Puddles' incredibly atmospheric 2022 cover of Black Sabbath's iconic 1970 song War Pigs manages to make the song his own while preserving its greatness.

If we're being completely honest, Black Sabbath's 1970 classic War Pigs isn't the cheeriest of Geezer Butler lyrics, what with all that talk of war machines and burning bodies and Satan spreading his wings and stuff. But if you ever wanted proof of man's ability to take a sad song and make it sadder, look no further than Mike Geier, a.k.a. giant unhappy clown Puddles Pity Party, who's just released a cover version of the song that plumbs almost unparalleled depths of despair. - Frazer Lewry at Louder Sound](https://www.loudersound.com/news/watch-a-giant-sad-clown-bring-new-depths-of-emotion-to-black-sabbaths-war-pigs)

Lyrics:

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death's construction
In the fields, the bodies burnin'
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds

Oh, Lord, yeah

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait till their judgment day comes, yeah

Now, in darkness, world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of Judgment, God is calling
On their knees, the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings

Today I discovered the work of Miyu Kojima, a Japanese artist who makes beautifully detailed miniature dioramas of rooms in which people have died lonely deaths, a phenomenon called kodokushi.

The inspiration for her work has its origins in a cleaning company for which she worked:

The company was advertising its services at the trade show by displaying photos of the rooms they’d cleaned. “But the photos are gruesome to look at,” Kojima said. “I felt they lacked respect for the deceased and for their family to be exposed like that.” So she bought some glue, polystyrene board, knives and other craft materials, and got to work. - Chris Michael and Keiko Tanaka in The Guardian.

Some of her images are now in a book.

Discussion of the work of Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere. I recently saw Arcangelo 1, which is made out of cast wax and animal hides.

Can't help quoting the "hmmm!" from this piece today. This is a track off Gil Scott Heron's first album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (though, it was actually recorded in an Atlantic Records studio with a small live audience).

Whitey on the Moon

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face and arms began to swell.

(and Whitey's on the moon)

I can't pay no doctor bill.

(but Whitey's on the moon)

Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.

(while Whitey's on the moon)

The man jus' upped my rent las' night. ('cause Whitey's on the moon)

No hot water, no toilets, no lights.

(but Whitey's on the moon)

I wonder why he's uppi' me?

('cause Whitey's on the moon?)

I was already payin' 'im fifty a week.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Taxes takin' my whole damn check,

Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,

The price of food is goin' up,

An' as if all that shit wasn't enough

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face an' arm began to swell.

(but Whitey's on the moon)

Was all that money I made las' year

(for Whitey on the moon?)

How come there ain't no money here?

(Hm! Whitey's on the moon)

Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill

(of Whitey on the moon)

I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,

Airmail special

(to Whitey on the moon)

Glorious hallucinations that are reminiscent of Calvino's Invisible Cities but also of Borges. Here's an extract:

"Even and perfect, the city lies amid green lawns, sunny hills and wooded mountains; slim, tall sheets of continuous buildings intersect in a rigorous, square mesh, one league apart. The buildings, or rather the single, uninterrupted building consists of cubic cells 5 cubits each way; these cells are placed one on top of another in a single vertical stack, reaching a height of a third of a league above sea-level, so that the relative height of the building varies in relation to the level of the ground on which it rises.

Each cell has two external walls. Cell walls are of opaque material, porous to air, rigid, but light. The wall facing north (or if this is an external wall, the wall facing west) is capable of emitting 3D images, sounds and smells. Against the opposite wall is a seat capable of moulding perfectly to the human body, even of enclosing it completely. Incorporated in this seat is an apparatus for satisfying all physiological needs. When not in use, this membrane and all apparatus withdraw and the wall reforms. The floor is a simulator, and can evoke all sensations of living things. The ceiling is a brain-impulse-receiver.

In each cell is an individual whose brain impulses are continually transmitted to an electronic analyser set at the top of the building, beneath a continuous semi-cylindrical vault. The analyser selects, compares and interprets the desires of each individual, programming the life of the entire city moment by moment. All citizens are in a state of perfect equality...

One remarkable ancient artefact, a Babylonian world map from the Sixth Century BCE, marks the beginning of this obsession. The map, inscribed on a clay tablet, shows how ancient people imagined the quadrants of the earth: it describes lands of serpents, dragons, and scorpion-men, the far northern regions “where the sun is never seen”, and a great body of water they called “the bitter river”.

But the map also makes one other curious reference. It describes “ruined cities… watched over by… the ruined gods”. By that time, the ruins of great cities like Ur, Uruk and Nineveh already littered the landscape, destroyed and abandoned due to natural causes or cataclysmic wars. These ruined places were thought to be places of magic, terrible warnings to living humans and the haunts of ghosts and evil spirits...

The Psychedelic Furs recorded this strangely mesmerizing live version of Love My Way at Perkins Palace in Pasadena, US in 1983, for a tv music programme. It has a slower tempo than the album version from Forever Now (1982), yet the timing is very even and Richard Butler is pitch perfect.

Lyrics:

There's an army on the dance floor
it's a fashion with a gun my love
in a room without a door
a kiss is not enough in

love my way, it's a new road
I follow where my mind goes

They'd put us on a railroad
they'd dearly make us pay
for laughing in their faces
and making it our way
there's emptiness behind their eyes
there's dust in all their hearts
they just want to steal us all
and take us all apart
but not in

love my way, it's a new road
I follow where my mind goes
love my way, it's a new road
I follow where my mind goes

love my way, it's a new road
I follow where my mind goes
so swallow all your tears my love
and put on your new face
you can never win or lose
if you don't run the race

Yeah yeah yeah yeah
awhoo awhoo awhoo awhoo

Love my way, love my way
love my way, love my.... way.

