Paul Bowles at 100

There’s an incident described in Paul Bowles’ autobiography Without Stopping, relayed without sentiment or much elaboration, in which the author flips a coin as a method of deciding between two actions: heads he sets off for Europe as soon as possible, tails he overdoses on barbiturates. Bowles doesn’t recall having had the idea to do this, only suddenly, compulsively, performing the act. “It occurred to me,” he writes, “that this meant that I was not the I I thought I was or, rather, that there was a second I in me who had suddenly assumed command.” Whichever “I” took command of Bowles’ life at such turning points was clearly drawn to games of chance, and at times to outright danger—yet perhaps this “I” had a shapr eye for the odds. Had Bowles found tails, and had he followed through with its dictates, he would have died far too young, far in advance of most of the journeys and friendships with famous and talented people that would bless his life, far in advance of becoming the celebrated composer and fiction writer so many cherish. But Bowles got heads, went to Europe and many other, much stranger places, married a woman who would also prove a marvelous, eerily like-minded writer, produced a great deal of music and wrote or translated a good number of books, and lived until the age of 88. Last 30 December he would have turned 100. So this is a belated happy birthday.


As usual I reminded myself that since nothing was real, it did not matter too much.
—Without Stopping

William Burroughs, who came to know Bowles in Tangier in the 1950s, once quipped that Bowles should have titled his autobiography Without Telling, referring to Bowles’ indefatigable reticence regarding his sexuality. But Without Stopping actually tells us a lot about this very particular, very peculiar man, especially his enduringly hazy sense of volition and sense of the fluidity of self. That troublesome “I” referred to above tells us something about the narrator of ‘You Are Not I’, an escapee from a mental institution who seems to undergo some sort of psychic transference by placing a stone in her sister’s mouth. I read Without Stopping only after reading Bowles’ more famous works, namely the novels The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down and those incredible short stories, and found it to be easily one of the most vivid and fascinating items in the canon, though to be sure, it only deepens the mysteries surrounding Bowles’ life and work. The couple traversing the Sahara in The Sheltering Sky find only death or perdition; the widower in ‘Pages From Cold Point,’ who relocates he and his son to a remote island so as to escape what he deems a doomed and grotesque civilization, finds that what’s most repulsive about the life he’s left behind has been following him all along. Nearly everything Bowles published reads like a warning to Westerners to stay home, yet Bowles, raised comfortably—if under the terror of a reportedly draconian father—in the Eastern US, cultivated a legacy as the quintessential expatriate, always seeking roads less traveled and living out much of his life in North Africa. He couldn’t bear staying home. Thing is, however terrifying or fraught Bowles made traveling sound, something in his stories remained seductive. He certainly made me want to go everywhere.


“You don’t take a honeymoon alone,” he interrupted.
“You might.” She laughed shortly.
—‘Call at Corazón’

It’s easy to emphasize Paul Bowles’ weirdness—we’re talking about a guy who took an extraordinarily long time to differentiate between the sexes as a boy, and one who happily married a woman despite the fact that both he and Jane Bowles seemed primarily if not exclusively homosexual. But I think Bowles’ manner of grappling with ambivalence in both his personal life and his fiction is what resonates so intensely with readers. Those characters who most resemble Bowles seem perpetually torn between companionship and solitude. In an especially memorable chapter of The Sheltering Sky Port returns at night to a desolate, beautiful place he’d visited earlier in the day with Kit. By returning alone and in secret he seems to be correcting the earlier, shared, and somehow flawed experience of the place. Yet Port isn’t tempted to abandon Kit—he wants to keep sharing things with her, even at risk of spoiling some of them. Perhaps this tension is itself desirable. Perhaps, for all its detached, quietly unnerving qualities, The Sheltering Sky is simply an accurate portrait of marriage. It is, in any case, as good a place as any to discover Bowles if you’ve never read him. That or The Delicate Prey and Other Stories.

The Radiant Child: Tamra Davis' Basquiat portrait colours within the lines

Among the elements that distinguished the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat was its merging of text and image, or rather its use of text as image, words crossed-out or repeated until meanings shift or dissolve, often hovering between the cryptic and the forthright. Given that the traditional documentary already embraces the incorporation of on-screen text, it wouldn’t seem too great a leap for a film about Basquiat to approach its subject with a like sense of lexicographical adventure. Tamra Davis’ Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child—kind of a condescending title the more you think about it—does in fact use lots of text—it’s a rare documentary that endeavours to give running credits for stills—but does so in a manner that’s neither mimetic nor especially enlightening. The Radiant Child is however a solid introduction to the artist, and for that reason should be widely seen.

