TABLE 1 8 . T h e
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. 6 T h e . 32 9 T h e 1T h0e . 36
40
OF
A l f r e d
m a n
CONTENTS
u n d e r
F r a n k Alfred Hitchcock
H i t c h c o c k
h a t
t h e
t h e r n d efilm n one of the most ufamous a at A closermlook directors of all time.
Z a p p a
h a t
S æ b ø P e t e r h a t t h e r e d n u Jacob Holdt is Not a Hippie m a n 2 Jacob Holdt is one of Americas s he is not even1american. a s t r dand Bphotographers G l o r i o u smost importent h a t e h t r u n d e m a n David Lynch David Lynch about creativity, meditation and bliss
Special Agent Dale Cooper “Damn fine cup of coffe”
W a i T o m t h e Selected Movies u n d e r L y n Our fauvorite movies i d v Lynch D byaDavid t h e u n d e r m a n e w i e R cnAndrew u s i u– M Reality t h e Subverting Lewicki d e r m a n ee w ....for some reason that he hasn’t broken into the big Yet... i e Rt htime. i l mem F eludes u n d e r m a n
m a n
th a st
ch aht vh a st vh a st
Abstract Art is Shit
Modernity, it seems, has robbed art of 20,000 years of development.
Yellow Pages
This is where we take a look at, and review our favourite movies, music, and stuff!
1 – WINTER 2011
THE WEIRD THE WICKED AND THE UGLY
CONTRIBUTORS
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Andreas Aasen
Rain Dogs would like to thank the following: Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Jacob Holdt,
IllUSTRATIONS Andreas Aasen
Andrew Lewicki, Rick Fortson, Henrik Saltzstein, Camilla Stephan, Conrad Keely, Morgan Velder, Paul Baines, Vincent Canby, Henrik Sheehan, Lucia Bozzola. www.essortment.com, www.fanpop.com, The New York Times, www.imdb.com, www.Rotten Tomatoes.com, www.wikipedia.com, Lucian Freud Exhibition London, www. afmuseet.no, www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk, Norwegian Wood, The Norwegian Opera & Ballet and Filter Magazine And also thanks to:
andreas.aasen88@gmail.com
Unless othervise notised.
TYPOGRAPHY Champion, Sentinell and Didot by Hoefler and Frere Jones.
PAPER Colorit White, 160g Cover, Colorit, White 250g All paper is from Norway Design
RAIN DOGS © If you have any qustions please contact: andreas.aasen88@gmail.com phone, 97 58 00 28 adr, Lofotgata 4A, 0458 Oslo
FRONT COVER: Dale Cooper in the movie Twin Peaks – Fire Walk with Me
Published by RAIN DOGS
Photo and editing by Andreas Aasen SPECIAL THANKS TO: Leieboerforenigen in Oslo who has made printing affordable
© Reproduction without permission is prohibited
rain dogs is a new magazine: a homage to the weird, the wicked the ugly, the original, the different, the strange, the extraordinary, the extreme, the nasty, the intellectual, the supreme, the creative, the artist, the musicians, the painters, the designers, the writers, qualitymakers, people who believe in their ideas, avantgarde, art, photography, strangers, liars, beggars, the swordfish trombone, blue velvet and much more...
ALFRED HITCHCOOCK | A MAN AN HIS BIRDS
A MAN HIS BIRDS AND
Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most famous film directors of all time. He, himself was as mysterious as the plots of his movies.
