Colin Marshall

Nicolas Roeg: Walkabout

I’m riding the highest wave of my Nicolas Roeg obsession. I’ve been watching and re-watching his films, sure, but I’ve also been seeking out all the interviews with him I can Google and reading all the books on his work I can pull from the library stacks. (For what it’s worth, I suspect that the definitive book on Roeg, or even the definitive collection of interviews, has yet to appear.) Naturally, for this month’s edition of my 3QuarksDaily film column The Humanists, I look at Roeg’s 1971 solo directorial debut Walkabout:

None of us really think about it anymore, especially if we grew up in  Crocodile Dundee’s pop-cultural heyday, but... how weird is Australia? This land mass, just large enough to qualify for continent status, hanging out by itself underneath Asia? Starkly arid and desolate, for the most part, between its eastern and western edges? Ten thousand miles from England, yet full (in a sense) of Brits? Without a doubt, Australia makes the short list of countries that can freak you out if you think hard enough about them. It doesn’t sit at the top — stiff competition from Turkmenistan, Paraguay, and North Korea — but which  filmmakers bother to actively engage with it? The Mad Max pictures grew more grotesque as they went along, but in a speculatively flamboyant way that didn’t really engage the actual weirdness. Baz Luhrmann seems to  hold a grasp on some of his homeland’s deep askewness, but his movies tend to convert it into mere eccentricity.

But if we’re keeping it to high international profiles, we’ve got to talk about Nicolas Roeg. Despite suffering the apparent disadvantage of growing up in London and not, say, Alice Springs, he nevertheless managed, in his solo directorial debut Walkabout, to deliver an Australia never seen before — or, for that matter, since. More specifically, he delivers an Australian outback, and a drama in it, never seen before or since, dropping a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl and her six-year-old brother right into the thick of it. Cinephiles, or even enthusiasts of modern myth, know the rest of the story: the uniformed, near-albinistically white siblings — credited only as “Girl” and “White Boy” — just about succumb to dehydration when they come across a young Aboriginal tribesman — “Black Boy” — who ultimately leads them back to their civilization, though only after a series of fatal failures to communicate.

That plot opens up a minefield of potential cinematic embarrassments, including but not limited to telling the story with a standard “survival” movie or, worse, telling it with a standard “noble savage” movie. The Girl and the White Boy owe their lives to the Black Boy, true, but Roeg doesn’t convey it with a broadside against Western civilization, colonial arrogance, excessive whiteness, or what have you, even though those seem like tacks the film has to take. I’d dragged my feet on seeing it for the first time because of my fear that Roeg, who had become one of my favorite filmmakers immediately after I saw The Man Who Fell to Earth, would succumb to obvious moralistic clichés. How foolish of me; watching any given Roeg film should assure you that, even when he uses time-worn components of plot or character — and he usually does — he fits them together with a box of tools all of his own cockeyed invention.

Lord help me, I just couldn’t resist the chance to compare cinema’s available creative space to the Australian outback, Roeg to one of the true adventurers who dares enter it regularly — and most other directors to the two white kids before they’ve ever left Adelaide.

Culinary reportage is cultural reportage

I don’t believe in opinion, but I do believe in food. Whatever that means. Hence my decision to join Yelp and incentivize my own writing of, effectively, two- to three-paragraph pieces of gastronomically themed writing. I’ve quite enjoyed getting a handle on this short form, despite never claiming brevity as a strength. Or maybe because of that. I’m with Tyler Cowen when he says, in his Ethnic Dining Guide, "Restaurants manifest the spirit of capitalist multiculturalism. Entrepreneurship, international trade, and cultural exchange all come together in these communal eateries."

Some principles I’ve thought up while crafting my first seven writeups of eateries in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara:

• If a writeup runs over three paragraphs, I’m not making it dense and/or concise enough.
• If a writeup runs under two paragraphs, I didn’t pay enough attention when I ate at the place.
• The food makes up half of what’s important about a restaurant — at most.
• Objective evaluations of food don’t exist — or if they do, who would want them?
• If a writeup has not reached beyond topics of taste, service, decor, and suchlike, that writeup has failed.
• My tastebud chemistry ain’t transferable.
• The words “good,” “bad,” and all synonyms thereof have the same place here as they do in any critical endeavor: none.
• At no point can I consider food separate from other varieties of world cultural product, including but not limited to music, film, literature, and visual art.
• “Authenticity” has neither any particular relevance, nor value, nor even meaning.