The film was prompted by Davis’ re-discovery of video interviews she recorded with Basquiat before grief consigned them to a drawer for 20 years. Davis and Basquiat were friends, and the film was clearly undertaken with tremendous affection, which makes The Radiant Child a very moving experience, yet prompts an approach so cautious as to fall short of offering rigorous insight into Basquiat’s art, celebrity, or private life. Basquiat was prolific, imaginative, wildly ambitious, intelligent, handsome and charismatic, but he died at 27, too young to be expected to comment meaningfully on his own work—not that any artist at any age is required to provide such commentary. So the lost interviews, in which Basquiat seems reticent and a bit self-conscious, are not enough to make The Radiant Child a revelation. An overstocked cast of interview subjects are recruited, but they’re either cut short or generalize. Poet John Giorno rightly attributes Basquiat’s textual innovations to his exposure to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique, yet fails to mention Brion Gysin, who co-founded the technique with Burroughs and was, you know, a painter. Fellow-painter Julian Schnabel, who launched his filmmaking career with a Basquiat bio-pic, seems like he could have contributed much more but has his comments squeezed. No one says much about the implications of Basquiat’s transition from street graffiti to graffiti-infused paintings. Historian Nelson George however does manage to shed some light on the role of racial tensions in Basquiat’s work.

Basquiat by Warhol

I don’t want to get carried away itemizing what The Radiant Child doesn’t do. What it does do is provide a vivid sense of the Lower Manhattan underground art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, probably the last time New York really mattered as a cultural vanguard—not coincidentally this was also the last time any normal person could afford to live there. Davis makes terrific use of archival tapes of Basquiat’s noise band Gray, of his appearances on TV Party, and of the artist at work. Davis also makes a case for the notion that Basquiat and Andy Warhol were, for a time at least, each other’s closest friends. In some only slightly perverse way, Warhol may have been a father figure to Basquiat, whose real father was a middle-class Haitian-American living just across the river in Brooklyn, and with whom Basquiat endured an uneasy relationship. Davis only hints at this unease, perhaps out of respect for Basquiat Sr., perhaps out of an unwillingness to psychoanalyze her dead friend. All of which is perfectly respectable, yet leaves The Radiant Child fraught with half-measures, a quality quite different from its subject who, for better or worse, threw himself headlong and devotedly into a truncated life of high art and dizzying fame.

Art in America: Terry Zwigoff's portraits of infamous or insufficiently famous men, their problematic legacies and vanishing worlds, return on DVD

Terry Zwigoff had played in a band and been close friends with legendary American cartoonist Robert Crumb for over two decades before finishing Crumb (1995), and it makes you wonder if more documentary filmmakers shouldn’t be turning their cameras on their most intimate acquaintances—providing their intimacy doesn’t blind them to these acquaintances’ more difficult tendencies. Crumb benefits enormously from Zwigoff’s relationship to his subject, yet familiarity in no way inhabits discovery or critique.

Crumb draws a portrait of the artist in middle-age, on the verge of leaving his San Francisco home forever to re-settle in France with his wife. It describes a deeply eccentric nerd and preternatural curmudgeon who learned to make a life for himself by submitting to a relentless compulsion to interpret the world around him, the result being sometimes satire, sometimes fantasy of the most brazen, grotesque, perverse incarnations, and often both—I wonder if this mixture hasn’t endowed Crumb with a legacy not altogether different from that of Naked Lunch author William Burroughs. Those who have seen Zwigoff’s Ghost World (01) yet are unfamiliar with Crumb will likely see him as the real-life version of the later movie’s hapless Seymour, but with talent and purpose.

Zwigoff’s clearly enamored if not obsessed with Crumb’s work and sensibility—Zwigoff conveys real love for everyone in Crumb’s family, who, it rapidly becomes evident, are as much this movie’s subject as Crumb himself. Yet Zwigoff’s interest isn’t reflexively defensive. What’s morally or politically troubling about Crumb’s monstrous, big-assed, powerful-legged—and, in at least one case, decapitated—women or his nostalgia for bygone eras awash in racist imagery is all on the table, and Zwigoff invites several articulate commentators to examine it, some of whom regard Crumb as a contemporary Brueghel or defender of full-figured female beauty, others a narcissistic pornographer of the most dangerous kind. I don’t think this is Zwigoff’s attempt at objectivity. I think he’s just trying to get things right, to look at Crumb’s work from as broad a perspective as possible.

You might argue that Crumb’s work is of secondary importance to the story of the Crumb brothers. Zwigoff and his crew accompany Robert on visits to his housebound, pharmaceutically dependent brother Charles, who still lives with mother in a house frozen in time, passing his days re-reading the Victorian novels he adored as a boy, and to his ascetic brother Maxon, who lives alone in a San Fran fleabag apartment, alludes to a history of sexual assaults, and meditates on a bed of nails. There’s something deeply unsettling about how closely Charles and Max resemble less fortunate variations on Robert, who seems to care for and even admire his brothers, yet is so overcome with despair over their lifestyles and psychological frailty that all he can usually do in response to their stories is emit more of his trademark dry chuckles. Truth is you’ll probably laugh too while watching Crumb, which never succumbs to pity or sentimentality and often celebrates that one essential element that might just keep the Crumb brothers—and some of the rest of us—alive for as long as we can bear it: a healthy sense of humour. Long before he made fiction movies, Zwigoff proved himself a masterful storyteller, and I don’t think he could honestly tell any story without recognizing it’s inherent laughter.

