At its best, a Wong Kar-Wai film reproduces the fever pitch of a music-induced daydream. A love song patters out a simple vision that plays out on a rain-soaked windowpane, story fragments form in the emotional ether that each rise of sound elicits, lyrics dipped in nostalgia drip off the song. Nothing is distinct, everything flows into one another, sound, lyric, dialogue, image all smudge together, all rested from the same sublime delight of feeling.

This playlist lives on a haunted jukebox left alone in a corner playing timeless love songs to itself.

In order to convey Kar-Wai’s unique ear for music, I attempted to restrict myself to music that was first and foremost, musical. This was a very difficult task for me as my inclination is towards lyrics first, music second. If you listen to the songs in films like Chungking Express or Fallen Angel, or more recently with My Blueberry Nights, lyrics are rarely emphatic, it tends to be about the mood that each song conveys as it passes through. However, something like the title song in Happy Together goes against this idea, a carefully placed pronouncement of directly pertinent lyrics, yet even this is sheathed in a musical familiarity that plays on both levels; such is the brilliance of his soundtracks. I have tried to apply the same ratio in my selections, the Nouvelle Vague track being very reminiscent of Happy Together, but on the whole keeping to a softer yet familiar sound wobbling in the background, at times letting instruments murmur to one another, all trying to get at something whimsically, lost in their own pleasure. This mixtape is not so much a return to the music of Kar-Wai’s films, but the promise of something more, possessing the same general spirit but conscious of his recent venture into American landscapes, the music unabashedly American, and lacking in his international variety. Still I like to think it belongs on the same jukebox that reappears like a ghostly portent in the Kar-Wai universe.

1. The Walkmen – There Goes My Baby (The Drifters cover)

2. Merle Haggard – I Wonder If They Ever Think of Me

3. Ray Charles – Lonely Avenue

4. Scarlett Johansson – Anywhere I Lay My Head ( Tom Waits cover)

5. Suftjan Stevens – Redford

6. Gladys Knight and the Pips – Midnight Train to Georgia

7. The Drifters – There Goes My Baby

8. Nouvelle Vague – Dancing with Myself (Billy Idol cover)

Kurt Cobain strained to be understood on a frequency barely audible to most, and as enthusiasts and journalists superimposed their private impressions onto the official transcript of the nineties icon, the faint transmission of the self-proclaimed homesick Martian passed largely without notice. He died alone just as he lived, surrounded but isolated, listened to but rarely heard. To me, Kurt was not a messiah nor even a musical genius (the craftsmanship and historical relevance feels beside the point), what made Kurt remarkable was the depth of his existential hyper-acuity. He lived with both body and mind on fire, able to stand outside the social mores of the unconscious and at least for a short while co-exist. The clinical term is depression but this does not seem to fit what Kurt appeared to be going through, the fierce incapacity to modulate his thoughts mixed with a body in revolt held him in a fixed state of dissociation that as an artist he was able to channel into his music. In the Herzogian sense, Kurt Cobain embodied an ecstatic truth by his presence on the world stage. He meant something even if most of us were incapable of recognizing it: the frail body, disinterested demeanor, lumbering guitar, splintering howls, crunching beats, and the reverb of ‘a denial’.

That said it was a relief to finally find a documentary that went beyond the peripheral importance of the man, and focused on this self-proclaimed unremarkable person. In A.J. Schnack’s intimate portrait, Kurt Cobain: About a Son, interviews conducted sporadically in 1992 and 1993 (within a year of his Kurt’s suicide) elicit Kurt’s reminisces of his life from working-class childhood to bittersweet success as lead singer of Nirvana. His voice carries the film as the visuals take on an almost ontological quality, every so often projecting in stills and flashes and fades the sort of mental images Kurt may have had whilst recounting his life. The documentary operates conscious of the memento mori significance of its content, starting with a God’s eye view of Kurt’s childhood town, Aberdeen, before eventually settling in to a more terrestrial encounter with the people and places his story interacts with. Occasionally his narration breaks to include musical segue ways consisting of songs or artists that had a particular influence on Kurt during these times. The result is an ambient flow of images and music and personal testaments that seems to admirably encapsulate the fragile headspace of its subject. Restricted from the use of any of Nirvana’s music directly for the film, director Schnack used this obstruction to his advantage which, along with the deliberate withholding of any clear images of Kurt onscreen until the final minutes of the film, helped intensify the sense of experiencing Kurt from the inside out.

