The Black Isle

High tech, Low tech Part Deux. I didn’t post a link to MUXTAPE yesterday because their system was overcrowded and uploading took forever. But do go. Do make a mixtape (Upload 12 songs from your MP3 collection, the more arcane the better — commercial stuff doesn’t load well) and share it with your fiends.

Here are some existing muxtapes:
http://theconsumed.muxtape.com/
http://dearingfilm.muxtape.com/
http://thisisawakeupcall.muxtape.com/
http://blacktshirts.muxtape.com/

Institut Drahomira, a French-posing-as-Russian art-film-music pair-of-dudes-posing-as-collective. I think I like these people! A lot! Thanks to Mutant Sounds.

PLUS Drahomira also uploaded this HILARIOUS clip of Michel Houellebecq doing a spoken-word thing with a live orchestra at the Folies Pigalle.

Spectacular finale from Kid Millions (1934) with Eddie Cantor. It’s like a live-action Silly Symphony. More from this collector of 1925-1935 musical clips.

High tech, low tech. 78s excavated from Hell, Devo muzak from 1981, etc. Ephemera for all! A treasure trove of a blog!

the Raymond Scott Quintet

I’m getting there, I’m getting there… I just wish it wasn’t so damned slow.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Michel Houellebecq could well be taking his adaptation (he wrote, he directed) of his own novel to Cannes this year. Benoit Magimel, the young buck who spent much of The Piano Teacher being ravaged by Isabelle Huppert, is ze star.

Sometimes I feel like the dame in the trenchcoat, but mostly I just love the upside-down titles and Ralph Meeker’s lousy attitude. The opening sequence from Robert Aldrich’s KISS ME DEADLY:

A passage from Octave Mirbeau’s Le Calvaire (p.89, translation by Christine Donougher), which I’m currently reading and loving:

Believing I had come upon art’s definitive formula by which I was going to achieve my aspirations, to pin down alive, in words, my quivering dreams, I published a book which was highly praised and that sold well. Of course, I was flattered by this small success; I, too, flaunted it proudly, as though it were something rare; I, too, put on airs, the better to delude all others. And wanting to delude myself, I have often looked at myself in the mirror at home, with an actor’s complacency, to detect sure signs of genius in my eyes, on my forehead, in the majestic carriage of my head. Alas! success has rendered even more painful my deep-seated awareness of my own incapacity. My book is worthless, the style is tortured, the conception childish: in place of thought, it resorts to violent haranguing, absurd phraseology. Sometimes I reread passages that were applauded by the critics, and I find it all there — Herbert Spenser and Scribe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Commerson, Victor Hugo, Poe and Eugène Chavette. Of myself, whose name is displayed on the front of the book, on the yellow cover, I find nothing. Depending on the vagaries of my recollection, on the memories that have remained with me, I think someone else’s thoughts, I write what someone else has written; I have no thought or style of my own. And important people whose taste is sound, whose judgment is law, have commended my personality, my originality, the unpredictability and sophistication of my feelings! How sad this is! What shall I do? Today, as yesterday, I do not know.

Seems like my fiction fragment Thwack! which appeared in the LA Weekly Literary Supplement last year is one of five finalists (including a bit by Etgar Keret) for the 2008 Best Fiction “Maggie,” an award given out by the Western Publications Association. Results on May 2.

the silence, you see, means that the writing’s going fantastic.