Criterion’s beautifully transferred and packaged release of Crumb this week coincides with their release of Zwigoff’s less known yet just as wonderful documentary Louie Bluie (85), a portrait of obscure country-blues musician and visual artist Howard Armstrong, whose recordings Zwigoff had cherished and emulated for decades before discovering that Armstrong alive and well and living in Detroit. As with Crumb, Louie Bluie takes a no-brainer approach to telling its subject’s story, with scenes of Armstrong doing his thing—ie: playing fiddle and mandolin or displaying his fecund, scatological and not un-Crumb-like art—and a journey back home, in this case rural Tennessee, where Armstrong learned to play whatever instrument he could find or invent, as well as several languages so he could play songs for diverse ethnic audiences. What’s magical about Louie Bluie arises not from its rudimentary structure but from Armstrong’s immense charisma and the movie’s slyly selected details.

We see Armstrong and his old partner Ted Bogan playing up a storm in the kitchen of “Yank” Rachell, another old collaborator. Armstrong solos with the mandolin behind his head while Rachell nonchalantly peruses the latest issue of Income Opportunities. We see Bogan boiling water in a frying pan to make a cup of Hill Brothers instant. We see Armstrong convince Bogan to give him one of his least-ugly shirts. We see Rachell sucking every last bit of anything we might call flesh from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken while Armstrong mercilessly and affectionately makes fun of him. None of these guys made much money from their musical talents, but Zwigoff makes it abundantly clear that what they did earn was several lifelong friendships. And as with Crumb, Zwigoff doesn’t shy away from the potentially offensive aspects of his subject’s outsized persona, allowing Armstrong to display his beloved erotic-historical Whorehouse Bible, and to hold forth on his ways with women and his inability to understand the appeal of Jesus: “Who the fuck cares about somebody nodding his damned head when some guy’s getting ready to kick his ass?”

Lovers of our less-recognized musical traditions owe a debt to Zwigoff for preserving this record of Armstrong, who died in 2003 at the age of 94, which also preserves many anecdotes and images of largely unheralded or even anonymous black musicians who developed what we call jazz, country and blues in the early 20th century. Lovers of our great if less-championed movies owe an equal debt to Criterion for rescuing Louie Bluie from oblivion.

The Mark on the page: Naked Lunch 50 years on

In the 50 years since its publication Naked Lunch has surely repelled more potential readers than it’s attracted, yet anyone compelled to work through William S. Burroughs’ seminal work knows how eerily fresh it remains, despite the novel’s refrain of putrefaction. Perhaps it endures because of its still arresting insights into the nature of addiction, a public health issue that does not seem to go away, that Burroughs renders in such a multitude of forms it becomes a multi-purpose metaphor of almost singular resonance. Perhaps it’s because the puzzle pattern of the text never yields to full cohesion, remaining tantalizingly just beyond our grasp. After all, Bill Lee, Burroughs’ alter ego and the closest Naked Lunch has to a protagonist, seems always to be departing, always refusing to sit for his appointed interrogations. Perhaps it’s the flamboyant grotesquerie and gallows humour, since besides Swift I’m not sure of any writer who’s mixed this particular cocktail so deftly. Though he’s testified to the contrary, Burroughs was indeed an entertainer.

I used the expression “to work through,” but when I picked up Naked Lunch as a teenager it didn’t seem like work at all. Tom Clancy, John Grisham, celebrity memoirs—now those would have felt like work. By contrast, the series of “routines” that comprised Naked Lunch were so casually inflammatory and recklessly stitched together it seemed positively inviting, something to be picked up, devoured and put aside when you’ve had your fill. Returning to the book for the first time in many years however, I no longer buy the ostensible randomness of its structure at all.

Naked Lunch is a lot of things, among them memoir, satire, science-fiction, vaudeville, metaphysical travelogue, hard-boiled junky pulp, grand guignol, pharmacological dissertation, avant-garde prose poem, hardcore pornography, and, as the author attests in the final passage, “a blueprint, a How-To book,” presumably on how to generate more like material, which Burroughs energetically followed. But while we can argue over how it might be finessed in some parts— personally, I think the abrupt interruption of the ‘Hauser and O’Brien’ sequence so late in the game by the belated “preface” kind of drops the ball—Naked Lunch is not random. Burroughs was a frequently masterful storyteller, if a rigorously fragmentary one. His first editors were Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, friends as well as fellow writers who knew Burroughs probably better than anyone and would have had a keen sense of how best to—literally—collect these pages from the floor and arrange them. For so much of Naked Lunch the accumulation of story fragments follows a propulsive internal logic and thematic causality, developing associations, characters, theses and sense of place, undulating and building like some demented mock-opera.

“I can feel the heat closing in…” It begins as New York crime fiction, allowing us our genre bearings, however briefly, immediately introducing the motifs of escape and paranoia. Bill Lee is on the run, and once he gets going the fleeing from one place to another never lets up. He soon encounters Doctor Benway, the quintessential Burroughs creation, a fountain of sinister wisdom and wisecracks, a villain of vampiric brilliance who represents the most innocuous and dangerous forms of societal control. He’s also good for ribald irreverence toward the human body, bragging about how he once performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can. The US will bleed into Latin America, into North Africa, into the fecund and deadly “Interzone,” into the blue movie Edenic deathless adolescent orgy of bizarre intercourse and orgasmic hangings that doubles as a protest against capital punishment. We’re regaled about the man who taught his asshole to talk until the asshole took over, a hysterically funny spin on parasitism, on the habit taking control of its master. It also exemplifies the anal fixation and Naked Lunch’s deep unease with homosexuality, this novel that careens with countless scenes of oddly touching, formative homoerotic bonding between boys and exceedingly graphic and often brutally violent gay sex.