Whether deliberately selected or not, there is a palpable difference to Kurt’s candor between the interview content that focuses on his early years prior to the signing with Geffen records and that period of success thereafter. When speaking of this early period Kurt sounds happier and unguarded, jumping seamlessly from from one memory to the next. Here we learn of his sense of the possibilities available to him, of his hours of guitar practice each day before it became a job, of the simple America that existed before his parent’s divorce (an event that deeply disillusioned him and which carried over in his music). In the later interviews there is something indecisive and inconsistent, here he becomes audibly combative about the issues confronting his life on the precipice between self-destructive drug-addict and reformed family man. Time and again Kurt over-emphasizes the importance of Courtney Love, as a wife, a mother, a musician. As we do not hear the questions that are posed to Kurt it is hard to tell what prompts these continual addresses to her importance, but as it is framed in the documentary the responses seem too pronounced. Animosity pervades his talk of his day-to-day life, snide asides about revenge and being bullied (replacing the high school jocks now with journalists) all unevenly set alongside his glowing affection for his wife and child.

In one of his tangents, Kurt muses over the significance of his generation; one that he feels marks the end of a kind of innocence. The early nineties did in fact precede the rise of the Internet age, and much of what Kurt comments on with regards to the corporate acceleration of culture is prescient. He suggests that 20 years from then rock music will be nothing more than a fashion statement, a tool used as background fodder for virtual reality machines, pessimism I admit to sharing. I cannot help but get caught up in his lament not only of music but also of art en masse, I feel the same sense of alien disconnect to this trend of consumer apathy. Where it appeared to cripple our generation the new generation seems hardwired for the transition.

His misanthropy too hit home. What he called a monkish attitude and pervasive loathing of the stupidity of people is truly the fixed point through which the Pagan Agenda operates. I have since aspired to control my misanthropy with far more success than had been achieved during my bout of depression, but it is almost impossible for me to not on a daily basis feel weary from the ignorance in the world. By this I mean not of some rote content in the academic sense, but an ignorance of the willingness or ability to even begin to learn. It is the lack of motivation and resolve for understanding itself that pains me, which inevitably leads to inherited or ill-conceived ideologies of convenience, creating ideologues and fanatics, the people that fill the streets, the schools, the political offices, endlessly in denial. I probably would not care enough to be irritated by them were it not for the fact that the saturation of such mediocrity feels like a direct threat to my well-being. It feels like a Herculean task to have the presence of mind to think through an idea, or experience an artwork, with the barrage of distractions modern society affords. The misanthropy that I feel and suppose Kurt felt had a lot to do with a fear of vulnerability, a fear of becoming ‘easily amused’. In the documentary, Kurt lashes out at both the popular and sub-cultural circles, all of their agendas leaving a bad taste in his mouth.

My impression of Kurt from these interviews is of a genuine, gentle, sensitive, ‘special geek’, damaged by the harassment of high school bullies, and the loneliness of not being understood for so long, until Courtney entered his life. It was unfortunate that he chose to use hard drugs as pain medication to soften his chronic stomach pain, as it appears to me that this not only became a physical crutch but an emotional one, and stunted his chance to work out his issues with himself and the people around him. He never learned how to cope with people without this dependency, and was not able to breakthrough on his own terms. His acute pain made for great art, and I appreciate it on that level, but listening to these interviews I cannot help but feel for the person that had to be sacrificed for it.

As Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights opens and closes, the same bluesy chorus purrs: “the story has been told before”. Clearly there is a higher significance to the lyric, in the way that it alludes to the recurrence of not merely prevailing themes of alienation and longing in Kar-Wai’s romantic canon, but of particular scenes and scenarios, snippets of dialogue, even musical cues, finely ground and revisited in a way that weighs heavily upon those familiar with the director’s oeuvre. We know it has all been done before and yet we keep coming back and allowing ourselves to play out the self-configured archetypes of this – if not auteur – then at least incestuous cinema. I appreciate My Blueberry Nights on this meta-level as one section of a larger tableau where pronounced story elements fix upon certain key events (perhaps of a biographical nature) that characters return to in earnest pantomime.

