Technicolor Memories: Le Samourai (1967)

Title Shot (60's Typography FTW)

Le Samourai (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967) is, if nothing else, exquisite meditation.

Since time immemorial, a valve of my heart has been exclusively reserved to pump at full capacity only while watching film noir, a fact first acknowledged when my high school film studies professor thrust Double Indemnity deep into my eye sockets, followed by The Big Sleep, The Killers, and Orson Welles' mischievously manipulated Touch of Evil (the 1975 cut). (He was a good guy, that professor, rode a mean hog, wore leather jackets, jeans, and aviators—when he wanted you to watch something, you fuckin' watched it.) The genre cut into my flesh like it was a knife, cutting until I bled, and when I bled, that blood was cold ("Jill, this blood, this looks like cold blood...").

So what I'm saying is: I'm a reptile, the responsibility for which falls squarely at the feet of [Dr. Octagon] (or Capcom?); and that I enjoy noir is no surprise—it's embedded in my cold, cold blood.

The first time I watched Le Samourai, I was in complete disbelief. Where had this film been all my life? It had taken me 6 years since Double Indemnity to watch this? How could that be? Well, I suppose it's availability may have been marginal up until its resurrection as a member of the Criterion family, but the point is, including that as an excuse, it was still inexcusable that I had never even heard of it. Why hadn't this been thrust into my eye sockets? (Or the more apropos location of my belly?)

Not that I have a VHS Deck in my abdomen; I envision a dubious transaction on the streets of Chinatown where the local bootlegger hands it off to me in a forceful fashion as I walk past, dropping my cash at his feet.

Because my life is noir as fuck.

Noir as fuck

Le Samourai is transcendent, style sublimating into substance; the sharp existentialism of assassin du jour, Jef (played to perfection by Alain Delon), puts all other cinematic killers to shame. Outdoor shots are thick with rainy-Sunday atmospherics accompanied by a melancholic electric-organ theme that hypnotizes; interiors often labyrinthine (note the first scene inside the Police Department), confusing the senses with unexpected doorways, extras as subterfuge, and post-bop jazz. Actual acts of violence are few and far between; the story is about accepting the consequences for those actions that you willfully performed, few as they may be. And as you sit, entranced by the 24fps sequence of events that unfolds, you will come to understand as Jef understands: life is not something to be taken lightly, but it can be taken quickly.

Rain, Rain, Go Away...

The collaboration between Melville and Delon produced two of the greatest crime-dramas in history (Le Cercle Rouge being the other. They also worked together on Un Flic, but I've yet to see it. So maybe they went 3/3. I'd believe it.). Melville's direction is refined, so enthusiastically intellectual, philosophical even, that it seems at odds with a genre that some might instinctively consider hyper-masculine (see: Heat). But that's just some gender-bias bullshit. Of course it took a careful, nuanced director with vision to craft a film like this and not have it devolve into some shitty tale of revenge (which in some respects it may resemble). When Jef is betrayed by the woman he's betrayed his woman with, he knows what he has to do. But do we?

The Beautiful Caty Rosier

Melville uses his actors to meditate on what may or may not be an actual quote from Bushido code, but whether the quote is real or imagined is irrelevant—Le Samourai makes it real through a process of semiotic transmutation. And we, the viewer, meditate on whether or not we need to watch this damn movie again.

I vote yes.

Takin' down the set

Soliloquy I / Science Leaves My Self-Importance in Ruins

Rapidly divergent thoughts converge always at a point of least expectance; and in that way, when you’re not expecting to think at all, you might dredge up an axiom: that your thoughts are of the same stream, a single river, come from some cloud-hidden valley in that unknown cardinal direction which points to the heavens. Therein resides a lake whose pure water is analogous to the gods, by its depth you might measure their ambition. On its surface forms a fine mist and from that mist the fontanus, simulacra of divinity made to stimulate the Earth by rain of dithyrambs, paeans, and odes. Diluted by descent from so high, these sacrosanct globules of thought travel through the infinite tributaries of man, his capillary labyrinths of consciousness; and then, when discarded as silt, whether that of the theologian or philologist, they’ll share the same soggy delta—before being poured into the maw of that eternal glutton, the Thought-Æther Ocean, its true source.

⁄ ⁄ ⁄

It's been a few days since I started this blog and after making two extremely dissimilar posts to begin things, I began to feel guilty that I should have opened with some greeting and/or statement of intent. But now it's too late for that, so I hope any potential readers are capable of accepting that the content of this blog will be as it will be. You wouldn't challenge the Ocean to a duel would you? Muhfuckahs get drowned-dead.