The episodes of Naked Lunch bloom and recede like persistent hallucinations. But hallucinations are not mere fancy; they reconstruct and renovate experience. “Fall asleep reading and the words take on code significance.” Burroughs deliberately blurs the perspectives of half-sleep and wakefulness, trusting that there’s something of value to be found along the frontiers. And at its most lyrical, Burroughs’ prose displays an intoxication with language itself that inevitably aligns it to Joyce, sex and all. The compression of images couples with the ache of flooding memories. Following an act of torrid sexual climax, Burroughs writes, “A train roars through him whistle blowing… boat whistle, foghorn, sky rockets burst over oily lagoons… penny arcades open into a maze of dirty pictures…” And a paragraph later: “Time jumps like a broken typewriter, the boys are old men…” Over the course of this one page we see ecstasy produce an effect most commonly attributed to death: cryptically, William Burroughs’ life is flashing before our eyes.

If you know anything about Burroughs, who died in 1997 at the age of 83, you know that his writing, ideas and biography are inextricably merged. And you probably know that in Mexico City in 1951 he accidentally shot and killed his wife Joan Vollmer while performing a drunken game of William Tell. He would eventually write about this event as forever haunting him yet ironically functioning as the catalyst for his writing career, but in Naked Lunch the only ghost of a memory of Vollmer appears and quickly disappears at the close of one of one of the more lucid autobiographical episodes. In Cuernavaca or Taxco—he can’t remember which—Lee and “Jane” smoke weed with some pimp and Lee flees in a fit of paranoia, finally catching a bus on his own back to Mexico City. “A year later in Tangier,” he then writes, “I heard she was dead.” David Cronenberg was right to make his film of Naked Lunch an overt hybrid of the novel and Burroughs’ life, with Vollmer’s death at the forefront. Burroughs’ novel has been rightfully heralded for speaking dark truths about social evils and human frailty, but in making blatant the loop that keeps Bill Lee circling back to confront the horrific event that formed the poisoned nucleus of Burroughs’ work, Cronenberg’s Lunch was the more Naked by far.

Talking ourselves to death: a precarious conversation with Bruce McDonald about a movie called Pontypool

In the beginning there was the word. In the end, perhaps the word will be all that’s left. At the start of Pontypool we hear the disembodied voice of radio broadcaster Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) filling the theatre. He wonders aloud about disquieting undercurrents in coincidence and connectivity in names and events, and we can already hear how easily his words might begin to collapse in their meaning. Words collide and words confuse. Language is robust and infinitely prolific, but human understanding is fragile. Pontypool images the world ending precisely where language and comprehension intersect, not with a bang or whimper but something rather like a bark.

On the way to work one abominable, very early February morning, Grant sees a woman approach his car, her words obscure. She slaps his window before receding back into the darkness. Shaken, he arrives at the studio, tucks into his stash of whiskey, and begins his highly enjoyable on-air shtick, the very masculine talk radio provocateur who “takes no prisoners.” But soon he and his colleagues will become prisoners themselves. Reports start coming in regarding crowds huddling around a clinic, riots without any apparent purpose, and murder. Something is infecting the citizens of Pontypool, Ontario, and it is spreading fast. Like gossip.

Adapted by Tony Burgess from his novel Pontypool Changes Everything, Canadian maverick Bruce McDonald’s latest feature is apocalyptic horror for the age of babble, a tension-riddled genre mind-fuck that does for the word what Videodrome did for the image. It has certain foundations in the bold proposals of William S. Burroughs and Marshall MacLuhan, in the claustrophobic scenarios of George Romero, in the irresolvable differences between English and French Canada—a theme it treats with pleasing irreverence. It harkens way back to the undead hi-jinx of McDonald’s very first foray into moviemaking, a high school horror flick called Our Glorious Dead. Just don’t call the rabid victims roaming the streets of Pontypool zombies. McDonald’s preferred term is “conversationalists.”

I met the always enthusiastic yet always relaxed McDonald on behalf of Vue Weekly one recent Friday morning in a Toronto bar. In signature cowboy hat—an accoutrement also worn by McHattie as Mazzy—he discussed Pontypool’s complex and prolonged genesis, his collaboration with cinematographer Miroslaw Baszak, with whom he previously worked on Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside and Picture Claire, screenwriters Burgess and Noel Baker, who scripted McDonald’s cult favourite Hard Core Logo, the challenges of making a movie in such a stripped down setting, and the pleasures of persuasion in the world of independent cinema.

JB: Tony Burgess’ novel sprawls with locations, characters, layers of metaphor and even shards of autobiography. It slides from one impression to another along very tenuous points of connection. It would surely strike most filmmakers as uncontainable. I wonder how you all arrived at this point where you could just boil the premise down to its purest essence, to a chamber drama of sorts.

Bruce McDonald: It was a very long process. But what that attracted to me to it all the while was just that basic, crazy premise of the language virus. The funny thing about the dizzying amount of material in the novel is how in a weird way its unruliness was precisely what liberated us to just cherry-pick the few items we wanted and make up the rest. The only obligation was to stay true to the spirit of the book, which is the best way to approach an adaptation, really. Great books with lots of incident and ideas often seem like goldmines yet turn out to be traps. In any case it also took a long time because while Tony wrote the screenplay he was also learning how to write a screenplay. You know, a novel is closer to a garden, where a screenplay is more like a machine.