I aim to iterate toward making these restaurant writeups interesting enough reading that they can work as blog posts in and of themselves. Here’s my review of Blue Owl in S.B., which users have so far voted “Cool” once and “Funny” once:

This place cleverly hacks Santa Barbara nonsense laws — or at least the particular Santa Barbara nonsense laws that prevent food trucks from parking on streets. Where, y'know, food trucks park. The proprietor sets up her stand outside at 11:30 (more like 11:45 when I went) and uses Zen Yai's kitchen to whip up a few different dishes, including egg-topped fried rice, shrimp sandwiches, "peanut butter burgers," and trip-tip sandwiches with oyster mayo.

These dishes all but force you at gunpoint to eat them — and fast. Those with health concerns, know that they're as good for you as anything so compulsively wolfable isn't. Not to say Blue Owl tries to pull a Jamba Juice; I distinctly recall the promotion pretty naked playing the whole "food for after you've burnt the evening drinking" angle. They serve dishes in the Roy Choi tradition, meaning they taste apocalyptically buttery even when/if they don't actually contain butter. Not that they could fool anybody — I mean, even decadent ancient Rome couldn't dream of peanut butter burgers.

People told me Blue Owl operates firmly on the take-your-shite-and-leave business model, but the woman in charge offered us a seat at one of Zen Yai's tables without hesitation. Plates, utensils, and water, too. We had ourselves a mini-restaurant going. I still feel like I'm languishing in the provinces when I eat food-truck food in a brick-and-mortar because of the quaintness fetishists around here — remember when the Kogi truck came to town and we all waited in line for hours? -- but this stuff oughta hold me for the months before I move down to Babylon.

Here’s my Yelp profile. Do you use Yelp? LET’S BE FRIENDS GUYSCulinary reportage is cultural reportage

The uselessness of "good"

Since my career prospects depend on people liking the stuff I make, I spend plenty of time thinking about how I got to like the stuff I like. (A slight variation on Jon Hassell’s ultimate question, “What do I like, and why do I like it?”) In what feels like a revelation, I suddenly realized that I’ve never grown interested in anything simply because someone said it was good, no matter how credentialed the someone, no matter how emphatic the superlatives piled upon “good.”

When I talk about criticism, I use a standard line about how two words have no place in the thinking critic’s vocabulary: “good,” “bad,” and all synonyms thereof. The sheer cheapness of broad positive or negative pronouncements — but especially positive ones — seem drained them of their interestingness. I guess you’ve got to burn a calorie or two to type out that a film “is perhaps the greatest, most astonishing masterpiece to grace screens in the last half-century,” but even praise an order of magnitude more grandiose costs you essentially nothing — well, nothing aside from devaluing the currency of your own praise, but that’s another issue.

Let’s take The Tree of Life, Terence Malick’s new movie, reviews of which now sprout up like mushrooms. Had any critic written the made-up line above about it, they wouldn’t have moved me an inch closer to the cinema thereby. When Roger Ebert calls it “film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives,” I raise an eyebrow, but only just. He makes a comparison to 2001, one of my favorite early-cinephilia experiences, and that piques my interest a little more. But the clincher comes in a single observation on Jack Fisk’s production design: “Fisk is about my age and was born and raised in Downstate Illinois, and so of course knows that in the late '40s, tall aluminum drinking glasses were used for lemonade and iced tea.” I feel l need to see those glasses.

A.O. Scott writes of the “awe, amazement and grist for endless argument” The Tree of Life offers; only the last of the three sound interesting to me, but I’ve found almost any film has the potential to fuel eternal (if pointless) debates. “It is like Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ transported into the world of ‘Leave It to Beaver,’” he writes, “an inadequate and perhaps absurd formulation but one that I hope conveys the full measure of my astonishment and admiration.” Astonishment and admiration rarely transfer from viewer to viewer, but Wordsworth meets Leave It to Beaver? Oh man, who wouldn’t want to see what comes of that mash-up?

