Brutal and True reading

“For where any one is conscious that his delight in an object is with him independent of interest, it is inevitable that he should look on the object as one containing a ground of delight for all men. For, since the delight is not based on any inclination of the subject (or on any other deliberate interest), but the subject feels himself completely free in respect of the liking which he accords to the object, he can find as reason for his delight no personal conditions to which his own subjective self might alone be party. Hence he must regard it as resting on what he may also presuppose in every other person; and therefore he must believe that he has reason for demanding a similar delight from every one. Accordingly he will speak of the beautiful as if beauty were a quality of the object and the judgement logical (forming a cognition of the object by concepts of it).”

(c) The Critique of Judgement

Bertrand Tavernier:

"I don't much like these canonical lists: too many beautiful and important films are missing, and they leave out the texture, the richness and life of cinema by not including all those 'imperfect' films which are more meaningful and alive than frozen, dated classics."

oh my it's the Kitchen

http://www.d-kitchen.com/
http://www.luckykitchen.com/

So any other kitchen companies?

Edit:
yes there is more:
two different visual kitchens even
who comes up with these names?
soon: the largest inventory of kitchen companies on the internet

http://www.visualkitchen.co.za/
http://www.visualkitchen.com/

gimme more!

a small guide to Mount Eerie

Regular noctos visitors will have noticed we have a soft spot for Phil Elverum, former Microphones frontman, now recording albums under his Mount Eerie moniker.

Apparently Phil has been real busy again and is releasing albums like crazy. Take a peek at his pwelverum & sun website. And as you can see on this next picture, he's keeping up with the DIY attitude.



Now let me try and offer some links and information on these albums because the pwelverum site wasn't that clear to me at first.

MOUNT EERIE - NO FLASHLIGHT
Okay so the most essential release for now is the 1st full album release by Mount Eerie called No Flashlight.

You can order this album via pwelverum & sun if you want a handmade LP & CD or get the european CD version in september through the danish play/rec label.

The album comes with this huge foldout artwork (5 ft. x 3.5 ft) which features track explanations, lyrics, photos, and excerpts from other sources.

The European CD version will be released September 5th 2005 on Play/Rec and contains 4 extra songs compared to the US edition, 19 songs in all. (I'm not sure if this version also has the foldout artwork).

I have seen two reviews so far: a very good and a very bad one.
- Tiny Mix Tapes praises the album and provides good notes.

- Pitchfork makes another mess review which is totally beside the point and they should stop expecting another Microphones record.

No flashlight is obviously a different direction than the old Microphones stuff. The music is much more stripped to the bone and Elverum is really tackling more conventional singer-songwriter material (but in his own idiosyncratic singing manner which makes it so interesting).

"I hold nothing" is already becoming one of the most beautiful songs of 2005 so far. So my suggestion is to go and get this album. (dutch readers should also check this interview)



Now let's take a look at all the other releases:

MOUNT EERIE - DRUMS OF NO FLASHLIGHT
as the title suggests, only the drums. Available through pwelverum.

MOUNT EERIE - SEVEN NEW SONGS OF MOUNT EERIE
This seven new songs album is now available as a free download on archive.org. It had a limited run on tour but now forever available for free. (check the song "with my hands out"!)

As Phil explain himself:

Seven songs recorded for the July 2004 tour of Australia by Mount Eerie. They were recorded "Nowhere" in Anacortes, Washington in the months of May and June 2004. The release was in an edition of 196 CDRs and sold out on tour.

MOUNT EERIE - DANCES WITH WOLVES
A 12" EP featuring only two songs. It was recorded live to vinyl at a pressing plant in Australia. 2 long songs that had just been written being sung/played by a large band of Australians, with horns and chorals.

You can order this one through Krecs

MOUNT EERIE - SINGERS
For now only available through pwelverum & sun. It has been described as more traditional Microphones stuff and it features quite a lot of good old guests such as Mirah & Calvin Johnson. There are extensive notes on who did what for each song on the album.