To speak of this film is to speak of its interrelations to its predecessors. Elizabeth (Norah Jones) and Jeremy (Jude Law) are the metaphoric reincarnation of any number of lovers in Kar-Wai’s universe, their actions, and the actions of the characters that are met along the way all evoke a déjà-vu that is entirely intentional. When a Norah Jones track is played twice in quick repetition we are reminded of California Dreamin’ in Chungking Express, When Elizabeth asks Jeremy to hold onto the key of a past lover we are reminded of cop 633 asking the same of Faye, when Arnie (yet another cop) watches his adulterous wife Sue-Lynn enter the bar it is a virtual superimposition of the same scene in Chungking, as cop 633 and the stewardess awkwardly say their goodbyes in the convenience store, the new beau waiting outside. Kar-Wai’s last film, 2046, was even more obviously a mash-up of material laid out in Chungking Express, In The Mood for Love, The Days of Being Wild, Happy Together, and with this history in mind and with My Blueberry Nights own persistent recurrences, such an inclusion ceases to be anything like an Easter egg for the cinephiles, as far as I am concerned, it IS the movie.

Any ability for this film to operate smoothly without foreknowledge of this atmosphere of recurrence, which is to say any ability for this film to be the break-out American debut of the director’s work, is stymied by this hermetic preoccupation. As a garden variety love story of girl meets boy, girl loses boy, the film pays only lip-service, and despite the outward façade of this kind of film with familiar faces like Jude Law and Natalie Portman, something mercurial waits in the wings, the lucid filmmaking that is Kar-Wai’s signature with slo-mo dissolves and smudgy rain-soaked visuals in cahoots with deceptively random musical cues and poetic bursts of narration, has nothing to do with conventional storytelling.

The critical backlash to My Blueberry Nights has been unrelenting, and some people place the blame on its move to English-speaking America, thus relinquishing one of the perceived enjoyment factors for Anglophones of Kar-Wai’s work, namely its exoticism. Dialogue and narration, which once had the filter of subtitles, now rings false and flowery when heard, cheapening all sense of genuine drama; so the argument goes. To me the fault lies elsewhere, not in its lack of exoticism or any defect of translation, but rather in a subtle yet noticeable shift in storytelling technique. Where previously Kar-Wai was satisfied to ‘show’ character longing and attraction, My Blueberry Nights time and again resorts to ‘telling’ us these emotions through expository dialogue and narration. Perhaps the first-time screenplay collaboration with Lawrence Block has something to do with this change for the worst to Kar-Wai’s successful formula, or perhaps there was a conscious decision by all involved that some concessions would need to be made to appeal to American audiences – the visual qualities of Kar-Wai’s signature could remain but only with a ‘telling’ device of intermittent narration. Chungking’s Faye Wong flippantly discusses music and visiting America, Blueberry’s Jeremy speaks of keys opening metaphorical doors, the blueberry pie being emblematic for the unloved, the unpaid bill as proof of life (unending heavy-handed platitudes) In Kar-Wai’s prior works, love was conveyed through body language, slo-motion visuals, musical cues, furtive glances… the real strengths of his style. Yes there was occasional narration but most of the time it was poetic or inconsequential to forwarding the plot. Blueberry, on the otherhand, uses dialogue and narration in a more pronounced way, taking that same poetic inconsequential talk and using it as the means of articulating the drama of the story explicitly. To make a perhaps strange comparison it is like what happened to M Night Shymalan’s Lady in the Water, a film that transported the ludicrously poetic quality of fairy tales into a real-world situation, made uncomfortable due to it being taken literally. A similar awkwardness pervades Blueberry by this shift in narration and dialogue, wrestling the poetry into some literal exposition function it cannot adequately fulfill. All the same parts of the formula Kar-Wai has used remain in this film, but with this subtle shift the dream world is punctured and met with cries of displeasure. If anything, this film shows just how delicate a balance Kar-Wai has kept up until now.

One of my problems with the film was that I felt 2046 was a perfect acceleration and summation of this eternal recurrence experiment of storytelling and that where better to carry the story then to some distant albeit imaginary future society where the same recurrence appears to go unending. It seems strangely terrestrial and uninspired to return again to the same conventions laid out in his past work, to tell a smaller derivative story that has only the change in location to make it distinct. I also found very little life to the characters, they felt like dolls rearranged to convey basic human emotions. At one point both Jeremy and Elizabeth suffer from nose bleeds from two separate incidents, and I do not grasp what is supposed to be conveyed by this overt depiction of coincidence: are they star-crossed lovers, and if so what exactly is supposed to make me care about them besides the well-worn convenience that both have loved and lost and can share that thread of understanding?

