil that lurks in the woods is actually a band of abominable boys who occupy the underground channels of the Bad Mommy Body. Needless to say, these horrible boys are a result of the Pants Wearing Woman who failed in her role as mother. Therefore, to avenge their neglect they kill the faulty father – the Vagaina Leg Husband and take revenge on the Bad Mommy. Also, one must note, that NONE of this would have happened to the poor couple had they stayed in small apartment in the city and not exercised their bourgeois tastes by buying the country estate. Fucking opportunist abominations. It certainly made for a fun movie though. The sound editing is awesome. All the fear and paranoia are generated through sound, light and shadow, and once you catch onto the whole Bloody Vagina Leg Thing, it makes great fodder for devising your own accompanying narrative. Trust me. I was a riot during this movie.

End movie reviews.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Demonlover: Women as Products and as Cannibalistic Achievers

Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover (2002) is, in short (and I know this is going to sound awfully heavy-handed), an absolutely bleak and scathing critique of the pornographic body that is the global capital machine, a machine that continues to be patriarchal driven. Stunningly and eerily filmed, incorporating anime and internet pornography at its core, Assayas shows us a vicious opportunistic business world in which women’s chance for survival and success are only achieved by cannibalizing each other.

The film opens in a high-tech, high-powered business space filled with men shouting in phones and at each other in a sea of computers blinking with numbers and stats. This is a man’s world that we see in the opening shot of the movie. Then the movie shifts gears, and the rest of the film is about how women operate in the man’s world of global capital. We see women trying to take control over capital and more importantly the commodification of their bodies. Diane De Monx (Connie Nielsen) is at the center of the film, and her trajectory is both appalling, heart breaking, and utterly damning. An excellent counterpart to Tilda Swinton’s character Karen Crowder in Michael Clayton, Diane is a ruthless, cold cyborg of a woman who will do anything to try to claw her way to the top of the business world. She steals trading secrets, drugs another female employee, and murders a competitor. When I say cyborg, I’m not too off the mark as the business that is being bartered in the film is pornographic anime and ultimately female torture, a business where women’s bodies are turned into artificial machines produced for mass consumption. The movie is spliced with graphic sexual anime pornography of women being fucked by machines and monsters. Certainly women are being fucked by machines and monsters – the machine of global capitalism and the monsters that are the men who drive the machine. The anime sex business content is the literal manifestation of the commodification of the female body and an allegoric representation of the pornographic matrix of global capital. In order to try to survive in this world and not just be pornographic profits, women become abominations cannibalizing each other to stay afoot. Interestingly, all the women in the movie are complicit in the sex torture business and find it alluring. When Karen (the woman Diane drugs at the beginning of the movie) finds Diane browsing the sex torture website, they both agree that they find it fascinating. What is not said is that by watching the women tortured on the internet, these women are somehow watching themselves and/or viscerally controlling their own bodies through others. Elise, on the other hand, actually orchestrates the torture of women (including Diane), again the literalization of women cannibalizing each other to succeed.

When I say global capital, I am not speaking lightly. While Diane, the French woman is at the center of the film, there is also an American woman (fantastically played by Gina Gershon) and a slew of Japanese women, not to mention a quietly menacing Chloe Sevigny as the cut-throat Elise. The matrix of global capital is represented in this network of women and the men they work for. The mistake these women make, particularly Diane, is to think that they can control the system when ultimately the system still has control over them. When Diane is outed for her crimes, she is taken to the giant mansion of the old school patriarch who runs the business. He sits in his garden with his tribe of daughters and his wife while Diane is taken somewhere into the bowels of the house (e.g. the bowels of old school patriarchy). She emerges gutted. We don’t know exactly what happened to Diane, but we do know that she has been put back in her place as submissive and compliant female. Likewise, when she goes on a date with her co-worker Hervé, he ends up pretty much “date raping” her body, and she blows his brains out. Well she may off Hervé, but she certainly isn’t going to off the whole system of men in control of her body and of capital. In a horrifyingly bleak ending, Diane is captured and sold on the internet via a porn torture website, her body reduced to literal commodity to be abused and sold. It is not Diane’s body encased in black latex and chained to a metal bed frame that is the horrific sight in this scene. In fact, we’ve been expecting that to happen all along, and in a way that is where she has been all along in a metaphorical sense. The real horror is the young boy mindlessly using his parents’ credit card to pay for the torture of a woman, a taste for torture that he has developed via media itself. In the final bleak shot, the boy turns off the computer leaving Diane strapped to the bed waiting for his next command while he works on his math problems, a small gesture that indicates his enormous control over and disregard of the female body.