Anthony Lane, whom I’ve realized many other critics seem to consider a disgrace to the trade but whose writing I simply can’t not read, has always skillfully avoided the good-and-bad game. Though the least straightforwardly positive of the three, his review paints the most compelling verbal picture of The Tree of Life. Odd lines about how the film’s main boys “relax into near-Oedipal bliss” or about shots with “Sean Penn, dressed in Armani, kneeling on a beach, while the other characters mooch around like unwanted extras from ‘Zabriskie Point’” stoke my curiosity, but, for whatever reason, a passage not directly related to the movie actually gets me looking up showtimes. “‘If we cannot educate ourselves to his purposes, then clearly his work will look like nonsense,’” Lane quotes. “That is Malick, writing of Heidegger, and introducing his own translation of Heidegger’s ‘The Essence of Reasons,’ in 1969.”

Wait wait wait. The director of this film — a film that stars Sean Penn and Brad Pitt, of all actors — published his own translation of Heidegger? That observation, one Lane includes under the pains of a little extra research and at some risk of losing his audience, convinces me to watch this film more than all the exhortations about wonder and majesty and transcendence and masterpieciness I’ve heard from countless critics, cinéastes, and utter randoms alike.

But in the interest of absolute clarity, let me say that I have a pre-existing interest in Terence Malick. I’ll watch anything he directs. But why? How did I decide to follow his films in the first place? Much of my interest grew from hearing rumors about his working methods: his shooting Days of Heaven only during the “magic hour”; his panning away from carefully orchestrated explosions on the set of The Thin Red Line and onto passing flocks of birds; his making a movie once every 11 years or so on average; his constant (and constantly backfiring) flight from fame; dreaming of producing an Andrzej Wajda-directed Sansho the Bailiff on Broadway. This stuff strikes me as more meaningful than incantations about his “singular quality of vision,” his “cinematic mastery,” or his status as a craftsman of “undisputed classics.” Goodness, or even greatness — especially greatness, maybe — doesn’t turn my head. Weirdness certainly does.

Or maybe I just got into Malick because of that old story about Pauline Kael’s review of Badlands. Reading her pan of the film, William Shawn, her editor at the New Yorker, said, “I guess you didn’t know Terry is like a son to me.” Kael’s reply: “Tough shit, bill.” My reaction: any movie Pauline Kael insisted on getting that harsh about has to have something special going on.

Taste and identity

Reviewing Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, Adam Cadre arrives, by way of a book wherein Jeffrey Steingarten forces himself to eat everything he dislikes to attain “perfect omnivore” status, at an intersection of the ideas of opinions, tastes, and identity that’s occupied my mind lately:

When Steingarten speaks of becoming a "perfect omnivore," what he really means is a "perfect hedonist": his contempt is palpable for those, including his past self, who deprive themselves of pleasure by disliking something. This is an interesting issue for someone like me who doesn't really like a lot of stuff. It also dovetails with a story I read a couple of days ago, "Reasons to Be Cheerful" by Greg Egan, which Elizabeth brought me four months ago but which I didn't get a chance to look at until just this week for reasons I've discussed. It deals with a guy who has the pleasure receptors in his brain burnt out by a virus and then receives an experimental treatment that amounts to receiving grafts of pleasure pathways from four thousand people. The problem is that initially they're all operating at once and so if even one person in four thousand liked something then he likes it too. In short, he now has "the widest possible taste," exactly the condition to which Steingarten aspires — but he's not happy about it. "Should I still be like this?" he asks his doctors in a panic. "Omnivorous?"

Before long he decides that if he's ever going to develop a sense of identity he somehow needs "to break the symmetry, to make some things a greater source of pleasure than others." Now, I can certainly see a case against this view: developing an even more refined sense of identity might be counterproductive if the self is mostly illusory, and developing a list of likes and dislikes might be counterproductive if true happiness comes from escaping craving and aversion.

Recording an interview with filmmaker Aaron Katz the other week, I mentioned my creeping envy for the kind of cinephiles who’ll enjoy, say, a Michael Bay movie as much as a Yasujirō Ozu movie. I could just front like I do, I suppose, but the fact of remains: I’ll enjoy the Ozu movie. Even beyond cinema, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that anything I don’t particularly like represents a grievous hit to my potential joie de vivre. I suppose this gives some sort of identity as a selective appreciator of, oh, films that have stood the test of time or what have you, but I don’t find it very useful, especially in the grander task of trying to keep my identity small.