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Article: www.essortment.com, Photos: www.fanpop.com, Drawing: Rick Fortson
BORN TO A CATHOLIC FAMILY in London in 1899, Alfred
Hitchcock endured many harrowing experiences throughout his lifetime that may have helped to fuel his fascination with the macabre. His father died when Hitchcock was only fourteen years old. He had to quit school, but continued to study and read on his own. He took evening classes, attended theater and cinema performances regularly, and he got his feet wet in the talent pool of art and writing. In 1920, Hitchcock became aware of an American film company called Famous Players-Lasky that was opening a studio in London. He was offered a position as a title designer, which he accepted, and developed a love for the art of filmmaking from there. Hitchcock was determined to learn the ins and outs of the
film industry, which led him to become an Assistant Director just three years after his introduction to the business. By 1925, he was a full-fledged director. Then, in 1921, Hitchcock met and became engaged to his first true love, Alma Reville, and they married five years later. They had one child, a daughter, born in 1928, and remained married until Hitchcock’s death in 1980. Hitchcock’s first film, produced in 1927 garnered
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mixed reactions. The Lodger, which centered on a boarder who was suspected of murdering several women, harvested both critical and public acclaim. Yet some moviegoers were shocked by its aberrant content. The Lodger focused on such dismal topics such as murder, suspicion, and even touched upon sexual attraction. This film was prepared in the painstaking style for which Hitchcock became famous. He was dedicated to his art from the very beginning of his A SHORT BIOGRAPHY BORN Aug. 13, 1899, London DIED April 29, 1980 KNOWN FOR English-born
motion-picture director whose suspenseful films won immense popularity. HITCHCOCK’S films usually centre on either murder or espionage, with deception, mistaken identities, and chase sequences complicating and enlivening the plot. Wry touches
of humour and occasional intrusions of the macabre complete this mixture of cinematic elements. A FILM A YEAR in the Hollywood motionpicture system. Among the important films he directed during the 1940s were Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Lifeboat (1944), and, Spellbound (1945).
career. He even created storyboards with mock-ups of every shot in a film before shooting. Hitchcock had directed a total of nine silent films and was one of Britain’s leading directors when he made his first partially sound film, Blackmail, in 1929. Thirteen Hitchcock sound films followed, including Murder! (1930), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1936), and The Lady Vanishes (1938). By this point he had become known as Britain’s top film director. Hitchcock journeyed to America in 1939, believing he would have more creative freedom. His first American film, Rebecca (1940) won an Academy Award for best film. Ironically, Hitchcock never did receive a best director award for this film, or for any of the other four films which were nominated over the years. In America, Hitchcock was cranking out more than one movie a year, but this prolific nature abated after his direction of Psycho in 1960. Just a few of his classic pictures of this period were Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958), and North by Northwest (1959), all of which were concerned ››
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I M C T W A I G
IF IT’S A GOOD MOVIE, THE SOUND COULD GO OFF AND THE AUDIENCE WOULD STILL HAVE A PERFECTLY CLEA IDEA OF WHAT WAS GOING ON.
A MAN AN HIS BIRDS | ALFRED HITCHCOOCK
PERHAPS THE DARKNESS OF HIS NATURE NOT ONLY LED ALFRED HITCHCOCK TO ATTAIN WORLDWIDE ACCLAIM, BUT ALSO PREVENTED HIM FROM ENJOYING IT.
“A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.” ›› murder and/or espionage and their effect on per-
sonal and social relationships. After the 1940’s, Hitchcock made good on his promise to himself to begin producing films as well as directing them. However, as a result of his unending public appeal, Hitchcock did not attract the serious critical attention he deserved. Like many writers, artists and celebrities, Hitchcock
created an aura of mystery around himself, rarely revealing anything to interviewers that was more in depth than list of “technical tales” about the challenge of shooting various scenes. Yet he obviously enjoyed the appreciation of other filmmakers and considered self-promotion to be one of the keys to his professional success. The only film aside from The Birds and Psycho that was financially successful in Hitchcock’s later years was Frenzy (1972), a tale of a psychopathic murderer who could only combat his impotence by strangling women to death. Some critics accused that Hitchcock’s later films lacked the dynamic power that his earlier works emanated. Some even began to downplay Hitchcock’s role in his earlier successes, claiming that the screenwriters Hitchcock employed were responsible for giving his films’ characters realistic personalities and motivations. Most of the western world, however, regards Alfred Hitchcock as The Master of Suspense. Throughout his long career, Hitchcock made 53 feature-length films, he worked with scores of actors, including Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly, not to mention technicians, composers, publicists and studio administrators, and he created some of America’s most popular and cherished films to date. Yet he frequently complained about his loneliness and his fear of death, even as he was still hailed, even in the last moments of his life, as one of the film industry’s greatest directors of all time. Perhaps the darkness of his nature not only led Alfred Hitchcock to attain worldwide acclaim, but also prevented him from enjoying it. RD
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JACOB HOLDT IS NOT A HIPPIE By Henrik Saltzstein, and Camilla Stephan Photos by Jacob Holdt Illustrations Andreas Aasen
HIS BOOK AMERICAN PICTURES did as much to revolution-
ize documentary photography as it did to paint an entirely new image of the country in the 70s, so it’s at least a little fair that Americans stuck their flag in him. In truth, he’s a Dane. As the American Pictures story goes, Holdt, facing multiple criminal charges after some nefarious left-wing activities during the late 60s, left Denmark intent on joining one of Latin America’s various guerrilla movements. He got sidetracked, hitching some 80,000 miles back and forth across America and bedding down with gangsters, junkies, prostitutes, and Klan members. His parents, wary of the outrageous letters he sent from the road, sent him a $30 Canon Dial half-frame camera to document it all. Five years later he’d taken nearly 15,000 of the country’s most indelible photographs. Holdt still travels the States visiting with his subjects.