All of this is delivered via Assayas’s gorgeous cinematics. The interior spaces – hotels and corporations – are eerily sterile. They echo with a menacing emptiness. These buildings and spaces contain humans yet seem to be completely devoid of humanity. They buzz and hum with electricity that keeps the machine going and has replaced the human body. The integration of anime footage furthers this kind of isolation from actual flesh and blood. That these cartoon characters are seemingly the most alive beings the film is unsettling. Much of that effect is achieved from the frenetic color-saturated anime scenes in juxtaposition to Assayas’ subdued and static view of the interior spaces the characters occupy. The film is also punctuated with a number of gorgeous night shots smeared with light and abstraction as Diane drives around Paris and reels out of control while she tries to maintain control in a system governed by men. All of this is scored by an original soundtrack composed and performed by Sonic Youth for the movie. The Sonic Youth socre provides a kind of  undersound of beautiful noise, a quietly saturating dissonance and an electric hum and buzz that carries us through the film.

All this may sound densely theoretical or absurdly over-read, but the content of the film definitely supports my premise. One could read the movie as a negative portrayal of women in business, but we need to look beyond that and see who is lurking behind the scenes. While the women are cutting each other’s throats as they try to claw their way to the top, in the end it is the men behind the scenes who are pulling the strings. Demonlover is a powerful critique of patriarchy and capital encased in the body of present day global capital. Yes, in my opinion, it is profoundly leftist and feminist filmmaking, but it brings Old School Critiques of patriarchy and capitalism firmly into the 21st century. Demonlover is brilliant, beautiful, and unsettling, and one of the most interesting movies I’ve seen this past year.

Edit: A thought on the movie I formulated in the comments but wanted to add here because it's worth thinking about further:

What was odd to me was how distanced the film seemed to be from the pornographic content and how it was almost like a tease. Diane starts watching the porno in the hotel room and we get all geared up for some exposing voyeuristic sex stuff, but then she gets interrupted. It seems like she and Herve are going to have some massively hot kinky sex, but then when they finally "consummate" their relationship, he just basically rapes her in a missionary position penetration scene completely lacking in any erotic appeal. Likewise, she logs into hellfire.com and we anticipate partaking in the taboo of porn torture, but then Karen interrupts her before we can really get a reaction from Diane. The only real sex scenes are the bizarre ones in the anime sequences. I guess I could write something on this whole kind of "coitus interruptus" aspect of the film. Like it leads you to believe that the film will be loaded with kinky pervert sex scenes, but then it withholds our pleasure. The sex appeal is in what is implied and promised but not in what's actually delivered. I guess this could also be linked to commodity fetishism where what is promised is rarely actually delivered so you just desire more, newer, better and still walk away unsatisfied. 

Freaking gorgeously beautiful exquisite day at the beach today. Went for a run and saw a chomped seal on the beach. You know what a chomped seal on the beach means. GREAT WHITE SHARK. MOTHERFUCKER. That's okay. I went boogie boarding anyway. Freaking fantastic boogie boarding today. Perfect waves. Perfect weather. And perfectly not eaten by sharks. I also paused to do a little KDD Beach Fashionista Photo Shoot, you know, to celebrate not being shark food and shit.

I’m out in Great White Shark Land and as such have extremely limited internet access, but I’m pilfering a signal to send you quick greetings and songs. Tonight I’ve been engaging in Collage and Music Therapy, namely listening to the new M83 album Saturdays = Youth which I got today at Lou’s Records and which I absolutely love. I figured it was time for a new record since my head was becoming a Portishead. I also cut up the Time Life Crime book (remember those old Time Life books?) and made a collage in the KDD Art Book. Here you see my Therapy Office in action which is a hotel bed with an Artforum, scissors, my art book, some shit to cut up, a tub of Yes Paste and a brush to smear it on with.

It took me exactly the duration of the M83 album to make my collage. Which you can kind of see here and which I will scan when I go back home.

In other news I saw a righteously awesome video art installation today featuring artists from all over the world. I’m going to see the rest of the videos tomorrow. I also saw the latest Hou Hsiao-Hsien film Flight of the Red Balloon, none of which I can tell you about now because my internet pilfering time has just about run out. Oh and I also watched Olivier Assayas's Demonlover last night. So many films and art to write about!

In the meanwhile, how about two of my favorite songs off the M83 album? You should have seen me disco dancing and doing my KDD Grove Thang to “Couleurs” on the hotel bed holding scissors. Talk about therapy.

See you soon.

