The term 'Lynchian' by David Foster Wallace

I was not that interested in David Lynch. Mainly because I had only seen three of his films and some of his short films: (1) Mulholland Drive, which I saw in my early twenties and was the first movie I enjoyed watching (maybe enjoying is not the best word to describe this, as the movie is quite unsettling) despite having absolutely no idea what the whole thing was about; (2) Dune, which is so bad that I immediately assumed Lynch was an artist who had tried and failed catastrophically to be a filmmaker; (3) Blue Velvet, which again I thought it was a good movie but also immensely unsettling, creepy and pretty much without a point; (4) a collection of his short films, which confirmed my suspicion that David Lynch was an artist and certainly not a filmmaker or anything close.

My friend, who is one of those rare kind of people with enough sense and wits in his brain as to suffer from all the world's incongruences, recommended me to read David Foster Wallace's 'A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again', a collection of essays on different matter subjects. One of the essays is about David Lynch, and on one particular instance he explains what the term 'Lynchian' means. Here is his first definition ("academic") of the term: "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." I, being Spanish and naturally a slow reader, had to read it three times to get the full meaning of the concept, but once assimilated it opened a new door to understanding David Lynch's movies and his strong influence on a generation of filmmakers that includes Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers and Carl Franklin.

This essay (and the book once you are there!) is a key piece that I strongly recommend to anyone interested in filmmaking, whether you love, hate or, like myself was, are indifferent about David Lynch. For my part, I am currently watching the entire Twin Peaks collection (I was the only kid in my class, probably in the school even, who never watched the series... and I hated Laura Palmer for that), including the series, movies, documentaries and anything really that falls into my hands about it, and have a pile of David Lynch movies to watch and re-watch. I'll let you know when I get to the end.

Latcho Drom

'ROCKS' selected for the 2010 Vancouver DSLR Film Festival

Our first official selection! Yay!

See the trailer here

Rocks - Trailer

Yuja Wang - Flight of the Bumble-Bee (Vol du Bourdon)

Yuja Wang plays Cziffra's arrangement for piano of the Flight of the Bumble-Bee (Vol du Bourdon) by Rimsky-Korskakov, at the 2008 Verbier Festival.

'Suso33'

Action graffiti

Nokia 'Dot'

New Guinness World Record for Smallest stop-motion animation character in a film

The drench Cubehead

Neat piece of work!

Showreel Aug10

Beautiful Funeral

I saw a funeral today. The cars, lining up in front of a Victorian house where a modest crowd assembled, were covered in flowers. Beautiful flowers. From the distance I stopped to observe. You can tell how people in funerals, despite their sad faces and their limited understanding, momentarily fathom the beauty of death. There they were these four impeccable black cars. They shined with such joy that you could almost hear the trumpets of heaven, blowing in all their glory. The first one, the hearse, was covered with the most amazing bouquet I have ever seen. So intense was the white of the flowers, so smooth their petals and so erect their stamens that its very sight put me straight away in a heavenly state. In contrast, the background of black and white smoking, weeping and murmuring narcissus, looking at their reflections on each other, dropped the image of a guillotine. I could hear the wooden structure creaking, slicing with its elegy right across the souls of a silent audience. There it came out of the house like an immense razor. The lustre of the ebony coffin somehow made it look lighter. When that procession crosses the town, I thought, the onlookers will turn their heads in awe and anguished confusion, and some will even silently wish they were the corpse. If you think about it, most of them are probably dead already. The elegance of that peculiar delegation brings them out of their miseries for the moment they hold on their breaths. There it was again, that unique sublime feeling you get when the stiffness of a dead cold body and the fiery bursting of a blossomed bouquet blend. There it was again the deep, immeasurable space and the exploding supernova. Life and death. Death covered with the most exquisite example of life. They cry because they cannot hold in their chest their immense joy. Their eyelids, clamped wide open, expose the corneas, pupils and irises to the flames of a pleasure they never though of this world. No priest has enough holy water to put that fire out. No verse, parable, proverb, oracle, theorem or prophecy can ever render in words that blow of pure ecstasy, that mystical orgasm, which momentarily shakes their entire existence. Because it is at that very moment, when words or thoughts have no meaning, that they feel most alive.

