Miles Davis - Le Petit Bal (Take 1

 

From the 1958 soundtrack to Louis Malle's Ascenseur pur l'échafaud, which I'll get into in a minute below.

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Watch:

Big Noir weekend. Here's the playlist:

I started Friday night with a film my good friend and Horror Vision cohost Prof. John Trafton recently put on my radar - Louis Malle's 1958 Elevator to the Gallows, or, properly in French, Ascenseur pur l'échafaud.

I knew nothing about this one; I basically took a list of films John had mentioned on the most recent episode of The Horror Vision - our Noirvember episode, which you'll see posted in the little widget to the right - and started looking them up on the Criterion Channel. When I hit this one and saw a pre-Kind of Blue Miles Davis did the score, well, I didn't really need any more convincing. Also, I've been trying to watch a few French and Japanese Noirs this month, but haven't really had any luck. This proved to be precisely what I needed.

We start with a love triangle not unlike the one found in Blood Simple. Employee and the boss's wife, boss needs to be taken out of the picture for the other two to be happy. Only where Blood Simple takes a somewhat straight-ahead path - somewhat - Elevator to the Gallows has all kinds of interesting twists and turns that include grand theft auto, stolen identity, and multiple senseless homicides. Can't recommend this one enough; it really set the vibe for our weekend.

Next up, a British Noir made at the famous Pinewood Studios back in the early '60s. Basil Dearden's 1962 All Night Long caught my eye because of the cast, which includes Charles Mingus, Tubby Hayes and Dave Brubeck. Yeah, that's right, and they all perform on screen throughout the film. The film takes place in a swanky London loft where a whole scene of professional Jazz musicians gather to celebrate the first-anniversary party for two of their own. Only one of their number is a jealous bastard who manipulates everything and everyone to try to break them up. Patrick McGoohan - whom I inadvertently got back to on Sunday with a rewatch of David Cronenberg's Scanners -  schemes to break up the marriage for his own devious reasons. McGoohan is a phenomenal cunt in this - his performance is fantastic and really anchors the film in a different kind of Noir than we're used to. 

Saturday night was Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in what I still say is probably the most beautiful black and white film I've ever laid eyes on. Carol Reed's 1949 masterpiece, The Third Man, filmed among the bombed-out ruins of post-war Vienna, uses shadow in ways that leave me speechless. Robert Krasker's Cinematography burns the city onto your retinas, and even though this one takes a little while to really get going, it's easy to see why this is the BFI's "Greatest Film of All Time." I don't know that I'd go that far, but as I mentioned up top, The Third Man is by far the best black-and-white film I've ever seen.

Next, Seijun Suzuki's 1966 iconoclastic Japanese Crime Noir, Tokyo Drifter. This is another film I'd heard John mention previously, way back on an old episode of his podcast This Movie Saved My Life, where he and cohost Miles Fortune discussed it as a film featuring elements of the Yakuza film spiced up with elements culled from the classic Western and Secret Agent genres as well. 

This one lives up to all that and has a main character who sings his own theme song throughout the film, to boot. 

This is my first film by Seijun Suzuki, but it will not be my last. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that, if, like me, you're a Cowboy Bebop fan, this film will endear itself to you just by how much it obviously influenced Shin'ichirô Watanabe in the making of that. 

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Playlist:

The Rolling Stones - Some Girls

Patti Smith - Horses

John Cale - Fear

Sharon Tandy - The Best of Sharon Tandy

Ashes and Diamonds - Are Forever

Pepper Adams - Encounter!

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

Peter Peter & Julian Winding - Copenhagen Cowboy OST

Pessimist - Burundanga EP

Spotlights - Rarities

Miles Davis - Ascenseur pur l'échafaud OST

Ell Fitzgerald - The Best Of (Vol. 2)

Bohren & Der Clob of Gore - Sunset Mission

Tubby Hayes Quintet - Down in the Village (Live at Ronnie Scott's Club1962

Charles Mingus - Blues & Roots

Oliver Nelson - The Blues And The Abstract Truth

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments 

Hangman's Chair - Saddiction

Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Patchouli Blue

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Hand of Doom Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

• Eight of Swords

• XIV: Temperance

• IX: The Hermit

Restrictions come from feelings of imbalance caused by isolation. Isolation is good, but can often perpetuate at toxic levels in our culture today. 