You’d never know by looking at this minimalist album cover that when you open up the new Portishead album and give it a listen, it’s like slicing the bottoms off of clouds and finding out they’re full of hardware. Don’t let the barebones simplicity of this cover fool you. Portishead Third is one of the most complexly beautiful multi-leveled artistic productions that I have experienced in a long time. This album moves beyond music. It is an artistically challenging network of sound that comes from a deeply personal and emotional point of origin. The songs rip open, circulate and morph. Listening to them in all their layered complexity is like listening to a live broadcast from the banks of personal memory and a deeply interior space. The lyrics themselves are unapologetically emotional, personal, and full of angst, yet what could be construed as self-indulgent emotionalism is encased in an avant-garde urgent assault of sound that undermines any inclination to dismiss the music as self-indulgent emotional narcissism.

Listening to this album is like experiencing the female interior being broadcast in all its complexity. The female body is merged with sound constructions, and the sound constructions themselves become a living body. Inside those layers of sound and body is the private voice articulated eerily, beautifully and surreally by Beth Gibbons. Gibbons sings of a deeply personal place where self-doubt and angst rule. The lyrics are laden with feminine emotion which question her value, her validity, her worth and her stability. Her desperate self-questioning and lines like “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you” (Nylon Smile) or “I can’t deny what I’ve become. I’m just emotionally undone.” (Magic Doors) could play into demeaning stereotypes of female emotionalism, but this sincere emotion is exploded into the avant-garde deployment of sound. Sounds blast through the interior of this music with a tremendous urgency and sense of alarm. As the drum pulses like a heartbeat through the album, we are hit with a barrage of sounds that demand our attention. Instruments are made to sound like emergency broadcast signals, morse code, air raid sirens, machine guns, helicopters, and a million mixed channels being broadcast from some deep interior space. The pulsing of these sounds produces a kind of biomorphic breathing. Gibbons voice is like a disembodied beckoning being channeled from multiple broadcast systems. Her voice is the interior projected through a body of sound. Open the album cover, and you’ll see radio towers, telephone poles, and crossed wires. That is where the true heart of this album lies. We are listening to congruent broadcasts from inside the female body and mind. The place this album is coming from reminds me mostly of Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods. The sound of the music is entirely different, but the passion and aggression with which these albums take control of the feminine is unapologetically fierce. While the Sleater-Kinney deploys female sexuality through hard-driven rock constructions, the Portishead is equally aggressive about deploying female emotion. The feminine emotion is encased in a network of broadcast noise which simultaneously works to give a sense that the feminine voice is fractured by media and that the female voice is the media itself.

The way that the music becomes the body and the body becomes the music furthers this effect. We feel a tension and merging between the organic and the artificial. It’s almost like we’re listening to some kind of cyborg that is a combination of machine, mind, and flesh. Real instruments like bassoons, clarinets and cello are forced to sound like artificial and desperate intrusions, and artificial sounds drive the songs like coursing blood. All of the songs build to an amazing crescendo as they open wide and everything spills out of them. The song “Small” starts out sounding like some kind of haunted disembodied lounge act but becomes a surging post-punk thrust of guitar and noise. The buzz and hum of cello in the background make the song sound like some long lost memory of the past being broadcast through faulty speakers, but then the song rips open. Guitar intersected with a riot of sounds comes at us like mixed broadcast channels, and the song rips open the memories of the past becomes an urgent call to the present. The song may be called "Small," but there is nothing small about it's sound. The song ends abruptly just as if the broadcast was interrupted, and the next song opens immediately with the sound of an emergency broadcast signal.

And this album is in its own way an emergency broadcast signal being broadcast from the female interior and giving solidity to Gibbons’ voice in the album’s web of sound. The songs build like breath growing more heavy and panting until the body of the songs explodes. “Plastic” opens with the most incredible beating sound like a helicopter in a war movie. The sound cycles like the frames of a film, and Gibbons voice comes at us like a cinematic image slightly out of sync. In fact this entire album is very cinematic, like we are going on an avant-garde film journey through the psyche and its projection through media. Even a “tender” song like “Rip” becomes a surreal film or a radio broadcast from a dreamscape that builds into crescendo of electronic pulses, like galloping horses (the wild horses of the song) flicking madly through the projector inside Gibbons’ mind. The 6 minute 28 second “We Carry On” is a masterpiece of fusion in which complete emotional sincerity is perfectly meshed with an almost guerilla-deployment of sound. Drums hit us like gunfire, and Gibbon’s guitar playing becomes an anthropomorphic presence, a living desperate thing, desperate, wailing, and gorgeous.