⁄ ⁄ ⁄

Thinking about thought (as I'm prone to do when doing little else), I was reminded of a video my friend Wythe linked to over at the Culture Project. In it, Professor Dan Dennett does his damnedest to remind us that, much like ants, there's a whole fuckton of human beings out there, and as a consequence of that fact we can't all be special, especially not in the way our minds work. The video is perhaps too brief to wholeheartedly dig into that vulgar proposition, but the good Doktor is an engaging and amiable fellow (lowering our guard with his jolly beard and bald pate) who, through the use of optical illusions, proves that since we all get fooled we are all not special.

His thèse dramatique is not something that humanity can easily be convinced of, as Doc Dennett observes through many dinner conversations, but even if you find yourself scoffing at the information presented I recommend watching it through to the end just so that you can test yourself at the "What's Wrong with the Picture?" Game. The website that hosts this video also has some other talks of his, including one on the dangers of memes, and a bevy of other excellent scientific resources. Always good for a wandering through the mist.

The discussed speech can be found here: "Can we know our own minds?"

I also like this one: "Apes that write, start fires, and play Pac-Man"

I'd befriend a bonobo.

Musica in tensione: Ebu Gogo (8/9/07, Matunuck Beach)

Seeing as how I seem to spend the majority of my largely illusory (and thus more disposable) income on what has quickly become obsolescent, the compakt disk, and any remaining phantom funds to obtain secondhand instruments (such as doodads, gizmos, and whizzing whirring whatthefucksitdos) for the express purpose of composing and performing music, it's frustratingly rare that I actually get out and enjoy music like it's supposed to be enjoyed. This disparity between live and Memorex could have something to do with the stultifying effect of being me, dancing. You (or I) might think that I would be relieved then, that it's rare for me feel that pulse, that rhythm, the beat, the need to get up and physically act on what the sound is telling me to do, but no—I fucking love that feeling, I think we all do (assuming you and I, and the other yous that are not you, that we each have a soul). That's why this lacking in my life, a lack of the most pure expression of what is a vital part of my life, is frustrating, exacerbated by the unbearably lame self-consciousness responsible.

And so it is that I've decided to fill that chasm, bring disparity closer to a parity, and by the power invested in me by the almighty bullet-shaped signifier, chronicle my adventures in enjoyment of the good rock show as many an internetist has chronicled before, except with a far greater percentage of neologisms and legomenons (the hapax kind).

⁄ ⁄ ⁄

The sun rose on Thursday to reveal itself as actually being a Saturday (well, no it was still Thursday, but we, the marginally employed/gainfully self-employed can treat any damn day we please as a Saturday), a day to be spent with a group of friends and falafel pockets in the streets of Providence and then head south, with those very same friends, to catch a free show on the beautiful beach of Matunuck, headlined by the well-goggled, but less googled, purveyors of semi-sinister chase themes, Ebu Gogo. The show was generously put together by a group of youths appearing more youthful than they probably should and generously attended by youthier youths courtesy of the ever-popular all-ages denomination. Wearing their usual attire of abused irony, the kids know how to enjoy a good thing, and a good thing it was.

Now let me be concise in describing the venue: shit was fucking intimate. Can you understand how that emphasis resounds? If not, I'll explicate: I'm not talking cramped hovel that smells like piss and skunk-stench; where the stage is not a stage, just a slightly elevated extension of the floor that ultimately makes the band more cramped than the audience; where you can't actually hear the music above the din of people who just came to do "something" (except listen).

No, this wasn't like that at all. Probably because it wasn't a real venue at all, it was nature. Make like Mr. Rogers and imagine it if you would: you're standing on soft grass, grass that you could sit on too if you like, it's clean, no needles hiding among the blades. The band is set up on that very same grass, and you can get as close as you like, as long as you're not making anyone uncomfortable and/or physically ruining the performance, but maybe that's ok too, shit is intimate, just don't be an asshole. And everyone there is there because they came for music, reacting to the music in personal forms of exultation. And the beach behind you, it too is just there for the music, waves crashing quietly in the background; Neptune doesn't want to interrupt. Maybe this is the way to experience live music.

