airborne

I'm happy to hear from Cut Copy again. Here's their new single "Airborne."

endless poetry

"To life! To life!" That's the kind of glass-in-the-air exclamations that Endless Poetry (Poesía sin fin) relentlessly makes and once that glass is drained, it's gleefully smashed against a wall. Now in his late-80s, director Alejandro Jodorowsky's film is raucous, occasionally outrageous, brazen and a heartfelt goodbye song; the "blazing butterfly" mentioned in the movie could describe the movie itself: a lily gilded with shiny gold spray paint smothered by gold confetti stars. It doesn't care if it's self-indulgent and opaque and it doesn't care if it's on-the-nose. It's Fellini-esque (a filmmaker Jodorowsky admires and obviously borrows from, specifically Amarcord) with its dense imagery: heavily-make-upped clowns and pizzazzy costumes and bosoms and sets upon sets.

It's a family affair of re-imagined autobiography. The director's son Adan (in a rock-wild performance) plays himself as a young misfit Alejandro and the director's older, other son Brontis (who was the child in Jodorowsky's 1970 seminal midnight acid western El Topo) plays his hardened, disapproving father. We watch Alejandro as a poet in 1940s Santiago passionately love and tussle with artists and bohemians, including a fierce and broad Stella Díaz Varín (played by Pamela Flores, who also plays Alejandro's mother, antithetical to Stella, operatically singing all of her lines). Adan also scores the picture, with sweeping romanticism, that perfectly props up the movie's melancholy and extravagance.  

When Endless Poetry works, in its furiously meandering fits, it somehow is able to communicate complicated emotions sincerely--like the idea of aging as a gradual detaching from all things once so treasured and also, the paralyzing inability to stop, with one voice, the mowing down of a fascist political movement. Its death and forgiveness-themed coda is a memorable and haunting. Also, Jodorowsky's tribute to all who helped fund the picture, is so moving, that even if one finds the film too bewildering, they can't help but palpably feel Jodorowsky's expression of gratitude. ***1/2

-Jeffery Berg

the windmills of your mind

Here's a great, loungey mix of "The Windmills of Your Mind" from Parisian DJ duo Polo & Pan.

They are recently getting some revived buzz for their tune "Nanä" from their 2016 EP Canopee.

flag

Some interesting thoughts from Isabelle Loring Wallace on Jasper Johns' famous painting:

“Flag is covered with a lush array of drips and fleshy brushstrokes, initially confirming Johns’s kinship with mid-century American painting. Yet Johns’s motif and technique tell a different story – one of endings and beginnings, and the passage that comes in between. Begun in the fashionable medium of oil-based enamel paint, Flag was completed using the anachronistic medium of encaustic in which pigment is mixed with hot wax and, in Flag’s case, strips of newspaper and fabric to which the coloured encaustic adhered. As Johns explained it, encaustic allowed him to be more efficient and, at the same time, more deliberate in his gestures. In other words, because pigmented wax sets quickly, Johns could add another mark or strip of saturated paper or cloth with the assurance that any previously laid marks would remain unaffected. In this way, each discrete trace was preserved, effectively embalmed."

"Long out of favour and largely forgotten, encaustic was an ancient technique most closely associated with a group of remarkable Egyptian funerary portraits. Affixed to the deceased’s mummy prior to burial, these highly realistic portraits from the second century were designed to preserve the image of the dead, just as Flag and its ghostly white pendant White Flag, preserved aspects of contemporary American painting at the very moment when Johns was laying to rest various aspects of this moribund tradition. A pivotal object within the history of modern American art, Flag was a beginning for Johns, but for Abstract Expressionism it was also the beginning of the end. For in the paintings that followed Johns’s dramatic debut, this audacious newcomer systematically challenged every aspect of mid-century painting, beginning with the tactile brushstrokes that are arrested in Flag."

-Isabelle Loring Wallace



A video of a conversation between Salman Khan and Steven Zucker about Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954-55 (dated on reverse 1954), encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels, 42-1/4 x 60-5/8 inches /107.3 x 153.8 cm (The Museum of Modern Art).

element

Much deserved praise has been heaped upon Kendrick Lamar's album DAMN.

Here's the video for "ELEMENT," directed by Jonas Lindstroem & the little homies, which is chock full of stirring imagery.

art by tor brandt

Here's some illustrations by Denmark-based artist Tor Brandt.

via Tor Brandt

was he slow?

One of the highlights of the uneven but technically marvelous Baby Driver was the soundtrack. Here is Kid Koala's memorably-placed tune "Was He Slow?"

Per Kid Koala (aka DJ San) in GQ:

"I tried it on turntables first, mashing all the dialogue bits into it—but it ended up sounding a little too accomplished," San explains. "Like someone who had been spinning for decades—which I have been, but Baby has just started. So I tried it on this magnetic card reader, which was originally made for an elementary school language class. There’s no smooth, elegant, frictionless way to scratch that thing. So when I started trying that it really came out funnier. It made me giggle."