Each song on the album could be dissected to the Nth power. Trust me. I have listened to this album every single day for a week and continue to discover new layers of meaning through sound. The album ends with the song “Threads” which at first sounds like the remaining Threads of the first Portishead album, but just when we think it’s a return to the past, the song explodes into the dissonance of the present. The song ends with the most amazing primal yet constructed sound, like air raid meets fog horn or some kind of gut wrenching moan or call from a ship lost or sinking. This sound is an alarm of urgency, as is the album. And for me personally? Well I can’t imagine a more perfect album to suit my tastes. It contains unapologetic emotional sincerity coupled with exceptionally avant-garde art/sound construction, the projection of the female body and psyched into music and sound, and a cinematic aura. What could be better? It’s like the Inland Empire of music.

Fantastic run in the foothills this morning. Holy cow what a beautiful morning in Tucson. Temps in the low 70’s and absolutely gorgeous.

So what was I doing while running? Listening to the new Portishead. What else? This time I actually wrote my review of the album inside my head while I was running. I listened to the songs and wrote my KDD commentary in my brain. Then I’d start a song over and reiterate my points, drilling them into my memory bank. I circled the points over and over, reformulated, edited and revised. All inside my head.

As I was doing this I had the distinct feeling that I was jogging with two people – me, Kim, the person who runs, moms, and is on her way to work and Kim Dot Dammit, the person who blogs, rants, and writes movie and music reviews. In other words, I had the distinct sensation that I was running with my Doppelganger. Somehow, listening to the music, revising my review in my head, and formulating an entire piece of writing while I was running in this beautiful Tucson morning really magnified the kind of schizophrenia inherent in blogging, that I am two people – the person who lives my daily life and the person who I have created here in this space. I really felt their distinctly separate identities as two solid people -- me and my Doppelganger -- occupying my morning run. Weird.

So I got back to my car, pulled out my little red notebook and jotted down encrypted notes on everything I want to say in my  Portishead review. I’d love to write it today but that’s probably not going to happened due to life's pressures with the Real Me who occupies the Real World. I will, however, write it for sure on the plane tomorrow. I am just incredibly electrified by having new music that is so complex, cinematic, poetic, artistic, avant-garde, experimental, passionate, and multi-layered that I can spend so much of my time listening to it and thinking about it even if I don’t have time right now to write about it.


Anyway, as I was pulling out of the parking lot, I spotted this big guy in the road. I pulled over, stopped the car, grabbed my little digital camera and proceeded to take his photograph. So these are actual photos of my Critter Encounter of the Morning. Then some more cars started coming up the road, so do you know what I did? I stopped traffic and helped the snake cross the road so he wouldn’t get squished. I was all running behind him, stomping my feet, and telling him “Go on big guy, move your snake butt!” Luckily, all the cars that stopped were occupied by friendly people who thought that it was uber cool that I was helping the snake cross the road. In case you’re wondering, he’s a gopher snake, not a rattler. He was about 3.5 feet long. I’m really glad I helped save him because people in this town are real ignorant asswads. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen trucks purposely swerve to hit a snake on the road. It makes me SICK and FURIOUS. Besides, not only are gopher snakes harmless. They’re helpful. They kill rattlesnakes and eat packrats. Anyway, even if it was a rattler, I would have tried to figure out some kind of way to ensure that he made it across the road safely without getting myself bit. Rattlers are awesome, as long as they’re at a safe distance. This isn’t the first time I’ve stopped to help a critter cross the road. Once I stopped traffic on the curvy part of Campbell to help a Gila Monster cross the road, and another time me and Bean stopped traffic on Paseo Del Norte to help a tortoise cross the road. That’s me. KDD Friend of Critters. Speaking of critters, I wonder if I can count my Doppelganger experience as some kind of Critter Encounter -- the Critter Carved From My Psyche. Hah.


Anyway, this is probably all I have to offer on my blog today due to INSANE PRESSURE IN REAL LIFE.

See you tomorrow with my Portishead review.

Ciao.

