I'll believe it when I hear it. The Daily Swarm: MBV Reuniting for Coachella

My Bloody Valentine, the legendary sonic sculptors of feedback and tremelo who helped define the shoegaze movement only to disband after releasing just two full length albums, is set to make its first live appearance in more than a decade at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, CA in April, 2008. According to sources in the United States and the United Kingdom who are familiar with the negotiations, the band is close to signing a deal that will see a reunited My Bloody Valentine headline Coachella, scheduled for April 25–27, before embarking on a world tour sometime later in 2008.

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Working on something.

Well, a couple of things actually. Here's some peeks at the first thing, though.

Diagonals in Austin, Tuesday the 28th

A secret place to shit

Diagonals next week at the Scoot Inn

Thanks Deena

Paglia in Salon, the death of the 'art film'

Camille Paglia's op-ed in Salon today has a cynical but worthwhile reflection on the passing of Antonioni and Bergman, and "art film" as a whole. I agree mostly, but for every piece of the art landscape that dies or withers into some sort of dim self parody, I see new and stranger branches flourishing. For every dead-eyed teenager that dutifully shuffles into the newest sports themed fart-comedy, there's another aspiring curator collecting unheard of weirdness from estate sales and off bittorrent, usenet and youtube. AV nerds and mutants, not intellectuals or bored grad-students, cataloging a barely explored history of international film and television, video art, lost exploitation cinema, mutant porn, hybrids, offshoots, who knew and who knows? An infinite amount of crazy ephemera, all based on strange new sets of aesthetics that barely have names yet. And the best part is I feel like all of it is going to be fodder to fuel an unborn generation of artists who never even thought to call themselves artists, and who care less and less about the jingoistic flag waving that conventional art and film school pushes you towards, and more about satisfying their freaky visions and fetishes. Just a hunch. I hope I'm a part of it.

Art film as a genre has waned with the high modernism that produced it. The premier modernists -- from James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf to Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and Martha Graham -- were rebelling against a hierarchical, authoritarian tradition that suffocated their youth but whose very power energized their work. They became larger from what they opposed and overcame. Today, anything goes, and nothing lasts.

Ingmar Bergman's creativity was certainly stimulated by the overly cerebral, puritanical Protestantism in which he was raised. In film after film, he militantly made space for emotion and intuition, usually embodied in elusive, charismatic women, whose faces his inquiring camera obsessively searched. Bergman's artistic drive was inextricable from the religious impulse.
Now, in contrast, aspiring young filmmakers are stampeded toward simplistic rejection of religion based on liberal bromides (sexism, homophobia, etc.). Religion as metaphysics or cosmic vision is no longer valued except in the New Age movement, to which I still strongly subscribe, despite its sometimes outlandish excesses. As a professed atheist, I detest the current crop of snide manifestos against religion written by professional cynics, flâneurs and imaginatively crimped and culturally challenged scientists. The narrow mental world they project is very grim indeed -- and fatal to future art.

My pagan brand of atheism is predicated on worship of both nature and art. I want the great world religions taught in every school. Secular humanism has reached a dead end -- and any liberals who don't recognize that are simply enabling the worldwide conservative reaction of fundamentalism in both Christianity and Islam. The human quest for meaning is innate and ineradicable. When the gods are toppled, new ones will soon be invented.

Your first onscreen crush?

I'm going to be a retarded bandwagon-y blogger today and attempt to start a meme-

Who was your first film crush?
Tag your post "filmcrush" and I'll try and collate any other posts that float up.

Mine was definitely Ornella Muti from Flash Gordon, the uber-campy 1980 De Laurentis production that ruled my pre-teen subconscious. Muti's Princess Aura had an exoticism and over-the-top sexuality that stood in stark contrast to George Lucas' sexless, nagging Princess Leia. The movie was decadent and tongue-in-cheek and I still love revisiting it, and Muti's character ( "No! Not ze bore worms!" ) to this day.

Okay Mountain - Passing Time and the Changing Seasons of Time

Don't miss Paul Slocum and Kevin Brewersdorf's show at OK Mountain this weekend in Austin. I write about Paul a lot on here, he's a super talented artist, programmer and musician. Kevin Brewersdorf starred in Joe Swanberg's great movie LOL and is a great artist and nerd in his own right.

Paul Slocum and Kevin Bewersdorf present a collection of sad and humorous videos, photos, and objects loaded with sincere jabs at our failure to grasp a constantly shifting world. Avoiding sophomoric indulgence through complex pathos and simple binary juxtapositions, the works are joined by the show's title, "Passing Time and the Changing Seasons of Time" which hints at the sorrow lying deep within every joke.

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Andrew's new movie

Crew gets ready to shoot, originally uploaded by weevil.

My friend Andrew Bujalski shot a scene for his new movie in my computer room. There's a few pictures on my flickr stream.

Sunset Boulevard and Inland Empire

Jürgen Fauth discovered a very interesting reference in Lynch's Inland Empire that is vertiginously meta. Lynch recreated a moment from the film within a film in Billy Wilder's classic Sunset Boulevard- Queen Kelly, an actual film directed by Von Stroheim, who plays Gloria Swanson's butler in Sunset.... A movie quoting a movie quoting a movie. Fauth has some nice ideas on what caused Lynch to add another layer of reference in this filmic cake. I remember reading Lynch talking about Sunset Boulevard in his Faber and Faber book as being the reason why he'll never reveal how he made the baby in Eraserhead. Sunset Boulevard was evidently one of his favorite films, he even showed it to the cast of Eraserhead before they filmed. Evidently someone revealed to him that Norma Desmond's house wasn't really there on Sunset boulevard somewhere but was actually on Wilshire and had since been torn down. At that moment Lynch decided never to reveal any secrets that might shatter the world that his movies created in the imaginations of his viewers, and has been tight lipped ever since.

Link
Found via GreenCine Daily

A side note: something I never mentioned before- When I was 15 I was an enormous Dune, Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet fan, but hadn't seen anything else Lynch had done yet. When I was in Dazed and Confused a writer from Details asked me what I thought about being in a movie and I told him that I liked it, but wasn't interested in acting again unless David Lynch needed a 15 year old for something. From what I remember, Jennifer Lynch read that and I somehow ended up being invited to a private screening of Eraserhead with some of the cast and crew of the film (That was the first time I met Jack Nance). I wish I could remember who all was there. Alicia Witt was there (she played Alia in Dune) and I had already met her during tryouts for Dazed... It was her first time seeing the movie too, and we were both confused and excited. That night I asked my father what he thought Eraserhead was about and he managed to advance a pretty solid theory about the horror of being a new father. Of course, that actually hit a little close to home, considering I was his son.
I never did get to meet David Lynch. The only time I ever saw him was at the Toronto film festival. We were supposed to show Waking Life there, but the day we were screening ended up being September 11th, 2001 (it was also Bob Sabiston's birthday).
From what I heard, David Lynch rented a car and drove all the way back to LA by himself.