JB: Noel Baker told me that years ago he’d worked on a version of Pontypool with you guys that was actually much closer to the novel, but would have been a much more expensive project.

BM: Oh, yeah. And we haven’t thrown away that first script! In fact, the plan has been that if this one takes off we might do a little trilogy. Anyway, Noel was kind of Tony’s teacher. He’s a really great writer and a great pal. He introduced a sense of structural rigour that was foreign to Tony up to that point, a regime of tightening. Restrictions above all were tremendously useful for us in the process.

JB: Speaking of restrictions, I understand Pontypool began as a radio play for the CBC?

BM: They’d asked me if I had any material and after racking my brains for a while I thought maybe there was something in this language virus idea. Which got me to thinking about Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and that thing about only hearing terrifying things happening and not really understanding what’s going on. So we got rolling on this idea when it suddenly occurred to me that the radio play might actually make a pretty interesting movie, and the simplicity of the demands on location and personnel made it seem possible. Everyone got excited with the idea that we wouldn’t have to wait four years to make this movie—we could do it in three months. We considered opening it up to the outside world as we developed it, getting out of the one location, but it was Tony who insisted on just keeping it locked indoors, keeping it a sort of theatre of the mind.


JB: You think about how much of, say, Night of the Living Dead takes place within the house. The claustrophobia of the siege drama can really work for a horror film.

BM: Yeah. Every once in a while a hand will bust through. There’s that constant terror of knowing what going on right outside. And the noises. You think too about Repulsion or Assault on Precinct 13, these kinds of things, and you see how nicely Tony’s book weds itself to a certain B-movie-like energy.

JB: By enclosing the film almost entirely within the studio you not only ramp up the claustrophobia but also attune your audience to the smallest details and motifs. I’m thinking of the way you incorporate the simplest little things, like the boiling of a kettle to prickle the tension. And of course that kettle whistle pays off quite nicely later on when it becomes a prompt for an infected victim searching for a sound to imitate.


BM: People’s first instincts are so often about the big canvas. We tend to want to be able to go anywhere, shoot anything. It was actually kind of scary to think about shooting something in just one room. I was accustomed to these sprawling road movies where if you get bored you just go to the next town. Suddenly I was dealing with minutia, that little Joey Ramone doll that might say something about Grant Mazzy’s character, Lisa’s bracelet that was obviously made by a kid, the bottle of booze, the pills the doctor takes. All these little details become more important, more loaded. There are no costume changes, so you pick the one outfit and, bam, that’s the character. There are sections where we’d shoot everything in profile, some where the camera moves and others where it’s still, ones where we shoot through the glass, others where we stay inside. It just makes you reconsider what it really means for you when you use this lens, when you use this angle. It was fun to have fewer things to think about but to think about those few things in a much bigger way. It’s primal. It felt like we were making a film for the first time again. Miroslaw and I shot our first film together. 20 years later it felt like we were making our second first film together.

JB: Pontypool initially seems a significant departure from your movies so far, yet it strikes me as being interestingly linked to The Tracey Fragments, which immediately preceded it. Both films operate around the principle of fragmentation, of image in one and language in the other. Have recent years found you feeling especially eager to mess with these fundamental elements of movies?

BM: There’s something to this idea of collage. My life feels like a fucking collage. Sometimes I just wish I could focus on one thing, you know? I’m always developing different projects at once. My brain’s always filled with too much stuff. So maybe it’s a reflection of my own sort of scattered, voracious interests in disparate things.

JB: There’s also that element in your work sometimes where it seems like you’re just wondering what you can get away with.

BM: Sure. Both of these last movies were like that. The fact that I could convince people to get on board with them delighted me. I mean, I’m as fond of big dumb popcorn movies as the next guy, but there’s no lack of people working in that department. I work in independent movies. We’re like pirates. It’s not so much that I want to be intentionally obscure, but I like to sniff out something fresh, something that’ll wake up the neighbours a little bit. Pontypool was financed by this private guy and I think he was seduced by the genre nature of it and the containment. For him felt like a perfect first step into the film world. Yet the fact is that we’re making a movie about a language virus, which is pretty damned abstract and cerebral for a genre film. So we managed to convince this guy, we convinced the CBC, we convinced Maple Pictures, and hopefully we can convince an audience that’s there’s something pretty wild and interesting going on here.

Watery, grave: exploring the murky depths of Carnival of Souls and Don't Look Now

It occurs, of course, only after the car carrying those girls has spilled over the edge of the old bridge and sank into the river. It occurs only after that credit sequence, awash in spectral organ, where titles appear at angles that mirror the branches and roots that loom crookedly above the water’s surface. That’s when we get the image of Mary Henry, hair caked in muck, slightly bowed, arms slightly extended out from her sides, a stunned amphibian creature emerging in some primal state of shock along the muddy banks of the accident site. It’s the traumatic image that everything in Carnival of Souls (1962) can arguably be reduced to. But why reduce it? I’ve seen the movie numerous times since that first midnight screening I caught while in high school at a little prairie art house, back when such screenings were common, and it seems only richer, not the inspired work of atmospheric amateurism I once took it for but something far more knowing and adult and genuinely strange.