So I went to the gym today where I planned on trying to purge my sense of Excessive Bloat and to give a close listen to the new Portishead album because I love it so much that I want to write something about it. I got the gym, took off my clothes and put them in a locker, opened my gym bag and . . . NO SHOES. I fucking left my sneakers at home. Dammit. So I stood there annoyed and frustrated staring into the giant gaping empty space inside my bag where my shoes should be, and I felt the ever-increasing sense of Ass Flab from sitting at my desk working all day, and I looked at my sad lonely Itty Bitty iPod Shuffle waiting for me to listen to it, and I thought, “FUCK. I don’t want an excuse to not workout. I want to workout. My ass is screaming at me!” So what did I do? Well I put on my tank top, opened my locker, got out my black corduroys and red boots, put them back on, went upstairs to the weight room and worked out anyway. Wearing my pants and my boots. So what? I would not be stopped. No one said anything. No one asked. I was just some crazy woman working out in red boots, and I did my entire KDD Workout Thing as if I always exercise in red boots. I either looked like a complete Dorkus or a Kick Ass Red Boot Gym Rebel. It depends on your perspective. And I’m glad I did persevere because I digested the Portishead album on a completely new, complex and detailed level. I mean, I dissected that album bit by bit, sound by sound, lyric by lyric, when I was in the gym. I took some notes in my little red KDD Notebook (apparently red is my color today), and when I get home tonight I’m going to give the album another listen. It’s been a while since I’ve been so inspired by an album, but Portishead Third is IT for me. I am sure it will be my favorite album of the year. I know that’s total projection and there are many months left of 2008, but I can’t imagine anything topping this album for me this year. I’ll write about the album on the plane when I fly to California on Thursday. No time for music and movie writing until then.

Anyway, I’m glad I decided to use my red boots for gym shoes. Otherwise I would have been fucked – flabby in both brain and body. Instead my muscles are all like THANK YOU and my brain is all inspired and charged with music and what it does to me. Woo hoo. Go me. And my red boots. (If I do say so myself.)

Yowza, I’m having an excellent critter day. Just back from a nighttime run. Right as I was turning the bend weaving my way through the final stretches of the desert, I saw an enormous bird take flight, its wings powerfully strong and the downy underside glowing in the light of the moon. I was hoping it was an owl because I love owls. Well, I got a chance to get a closer look because he stopped on top of the street sign and looked down at me. I stopped and shone my flashlight up at him to see his magnificent form. I then engaged in Owl Conversation which basically was something like, “Oh aren’t you just so magnificent? Who's a beautiful owl? Who's a big gorgeous guy?” Etc etc. He looked right into my eyes and let me talk to him for a while. I gave him more reassurances of his spectacular awesomeness. Then he nodded his head at me and flew off into the night with a giant beating of his massively gorgeous wings. I felt so happy. I love owls so much. They’re like flying cats. And this guy obviously wanted to visit with me for a while. Cool Owl Mojo Stuff. I ran the rest of the run home at high speeds with an ENORMOUS KDD SMILE smeared across my face.

Oh, and this sure beat the massive amounts of Road Kill we saw on our early evening bike ride tonight. Bean kept saying, “Looks like it’s Road Kill Season, Mom.” I mean we saw so many flattened furry and scaly things today we could have paved an entire road with their entrails.

But not with my friend the owl. He was very much alive. And he liked me!

I was going to share some music with you, but I need to go water the garden.

PS: I guess that since I had two critter posts in one day, I can officially proclaim that it's Critter Season which means that, yes indeed, we will now have a few months of regular KDD Critter Reports. Because sure, I get excited about movies and art and music and all that, but I also love love love to spot me some desert critters and tell you about them. So what? You don't like critters then don't read my Critter Reports. So there.

Dang it! The one morning I forget to bring my little digital camera with me, I stumble upon one of those Totally Awesome Tucson Moments that don’t happen anywhere else on the planet. So I dropped Bean off at school and was heading down Campbell when something runs into the road. Wait. Not just something. Three things. In fact THREE JAVELINAS. Not just any three javelinas, but a Mommy, a Daddy, and a LITTLE ITTY BITTY BABY javelina. Now I gotta tell you that there is not much that makes me happier than seeing the desert critters out in their natural environs, and I also gotta tell you that LITTLE ITTY BITTY BABY javelinas are pretty freaking CUTE. (Yes, I said cute.) You should have seen the little booger’s legs running.

So I slowed down and let the javelinas cross the road all the while squealing with ecstatic joy: JAVELINAS! JAVELINAS! But then I watched where the javelinas were going, and they were going to the lawn outside of the townhomes on Campbell where there was an ENTIRE HERD of javelinas chomping away at the grass. Not just a herd but a herd that included A GIANT BIG KAHUNGA OF A MONSTER BUTT JAVELINA. AWWWWWWEEEEEESOMMMMMMMMME.

So yeah, these javelinas were in seventh heaven because grass, my friends, does not come easy in Tucson. That green shit is like gold, and this big old herd of javelina was chowing down on the yummy stuff.  LAWWWNNNNNNNNNNNNN! FUCKING A!

So now I know why Mommy, Daddy, and Baby were RUNNING across the road. They were all like “PARTY AT THE TOWNHOMES!” Not just any party but a GRASS PARTY. Dudes. And I got to see the JAVELINA PARTY! Cute little peccary fuckers. I wish you could have seen them. I wish I brought my camera. Dang it squared.