I'm not really sure what this means at the moment. I am pretty isolated sometimes, even from the people in my everyday life. I'd imagine this is a reminder to 'get out of my head' a little more often. 

Immoral & All Seeing

 

I still find myself thinking about Wayne Shorter's recent passing. I'm by no means a huge fan; I say this not to distance myself from his work, but to respect those out there who are much more committed. Truth is, I started dabbling in Jazz when I was still a teenager thanks to Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, but I was way more into it in my twenties. Since moving, I've gotten back into many artists I've been away from for a while, but I still don't spin enough Jazz to be considered anything more than a passing fan. Yet, this music echoes inside me in a way nothing else does. I don't feel like a have a lot of room in my life for it, which is unfortunate, but Jazz is music that requires attention to appreciate, and as I've aged and the world has fallen apart and injected me with its anxiety, I have less and less attention; it's something I fight for on a daily basis. 

As I said upon Mr. Shorter's passing, there is something in his work - whether solo or his collaborations with Miles Davis - that sounds like a conjuring to me. It puts me in a very particular headspace, and in reflecting on his passing, I'm wondering if there is anyone making music today that might have the same effect. Or if the "Jazz Ritual" sound that Shorter and Davis - especially on Bitches Brew, Sorcerer and The All Seeing Eye - summoned into this world is all but gone now. I feel that's likely, as our world is very different from the one where this music was composed. If there were "Jazz Spirits" or "Demons" that came to this plane as a result, where are they now?

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Watch:

Wow. Now, this is an interesting idea:

 

I subscribed to the channel immediately, and plan on giving this a full go. I was pretty stoked just watching along for a moment, as the music, different voices and sound FX told the story.

          

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Read:

Re-reading Sins of Sinister from the beginning now, because my memory sucks. Also reading again because this week's Immoral X-Men really stayed with me.

            

The thing with the core of the X-Books now, and especially this Event and this issue in particular, is these are no longer superhero books. These are hardcore SciFi. I've talked about my love/hate with genre here before - I don't really go for big, tropey works like Space Opera or High Fantasy, primarily because I just feel like much of those corners of genre just repeat (and expand in some cases; credit where it's due) the most influential work that precedes them. I know there are a million people out there who would tell me I'm wrong, and that's fine. But I avoid those traditional genre lanes and look for stories that do their own thing. By the time we get to the events in Immoral X-Men #3, we're essentially in a deep-space salvage SciFi realm.

Deep-Space Salvage, or DSS for short, is the name I've finally arrived at in my head for those stories that pull me back into the kind of home-brewed, SciFi prevalent in 1980's Hobby Shops and indie comic books. Think TSR and old-school Guardians of the Galaxy. Think comics written by Bill Mantlo. A deep-space enclave where everything is old, rusted, down-and-out. It's the future but nothing is new, progress has flatlined or reversed, and everything is falling apart. That's where Kieron Gillen has taken us in Sins of Sinister.

There are no superheroes here - that's reserved for the regular Monthly X-Book, which anchors the line to its original intent. Instead, here and in X-Men; Red, S.W.O.R.D. before it, and partially at work in Immortal X-Men, we have very meticulous, long-game genre stories that branch off into many different styles and territory, and S.o.S. is definitely DSS.

By the time we arrive at this last panel, page three of Immoral #3, you can see the filth and decay. You can also see a monstrously sized Exodus, now something much more than the mutant zealot we all know and love so well. This issue reminded me A LOT of Daniel Warren Johnson's Beta Ray Bill mini-series from a few years back, and like that series, Sins of Sinister is surprising me with how much I'm enjoying it overall, especially when I didn't read the entire thing (I have not been buying that third title, Nightcrawlers, although I'm thinking about going back and picking it up) or like everything I've read. 

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Playlist:

Gang Starr - Hard to Earn

Godflesh - Slavestate EP

Godflesh - Pure

Godflesh - Cold World EP

Godflesh - Love and Hate

QOTSA - ... Like Clockwork

High On Fire - Surrounded By Thieves

Lustmord - Dark Matter

Wayne Shorter - The All Seeing Eye

Miles Davis - Live at the Filmore West

            

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Card:

From Jonathan Grimm's Bound Tarot, which you can buy HERE.

Circumstances drift and Change rears its head. It will be tempting to interpret this change as negative, but the reminder in the cards today, me thinks, is that interpretation dictates the positive/negative aspect of change. Change is always good in some respects, it can just be mighty difficult to remember and 'see' that. 

 

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