Should I therefore thrust myself into an ordeal of Nietzschean self-overcoming by watching all the films to which I feel the least attraction — by megadosing debased genres, say? Should I eat superhuman amounts of whatever I fear most? While I feel no pressing need to go that far, I admit that I’ve felt flashes of vast contempt — though only flashes of it — when people write off a swath of cultural experience as not their “thing.” I desperately wish not to return to middle- and high-school days, when we could only build identities out of abstract likes and dislikes. That didn’t work out so well for me, one reason being that it cut me off from too much of the rest of humanity — but then, I’ve already covered this.

The possibility remains that this likes-and-dislikes business actually bears less on my ability to connect with others than I think. Take Adam Cadre’s site. Most of his writeups on film come to the exact opposite evaluative conclusion I would have — Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, Old Joy, The Limey, In the Mood for Love, Paranoid Park, Silent Light, and Woman in the Dunes all score one point out of ten with him — yet I eagerly read everything he posts. Some film bloggers — let’s face it, many film bloggers — hold opinions that nearly replicate my own, but I don’t read them. Oftentimes I don’t read them because of their bad writing, but really, if I want a lionization of Abbas Kiarostami, I’ll write my own. I stand in the choir’s front row; I don’t need the sermon.

In any intellectual area, give me opinions that aren’t mine, as long as their holders express them well. Scratch that: only if their holders express them well; I’d rather not fill my mind with strawman stuffing. Not only does the very act of coming up against differing opinions make the world an interesting place, it makes me less likely to hold opinions of my own, or at least to hold them with quite as much strength as I would have, which reduces the risk that an identity will dumben me. Which, of course, will eventually make it hard to find conflicting opinions to come up against. Which will make the world a less interesting place for me. Oh well!

Undeniable Mitchellness

My main concern in life right now is that Elvis Mitchell may not be getting sufficient props. I first came to know of him as the host of KCRW’s The Treatment, which you might call the Bookworm of film and style. Like Michael Silverblatt, Mitchell conducts not interviews, with all the question-prewriting and formal rigidity that term entails, but conversations. (Also like Silverblatt, he’s restricted to half an hour, but I’ll take what I can get.) He writes film criticism in print and has done so since the eighties — thus doing his part to break down that bothersome wall inexplicably constructed between criticism and all other pursuits — he’s hosted various television programs, he’s lectured at colleges, and he possesses two-foot dreads.

Further evidence of Mitchell’s undeniability:

• (from Popdose) “I’ve never been in a situation on my radio show or when I filled in for Charlie Rose where I’ve had a list of prepared questions given to me. I just can’t think that way. I’ve always found when you’re sitting in front of somebody and you’ve got a list [of questions], their eyes go to the list, they’re not looking at you, they’re trying to see what the questions are and trying to count the questions so they can get done with this and go meet somebody for a drink or go make their flight.”
• (from Undercover Black Man) "When I walked into the restaurant, Elvis was in there smoking a cigar. I thought they shot people for that in L.A. Elvis said it was cool. 'They know me here.'"

• “I went back after being out of school for six months and not wanting to go work in an auto plant. ’Cause I knew that I was basically too shallow to be a real working man for a living.”
• “I don’t have a publicist. You would’ve thought I did, but I don’t.”
• (from Film.com) “[James Lipton] sits down with that stack of questions, and like a prosecutor he never asks a question that he doesn't know the answer to. And for me that's where it gets interesting, where I want to start is the question that I don't know the answer to and with any luck they don't know the answer either, and it becomes a conversation about that. You know, there's a kind of connection you make when people are just weighing things out. Sometimes it gets to be that moment when somebody says ‘I've never said this before,’ because in conversation we tend to not say that kind of thing. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that happens.”
• (from New York magazine) “Mitchell is known for his opportunism as much as his talent, and he has a great ability to generate opportunities for himself. Often too many, to the point where it could be an editing adventure to track him down to get him to file.”
• “‘Elvis has this sort of Candide-like air about him,’ says Outside executive editor Jay Stowe, who edited Mitchell at Spin (yes, he worked there, too). It’s not naïveté, exactly, but an aura of doing what he wants and seeming surprised, in all innocence, when people take offense.”
• “He often invites his students to the Enormous Room, a campus-area bar on Massachusetts Avenue, to see one of his teaching assistants D.J.”
• (from Wikipedia) “On April 27, 2008, Mitchell was returning from Toronto to Detroit when border guards found Cuban cigars and $12,000 in cash on him.”