I love this world and the people in it. I want them to feel alive. It requires some sacrifice. But it is worth it. It is a million times worth it.

Faded reflection

I sit and see the people pass by. Then I see their reflection on the shop window and they are faded. I wish they could stay like that, semi-transparent and dull, because when they are in their full colour, shape and form they exhaust me. I want them to stop. I want them to shut up and read a book, read a thousand books. All the books I never managed to read. So maybe they can explain them all to me. Maybe then, they can explain everything to me.

YKK (revisited)

How many zippers must one man unzip
before he realises it's YKK?

Grey Matter, The Moon

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain. You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today and then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun. So you run and you run to catch up with a sun that is sinking. Racing around to come up behind you again. The sun and the earth look exactly the same but you're older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Pink Floyd - Time (Adapted by H. Dubrovsky)

La Haine (1995) by Mathieu Kassovitz

Senselessness. This film transmits rather well the results of a very common and dangerous mix: ignorance and frustration. Ignorance due to a partial and limited understanding of social dynamics and frustration due to being in the oppressed side. They both result in an aimless rage, an untargeted and random attack to defend against an invisible enemy.
Technically interesting but too often indulging in pretentious camera tricks and transitions, which are unlinked with the purpose of both the scene and the film, standing undecided between Cinéma vérité and a hardboiled heist film. Attacking violence with stylised irony and grim realism at the same is a hard one to pull and ‘La Heine’ fails to do so.
Nevertheless, 'La Heine' is an interesting trip, the characters are subjugated to a society that treats them as scum and hopes of them to just disappear, and one cannot help but to empathise with their self-destructive desperation, their anger and their resentment.

Funeral (draft)

I saw a funeral today. The cars, parked in front of a humble Victorian house where a modest crowd assembled, were covered in flowers. Beautiful flowers. Despite their sad faces and limited understanding, you can tell how in funerals people momentarily fathom the beauty of death. There they were these four impeccable black cars. They shined with such joy that you could almost hear the trumpets of heaven, blowing in all their glory. The first one, the hearse, was covered with the most amazing bouquet I have ever seen. So intense was the white of the flowers, so smooth their petals and so erect their stamens that its very sight put me straight away in a rather lecherous mood. Simultaneously, the background of black and white murmuring narcissus, looking at their reflections on each other, dropped the image of a hangman in my head. I could hear the gallows creaking, slicing with their elegy right across the souls of a silent audience. There it came out of the house like an immense razor. The lustre of the ebony coffin somehow made it look lighter. When that procession crosses the town, I thought, the onlookers will turn their heads in awe and anguished confusion, and some will even silently wish they were the corpse. If you think about it, most of them are probably dead already. The elegance of that peculiar delegation brings them out of their miseries for the moment they hold on their breaths. There it was again, that sublime feeling you get when the stiffness of a dead cold body and the fiery bursting of a blossomed bouquet blend. There it was again the deep, immeasurable space seizing our fat juicy brains and squeezing them dry of understanding. The tears of the mourning are of incomprehension, they are of fear of the unknown. A day ago, their little blue cage was all they ever knew and all they ever wanted from life and suddenly, out of nowhere, a black hole opens in it without warning, and they are forced to gaze upon it. Their eyelids clamped wide open, exposing their corneas, pupils and irises to the flames of a hell they never though of this world. No priest has enough holy water to put that fire out. No verse, parable, proverb, oracle, theorem or prophecy can ever render in words that blow that momentarily shakes their entire existence. And it is at that very moment, when words or thoughts have no meaning, that they feel most alive.

Thought I'd open with a quote...

...or two.

Obscenity

"Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war." Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer

Everything is endured...

"Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable." Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer

Slaughter...

"It's like a man in the trenches again: he doesn't know any more why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he'll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just his bare nails, and he'll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he'd slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why." Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer

Charity

“It’s easy to love the idealised figure of a poor, helpless neighbor, the starving African or Indian […] as long a he stays far enough from us.” Slavoj Žižek - Enjoy Your Symptom!

Success

"When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." Oscar Wilde - An Ideal husband.