Of course the film looks wet and electric and gorgeous, and if you turn your mind off and let it all wash over you, time will pass effortlessly. Occasionally something inspired emerges, such as the stellar performance of Natalie Portman as a cocky Texan, or Norah Jones’ face with the power to transfix with an extended gaze, and the dizzy heights of the music can make one swoon in and out but it all seems detuned, scraps of a message breaking out of the static. The film goes one way, I go another. I would have preferred the story stayed minimal, fixed on the writing of postcards, the cinematic challenge of telling a love story through the written word – a challenge Kar-Wai is surely suited for. Or when the story suddenly dips into a casino I wanted the film to stay there and eek out an Edward Hopper-like rumination on alienation and isolation among the glittery electric lights and blips and beeps of that nether-region of civilization. Instead the story careens forward, aimless in its pursuit of some quaint reunion of souls, using postcards and casinos as collage material towards its ultimately unsatisfying end. While wondrous things occasionally flow within it, I feel its life force is best appreciated elsewhere in the works that this film so unduly saps.

A fanboy values loyal representation of source material in their films that appeals to a lowest common denominator – the film need only reproduce it, and the ceiling is set.

A snob has a different ceiling altogether, he/she does not require that a film conform to something (and be self-contained) but that it expand and challenge conventions and challenge him/herself in the process.

A nerd is situated somewhere between the fanboy and the snob, able to articulate in detail his/her interests but which remain too preoccupied with the arcana of the film, and still think of it largely in commodity terms. Such a perspective is not slavishly interested in the accuracy of representation from source material to the screen but is caught up in the superficial significance of the film as a work set within a certain industry framework. The academic could also be thought of as a subset of the nerd, merely exchanging one fetish for signifiers with another.

All of these mentalities come with their own ideas of what is meant by ‘art’, yet they all share a similar notion of it as existing in terms of a sliding scale of value with ‘art’ at the high end. What constitutes this distinction is where differences emerge. Before pleading a case for a definition of ‘art’ according to the snob, I must acknowledge that I am fully aware that there are no universal uses of language, there are merely the habitual uses within certain crowds through which we may observe familiar meanings. What is important is that any definition herein proposed be useful.

In studying aesthetic theory I have noticed a recurring idea where ‘art’ is foremost a very difficult to attain level of excellence. Giorgio Vasari, when articulating what he considered the unparallel greatness of Michelangelo, said he went beyond the bounds of manual skill suggesting there was/is a threshold to valuing something purely on its technical achievements. He used words like ingegno and grazia, but the general idea, and what I think is carried through in an academic reading of ‘art’, is that there is a quality to the “art” work that transcends the sum of its parts in such a way that one cannot point to any ostensive evidence as to why it is so great, it is the experiential event of the patron which alone authenticates this upper echelon of greatness. Hence the very snobby and academic phrase ‘the work has a certain Je ne sais quoi”, meaning the value ceases to be something of a manual nature that can be accounted for. For lack of a better word, we are in the realm of the spiritual (a word which has its own unsavory connotations).

Fanboys and nerds scoff at any notion of some spiritual classification to a work, and may even suggest that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I can see why these sorts of conclusions would be drawn, there is a stigma that something which cannot be demonstrably articulated as the reason for a value must be either wishy-washy new age shit, or reduce everything to personal taste in a sort of fatalist inevitability, giving up before anything has been started. Yet we tend to think there is such a thing as mutual love, and whether or not such a thing exists it remains a fixture of our lexicon, and so too, ‘art’. It may be worthwhile to propose an alternate definition; one that accounts for this familiar usage of the word art and for the endless attempts by people to express what makes ‘art’ special.