He’s even brought his two-year-old son on trips through urban ghettos and rural slums to make sure he didn’t become a racist prick. This is not at all unexpected from a guy who funneled all the profits from his book toward the anti-apartheid struggle in Africa and says the best way to deal with the odd gay rape is
to instantly embrace your attacker. In addition to the enlightening little chat that follows, Holdt was kind enough to share some new photographs he took of a mass-murderer named Dave hanging around with his family. Vice: Can you tell us a bit about these new images? A SHORT BIOGRAPHY BORN born 29 April 1947 in
Copenhagen, Denmark IS A DANISH photographer, writer and lecturer HIS MAMMOTH WORK,
American Pictures, gained international fame in 1977 for its effective photographic revelations about the hardships of America’s lower classes. HOLDT WAS THE SON of the pastor at Grundtvig’s Church in Copenhagen. IN 1950, the family moved
to Fåborg – a small village near Esbjerg in western Jutland - where he spent most of his childhood. AFTER BEING thrown out of high school in 1965 he went to Krogerup Folk High school, north of Copenhagen. AFTER 8 MONTHS in the Royal Palace Guard he was thrown out and then for a couple years involved in protests against the Vietnam War.
Jacob Holdt: I met Dave in ’96 through his brother, Snoopy, whom I’d picked up in my car back in ’91. I’d given up hitchhiking by then since no one would pick you up anymore. Snoopy had been waiting on a ride for three days when I came along. When he eventually started talking, he told me his brother and him had killed more people than he could even count. Naturally, I was skeptical and just dropped him off where he needed to go. Had he actually killed anyone? I didn’t know at that point, but five years later I tracked him down—me and a journalist, who was intrigued by this random mass-murderer story. Snoopy was in prison. Apparently, two days after I had dropped him off, he had broken into a house and tried to butcher the family living there, cutting up the woman’s stomach. She barely survived. There was no reason to doubt him and his brother having murdered all those people. And that motivated you to track down his brother, Dave. I was curious about where all that hate comes from and what makes people act in such desperation. ››
AMERICAN PICTURES | JACOB HOLDT
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JACOB HOLDT | AMERICAN PICTURES
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AMERICAN PICTURES | JACOB HOLDT
›› Dave and his family lived in the middle of a deserted swampland and everyone was afraid of them.
Were they friendly with you, though? At first we were met with shotguns pointed at us, but you have to understand that people like that are potentially the easiest to befriend because of their hunger for love and acceptance. Obviously, me knowing Snoopy smoothed the waters. I watched Dave and his wife, Connie, smack each other around and beat on their kids. Getting actively in between them wouldn’t have helped anything. I mean, I wouldn’t get very far if I was perpetually criticizing people in their own homes. I just hang around and observe and help where I can. By doing that, you can enable people to believe in themselves. Dave and Snoopy probably didn’t kill people because they hated them, more likely they did it because they hated themselves. And then in May of last year you went back to visit. Yep. I brought a friend with me, and when I told her we were going to see a mass murderer she thought I was joking. When we arrived at Dave’s, the front lawn was covered in blood. I thought, “Oh no, oh no.” But it turned out to be blood from his cow. He’d killed it? Yes. He told me he’d been drunk the previous night and used his cow as target practice. As it was trying to escape he got his shotgun, started up his old pickup truck, went after it, and eventually killed it. You’re practically laughing! What else can you do? The spiral of violence, hate, and despair had run so deep in this family. You see that photo of Dave’s daughter Mel? She’s looking at a photo I took of her uncle Snoopy back in ’91. When he got out of prison in 2003, he raped her—his own niece. Today she’s in prison. It’s a pretty horrid situation. Well, I’m dogmatic in my choices—if I wasn’t I would always have chosen beauty over ugliness, pleasure over pain. You know how hippies always say, “Let’s have a good time”? To me that’s just selfish, and thinking like that would have gotten me nowhere. I would have never made American Pictures without being used—and without the abuse I endured. How did American Pictures come about? I mean, you were going to be a revolutionary freedom fighter. I started hitchhiking to various Vietnam rallies across America instead. In Chicago I met an 18-year-old black girl who let me stay with her family in an all-black neighborhood. Seeing firsthand how alienated the black community felt was just mind-blowing to me.