Nicholson Primer

Act now and you can be the first to comment on my primer on the novels of Nicholson Baker, published today on The Millions:

If you don’t know Nicholson Baker as an intensive describer of everyday minutiae, surely you know him as an intensive describer of goofy sexual fantasy. At the very least, you might hold the broad notion that he’s very, very detail-oriented. None of those images capture the novelist in full, but if you twist them into a feedback loop by their common roots, you’ll get closer to the reality. Whatever the themes at hand, Baker adheres with utter faith to his narrators’ internal monologues, carefully following every turn, loop, and kink (as it were) in their trains of thought. He understands how often people think about sex, but he also understands that, often times, they just think about shoelaces — and he understands those thoughts of sex and shoelaces aren’t as far apart, in form or in content, as they might at first seem.

This is why some find Baker’s novels uniquely dull, irritating, or repulsive, and why others place them in the small league of books that make sense. Not “sense” in that they comprise understandable sentences, paragraphs, and chapters; the existential kind of sense. So many novels exude indifference to their medium, as though they could just as easily have been — or are merely slouching around before being turned into — movies, comics, or interpretive dances. The Baker novel is long-form text on the page as well, but it’s also long-form text at its core, and on every level in between. Adapting it into anything else would be a ludicrous project at best and an inconceivable one at worst; you might as well “adapt” a boat into a goat.

After you’ve read the whole thing, feel free to enter the month-long grip of anticipation for my Jean-Philippe Toussaint primer.

Rehumanized

The Humanists, my monthly film column at 3Quarksdaily, returns this week with a piece on Sangsoo Hong’s Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors:

“Art is the concealment of art,” someone once said. Though sources conflict about exactly who that was, his words must have reached Sangsoo Hong, who toils to produce films that look and feel like nothing at all. This is a canny strategy to raise cinephiles’ eyebrows: plain people doing plain things, plainly portrayed? Then there must be something big and complex grinding away beneath the surface. While this way of thinking often leads straight to a dead end, the wall against which earnest film students beat their heads until their grad school fund runs dry, it pays off when applied to Hong, the most distinctive filmmaker to emerge out of South Korea’s cinematic boom of fifteen years and counting.

The Hong movie, of which ten specimens with a strong family resemblance now exist, is both a hard sell and an easy one. Spartanly unadorned, it’s built out of long, often unmoving shots of decidedly un-epic subjects. Its large stable of floundering creative types — writers, composers, filmmakers — pass the time hanging out in pubs, taking car and train trips, pounding bottle after bottle of liquor, stumbling into wanly unappealing sexual encounters, and blearily, unconvincingly, insisting upon their worthiness as artists, as lovers, as human beings. Their conversations are as outwardly inane as anything overheard on public transit or in hotel lobbies around the world. Despite the small scale of their problems, solutions refuse to budge from the hazy distance.

Yet it can all be so relatable. Though subject to a wide range of cultural and temperamental oddities — about which more later — Hong’s flighty monuments to frustration endure, in some sense, the same problems we all do. They want to stake out recognizable individualities, to do work that will make a mark on the cultural world, and to hook up with the men or women they’re particularly into — to connect, in various senses. But these broad desires are also vague, and they’re easily overwhelmed by the detritus of the moment. In Hong’s world, this detritus manifests as an endless stream of cigarettes, bottles of soju, chintz in all its forms, and sudden opportunities for sexual congress.

But do check it out in full. I don’t know whether it’s the highly concentrated dosages of Anthony Lane with which I’ve lately been injecting myself or the film critics I’ve been interviewing for The Marketplace of Ideas, but my interest in film criticism has been fired up lately. Maybe I just need a form to quixotically attempt revitalizing.

He wanna travel

This article, from the Japanese magazine Paper Sky, is an interview with Haruki Murakami about writing and the states of mind brought on by foreign geographical contexts, and vintage record collecting. It was pretty much precision-engineered to get me to read it:

I hate asking you this, but here goes: What are your three favorite overseas destinations?

H: First would be Boston, Massachusetts in America, because it’s the most convenient and satisfying city for collecting secondhand Jazz records. Plus, there many delicious Indian restaurants in Boston — and you can find Samuel Adams draft beer anywhere in town. You can also run the marathon there — which I’ve done a few times. In Europe, I really like Stockholm, Sweden. Again, there’s a wonderful secondhand record shop there, and I visited that store everyday for three days straight. The owner is a fanatical collector of great jazz records. And here’s something unusual: The passengers on the subways in Stockholm are almost all talking on their cell phones all the time. It’s very surreal.