Rather then focus on the product to say what art is I think a more useful approach is to focus on a kind of inner activity of the art patron when having an art-experience. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it is not limited to there, or does not need to be. One can set as a threshold for the meaning of ‘art’ or the art-experience as one of momentary destabilization, or spiritual re-evaluation of some aspect of being when posed with the transcendent artwork. There is the implication that “destabilization” leads to something altogether new in the individual’s self-identity, and I don’t think that is quite right. By destabilizing I do not mean necessarily something progressive, that with each experience one negates the past. It is just as likely the destabilization would lead to a reaffirming of one’s previously held convictions. The art-experience is an indicator to the subtle yet significant distinction between living and merely existing; living incites evaluation into one’s identity. Each person measures this experience according to their own self-awareness, and they feel genuinely a part of the work.

The best analogy I can think of to show the distinction I interpret between something like the formulaic nature of Iron Man with something that provokes a destabilization of the individual, is circuits. As I said earlier, repetition lulls one asleep and the continual repetition of formulaic films has a way of disengaging the viewer from the experience and into a passively observing state; this would be like a closed circuit sat before you operating without your input. When repetition and familiarity are removed enough to interject some intrigue on the part of the viewer opportunities for the academic notion of ‘art’ are afforded; this would be like an open circuit with the viewer embedded in the film experience, and coming out of it changed in some palpable way. There is no universal recipe for opening the circuit, each of us cultivates our own aesthetic sensibilities… BUT I believe it is useful to say that some similar destabilization need occur for something to be considered ‘art’.

So to summarize, the snobbish notion of “art” has the following characteristics:

1) a rare level of excellence that transcends the purely technical achievements of a work

2) wholly authenticated by the individual’s reaction, not by any property of the work itself

3) requires a palpable momentary or long-lasting destabilization in the individual’s sense of being that induces a direct communion between him/her and the work.

Hardly complete, that is a barebones definition of what I consider the familiar meaning of art if it is to have any sliding scale significance. One can always lower the bar of what constitutes ‘art’ but in doing so one draws attention away from our personal involvement in artworks, and towards the inert things themselves, closed circuits to be admired from afar, rather than open circuits that we feel directly a part of. I think fanboys generally do not care about this kind of participatory idea of art, they want the self-contained ‘art’ you can put behind glass and admire, what I would call the commodity value of a work.

‘I remember Hiroshima’
‘You remember nothing’

The seemingly unprovoked pang of despair, a curious phenomenon of heightened sensitivity not unlike what the Japanese refer to as ‘mono no aware’. I think of it as a sensation of rebooting in response to some unknown complication in the machinery of life. For me the pang consists of both a deep-felt sadness and paradoxically a residual pleasure. I feel I am not alone in deriving a certain pleasure from the sadness, especially in a society like ours where the presence of a heightened emotional state alone is something to celebrate, a twitch of life to hold onto before apathy envelops us once again. When confronted with an existential pang I am compelled to excite it further by watching melancholic films. Again I do not think I am alone in this ritual, though it may be an exclusive club of masochists. If you are one of these masochists may I recommend the following: the next time the pang hits isolate yourself within a darkened room, preferably curled up in a blanket, and wallow in the melancholic opus that is Alain Resnais’ ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’

Now not any ‘weepy’ film will do in these cases; I want to make it clear that I choose ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ deliberately for what it does that so many films of the same ilk fall short of. This is not an exploitive melodrama which seeks only to trigger emotions without first earning the sentiment through the narrative. While much of the film will have an effect over you on a lower immediacy level (to borrow from Kierkegaard) by the sheer poignancy of the images and poetry it supplies, the art-experience potential of the film depends principally on the cerebral journey one takes to unlock the very meanings of love, loss, guilt, and madness. The substance keeps pace with the style, and Resnais has done a miraculous job of keeping the film wavering on the cusp of pretense in order to take advantage of the psychological effects which come from transgressions of narrative norms without going so far as to disrupt the trance the film is able to sustain. That said, ‘Hiroshima’ is punctuated with breathless visuals that are so fantastically beautiful and emotionally charged that they seem to push the envelope of what cinema is capable of. I am here thinking specifically of the climax scene in the Casablanca bar which with mere visuals alone is able to evoke the entire culmination of the narrative without need of dialogue.