(I guess this album will also get a proper distribution deal in Europe, so wait a little longer for that)

MOUNT EERIE - 11 OLD SONGS (not released yet)
This album is not released yet but should be available in November. From what I read this album features apparently songs that are just phil and a casio keyboard. So that should be interesting!

Anyway everyone who wants to have more information or wants to chat with other fans should check this Mount Eerie fan forum.

Grizzly Warrior

The new Werner Herzog looks pretty interesting. It's a documentary about the life of eco-warrior and grizzly bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell who eventually got killed by one:

- Trailer

- Article from the Anchorage Daily News on Treadwell

2nd Hollywood Lookalike InstalmentVincent D'Onofrio & Vince VaughnWho's Your Daddy?

Plus now again starring in the same movie.

g-d and lucifer

please remember me
happily
by the rosebush laughing
with bruises on my chin

(c) the trapeze swinger by iron&wine (or)
your song for the day in mp3

envision your ghost blowing up globes

without a universal law, there is no gravity
without no gravity, there is no atmosphere
without no atmosphere, there is no chance of life
and with no chance of life, I don't ex-ist

(c) soft atlas by 13+god
your song for the night

it's the modderfucking elefanten again

all you hipster cat and dog lovers
elefanten from live it happy land did another mix.
its rap mash up free jazz yo.
soon playing in da club near you
checkit!

elefanten (sonores) mix #1: "you got me going in circles"
DOWNLOAD. (41 min. 47 MB *.mp3.)

elefanten (sonores) mix #2: "look at the lights"
DOWNLOAD. (28 min. 32 MB *.mp3.)

all of us lost.

Urgent hype message from senor Shaven Head:

A new interesting TV series called Lost hits the uk tv screens August 10th on Channel 4 & hopefully soon coming to a screen near you.

Meanwhile we got some teasers and trailers to keep us busy:

Teaser version 1 (alternate link)
accompanied by Cinematic Orchestra's wonderful song Channel 1 Suite.

Teaser version 2
accompanied by Portishead's equally great Numb.

Channel 4 trailer/advert

The dancing was a bit weird at first but I'm loving it now. There's no dancing in the tv series if smart younguns were wondering. So if the show is as good as the accompanying music, we should be set for new marathons!

a new narraglyphic picto-assemblage by Daniel Clowes

So what we think of this? Looks good to be honest:

At long last: Daniel Clowes is back at Pantheon, with a brilliant new graphic novel already hailed by Time as "another of his hilariously slightly off-center worlds that have a vague sense of dread about them. Kind of like where you live."

Welcome to Ice Haven! "It's not as cold here as it sounds," declares Random Wilder, our reluctant guide to this sleepy Midwestern town. He's also its would-be poet laureate. Would-be, that is, were it not for the "Florid banalities" of his archrival, Ida Wentz, published ad nauseam in the Ice Haven Daily Progress. Among Wilder's other fellow Ice Havians are the lovelorn Violet Van der Plazt and Vida Wentz; the detective team of Mr. and Mrs. Ames; the adorable interracial moppets Carmichael and Paula; disaffected stationery salesgirl Julie Patheticstein; the Blue Bunny, newly sprung from prison and the bitterest rabbit in town; and poor little David Goldberg, missing for more than a week now...

Also check the interview The Guardian did with Daniel Clowes:

He admits that he finds writing female characters easier. "With every male character I feel like I either have to consciously make it not myself or I have to make it myself," he says. "In the case of these girls, there's a certain freedom. I just don't feel any connection to them. I don't feel like I have to represent myself."

a message to the far away free

Dear Garden State lovers,

the noctos board likes Natalie Portman too and understands her appeal but we are not so sure about Garden State. Don't get us wrong, mr Zach Braff did an admirable job in doing altogether the writing, directing and playing the lead. Well at least the latter wasn't so hard when you assign yourself to be Ms Portman's love interest. In that regard we also heard a certain Monthly Dolores is steadily working on her upcoming pornographic comedy for which she will try the same procedure as herr Braff.