So Mary (Candace Hilligoss) walks away from the accident and, after some unseen recovery period, sets out to start a new life in a new town, some god-fearing place in Utah as it happens, where she can play organ in the church—and play the soundtrack to her own movie—and be perfectly anonymous, and lose herself, and live next door to an alcoholic lech who works in a factory and is nearly beside himself with desire for her, egged on by Mary’s capricious, peculiar demeanor, ice cold one day, friendly and needy and maybe even willing the next. He seduces her with coffee and normalness, then later takes her out bowling, but she really just wants to visit the swampy old abandoned palace outside of town, where pale figures beacon to her, rising from the water as if to say, We know where you’re coming from.

When Mary leaves her hometown—actually Lawrence, Kansas, the place William S. Burroughs called home after decades of restlessness—the kindly minister at the church imparts to her how “it takes more than intellect to be a musician—put your soul into it.” But Mary seems so utterly vacant, like she walked out of an audition for Bresson, and anyway she’s not a believer, at least not in the Lord, though the ghosts she catches sight of scare her half to death. Rather than win the hearts of churchgoers, she just wants to hit the right notes—they have a meaning that only she can decipher. She is also an unlikely feminist heroine, setting out by herself in her car, vulnerable but independent, resistant to the patriarchal comforts of fathers, boyfriends, doctors and the church. But there is a price to be paid for going it alone. We learn so little about Mary’s past, but it’s clear that the road trip that brings her to Utah is a flight from one of those “private traps” Norman Bates discussed with Marion Crane just a couple of years previous. If you’ve seen Carnival of Souls, you know just how airtight a trap it is.

I’ve heard it speculated that Colorado-born Herk Harvey directed over four hundred educational and industrial films during his years in Lawrence, and it says a lot about the secret artist in certain people that something so clogged with morose beauty could stay welled up in Harvey during all those years of cranking out documentaries. But who knows? Maybe there are hints of something dynamic and spooky in such titles as What About Drinking? (54), Operation: Grass Killer (61) and Pork: The Meat With a Squeal (63). Harvey made Carnival for an estimated $33,000.00, the production design having been largely provided by a pavilion outside Salt Lake City that caught his eye. The cast were mostly non-professionals, and many of them are quite stiff, delivering flat dialogue that aligns with the odd cutting patterns and the dropping of sound here and there. And it works, and not just as a cult movie. Reality is hardly grounded in this tale and the poverty row mise-en-scène feels as much the product of an aesthetic as necessity. The film remains singular, and not only because Harvey never made another feature.

Like Carnival, Don’t Look Now (73) begins with an accident, and with an image of its protagonist rising up out of murky waters, streaked with the earth that’s under the water, a man rendered monster in a moment of harrowing desperation. Because the film is edited as a sort of hopscotch puzzle, patterned on temporal ripples that evoke a distinctive flashing imagery shared by both an idea of what telepathy must be like and by the nature of the movies, it also, in a sense, can be reduced down to this one image. But reduction is precisely what the story, taken from Daphne Du Maurier, warns against, the title being ironic: look now, damn it, and then look again—you might just be missing something unfathomably important.

I don’t want to over-emphasize the links between these two films, but I do like the fact that in more or less randomly revisiting them in the days leading up to Halloween they revealed these very curious connection points. Nicolas Roeg, to say the least, is a far more consciously artful director than Harvey, with a career that goes all over the place but frequently touched on something like genius, yet at the same time he seemed very careful to invite a great deal of accident and spontaneity while making Don’t Look Now, and the details yielded from this approach just keep paying off when you watch it again. The story concerns John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura (Julie Christie), a Canadian and an English woman long married and freshly grieving for a dead child. Though, like Mary, he’s not a believer, John finds work restoring a crumbling church in Venice, a place I can’t imagine why you’d ever visit if you watched the movies—try following this one with The Comfort of Strangers (90). Laura seems unable to revive herself from grief until she meets, accidentally, the two traveling Scottish sisters, one sighted, the other second-sighted, who claim to have news of her dead daughter. They also claim that John has the gift, and that if he’s smart he’ll start to use it.

The portrait of familiar love and shared tragedy between John and Mary is tremendously resonant and moving, even if you don’t entirely respond to the notorious sex scene, inter-cut with other images of domestic behaviour and accompanied by a homey tune. Christie is radiant with hope after she meets the weird sisters and seems more in love with her husband for having gleaned something he hasn’t yet. Sutherland, in that wonderful wig, is very touching in his gentleness and patience while also giving hints of neglect and fear in his reasonableness. That both actors had worked with Robert Altman not long before might go some distance in explaining just how easily they could immerse themselves into their roles, and even more into their surroundings, while still remaining star presences throughout. They are both so subtle and easy with the more portentous demands of the story, such as the early scene where John merely closes a window and causes grit to fly into the blind psychic’s eyes, one of several acts that render him unintentionally culpable for another’s misfortune, the first being his spilling of water on a slide, causing an image to be consumed by red, and, in some deeply sinister logic, causing his daughter to drown? It’s a horrible implication, and it’s the real meat of Du Maurier’s best work, not unrelated to Melanie Daniel’s mildly sensational arrival setting off a small neurotic apocalypse in ‘The Birds.’

