01.12 to 01.25

Yikes, I kept terrible track of when I saw and heard the little I did these two weeks.  Chronologically, however:

The Way I Am (Knoc-t'urnal, 2004)

I was stoked at first: the first track is groovy and Love LA is absolutely slamming.  After that it's all kind of samey and didn't intrigue me enough to give it a second listen.  Knoc-t'urnal has great energy but maybe it's not the right kind to carry a whole album.  When the song that's on Hittman's album comes along it's just a reminder of how much better that album is and of the extent to which Knoc-t'urnal's lyricism is lacking.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Leonard Nimoy, 1984)

Not awful by any means, but another one of those extended mediocre episode TV adaptations.  It's hard to imagine who greenlights these things but I guess it got okay reviews at the time.

Molam: Thai Country Groove from Isan Vol. 2 (2007)

Indefatigable and endlessly relistenable.  Might get a bit redundant towards the end but it starts over soon enough after that anyhow.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986)

Goofy as hell but/and probably one of the better things to emerge from Star Trek, though all the whale shit gets old quick.  The Uhura/Chekov stuff is gold, especially nuclear wessels.

Winter Solstice (Hollis Frampton, 1974)

Upper tier Frampton for sure, it's length lends it a hypnotic quality.  I might just be a sucker for this kind of industrial stuff though; the cow one (Spring Solstice?) is about this length and that bored me silly.

Gloria! (Hollis Frampton, 1979)

Probably my new favorite film.  I don't have much to say about it but it worked perfectly on every level for me at the time I saw it.

Satan's Brew (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976)

Damn, for a sparse week this was a pretty killer run, new favorite from Fassbinder here.  This kind of satire in a world with slightly different rules from ours could easily have annoyed me, but Fassbinder pulls it off way better than Buñuel.  I'm not sure how coherent a criticism of contemporary Germany it's supposed to be but at least in the context of Fassbinder's oeuvre it's often incisive.  Very fucking funny movie too.

Shaft (Isaac Hayes, 1971)

Comparisons to Mayfield's Superfly are obvious but not unjustified.  This isn't nearly as good at least on first listen but it's still pretty cool.  The longer songs tend to be stronger but the whole thing has a nice flow.

01.11

Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I: The Red Gate 1, 0 (Hollis Frampton, 1976)

Still very Frampton but surprisingly flashy; definitely one of the better things I've seen from him.  Good companion piece to the Brakhage autopsy movie too.

01.10

The Shooting (Monte Hellman, 1966)

Split this into halves, enjoyed the first but was both surprisingly unpsychedelic and kind of seemed like it could be made by anyone, but by the second half I was really digging it, probably both because it's better and because my expectations were a bit different.  Warren Oates is in a league of his own, in the gap between Price and Cage he certainly takes the American actor cake.  Bomb ending too of course, makes me stoked for more Hellman.

01.09

INGENIVM NOBIS IPSA PVELLA FECIT, Part I (Hollis Frampton, 1975)

I keep watching more wanting to like him but I think ultimately I'm just much more in it for the fun than Frampton.  But maybe I'm full of it, Bresson's my favorite director for fuck's sake.  Eerily similar to another shitty experiment from 1975, I think it was called Girl.

01.08

Trances (Ahmed El Maanouni, 1981)

Not bad, in fact would probably be great if it wasn't a musical documentary.  I'm starting to think this is one of my least favorite genres, Ne change rien is the only one I can think of that I particularly like.  When it's just the music, especially off the stage, it really captures something though.

01.07

The Chase (Arthur Ripley, 1946)

Turns out it doesn't make much difference whether or not you sleep through a good chunk of this, which isn't necessarily a knock: the dreamlike atmosphere is its best asset.  There's a lot of eccentricity and some great individual scenes but overall it feels kind of minor and rushed.

01.06

Slanted and Enchanted (Pavement, 1992)

Pavement's aesthetic doesn't really appeal to me, so it's to their credit that I like their music as much as I do.  This doesn't quite have the flow of Crooked Rain Crooked Rain or the endless relistenability but it seems like a pretty great album.