I also love Sydney in Australia. Although most of the people there wear boring clothes, because the fashions are really casual and simple, the food and wine in Sydney is excellent. How mysterious! Also, the aquarium and zoo in Sydney are both unique and wonderful. Unfortunately, there’s not a single good secondhand record store there. Maybe that will change in the future.

What does Murakami do on his many airplane flights? “Sometimes I take my small DVD player with me and watch old Jean Luc Goddard [sic] movies. As you know, those great old Goddard movies are hardly ever shown on planes.” My greatest desire is to be Haruki Murakami watching a Jean-Luc Godard movie on a flight to Stockholm.

A map of Couplândia

The latest chapter of my 101 Contemporary Novelists Without Whom Your Brain Might Well Shrivel and Die is up today at The Millions. It’s about Douglas Coupland:

“I’m not saying that the bulk of novels out there aren’t art — they are — they’re just not modern art.”

Douglas Coupland, “Why Write Modern Fiction?”

How ironic that Douglas Coupland, the man who popularized the term “Generation X”, turns out to be one of the least ironic novelists of his generation. His novels may, on the whole, be loaded with typographical trickery, brand names of the nanosecond, slacking youngsters, and Simpsons references, but he’s also deep into a suite of timelessly, radically un-hip novelistic themes. At the lightest readerly touch, Coupland’s smirking surfaces and visual bravado give way to a landslide of questions and concerns about, as Andrew Tate put it in his book-length study of Coupland’s writing, “conviction, community, connection, and continuity.”

Take Coupland’s work as a whole and his strengths become starkly apparent. He’s especially good when writing in the voice of an actual character, not a neutral, disembodied narrator. (He’s even better when writing as several of them.) Often criticized for peppering his texts with marketing detritus forgotten or best forgotten — Tae Bo, Gap, Pets.com — he deals with the timeless human problems best when discussing them in parallel with things so disposable. His penchant for suddenly dropping protagonists into bizarre scenarios also draws reviewer heat, but when he successfully mixes the very bizarre and the very mundane, there’s nothing quite like it in literature. He’ll often steer away from the norms of plotting and typesetting tradition, and when he does, the harder he cranks the wheel, the better.

Consider yourself linked not once, but twice.

The Experimentalismist

I totally knew this wouldn’t win McSweeney’s 2nd Annual Columnist Contest — it didn’t even come close — but I submitted it anyway. Some of the titles of the winners’ columns are In These Deserts: War Stories from Afghanistan, Balls Out: A Column On Being Transgendered, and (runner up) Diversity in the News. Mine is about some radio shows experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage did in Colorado (I first typed "Coloradio") in 1982. It was what I felt like writing about at the time.

* * *
 

Narrative-eschewing, sternly bearded, and even kind of fearsomely named, Stan Brakhage seemed to embody what people who don’t watch experimental film suspect experimental film is. His is a cinematic oeuvre to which you can lead friends — most of his movies are quite short, some are available on the net, and the rest come in handsome Criterion Collection packages — but from which they won’t necessarily drink. And that’s okay. You have to settle into a very particular mental space to enjoy dozens upon dozens of silent films made of paint, scratches, abstract visual artifacts, and no few discernible representations of the human world. (But when you get there, boy howdy.)

An article on Brakhage’s work would, I suppose, make a decent beginning for a column on avant-garde culture — “The Motion Pictures of Stan Brakhage: No, Really, They’re For Watching”, I could call it — but it would also make a predictable one. Much more interesting to focus on the year this luminary of purely visual film had his own radio show. His goals on the air turn out to have been the same as mine are on this digital page: find something odd and lead your audience through it in as friendly and real-person a way as possible.

For 23 years, Brakhage taught at the University of Colorado. (Two of his students were South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but that’s another column.) In 1982, KAIR-FM, the campus station, offered Brakhage the opportunity to try his hand in perhaps the medium furthest from his own métier. In these 20 half-hour broadcasts, collectively titled The Test of Time, DJ Brakhage (not that he goes by that name, but some temptations are irresistible) spins the most personally meaningful pieces of recorded sound in his collection, providing copious interstitial commentary all the while. In the same way a Brakhage fan might invite a few buddies over to finally check out his favorite parts of Dog Star Man or the Songs cycle, Brakhage himself sits you down and plays what he finds terribly exciting while telling you exactly why he thinks it is.