Elsewhere the dialogue drifts into the lyrical giving scenes a degree of ambiguity which requires active participation on the viewer’s part to interpret. There are moments particularly in the opening scenes where it seems the film has foregone concerns of narrative altogether in order to push the limits of the effects of words, sounds and images, however Resnais is a first rate master of cinema able to orchestrate the emotional import of the story in a way unlike any other. One should not be deterred by these opening scenes and think the entire film is to be so opaque, it very quickly finds a pace once the principle characters have been introduced and stays on this human level. The montage sequence Resnais uses to bring us into the story is, I think, primarily a device to enhance the emotional import of the pillow talk that is to be the catalyst for the French woman and Japanese man falling in love. The use of metaphor gives the narrative a monumental significance, situating the meaning of Hiroshima and Nevers, France within the relationship of these two people. Endless scholarly papers could be written on the significance of ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, but as Resnais states in the Criterion Collection interview it is his intention that the viewer actively constructs the narrative rather than seek out a pre-established one. This may be why the professor at Berkeley of whom I am listening to via podcast has not been able to find any direct proof that Resnais was referencing Kierkegaard in his characterizations of the French woman and the Japanese man as representations of the ‘knight of infinite resignation’ and the ‘knight of faith’, though the reading is very compelling.

As a knight of infinite resignation the french woman has devoted herself to an eternal defining commitment, namely the dead German, and her confrontation with the possibility of new love with the Japanese man seeks to not only affect her emotionally but in some very real way destroy her entire world, hence, as the professor notes, the sigh of complete and utter despair as she looks at herself in the mirror of the hotel bathroom. The logic of her resignation from the love of the Japanese man according to this Kierkegaardian reading of the film is if she is able to break her commitment to the German, something she has held as eternal, than there is no hope for any commitments, and the sword of Damocles hangs over every relationship, including the ones to come. If that is true, then that is a very significant sigh, the sighs of sighs, in existential terms a sigh of despair.

For me, the story evokes Dostoevsky’s short story ‘White Nights’, which was also made into a beautifully shot black and white film, ‘La Notti Bianche’ by Luchino Visconti. Incidentally, this would make a great double feature with Hiroshima. Both involve strangers meeting in exotic locales and having very intimate and life-altering experiences over the duration of a short amount of time. In both the male characters struggle to possess the affection of female characters as they themselves struggle to hold on to unrequited loves from their pasts. I hazard to guess what sort of emotional shape one would be in after a double feature of this caliber, but that is the desired effect after all.

Herzog, for me, serves as a signpost on the road to realization, his films and the mythology he works within, a kind of password to that half-remembered clarity lately lacking in my aesthetic life. I can hypnotize myself if only for a short while whenever I take on one of his captured dreams and whether it be a feeling of joy from the recognition of what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’, or whether it be merely the relief from solitude that such shared remembrances bring: it is to my life a basic necessity. The signposts appear sparsely, in art and out. No matter how long I may stand before an uninspired masterpiece this same spark will not show, it has no patience for theory nor authority. Even if this realization is nothing but a charade of the subconscious, or a tick of the superego, I still obey. Herzog by any other name would still be Herzog.

Once, Herzog was merely endearing. He was an adventurer with stimulating tales to tell, and though he could steady his camera and squeeze a shot out, the finished product was often nothing more than a memento. His longtime editor had a similar disdain for the product and would lash out at him about the quality of material she had to work with. It is very easy to understand how to many, Herzog’s films are tedious endeavors elusive of any particular value. Likewise it is just as easy to give him a pass because someone like Roger Ebert has nothing but praise to bestow upon him. I find it challenging to pierce the grammar of filmmaking employed in something like Fritzcarraldo or Aguirre, Wrath of God; it almost wants you to underestimate it, and refuses to hold your hand.

Although film literate, Herzog sets his scenes with only the most tacit concern for stylization, letting the story direct itself in the ebb and flow that he sees fit. Filmmaking to him is ‘athletics over aesthetics’, and it is crucial for the life force of the film that one feels embedded in the story due in part to the tacit understanding that Herzog himself is embedded, that things are really happening and the camera is protruding into the drama. The screen is not a frame, or not merely a frame, it is a conduit to another world, a world of inner landscapes that depict our dreams, our ‘ecstatic truths’ that go so often unspoken and unaccounted for. Verisimilitude is not the aim, historical accuracy is not aim, and neither is stylization: the aim is to make dreams worthy of dreamers. That’s it. If a character’s costume inexplicably changes between shots, so be it. If the wake of the camera’s boat circling a raft appears due to the effort to capture a shot, so be it. If these sorts of things affect your experience, then Herzog’s films are not for you. His films come from a neurotically earnest place, a hyper-realm that has no time for the usual hang-ups of filmgoers. That Herzog claims to have no ironical sense of humour speaks volumes for the approach he has and his penchant for serious drama (though not entirely without a sense of humour as is apparent from some of the great wry observations made in his documentary voice-overs).