Really thoughtful piece by Dennis Lim on the relationship between ghosts and cinema. Excerpts:

Premised on illusion and promising endless reanimation, cinema is often called the ghostliest of mediums. Ghosts are themselves cinematic in essence, automatic disruptions in space and time. Movies and ghosts both afford the possibility of life after death. Our engagement with them inevitably raises the matter of belief.

What was the cinema’s first ghost? One very early instance can be found in The House of the Devil, a three-minute film from 1896 by Georges Méliès. The hauntings here, goofy more than spooky, are essentially a series of transformations achieved through simple in-camera edits: a skeleton becomes a bat and then the devil. Méliès would go on to develop some of the practical effects—multiple exposures, superimpositions—that are still central to cinema’s vocabulary of the supernatural. Even in his primitive, late-19th-century trickery, one senses a nascent delight in the spectacle of figures materializing and vanishing before our eyes.

One could argue that the ghosts were present even earlier—at the birth of the medium, in fact....

@Arotrios seems to be on a break, so for the time being, "I am Torgo - I take care of the place while the Master is away". Widely regarded as a strong contender for the worst feature film of all time, Manos: The Hands of Fate is a film about a family who take a wrong turn and end up in the sinister domain of the Master, his harem of wives draped in bedsheets... and Torgo.

Manos: The Hands of Fate fails at nearly every aspect of filmmaking. This is undeniable. The use of blurred focus feels completely accidental, the performances are stilted and lack even a modicum of humanity, every line of dialogue is dubbed, and things just happen with little to no explanation. Watching the film is to view a disaster unfold. It is a product of incomparable incompetence. And yet, is this secretly part of the film’s genius? Because of the sheer ineptitude on display, the film transcends traditional notions of filmmaking and becomes something else entirely. Something avant-garde even.. - Anthony Bowmer, Loud and Clear

#cinemainsomnia

The world is full of museums that don’t exist fully in three dimensions – museums described in words or drawn on paper; museum catalogues; museums on the web. There are also many museums that are the creation of artists, novelists and poets, and so have a strong thread of imagination running through them. The latter cast an interesting light on ‘real’ museums and compel us to ask: What is it that the metaphor of a museum enables writers and artists to say? The question is doubly interesting because there is a long history of these 'imaginary’ museums created by artists. This paper suggests that there are five qualities of museums that writers and artists tune into: the power of objects to take us back in time; the apparent ‘alive-ness’ of objects; the power of collections (which is different to the power of individual objects); the ability of museums to shape the world and tell us stories about it; and the role of museums as powerful metaphors through which we can talk about loss, fear and yearnings for the past. So writers and artists find museums powerfully imaginative places; but then so do visitors. Visitor research shows that visitors come to museums ready to use their imaginations. So my question is: Do ‘real’ museums do enough to work with the visitors’ imaginations? Or, to put it another way, Do enough museums think that the visitors’ imagination – and indeed their own - is relevant to the museum experience? It should be. It is.

Gritty and heartbreaking, this 1970s collection from the master of gekiga, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, was published in English in 2006.

Tatsumi had that magic touch all great storytellers have, illuminating many corners with economical light, telling simple tales that unfolded to reveal many subtexts, implications and messages. He used and abused the manga tradition, repurposing the format to interrogate a national culture, with real human characters who were bored, horny, frustrated, and lonely. With gekiga, he developed a way to tell stories that passed across decades without losing any of the mundane affects of daily pressures or cultural subtext. - Jennifer Jane Allen in The Guardian

Alice (Neco z Alensky) was Czech surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer's first full-length feature film, and combines stop-motion animation with live action. In some ways it's a very loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland but in another sense it's very faithful, as it allows us to experience anew the initial strangeness of that story.

Here the White Rabbit is a manic-looking taxidermy exhibit escaped from its own display case; Bill the Lizard is a sawdust-stuffed crocodile with a bird skull for a head; the Frog Footman swats flies with a pot-denting tongue the size of a cow's; the Mad Hatter is an antique wooden marionette; the March Hare is a wind-up plush toy with a habit of buttering fobwatches; the Dormouse is a slithering fox pelt; and, perhaps most memorably of all, the Caterpillar is a sock puppet with incongruous false teeth and eyes that have to be stitched shut for sleep. These and other defamiliarised figures, reconstructed from items in Alice's bedroom, are as inventively realised as they are genuinely nightmarish – not that Alice herself ever seems much fazed. - Anton Bitel, Eye For Film.

#cinemainsomnia

A late version, in postwar Rome. Earlier versions with Quintette du Hot Club here (includes vocal) and here.

The start of World War II broke up the popular Quintette du Hot Club de France, then touring England, with Stephane Grappelli remaining in London for the duration of the conflict, while Django Reinhardt returned to France. Beginning in 1946, the two reunited periodically up until their last recordings in Italy in 1949.

As one hears on this track from those final sessions, their playing by then had taken on a new level of assuredness and virtuosity, no doubt indirectly influenced by the innovations of bebop.

“In a thousand years, Gandahar will be destroyed. A thousand years ago, Gandahar will be saved and what can’t be avoided will be.”

The riddle at the heart of legendary French animator René Laloux’s strangest movie is as confusing as the film itself. By the end of Gandahar, you may not understand either, but you’ll have experienced one of the most ambitious and beautiful time-travel stories ever told.

Inverse article on Gandahar

Original in French

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