You may have guessed that he doesn’t drop the needle on anything particularly Top 40. This is a program that invariably begins with Gregorian chant — “almost church militant,” as Brakhage describes it — and ends with a little something atonal from Charles Ives. Brakhage’s playlists include Chinese music from between 206 B.C. and 618 A.D., microcassette field recordings of street musicians playing goatskin bags, Tennessee Williams speaking lines from The Glass Menagerie (“I hear a terror in that flat reading”), Glenn Gould complaining about his early recording of The Goldberg Variations, and James Joyce reading Ulysses under a thick layer of cylinder hiss.

This could be insufferable if Brakhage presented himself as an anointed emissary of the avant-garde, here to tell an artistically benighted America what’s what. He instead takes the tack of an enthusiastic, sometimes bumbling (if supremely well-spoken) cultural traveler — an outsider even to the outside. “I have to be free in doing this kind of program to be nothing but personal, which is to say, sometimes — often, maybe always — a fool,” he admits early in the series. “I’ll mispronounce things and falter now and again, and my knowledge is one that is amateur, in that sense of ‘lover.’” Despite being out of his domain, he doesn’t seem to actually get much wrong. But that disclaimer, and his manner throughout The Test of Time, struck me as pretty thoroughly disarming nonetheless.

Yet Brakhage had the same attitude within his domain, proudly calling himself an amateur filmmaker, a producer of home movies, reverence of the cinephile community be damned. As an old taped conversation with poet/critic Parker Tyler in episode twelve reveals, he disliked the terms “experimental” and “avant-garde,” finding them badly wanting for descriptive value. Remembering the work of eighty or so filmmakers at a recent exhibition in Brussels, he says, “There were only between twenty and thirty that I would call artists in film. And out of that twenty or thirty there were only maybe ten that I felt had accomplished anything.”

Brakhage’s baby daughter cuts through this high-minded back and forth, and the wailing gives him a good excuse to stop the tape. Coming back on the studio mic, he explains how pained he was by the conversation at the time, how he could never bear to listen to it between then and now. “Yet as I go back to it,” he continues, “it’s the clearest expression that I have ever been able to make of the beginnings and the continuities of my feeling. Parker brought that out in me, however annoying he was in the process.”

The near-superstitious exhumation of the long-buried recording; the frustration with limiting, marginalizing labels; the crying baby — they all exude Brakhage’s humanness. This isn’t the work of a steely, uncompromising artist-philosopher caricature whose every incomprehensible piece speaks only disdain for the insufficiently evolved human race that ignores it. This is the work of an honest appreciator — a lover — who wants to share the visceral thrill he gets from “odd and strange things, records that are out-of-print, poets reading poetry.” (Besides, I’m pretty sure you need a mindset like this to open a broadcast with lines like, “Hi, I'm Stan Brakhage, and today I feel like talking about love of women.”)

Brief, dreamlike, and almost wholly about their own form, Brakhage’s films are often and rightfully compared to poetry. Given his love of actual poetry evident in these broadcasts, perhaps that’s no surprise. What I did find a potential Deep Insight Into the Mind of the Artist is that he approaches pretty much every other type of art he shares on the show as poetry too. Letters from a young Jackson Pollock? Poetry. Fellow film artist Bruce Baillie rambling into a tape recorder as he wends his way through a 1960s road trip of obscure purpose but desperate motivation? Poetry. Orson Welles lampooning Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society? Poetry.

In Program 13, Brakhage discusses his love of James Joyce. “Surprise, surprise,” those still unconvinced might say, “that guy who made those movies nobody understands is a fan of that guy who wrote those novels nobody understands.” Brakhage includes his response in the broadcast: “Certainly, most people find Finnegans Wake impossible, but I don’t, because I always start with just the music, the beautiful sounds of it, and then let whatever it is that will come to me arise from that.”

Or, as one astute YouTube commenter (to whip out a possible oxymoron) typed into the reply section below a clip of Dog Star Man, “Dude, it's not about metaphors, symbolism, or storylines. That's the mistake people make — they think he's trying to make snooty ‘high brow’ art. He's not. His art is primal, not intellectual and certainly not narrative. In other words, Brakhage isn't making ‘movies,’ he's creating a purely sensory experience that stimulates and invigorates your brain.” Couldn’t we use more filmmakers, broadcasters, and cultural curators who do the same?