In His Minnesota Declaration, Herzog made the distinction between fact and truth in film, issuing the notion of ecstatic truth. As he states, cinema has the power to depict not merely the accountant’s truth, the truth of real world documentation, but of our dreams of the world, and that the proper manipulation of facts can agitate an ecstatic truth realization that would have not existed otherwise. He says that it is up to the poets to provide us with adequate images, and this is so urgent nowadays as we are overwhelmed by the saturation of the mundane, and with so many avenues for communication set before us we remain victims of greater solitude. Our understanding remains dumbfounded and art is needed to reacquaint ourselves with our dreams. It is a beautiful bit of dreaming in its own right, and for this and for the imagery of his films, I write this.

Up until this point I have seen the following of his works: Fritzcarraldo, Aguire: Wrath of God, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. I have recently finished the entirely engrossing ‘Herzog on Herzog’, and have bought the Herzog/Kinski boxset. My idea of Herzog is admittedly vague; a more thorough examination of his oeuvre will hopefully remedy this.

update New muxtape version of this playlist can be listened to here

Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums is a grinning fool of a book, partially autobiographical, spewing forth like a wine-induced poetry reading, all mirth and chaos, and yet, fighting through the adolescence and restless spontaneity of the piece is the aspiration for a mature spiritual enlightenment of a Buddhist nature, a clamor in pursuit of calm. Throughout the loosely strung events of the book, a gaggle of beatniks (Zen Lunatics) traverse America, climb mountains, sleep in boxcars, quibble over dogma, screw and meditate. As escpaist literature goes this entry really hits the spot, calling out to that teenager in me who still longs for the satori Suzuki talked about. One feels the joy of at least Kerouac’s kind of buddhism through his tumbling diction, that cascade of words which become descriptive/poetic/paintstrokes creating a fiery mosaic of what is in reality a fairly non-eventful series of events. He of course wrote this novel in a flow without editing as a disciplined act of spontaneity hoping to capture some of the instilled truth of his experiences through it. The effect is awesome and awe-inspiring.

In the same spirit I have cobbled together a playlist which shares the same pleasure of creation and spiritual themes of the novel. Finally I get to give some love to Cat Stevens.

“We weren’t lovers like that but even then it would still be okay” – Sisters of Mercy

Strange how I have been writing for so long about my acute aesthetic experiences and yet only now have I set aside a post to one of my true heroes of the verse, the palatable Mr. Leonard Cohen. Here I stand in awe and reverence worthy of a Montreal poet, a Zen Buddhist monk, a rock star and crooner, and grocer of despair. I knew him first from his poems and then got around to his songs and then in documentary form in the wonderful bit of cinema verite that was ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen’. There is a wonderful moment in that film where the youthful Leonard is shown the documentary and we watch him watching himself onscreen, and its like watching revelation, a poet that has swept every corner finding all of a sudden a new dimension to his identity to work with.

In June I will finally have the rare opportunity to see brother Cohen perform, something he has not done publically in some fifteen years of boredom. Elated is hardly the word for what I feel, but I guess it’ll do. In celebration of this reprise of genius I thought I would cobble together a playlist in his honour. While not entirely surrendering to the best-of impulse of lesser lists, I have included the tried tested and true works, Suzanne and First We Take Manhattan, but tried to offset these with peculiar yet earnest songs that show the underappreciated range Cohen has musically and lyrically. Regarding the arrangement, Last Year’s Man is one of my all-time favorite songs but it took at least a decade for it to seep in. Not the most accessible of his songs, for sure, but walk with a bit and see where it takes you. One of the rare tracks Cohen used a children chorus, and this playlist ends with yet another. Forgive the exclusion of Hallelujah, and Sisters of Mercy, I choose not to include them simply because I am so fond of the covers of them that I wanted to limit to those songs that I felt Cohen had full possession of.

Enough talk, let’s listen.

