Horror Music for Scary People

I have a “project.”

I’d rather not call it a music project, because it really isn’t.  My fascination with horror movies, and the way music can affect emotions and mood, has led to the production of a couple albums.  As I explained to friends the other night, I’d say calling it [experimental] is an understatement, it’s way beyond deconstructionalistic, and on the other side of the mountain from avante garde – much to the point where it sounds like a carnival full of banshees got attacked by zombie cowboys, and then got swept up by a tornado and went to an Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West had already taken over.  That’s kind of what I’m going for.

And the weird thing is, people seem to like it.

So.. without any further ado, let me introduce the up and coming new music genre:

Horror Music

Hippy Barfday, Sofia Coppola

Hippy Barfday, Sofia Coppola.  You’re officially over the hill, but your films sure aren’t .

And those Miss Dior “Cherie” commercials – Hot Cha Cha, Mama!

Let’s take a brief look…

Lick the Star

Her first film, black and white, irresistibly bad acting.  Any young filmmaker that can combine teenage girls in black lipstick, sinister plots involving arsenic, and a soundtrack featuring Kim Gordon is way okay. Check the blatant references to Flowers in the Attic, a book/movie that Miss Coppola draws influence from in almost all of her screen work.

The Virgin Suicides

I watched this movie when I was much too young, and I blame it for most of my teenage angst.  That’s how dreamy this movie is, that it made me wish for stricter curfews, a suicidal younger sister, and Bible homeschooling, just so I could rebel in a mischievous and seductive way.  Watch their eyes, they know what they’re doing to those poor neighbor boys, the young sirens.

Lost in Translation

I’m skipping this one. It hardly needs another review.

Marie Antoinette

Fabulous.  No other words.  Weak plot, simple characters, but DAMN luxurious. It makes you think you can pull off 18th century fashion everyday, and after this movie, I’d give up all modern appliances AND wear a corset for Marie’s castle.  Andddd there’s a shoe and pastry montage to Siouxsie & the Banshees – reason numero uno why all girls should love Miss Coppola.

Somewhere

I haven’t seen this one yet, but I DO plan to.  I simply can’t sit in a movie theatre, because I have a horrid case of the wiggles.  So when that movie hits redbox, I’ll be there, waiting.

Besides her illustrious career as a screen writer, director, and film maker, she also created a Japanese clothing line,

Milk Fed

with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.  It puts scrawny

Schmerican Apparel to shame.

Marie Antoinette Fanatic? Click Me!

Strange Dreams

Last night, I had a dream.

A dream about this man: Duncan Jones.

You might think it because of my fascination with David Bowie and all who sparkle,

but really, I had never seen a picture of him nor even knew his name. YET HE WAS IN MY DREAM.

I also had a fever of 104′ and was slightly delirious from various medications, but this still does not take away from the fact that Duncan Jones was in my dream.  I immediately knew he was David Bowie’s son, his name, and that he was an English filmmaker.

Conclusion:

I am having prophetic dreams.

About David Bowie’s son.

I might be an Indian Shaman of Glam Rock.

Future Legends: Boosta!

So there’s this girl.

Her name is Rachel Enneking, but you may know her as Boosta!, a photographic genius.  So obviously, she is a “photographer,” but who isn’t these days?  I even tend to scorn someone when they say they are a “photographer.”

The difference is that Rachel is not really a photographer.  She is an artist, who happens to use a camera like a painter would use a paintbrush.  She isn’t someone who takes pictures, she simply uses photography as a medium for her vision.

For example, check out her latest shoot.  She designed and made the scenery, styled the wardrobe, hair, and make-up, directed the set, AND made a movie throughout this:

BAM POW WHOMP~ how fabulous are those shots?  Is that the work of a “photographer,” or an artist?  You tell me.

[Check out the rest of this scandalous shoot "Girlfriend" at Boosta! Photography]

Future Legends: Bridie Jurasevich

A singer of jazz standards, a writer of melodramatic screenplays, and a bubble of bright energy.

Meet Bridie.

She’s a lovely gal.

We met while living on a dorm floor together two (three?) years ago.  My first words to her were, “I see you have a guitar.  Want to play in a gypsy punk band?”  She shouted yes.  Then we were friends.

Later, I heard her singing and was hooked.  Anytime jazz singers are brought up, I will shout down anyone who thinks they know a better one than I do. ‘Cause they don’t. She warbles like a nightingale.

And to top all that off, she writes. Really, really well.  Luckily for me (and you!), she sent me an excerpt of her new screenplay, soon to be shot in and around Chicago Harbor, including music produced by yours truly.