Roeg made several superb, obsessive, haunting movies in the 70s and early 80s, and the title of one of them, Bad Timing (80), could easily have worked for Don’t Look Now. Fate may or may not be an active agent in this movie—against all odds, it’s left deliberately ambiguous—but so many events possess their own inherit disaster. Inevitability hides in every scene, though it only reveals itself to us in that final killer flashback montage. The ubiquitous water and other reflective surfaces splash and offer clues along the way. The truly horrible ending shocked me more upon my second viewing than it did on the first. I somehow forgot what was coming, or, like John, maybe I was just in denial. This is the kind of movie that makes you want to reconsider your relationship to your instincts.

Breaching the life/art divide: synthesis, style and seppuku in Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Mishima's own Patriotism

If Japanese author Yukio Mishima seemed unusually anachronistic it may be above all because he staked so much on the equation of aesthetic power and political power, trusting that attaining the one would naturally lead to possessing the other. Yet that he also staked everything on the romantic belief that beauty and destruction must court one and other on equal terms, the former reciprocating the latter in fortitude, gets perhaps closer to the deeper truth of this man, the only genuine key to the mystery. Great beauty, in Mishima’s highly disciplined ontology, could receive no higher honour than to meet with a magisterial death.

Paul Schrader’s remarkable, at once beguiling and grotesque film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) wisely founds every aspect of its complex portrait of the artist within the consideration of this deeper truth, bookending itself with the event that most boldly exemplified Mishima’s aesthetic convictions. On November 25, 1970, Mishima ate no breakfast. He carefully laid out his pristine uniform, the one he had specially designed for his private army. He gathered his closest aides, laid siege to Japanese military headquarters, and attempted to rouse a disinterested audience of soldiers and journalists with appeals for Japan’s return to imperial rule. He then committed ritual suicide, or seppuku, before having his men chop off his head. In the nearly four decades since, Japan still seems unable to process this event.

United by one of Philip Glass’ finest scores, Mishima’s final hours, shot in quasi-documentary style, are interwoven with biographical episodes, shot in black and white, and dramatizations from three Mishima novels—Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House and Runaway Horses—that help to convey his persona as it paralleled or imitated his fiction. These sections are the most visually extraordinary, vibrantly colourful, highly theatrical sequences that owe as much to the special genius of designer Eiko Ishioka as to the formal brilliance and collaborative skills of Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey. The result, buoyed by the charming, tormented, spookily focused central performance of Ken Ogata, is not a comprehensive bio-pic so much as a study in meticulous self-invention, and an investigation into a very particular psychopathology. As Glass puts it, Mishima is about “how the unimaginable becomes inevitable.”

Watching Mishima on Criterion’s new two-disc set, it occurs to me that the only other movie that shares something of its specific approach to literary portraiture is David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (91), which is more a portrait of William S. Burroughs than it is an adaptation of his famous experimental novel. Both movies fuse their writer’s lives with their fiction, both blur artifice and naturalism, both wrestle with their writer’s complicated relationship to homosexuality in fittingly complicated ways, both fixate beautifully on fetish objects and use the body as the site of drama, and both use death as a catalyst of creative propulsion. I bring up this comparison not to diminish Mishima but rather to try and supply a better idea of just how special the movie is.

Criterion’s supplementary material, generous by even their standards, can of course offer a far better idea. The audio commentary by the always engaging Schrader and producer Alan Poul—recorded two weeks after the death of Schrader’s brother and Mishima’s co-screenwriter Leonard—is especially enlightening and lively. Apparently Schrader’s first idea for a movie about an artist willing himself toward death was a Hank Williams bio-pic, though clearly in Mishima—his brother’s idea—he found a subject that would truly up the ante regarding the themes of narcissism, obsession and death he’d been exploring in Taxi Driver (76) and American Gigolo (80). The bulk of the commentary focuses on the extreme sensitivity of the Japanese toward everything to do with Mishima and the many, sometimes frightening campaigns to shut down production in the country where the film has never been theatrically released to this day. Another highlight is a short video featuring insights from Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, who was also a friend of Mishima’s, and Mishima biographer John Nathan. Both speak eloquently and respectfully about Mishima’s painstaking efforts to stage-manage his own life and construct his own celebrity.

Arguably the greatest example of Mishima’s will to synthesize art and life—outside of his novels—is found in Patriotism (66), the 29-minute film he wrote, produced, directed and starred in, which is also now available from Criterion in a separate package with its own very good array of supplements. Shot secretly with a borrowed crew in silent black and white, Patriotism concerns the double suicide of a Japanese Lieutenant and his wife, based on a real event that occurred in 1936. The film feels wholly disinterested in developing narrative, leaving context and developments entirely to title cards. What we get instead is a stark, theatrical, inventively photographed, eroticized aestheticization of suicide, replete with the spilling of entrails and great splashes of blood on white surfaces. The film, obviously, was one of many unabashed rehearsals for its author’s death.

