“Train to Satanville” by Gin Gillette. I’m not sure if it was always there, or if time has a way of fucking with things, but I love the guitar in this song. It’s like a three-foot-tall, liquored-up bumblebee trying to hum along.
Ah, “Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).”Couldn’t find a good scene to represent this movie, but just watching this part should help you piece it all together…or, at least as much as you ever will.
When I first thought of how I would explain this movie, I thought “hyper-kinetic fever-dream,” which is exactly what it is. Everything is just so ADD and progressively more and more insane that by the end of the film, you’re too confused to say much of anything. The first time I watched this, I was incredibly drunk (on sake, of course) and decided that maybe I had just missed all the important bits. Saw it sober about a week later, and no, I really have no idea what the hell is going on. Still, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching it. The real thrill of films like these is that you’re never, ever bored.
Seeing as plot is not something I’m 100% on with this, here’s what Netflix has to say:
“Soon after he accidentally runs down a man with a fetish for implanting scrap metal into his body (Shinya Tsukamoto, who also directs), a businessman (Tomorowo Taguchi) begins eerily morphing into a hybrid man-machine, accompanied by twisted, metal-related nightmares. Is the metal fetishist somehow controlling the transformation? Now, the businessman must track down the man he thought he killed before the horrific metamorphosis is complete.”
That’s…about right. Sure.
Anyway, if you’re trying to find something in that elusive state between catharsis and entertainment known as confusion, or are seeking the paradoxical concept of a good Troma film, this movie is for you. Better, if you like it, there are at least two sequels. All the movies are on instant-watch on Netflix, and you can find the first movie on YouTube and several other sites as well.
Quick, name a cartoon before 1950 that was regularly at the forefront of visual surrealism, even ahead of the common sight gags of the time. If the answer was anything other than “Betty Boop,” I’m sorry, but you are very fuckin’ wrong.
Until recently, I associated the show with, what else, Betty Boop, and chalked it up to the sad fantasies of males born before internet porn. Turns out, they were some of the most interesting, innovative shows I can think of, aesthetically:
One of the many twisted works of Unomoralez. Absolutely sinister surreal pixelartist. No matter how many images I see by him, I can never become fully desensitized. There is always at least one element that continually leaves me confused and disturbed, and I can never isolate exactly what that element is.
You can also find him on DeviantART: unomoralez.deviantart.com
Oh, and to all the people that keep re-blogging this, but can’t find the simple courtesy to mention or support the artist? Fuck you guys. Seriously, you’re all assholes. For the two seconds it took you to take this from me, you could have at least shared a way for people to find more images by the same person through their website, let alone recognized that this was done by human hands, and is more than some pretty picture designed to make your internet-space look cool. Once again: go fuck yourselves, from anus to scrotum to throat with some rusty carpenter nails.
King of Hearts (1967), directed by Philippe de Broca.
Absolutely wonderful film. Realistic, yet absurd, in the style of the early surrealists.
The general premise of the film is that there’s a town in France during the tail-end of World War I, and the German army has rigged the whole area with timed explosive charges, certain to blow it up.
Knowing this in advance, the whole town evacuates, save for the newly-freed lunatics from the asylum. Having no firm grasp on reality, they decide to run the town themselves, each picking up items left in empty homes and stores and assuming new roles: mayor, barber, harlot, and so on.
A Scottish soldier sent to disarm the bomb tries to warn them, and they dub him The King of Hearts. In just a very short amount of time, he must convince the lunatics to flee to safety and/or successfully dismantle the bomb hidden somewhere in the town.
The general feel of the film is like “Life is Beautiful,” minus most of the sad bits. There’s a very cheerful, light touch to every situation that makes it as endearing as it is absurd.
Netflix has it on instant-watch as of now. At only 102 minutes, it deserves at least an impulse-watch.
From Nadja by Andre Breton: “She was, finally, strong, and extremely weak, as one can be, in that idea she had always had but in which I had only too warmly encouraged her, which I had only too readily aided her in giving supremacy over all the rest: the idea that freedom, acquired here on earth at the price of a thousand—and the most difficult—renunciations, must be enjoyed as unrestrictedly as it is granted, without pragmatic considerations of any sort, and this because human emancipation—conceived finally in its simplest revolutionary form, which is no less than human emancipation in every respect, by which I mean, according to the means at every man’s disposal—remains the only cause worth serving.”
It’s amazing what constitutes as help to those condemned as helpless.