But back to the movie: it truly had its overall seductive quality (above), its occasional good writing (one thing about natalie's character though, we didn't like the hysteria, going from very irritating to very adorable), good acting (Braff, Portman and Sarsgaard are all nice) and the literally sweet music (the postal service, nick drake and the one and only great coldplay song there will ever be: Don't Panic) but still it felt too much of drinking a bacardi breezer on a hot afternoon by the pool listening to a complete Manu Chao album.

So the board must advice you all:

For fun executed popcorn, it's at Mr and Mrs Smith's place.

For a more meaningful love related movie, you should try David Gordon Green again and particularly his second movie All The Real Girls. It has better music, dialogue, story & camerawork but no Natalie (Zooey is fine too though).

Sincerely.
The Board of Directors.

in the garden state spirit

Dolls
What's the word on these two?
Imaginary Heroes
Napolean Dynamite

Waste of the World or why Steven Spielberg's aliens will always suck

I can't put it any better than this. Just look at those miserable unimaginative aliens (and notice how similar and anthropomorphic they are).

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., AI, War of the Worlds, you're not with the program Steven. These are four horrible alien movies (with ET maybe being the least worst). And you made the same errors over and over with War of the Worlds: holy crap, what a bad effort: the script, the simplicity, the ending, the effects, dakota fanning, tom cruise and that gremlin alien?!

So please mr Spielberg, small advice from an insignificant moviegoer: no more scifi for you, stick to making nice little harmless movies and don't try so hard. I want more Jaws or Poltergeist or Catch me if you can or Back to The Future. Thanks.

Ricky Gervais goes Seona dancing

Ricky Gervais, Circa 1983

Ricky Gervais, Circa now

WARNING: Hilarious photos ahead!
Check out this fansite to get the whole story behind Seona Dancing.

Smile, Almost There

Whoo Broken Flowers is being released in the States. The EU has to wait a little longer but september will be soon there, so let's all wait by the campfire.

A few interesting articles have recently appeared on Jarmusch in the US media, let me bring you up to date:

- The New York Times has a very nice, lengthy piece on Broken Flowers and Jarmusch's career. This is the longest but most essential read. It's available online for registered users but you can also get the txt file here.

Most interesting quotes include:

''I know,'' Jarmusch moaned during a recent meeting with me in Manhattan. ''It's all so . . . independent. I'm so sick of that word. I reach for my revolver when I hear the word 'quirky.' Or 'edgy.' Those words are now becoming labels that are slapped on products to sell them. Anyone who makes a film that is the film they want to make, and it is not defined by marketing analysis or a commercial enterprise, is independent. My movies are kind of made by hand. They're not polished -- they're sort of built in the garage. It's more like being an artisan in some way.''

More than anything, Jarmusch is a sort of focused amateur enthusiast. ''I consider myself a dilettante in a positive way, and I always have,'' he said. ''That affects my sense of filmmaking.'' His passions, which reflect his resolute disinterest in the conventional, include the study of mushrooms (''I almost died after eating wild mushrooms''); bird-watching (''In 12 years, I've identified about 80 birds in my yard in my home in the Catskills''); the authorship of Shakespeare's plays (''I think it was Christopher Marlowe''); the history of cinema (''Some mornings I'll wake up and say, 'There's an Ophuls film I haven't seen, and I need to see it today'''); and, most of all, music. He wrote ''Broken Flowers'' while listening to recordings from the early 70's by Mulatu Astatke, an Ethiopian jazz-funk artist (whose music ended up in the film), and is currently enthralled by a duo called Coco Rosie, who, as he described them, ''sound like two little Billie Holidays an octave higher if you were on acid in Tokyo in 1926.'' ''I think I was supposed to be a musician,'' he said. To him, movies should aspire to the immediate sway of music. ''I want to capture the temperature, the texture, the atmosphere you can inhale just by listening to a three-and-a-half-minute song.''