But you hadn’t started taking pictures at that point? No, my parents sent me the camera in ’72, and at first it was just a faster way for me to keep a journal. I had no photography experience, and whenever I showed my pictures to real photographers they would shake their heads at me. But they also gave me some tips, like wrapping pink toilet paper around the flash and placing it behind lamps… stuff like that. When did you realize you were actually in the midst of a massive photographic project? Mostly I just thought about getting by and finding places to stay. But in ’73 I saw a juxtaposed photo slide show in Florida and I thought that this could be a way for me to present my photos and explain the stories behind them. I still don’t think my photos have stand-alone qualities to them. A lot of people are protective of your work, though, and believe you’re a very skilled photographer. But I’m not a photographer—no more than anyone else with a camera. I barely took a single picture for 12 years after American Pictures. My talent was gaining access to people’s homes and lives. Once I was there I basically just had to point and shoot. People often send me their photos of homeless people on the street, but truthfully, they bore me. Anybody could have taken those pictures. Why do you think getting this sort of access came so easy to you? It didn’t, not at first. I spent two years being mugged whenever I entered black neighborhoods. So I mostly stuck to college towns. I met black students and gradually it changed my outlook, because I also met their friends and relatives and occasionally they would be ghetto thugs. So what changed exactly? Simple: I stopped being a racist. I had been fearful of them, because I was told “Don’t go there” or “Be careful in that neighborhood.” When you are fearful like that you perpetuate a negative prejudice. You are telling people that they are bad and you have reason to fear them. That’s the psychology of racism, and that’s what I try to dismantle when I talk about American Pictures today. That can’t be as easy as it sounds. It doesn’t happen overnight, but when you give out acceptance you should receive it as well. After those two years I was never mugged again, no matter where I went. But you still have to prove yourself. Every time I arrived in a new city and ghetto, they automatically called me “boss man” because they thought I was an undercover cop. You know, everyone had long hair
back then, especially undercover cops. But then I started weaving my beard and that really opened doors for me. That’s all it took? It also closed some. Like when I had to renew my visa I would always go to either Mexico or Canada because it was free there and I couldn’t afford the ten bucks it cost in the US. The trouble was getting back in, looking like a hippie during the Nixon administration, so I had to improvise. In Canada I had some friends who would lend me their Cadillac. I filled it up with Bibles and posed as a Bible salesman. I also had a short-haired wig for emergencies. Smart. But how were you able to afford to buy and develop your film? I donated blood once a week—that earned me two rolls. When I was through with them I sent them to a girlfriend in Washington and she would stock them. I went there once a month to develop them and look them over, but she wasn’t happy with our arrangement, and she kept pushing for me to marry her. Eventually I got scared she would destroy the film if I kept leading her on, so I moved them to a more levelheaded ex-girlfriend’s in New York. You had lots of girlfriends back then? When you travel like I did, you didn’t get to choose. That’s why I called myself a vagabond. It’s a different philosophy. How so? Well, a hitchhiker travels from A to B, whereas a vagabond moves in a third dimension—you roll with the punches. I realized early on that if I allowed myself to choose, I would never get where I wanted to go: beyond and behind the scenes. So it wasn’t a case of just catting around the country. It wasn’t desensitized like that. I received tons of love from them and vice versa. It kept me going. But of course beggars can’t be choosers, so it wasn’t like I always loved the company of each and every woman I met. But I couldn’t say no, and that applied to men as well. Really? Yes. Every so often I would hitch rides with dirty old men, as I call them. I wasn’t gay, but I guess I just felt bad for them and at the same time I was fascinated by the amount of self-loathing they exhumed, the mechanisms of it all. But as a whole, the things I experienced and saw were amazing. I was having the time of my life, and people need to understand that when they see my pictures. RD
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DAVID LYNCH Whith his engimatic masterpieces Blue velvet Twin Peaks and Mullholland Drive the director created a dark disturbing vision of America.