The Plea (Tengiz Abuladze, 1968)

Like Ghostface's early stuff I was so enraptured by the details I didn't realize there was a story to follow til a good deal through.  It didn't lose any of its sense of walking through a dream when I started paying attention to the narrative either.  I'm not sure how I feel about its politics but I'm not exactly sure where it stand either.  In any case a trip everyone should have the pleasure of taking.

01.05

Control System (Ab-Soul, 2012)

Disappointing, not because I expected Ab-Soul to put together a great album but because a lot of people seem to think he did.  Compared to his labelmates he doesn't seem to have much to say, and the only time I found myself invested in his personal life was on the song about his dead girlfriend.  His wordplay's pretty good but gets repetitive.  The beats are emblematic of a certain subsection of current hip-hop and are not to my taste.  Ultimately I expected more from it on the MC front if nothing else.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer, 1982)

Shines from the first scene with an energy totally lacking in the first film.  Definitely better written but most of it comes down to far better direction, which says a lot about Robert Wise.  And actually its particular sheen distinguishes it from the original series to the point that it feels less like a Star Trek film than Never Say Never Again feels like a Bond film.  But for the first half it seems like it's gonna be an amazing film in its own right.  Khan feels much less threatening when he actually starts battling Kirk though, and the payoff is anticlimactic.

Le revelateur (Philippe Garrel, 1968)

Not all the vignettes work as well for me but at its best it's absolutely magical.

01.04

Ah Um (Charles Mingus, 1959)

In contrast to the cover reminds me of those big toy blocks in bright primary colors for kids.  Too dull for me want to invest the time listening more carefully to understand the critical appeal or what it's doing amongst Mingus' dope contemporary oeuvre.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979)

Yeah pretty shockingly inconsequential but not without its utterly bizarre moments like the wormhole or the long journey through the layers of V'Ger.  I eat that kind of shit up but even I'm not gonna call this one a misjudged sci-fi classic.

01.03

The Naked Dawn (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1955)

On the same tier as stuff like The Searchers and Johnny Guitar but in its own grimy pushing-the-Hollywood-B-movie-to-new-heights way.  The studio system had pretty strict parameters and expectations that led to a lot of the same boring stuff in genre films; with so much talent floating around it's a shame there weren't more like this.  Ulmer's style is probably the grittiest in old Hollywood but at its heart this is quite fond of humanity, which gives it an edge in my book.  Its emotional moments resonate, its insights are consistently valuable, and it's stuffed to the brim with beauty and oddity.  Vies with Rancho Notorious for Arthur Kennedy's best performance too.

01.01

Filles de Kilimanjaro (Miles Davis, 1968)

Good but probably my least favorite Davis so far, feels fairly innocuous.  Maybe it's that I've heard so little from him this early, what I've read about it kind of makes me want to revisit it.

12.31

19th Century Georgian Chronicle (Aleqsandre Rekhviashvili, 1979)

Pretty groovy, fantastic when it's just shots of people walking through forest (holy shit, they have some cool plants in Georgia).  I remember none of the dialogue and little of the story (weed), but I'm glad to have seen it.  Also photographed by Guram Shengelaya, the son of the director of 26 Commissars.  Which reminds me I should watch Pirosmani.

12.26

Follow Me Home (Jay Rock, 2012)

Jay Rock's style is like a blunt ax chopping down a sequoia.  He compares himself to Scarface at one point, which is probably his closest analog, but without the shortcoming that made it hard for me to get into Face's solo career.  I'm not sure if this is better than Kendrick and Schoolboy's albums, but Black Hippy is definitely the most talented crew on the scene.

Baduizm (Erykah Badu, 1997)

Took me a while to get into, either because it's not really my style or because I'm not used to it, but by the time it ended I was pretty impressed.  I dig the subversively light touch she gives her takes on serious subjects, it makes for a pretty unsettling experience.

12.24

Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz, 2010) (rewatch)

Not the same experience as in theaters, but a different kind of perfection.