''This is extremely time-consuming,'' Jarmusch said. ''We're getting close to giving the baby away, and I'm exhausted. I'm happiest when I'm shooting the movie. Filming is like sex. Writing the script is like seduction, then shooting is like sex because you're doing the movie with other people. Editing is like being pregnant, and then you give birth and they take your baby away.'' He took a swig of cranberry juice. ''After this process is done, I will watch the movie one more time with a paying audience that doesn't know I'm there, and then I will never see it again. I'm so sick of it.''

"I hear William Burroughs a lot, too, but I don't really want to listen to his advice.''

"Nearly all of Jarmusch's films had been warmly received in competition at Cannes, and ''Dead Man'' had momentum; there had been talk that it was going to be the best movie at the festival. But after the film was shown on the huge screen at the Palais, only a few people applauded. And then, in the vast, mostly quiet auditorium, a voice boomed down from the balcony. ''Jeem,'' a man yelled in a heavy French accent, ''it's [expletive].''

- Howard Feinstein from indieWIRE reports:

Movie-savvy readers, who have followed articles about Jim Jarmusch's picaresque "Broken Flowers" ever since it took the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, are familiar with its spare plot. Film icon Bill Murray plays ennui-ridden Don Johnston, a wealthy retiree and lifelong Lothario described by the director as "a man with a hole in his life" -- the latest in Jarmusch's gallery of isolated protagonists. Don receives an anonymous unsigned letter on pink stationery informing him that he has a 19-year-old son. Partly out of curiosity but mostly out of endless prodding by his friend and neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), a working-class Ethiopian immigrant and amateur sleuth, Don embarks on a trip around the States to check out the motherhood status of four ex-girlfriends from two decades before. The women are played by Tilda Swinton, Frances Conroy, Sharon Stone, and Jessica Lange injecting indie, television, and even more Hollywood star power into the film.

What most readers don't know is that "Broken Flowers" -- a kissin' cousin to Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1949 "A Letter to Three Wives" -- is the offshoot of an earlier script, "Three Moons in the Sky," also penned for Murray. "It's about a polygamist who deeply loves each of his three wives and families but keeps them secret from one another," Jarmusch explains. He chats affably in the garden of an upscale Cannes hotel, his silver mane attracting the attention of passersby. "The man works his ass off to maintain the secret, but it wears him down." Murray agreed to do the picture. Jarmusch recalls that he then obtained most of the financing during the 2002 Cannes festival, where his Chloe Sevigny-starrer "Int. Trailer Night" was playing. (It is a segment in the omnibus film "Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet.") Now the screenplay is, he says, "in a drawer." He had second thoughts after he returned home.

"I reread the script and thought, this is a great story -- this isn't a great script. It's overwritten, it needs work. I don't rewrite scripts. I didn't want to spend two years of my life fixing it. So I went to Bill with the idea that became 'Broken Flowers' and told him, 'I got the money but I don't want to make the film.' He looked at me, as if to ask, 'What are you SAYING?' I told him I had another idea and what it was. He just said, 'Let's do that one.' I didn't want to do a bait-and-switch thing on him, but I had to be honest. I wrote the new script in two-and-a-half weeks and gave it to him."

He does not regret the time most of us would consider wasted. "I've been making films for 25 years. I don't like looking back into my own past, but I've learned that progress comes from the mistakes. Mistakes are gifts. The stuff that didn't work remains mysterious. You can't analyze why something worked, but you can analyze why it DIDN'T work."