Written by: Morgan Velder, Photos and llustration: Andreas Aasen except portrait of David Lynch (by Think-Work -Play)
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DAVID LYNCH | CATCHING THE BIG FISH
UP A STEEP, STRANGE, SNAKE of a street and sheer, straight
steps is a set of concrete buildings clinging onto the side of the Hollywood Hills. In an attempt to penetrate the bunker (I have an appointment, after all) I mistakenly walk into an empty recording studio, where a state-of-the-art mixing table spans several metres and a blank cinema screen covers a wall in front of it. Beyond this, the place is all skylights and high slit windows – a bright but viewless series of rooms with severe angles and unpredictable shifts, blind corners around which are an empty kitchen or an empty meeting room with a single lightbulb drawn in chalk on a blackboard. Once inside, its geography is impossible to decipher. I have come to meet David Lynch who lives, works and meditates here – the bunker includes offices, an outdoor painting studio and a home. Lynch has just brought out a lavish retrospective set of DVDs, which includes (among other things) material from his student days that he found in a foot locker, a brand new sound mix of Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and deleted scenes from Wild at Heart – all of which makes one wonder where he’s been in more recent years. Mulholland Drive – an unparalleled triumph in my view – was released in 2001; since then he’s made some entertainingly loopy shorts and Inland Empire, a three-hour ode to impenetrability that was shot on digital video and struggled to find a distributor . “I’m through with film as a medium,” he wrote in a book published two years ago. “For me, film is dead.” What ever happened to David Lynch? He enters, a dishevelled version of himself: the rockabilly hair caving at an angle, the buttoned-up white shirt not as neat as it might be, silvery stubble on his chin. He offers me a coffee – his own brand, of which he drinks at least 15 cups a day – and settles into a battered armchair with a packet of American Spirit cigarettes. The concrete floors turn out to have a practical purpose: you can routinely drop cigarette ash on them without worrying about starting a fire (the chair in Lynch’s studio is forever at risk of being buried in butts). “I just love this camera,” Lynch says, in his nasal, deliber-
ate, almost robotically enthusiastic voice. We are looking at a large chiaroscuro nude, which has been printed in two parts and hung on the wall, and Lynch is telling me about his Hasselblad digital. Unbelievable. ›› ›› Thirty-nine million pixels. The camera remembers something like 4,000 pieces of information per photograph. It is machine. It’s a machine.” A look of delight passes across his face. “It’s just a glorious world,” he says. Lynch has been taking a great deal of photographs
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some of which will be shown as part of the Format09 photography festival in Derby this month – and they have long been a component in his mixed-media canvases. He says he mainly likes to photograph nudes and factories, a curious combination until you see that the factories are defunct, celebrated for their decay and decomposition in a way that renders them organic – like the nudes, they seem stripped bare and almost mortal. In 2007, the Fondation Cartier in Paris put together a big
show of Lynch’s artwork spanning more than 40 years. There were Keith Haring-like doodles and sketches on napkins; there were his taxonomic boards: a disassembled fish or pinneddown bees with names like Chuck, Bing, Ralph and Hank; there were large paintings that incorporated clothes, watches and words scrawled in oil paint. Lynch says he is now working on a new series of paintings – though the weather in Los Angeles this week has stalled him somewhat: it’s unusually cold and gloomy, and Lynch works outdoors because he tends to use “toxic materials”. These particular works include tile glue and cotton balls and, “you know, lightbulbs”. The muscular nature of Lynch’s work is not A SHORT BIOGRAPHY BORN January 20, 1946 IS AN AMERICAN filmmaker,
television director, visual artist, comic book artist, musician and occasional actor. KNOWN FOR his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed “Lynchian”, and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound design. THE SURREAL, and in many cases violent, elements to his films have earned them the reputation that they “disturb, offend or mystify” their audiences. BORN TO A middle class family in Missoula, Montana, Lynch spent his childhood traveling around the United States, before going on to study painting at the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia DECIDING TO devote himself more fully to this medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977). AFTER ERASERHEAD became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct The Elephant Man (1980), from which he gained mainstream success. THEN BEING EMPLOYED
by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, he proceeded to make two films: the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, and then a neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986).