[Scene 1]

““Get me out of here.”  Helene says under her breath as she sits between her two older brothers, John Michael and Peter, in the narrow pew. She looks forward, with her father’s deep-set brown eyes, staring blankly at Saint John Jacob from Neamţ one of the Saints depicted at the head of the church.  She moves over the smooth page of the hymnal with one hand as the other clenches the thick book.
St. Xavier Romanian Orthodox Church is holding a memorial mass for the parents of Helene Lazar. The air in the church is heavy, almost stagnant. The saints are vividly depicted in rich colors across the alter. Stained glass windows send in enough light that path of dust visibly meanders through the air. The room screams eastern tradition. The priest suddenly, almost violently, opens the red velvet curtain. As he does so, the rings of the curtain screech against the rod holding the up. He carries metal thurible. The burning of the incense is a strong smell, but not unpleasant. As he walks the sound of the linked chain clanging against the body of the burner pervades the small church.  Creaky pews made of dark stained wood are scattered with bodies of older woman with dark hair and moles and men in suits all looking very foreign.   The song “Memory Eternal” fills up the space as it is sung by a middle aged Romanian women, heavier set, but not obese. She sings one verse in Romanian in her alto timbre. It is slightly muted as though we are in the mind of someone detached.
Things are blurred and muted then suddenly there is a terribly loud sound of a train horn. Helene is in the back seat of a car. A light comes in so fast that it feels as though the light has struck the car. Her father yells like she’s never heard before. Fear, terror, almost a hint of regret is in his voice and then the sound of metal twisting against metal giving way. “Get me out of here!”  Helene screams.
Helene returns to the present with a pained look on her face, striving to catch breaths that seem to get caught in her throat. Her oldest brother, Johnny, puts his hand gently on the hand at her side which is now clinging to the pew. Upon noticing her nails almost cutting into the wood she relaxes the tension in her hand. Tears well up in her brother’s eyes as the song concludes and the priest begins a memorial service in a language they seem to understand less and less of everyday. “

Fan Bing Bing – a Ling

Spring Fashion Weeks = Lotsa Lotsa Asian Persuasion Inspired looks.

Check out any fashion magazine last month. Yellow Fever.

Let me explain the cause:

FAN BING BING; actress, model, sexy sexy superstar

Hippy Barfday, Maya Deren!

Because it’s her birthday soon… and I adore birthdays. And the word “juxtaposition” which I have deemed her unofficial mantra.

.

Maya Deren : Gorgeous, Genius, Film Maker Extraordinaire,

Let me (and somebody else’s descriptions) brief

you on the beauty of two of my

favorite films.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

A large flower, the silhouette of a figure briskly walking away, a house key, a bread knife, a telephone receiver resting off the hook, and a spinning phonographic turntable define the shifting functional elements in Meshes of the Afternoon from which the film’s evolving, malleable construct – the fragile and tenuously interconnected mesh of actual and perceived reality – is intriguingly (and ingenuously) mapped. A woman (Maya Deren) walking along the sidewalk near her home catches a momentary glimpse of a figure turning the corner, unlatches the front door and, after a cursory inspection of the empty household, proceeds upstairs to rest on an armchair situated by a front-view window. From this deceptively simple introductory premise, Maya Deren modulates the mise-en-scene of seemingly mundane objects to create overlapping, yet non-intersecting planes of existential reality, using permutations of recurring images – mirrored surfaces (the apparition’s face, polished metal spheres, a hand mirror), glass, duality and doppelgangers – to represent variably interlocking narrative fragments of observation, inference, deduction, and memory. Unfolding with the narrative discontinuity characteristic of nouvelle roman literature (creating an idiosyncratically dissociative filmic language that also characterizes Alain Resnais’ subsequent feature films, particularly Last Year at Marienbad and Je t’aime, je t’aime), the film posits a series of subtle structural, temporal, and logical mutations, creating a sublimely recursive, mind-bending meditation on the interaction between experience and memory, domestic banality and violence, imagination and causation.

At Land (1944)

At Land is another of Maya Deren’s dream like films. The message which it transmits to and its main subject rests on the idea of the mutability of a personality. Maya said once that this film was made to show people the struggle to maintain the personal identity. The whole film has only 15 minutes, in which a whole life is subjectively described. It was made in the year of 1944, and Deren was the one who wrote, directed and played, the featured role in it, just like in her first movie Meshes of the Afternoon. Maya Deren is laying on the sand, and the ocean’s waves are coming and going like if she had been spelled from it. This symbolic birth from the sea was particularly chosen to make us think of the role of education. She came from the sea, different from all the others who had influences and rules to follow since were born. Having the chance to find out by herself who she is and what she is doing there at that specific moment, like in a natural way Maya would say, make her run. The film is all about her world exploration, her curiosity to discover what is in there, criticizing the society at that time which was not curious to know if there was any truth besides television or Hollywood. At the end, she chooses to go back to the sea after her incessant odyssey at land to find an identity.

<<http://www.film-makerscoop.com/search/search.php?author=Maya+Deren>> (Because they’re better critics than I am)

You can rent her films at that link, too.

Or you can click my link to watch them FOR FREE on youtube.

Because Maya Deren’s kind of anti-establishment like that.