1) Last Year’s Man

2) In My Secret Life

3) I’m Your Man (live)

4) If it Be Your Will

5) Suzanne (live)

6) Ballad of the Absent Mare

7) A Singer Must Die

8) First We Take Manhattan

9) Songs of Love and Hate

10) Famous Blue Raincoat

11) Dress Rehearsal Rag

Repurpose. A shiny new word used with abandon in this post. Maybe my vocabulary is lacking but it seems to me there has never been an adequate (and by that I mean laymen) term for what is meant by pastiche or homage, and then steathily repurpose enters the popular conscience and all is well in the world once again.

The following mixtape is all about the art of repurposing, taking songs which although to my knowledge have been overlooked in popular soundtracks nonetheless possess an allure of the cinematic about them and which live amongst us. These are the same old songs we hear playing in the background of a party or a department store, but all of sudden, situated within an overt cinematic context, something clicks and the songs become something else altogether: the ethereal expression of film-thought. Unconsciously many of my compilations uphold this unspoken lesson gleaned from the finest soundtracks of situating the familiar into new and sometimes unexpected contexts; not surprising since my earliest infatuation with music came about through my reverence for soundtracks. It was the Pulp Fictions and Natural Born Killers that I was drawn to more so than the score-laden soundtracks with their aural landscapes which evoke mood without the same sort of revelry of repurposing.

This playlist is my love letter to the soundtracks of pop cinema, the stand-alone masterpieces of Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and Sophia Copolla, just to name a few. It takes a musical savant like a Quentin Tarantino or a Wes Anderson to provide that special fusion of old familiar sounds in new exciting contexts, side by side with symphonic vista-creating set-pieces of music which come to define the cinematic experiences they are a part of. It also takes a particular kind of music to play cinematically, and even more so, for it to be iconic. I admit there is a geek factor to this display of arcane knowledge in that a part of the joy of this sort of soundtrack comes from the clever deployment of the familiar (one of my favorite examples is ‘He Loves Me’, the Olive Oil croon song from Altman’s Popeye, that hit just the right note in the montage of Punch Drunk Love). Perhaps nobody is better at this then Tarantino whose films are all about repurposing popular culture, and his musical cues are no different. Think of ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ from the ear-slicing scene of Reservoir Dogs, or more recently, the rip-roaring riff that is played during one of the bloodiest scenes in Death Proof, ‘Hold Tight’ by The Who side project, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich.

Some of my other favorites include: ‘Jessie’s Girl’ in Boogie Nights, ‘Mad World’ in Donnie Darko, The Kills track in Children of Men, Kath Bloom’s ‘Come Here’ in Before Sunrise, Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ in Trainspotting, Cowboy Junkies’ ‘Sweet Jane’ in Natural Born Killers, Dinosaur Jr.’s ‘Just Like Honey’ in Lost in Translation… and so many more.

So this is my very own Tarantinoesque mixtape. The challenge was to keep the ethos of obscure but solid ditties which possess the cinematic in their repurposing. It became necessary not to covet from pre-existing soundtracks and avoid the more obvious choices, to get to some sort of pure vision of sound as it manifests onscreen. Sometimes I was thinking about the opening music, other times, envisioned set-pieces; I would be interested to know what sort of films this soundtrack brings to mind. Quite by accident my playlist has taken on a two-part structure which evokes Kill Bill, and superficially the soundtrack as well, except in my version the first part remains loyal to a Western vision, the second part succumbing to a wistful delight in pop music.

I should add in closing that I am aware that two of the songs on this compilation were originally used on soundtracks, but I think those sources are so incredibly obscure that I can get away with this, and if you can tell me which ones and from where then you are truly a star. I owe my awareness of them entirely to the music blog, Fire in the Stereo .

Fade to black.

Side A

01 Destination – Nick Lavranos

02 God Bless the Ottoman Empire – A Hawk and a Handsaw

03 Don’t Even Sing About It – The Books

04 In the Human World – Jason Molina

05 One More Cup of Coffee – Bob Dylan

06 Goodbye, My Friend – Guido & Maurizio De Angelis

Side B

07 Mbube – Miriam Makeba

08 Dink’s Song – Bob Dylan

09 By Your Side – Cocorosie

10 Staring at the Sun (remix) – Tv On The Radio Vs Afrika Bambaataa

11 Psycho Killer – Bishop Allen

12 There is an End – Greenhornes