⁄ ⁄ ⁄

If you're unfamiliar with the sound of Ebu Gogo, get familiar. An extension of the cultishly-adored-by-those-that-know, Grüvis Malt, self-proclaimed innovators of Futurock currently on indefinite hiatus, Ebu Gogo has whittled themselves down to a lean, mean, instrumental machine, a Bass/Keys/Trap Kit combo engaged in the production of soundtracks to motion pictures of their own imagination. On their first album, Chase Scenes 1-14, they run through the fourteen breathless non sequitur in under 40 minutes, slowing only to add menace on "Never Ending Hole" and parts of "Mostly Evil, Totally Dead", a song so treacherous they added outtakes at the end so that we can feel drummer Brendan Bell's pain as he misses one of the many time changes ("Red Light Fever").

You can draw connections to a lot of the bands if you want, especially those they themselves acknowledge (I would choose the ones making linear structured mayhem), but you don't need to. They say This Heat, I prefer Massacre (if you replaced Fred Frith's avant-garde noise infatuations with good ol' NES-nostalgia; Ninja Gaiden's got'm cut in two).

For all the goodness of Chase Scenes, however, I never really listened it. The recording quality is admittedly low-budget, not in a teenager-with-a-four-track kind of way, but in a way that you know they're professionals that just wanted to get something out quickly. But meaningless qualms with the audio quality ("It's not warm enough") shouldn't really stop me or anyone else from listening to something, the biggest deterrent is that you just can't grasp how fun this music is until you see and hear it in person. That's what it's all about. No matter how immensely technical the music gets, and how utterly impossible it is to dance while completely disoriented, it is always about simple, retahded fun. After all, the core of The Goonies isn't a story about how much fun it is to follow a convoluted treasure map while being chased by incompetent criminals, it's the tale of misshapen mongoloid Sloth and his undying love for a chunky chunkster named Chunk—a love born from the bond of a shared Baby Ruth.

⁄ ⁄ ⁄

The sun now sinks as the Gogo finishes setting up. The preceding band, some talented young musicians dutifully attempting to integrate cello into what would otherwise be a two-man Don Caballero Jr., quietly try to gather up their own gear just as Gogo break into "Cuckoo for Bird Flu", the opening track off Chase Scenes and a seriously jarring attack on one's ability to refrain from having a seizure. As a testament to that fact, two clusters of South Kingston's finest mullet-coifed teens immediately developed into equally odd strains of spasmodic line-skanking.

Quickly the set becomes something of a blur. Standing front and center, behind a metalhead who knew what it meant to thrash, I try my damnedest to head-bang in time with the madness, but the always shifting nature of an Ebu Gogo song means I stumble on a few unexpected downbeats. "Spaghetti Chest Burn", with its epic Rocky IV power-synths, causes one kid to get down on one knee, fist raised, a display of allegiance to his new favorite band or signal that he's just had an aneurysm. The aforementioned "Mostly Evil" is played to perfection, and scattered throughout they perform some new songs off their forthcoming second album, including one that has me grinning ear to ear from Gavin's (the keyboardist) use of the pitch-wheel, giving it that early 90's West Coast/Dre vibe on top of the stuttering rhythmic interplay of Justin and Brendan. Fuck Girl Talk mash-ups, these cats do it live with fucking Ziggy Stardust powers.

As darkness surrounds us, the supervisory police inform organizers it was time to wrap it up. Brendan announces that they can play two out of three songs left, so we have to choose between "a heavy and a slow one" or "a heavy and our dance song". Amid cries for "heavy and heavy", it's decided that first would come the dance and then the heavy, as heavy is a given—the proper request would have been "heavy and a heavy-heavy".

"Dance Song" turns out to be heavily-syncopated dub-rebel anthem "Dikembe Bumbwembwe" (definitely one of my favorites off Chase Scenes [because I like to dance?]). Proving to not be anymore danceable than the rest of their material, it still keeps everyone having fun. And then the finale, another new song, tentatively titled "Take off all your clothes...or no, wait, put your clothes on the floor...no, no, but it's something like that." No one takes off his or her clothes (I wouldn't take it to heart, guys, blame mosquitoes and/or malaria).

And like that it was over. Everybody has to scuttle away lest our cars get locked in by the police, the band included, but I imagine everyone's left feeling like they've just huffed a tank of nitrous.

That's a good thing, when it doesn't involve dentistry.

⁄ ⁄ ⁄

Ebu Gogo is:
Brendan Bell - Trap Kit Jr.
Justin Abene - Bass
Gavin Castleton - Keyboards

Photograph by: David McDonald
Ebu Gogo Poster by: Brendan Bell