Jarmusch had another purpose in mind with the new script. "I wanted to do something with this incredible wealth of female actors 40-55 who seem discarded. I wanted female characters who were varied and interesting as part of the story." He had Stone and Lange in mind, but didn't initially think of either "Six Feet Under"'s Conroy ("I don't watch TV") nor Swinton ("I met her in LA backstage at a rock 'n roll concert by The Darkness"). And varied and interesting their characters are. "I don't like back-story," he asserts, adding that the viewer can chart the women's 20-year path "by the way they live, by objects in their homes, by how they dress and talk." Stone's earthy, working-class Laura has a yard sale going on in front of her home, a "suped-up" car in the driveway, and a naked teen daughter in the living room. Conroy's passive Dora lives with her husband in a sterile pink home in a faux-quality real estate development. Lange's low-key Carmen, who has opted for an alternative lifestyle, practices her profession of "animal communicator" in an expensive structure of barn wood and glass on a large wooded site. Swinton's Penny is a tough biker gal whose unmanicured yard contains motorcycles, car seats, and wrecked autos.

Just as we begin to think that Don's voyage across the country by plane and car (accompanied by a fabulous bluesy piece written and performed by Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke) is, on one level, an anthropological study of class and values in contemporary America, we realize that something is missing. We don't have a clue where any of them lives. License plates are blurred; no telling road or airport signs are visible. "On set I always referred to it as 'Generica,'" says Jarmusch. "Normally I like the contrast between city and country. I live in the city and in the Catskills, and I love them both. This film is in between. It's all in the suburbs, like where I came from, from where I escaped." He neglects to mention another, less abstract reason for the non-differentiation of locations. Murray agreed to the project on condition that all of it -- and he is in just about every frame -- be shot within 100 miles of his New York home. The film was made entirely in New York and New Jersey.

"Broken Flowers" is poignant, sadness overriding comedy. Winston IS comic relief, and we can't help but laugh at seeing four well-respected actresses playing parts that sabotage our expectations. The movie begins with Don's live-in girlfriend walking out and ends on a revelatory note with an existential 360 degree pan around him. "I always have a natural mix of melancholy and humor coming from inside," says Jarmusch. "In this film, I tried to pull the humor back a bit for two reasons: I wanted sadness to have its proper place; and I wanted to pull from that side of Bill, a very precise actor who can be so hilarious. Usually when I start a movie, it gets funnier as I go along; it just sneaks in. In this one, I tried to keep the humor between the takes." It's more "Ghost Dog" than "Down by Law," less "Stranger in Paradise" than "Dead Man." "We laughed a lot when the camera wasn't rolling, but we were careful not to let (the film itself) go in the direction of the goofball stuff. I hope it's funny, although I'm afraid the American people will just sit there and..." He offers a shrug signifying incomprehension.

He is wary of how "Broken Flowers" will be seen compared to his earlier works. Someone at the press conference earlier that day had brought up its relative accessibility. "What's more accessible about it?" he barks, referring to the comment. "Maybe my paranoid brain hears 'commercial' when I hear accessible -- and that's a bad thing to me. That makes me draw a gun. My intention is not to make my films commercial. I'm not willing to make a product for commerce. I'm not stupid, though. Some distributors so have to work their asses off to get people to see it-- but that's not my job or concern. If it were, I'd be betraying myself."

"I worry that, because Bill was in Sofia Coppola's film" -- he notes that his script came first -- "they'll try to sell 'Broken Flowers' as (deep voice) 'Lost in Translation' meets 'Sideways.'"

- The Washington Postalso also has quite a long article but mostly repeats what's been said in the NYT. Except for this nice little anecdote:

Both Murray and Jarmusch share a knack for improvisation: They both, as Jarmusch says laughingly, "are a little contrary, and don't like to plan ahead.

"Bill doesn't like to rehearse," Jarmusch adds. "While we were shooting I told him, 'The script is a sketch to me, and you add or change any dialogue you want.' He did add some things, but he also gave me a number of very subtle variations on each take. The fact that he could do that amazed me."