Besides an informative essay by Tony Rayns, the best material on Criterion’s Patriotism disc comes from Mishima himself, who, in both archival film and audio-only interviews, discusses his ideas on Japan’s defeat in WWII, nationalism, death, literature, the West, and much more. Curiously, Mishima makes consistently compelling arguments for even his most unnerving points of view, and his particular charisma, even weighed against the violence of his life, enchants and entices from beyond the grave.

Radical Adults deserve radical books to be written about them, but for now Goodbye 20th Century will have to do

Sonic Youth holds such a tremendous yet peculiar place in music as to confound any attempt to explain it to an unknowing bystander. One can certainly propose a lineage of sorts, tracing their roots in New York visual arts and underground culture in such a way that links them to The Velvet Underground and Talking Heads, yet Sonic Youth, with its core membership of Kim Gordon, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Thurston Moore, has blazed a trail far longer than either of these predecessors. In fact I’d be hard pressed to think of any other more or less democratically-geared rock band in history that has stayed together and remained as active and engaged, as enthused and good-humoured, as prolific while, to my ear at least, never once phoning it in.

Their music rose out of a sensibility that for all its obsessive influences still feels somehow essentially sui generis, the product of suburban kids with gravely mistreated instruments dragging their enthusiasm for pop art, the Beats, Charles Manson, science fiction and the avant garde into their parents’ garage, producing growling enactments of a head-on collision between the monolithic guitar armies of Glenn Branca, ferocities deconstructed from punk rock and no wave, shuddering B-horror movie soundtracks, and a barely secret infatuation with classic rock, pop and jazz. I’ve been in love with the band since high school, and my familiarity with their work on record or in concert only makes classification feel that much more futile.

I’d never paid too much attention to their private lives or working practices, but, coming on the crest of a wave of new or recent SY-related literature—Moore and Byron Coley Abrams’ No Wave: Post-Punk Underground New York 1976-1980 and The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth are especially tempting reads—David Browne’s Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth (Da Capo, $27.95) seemed too intriguing to pass on. With a sprawling discography a quarter century of general activity under or beyond the SY moniker to draw upon, not to mention extensive interviews with SY and virtually everyone ever associated with the band, Browne’s relatively hefty tome promised something authoritative and thorough at the very least.

Though the prose is pretty baggy and the use of quotations often redundant, the facts and anecdotes collected in Goodbye 20th Century are indeed fascinating. That Gordon’s father wrote the first major study of adolescent factions, that her mother made clothes for the family, that the young Gordon once choreographed a dance based on a narrative deduced from her rearranging of her father’s jazz album covers, or that she later made a student film about Patty Hearst intriguingly conveys the roots of a highly unusual modus operandi. Reading about how ‘Teenage Riot’ was intended as a campaign song for imaginary US Presidential candidate J. Mascis, how SY were instrumental in getting Nirvana signed to DGC, how Chuck D performed his part in the ‘Kool Thing’ video while standing in a hallway between meetings, how Gordon once made dinner for Neil Young on his tour bus after buying raw meat from a roadside KFC: all of these items enliven and enrich anyone’s reading of the Sonic Youth story.

What’s seriously lacking in Browne’s book however anything like a close critical analysis of the band’s work, habits or lifestyle—and when Browne does suddenly try to get a little tough on the band’s music near the end, his observations, such as suddenly deciding that 2000's NYC Ghosts and Flowers, a record so sharpened with tension as to make your hairs stand on end, was the first time the band sounded "pretentious," seem way off the mark. Goodbye 20th Century may provide constant candy for curious SY fans but it rarely digs below the surface, offering only a vague idea as to how their songs are constructed and relying on rock critic boilerplate to describe their music. Browne also seems frequently overwhelmed by the band’s prolific output, barely giving us an idea of Ranaldo or Moore’s catalogue non-SY outings. And the culture junky nerds who will inevitably constitute a large part of this book’s readership will be irked by numerous minor errors found throughout: Nick Cave being called British, Bad Brains being called “The Bad Brains,” or William S. Burroughs’ Kansas home being located in Nebraska. (More frustrating still, while old WSB appears twice in the book’s truly superb photo inserts, the guy’s barely mentioned in the actual text!)

I suppose it would have been too much to expect a book about Sonic Youth to be even half as adventurous as the band’s music—yet an inventive approach to writing about music is so welcome when one surveys the music section of any store or library. On my own shelves I can quickly pick out the music-related titles that stand out in any way, nearly all of them diverging from the conventional model, whether it’s Ashley Kahn’s Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, wild, stream-of-consciousness memoirs from the likes of Iggy Pop or Bob Dylan, Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful or Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus’ The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. Compared to these, nearly all of the standard cradle-to-grave/rise-and-fall bios seem dull and formally slavish, notable mostly for their various levels of banal, groupie-screwing dirt.

Reservations aside, I’m still deeply grateful to Browne for what amounts to an enormous investment in chronicling a unique, unruly, and still unfolding chapter in music history. What does come across in Goodbye 20th Century very well—besides its catalogue of dingy NYC apartments in the early 1980s—is a sense of how several individual, highly distinctive and equally opinionated artists can get together and continually work toward developing a sound all their own while still attempting to manage something akin to a career, as well as spouses, children and mortgages. More than is usually the case, for rock at least, the story of Sonic Youth is the story of extraordinary creativity being balanced with basically ordinary lives. And the result of such alchemy is genuinely inspiring.