Murray's funny, wistful performance has been compared with his Oscar-nominated turn in "Lost in Translation." But the actor underscores the difference: "For me, Jim's film was a completely new experience," Murray says by telephone. "I never had a job like this one before. Usually, if you get the lead in a show, you're sort of driving the boat. But here, I never knew ahead of time how any of the actresses were going to play their scenes. So I had to be completely open and just react to them."

He pauses. "You know how people say, 'I'm really proud of this movie'? Well, it's sort of beyond that for me. I feel that I got to something here that I wouldn't have gotten to otherwise. I don't want to walk in and give a performance that I've thought about all week and know exactly what notes I want to hit. I just feel like I know enough about life that I've got the big moves down, sort of. The fine moves are moments you discover as you live life attentively."

Jarmusch shot "Broken Flowers" on locations around New York's Rockland and Westchester counties, and in New Jersey, in the fall of 2004. Frances Conroy recalls the set as homespun, "sort of like a block party." So homespun, in fact, that one morning Jarmusch watched Murray suddenly leave the set, walk to the house across the street (which was not involved in the film shoot), open the door without knocking, and disappear inside. "Ten minutes later, Bill emerges again with a plate of cookies, and starts offering them to the crew," Jarmusch says, shaking his head. "What I would have liked to see was the people inside eating breakfast, when Bill Murray walks in."

So any US reader already seen it?

Being an artisan

The Guardian reports the latest on the adaptation of On The Road. Coppola is taking the rear again and Walter Salles & Jose Riviera who did The Motorcycle Diaries together are tackling the book. Exciting news actually and I don't ever want to hear the name J. Schumacher again.

"OK, here's the pitch. 'A desolate road, the 1940s. Our hero, Sal Paradise, is with Dean Moriarty, free spirit and angel-headed hipster. They're taking off on a hitchhiking tour of the USA, during which they will meet girls, listen to jazz, get drunk and visit spots of scenic and historical interest. Then they go home -' Hey, what do you mean, 'Get out of my studio, hippy'? Don't you know who I am?"

You can see the problem. But when Francis Ford Coppola first bought the rights to On the Road in 1968, you can also see why he thought he was on to a winner. With its promise of bohemian freedom, Jack Kerouac's spiritual journey into the heart of America has been seducing generations of young people ever since it was published in 1957. Its iconic status is such that to have a battered copy sticking out of the back pocket of your Levi's is as much a teenage rite of passage as actually reading the thing.

On the Road is a visual book, too: all those descriptions of enchanted mesas and lost highways are begging to have a camera turned on them. The problem is that the book's appeal lies in the spirit of its writing, which is hard to translate to film. Without traditional storytelling devices, On the Road is less a novel than a surge of energy - and that's not an easy thing to storyboard.

Still, you have to admire Coppola's tenacity. Over the last two decades, he has commissioned writers Michael Herr (Apocalypse Now), Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart) and Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter) for the Herculean task of turning Kerouac's freewheeling, jazz-inspired prose into filmable narrative. Now he has commissioned the Brazilian director Walter Salles to prepare a script and slated Billy Crudup for the role of Paradise. It's exciting news, but the book's legions of fans are advised to stay cool until On the Road actually hits the multiplexes - if it ever does.

For The 6FU Fans

The photos supposedly taken by Claire in Six Feet Under are actually from this L.A. photographer David Meanix.

I really like the technique, although it doesn't work with every photo. But these two of actor Michael C. Hall are amazing, especially the one below. Mr. Meanix seems a bit too much of "the artist" though but nicely done anyway.

Links:
Salon about David Meanix
David Meanix about the show

You died last night. You O.D.'Ed.

Damn what a saddening blast from the past:

Frhate (aka Sean Otero) whom I used to read these long beat-esque stories from on the old Anticon messageboard, apparently died. Read here.

I didn’t know him personally off course and it’s weird to even read about the death of an internet persona you never spoke with. But there's a relation somehow I guess. Anyway his friends compiled some of his stories, read em. Especially the Meghan story is nice and sad at the same time in light of recent events.

Art Or Not