something often associated with him. He’s thought to be a reticent cinematic visionary, yet most of his time, when he’s not working on a film (and just now he is not), is spent creating these sprawling twodimensional works involving electric saws, brown sludge and molten plastic. A recent documentary (Lynch (One)) shows him doing this himself, always in his uniform of baggy beige chinos and buttoned-up shirt – the buttons are done even when the shirt is spattered with paint or half hanging out of his trousers. He is more Jackson Pollock than François Truffaut. “I love paint,” he says, in the same mechanical tone he
used to describe his camera. “I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint … a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much.” There are two traditional views of Lynch in person: either that he is as weird as his films suggest, or that he’s unnervingly, wholesomely ordinary. The fact is, he doesn’t like talking about his work. As Chris Rodley writes in his book of interviews, Lynch on Lynch: “Nowadays, a director’s commentary on a movie’s DVD release is standard issue. For Lynch, this is the very definition of a nightmare situation.” For instance, here is Lynch, when I meet him, on how his films come together. He speaks slowly, as if teaching me the basics of his mysterious art: “Sometimes I get an idea for cinema. And when you get an idea that you fall in love with, this is a glorious day. That idea may just be 1a fragment, but it holds something. It might be a scene, or a part of a scene, or a character, or a way the character talks, a light or a feel… You write that idea down. And thinking about that idea will bring other ideas in – there’s a hook to it. And things start to emerge. And then you see, one day, a script. A script is just words to remind you of the ideas. And you follow that, but always staying on guard, in case other ideas come in, because a thing isn’t finished till it’s finished. And one day, it’s finished.” “Christ!” I thought when I heard this, “What am I supposed to do with that?” In the course of our interview Lynch had made (I felt) a series of didactic yet meaningless speeches of varying length, none of which lent itself to illustrating any particular point. But afterwards I found myself laughing, because I realised he was not so much unforthcoming as bordering on the Delphic. He is – unbudgingly, impenetrably, but nevertheless magnificently – a character of his own making. In his movies the characters who talk like this – a sort of
scattershot guru-speak, in which sayings are either
THE IDEAS DICTATE EVERY THING, YOU HAVE TO BE TRUE TO THAT OR YOU’RE DEAD.
DAVID LYNCH | CATCHING THE BIG FISH
wise or total rubbish, depending on what sticks – are fortune-tellers, random ciphers or mysterious orchestrators of strange plots (the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks, the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive, the witchy neighbour in Inland Empire). In other words, the most unnatural among the dramatis personae. But when you listen to Lynch you realise they are (in their delivery at least) the most natural, the most like him. Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, and brought up in various places around the US, depending on where his father’s job as a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture took him. “I think his happiest time,” Lynch says of his dad, “was when he had the Boise National Experimental Forest. A whole forest to experiment with! Things like erosion, bugs – so many different kinds of bugs – disease … And I loved going into that wood. There were little stands with little houses on the stands, and you’d open up the door and there’d be all kinds of weather equipment in there – little read-outs. It was really kind of great.”
an experimenter as well as a dreamy fi lmmaker, none of this really seems odd.
The shorthand for Lynch’s interest in things is “nerdy” – whether it’s cameras, music, weather or the effects of transcendental meditation, which he has been practising twice a day since 1974. But he could be thought of more as an old-fashioned natural philosopher – someone for whom dissection, technology and the unconscious all exist on a single plane of curiosity. When I ask him whether he has visited Thomas Edison’s factory, thinking this would be up his photographic street, he replies immediately: “No. I don’t like Thomas Edison. I’m a fan of Nicolai Tesla,” fervently taking sides about these two 19th-century inventors as if they were contemporary politicians. In 1967, Lynch was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He had made a painting and he wanted to “see it move”. So he projected a one-minute animation onto a sculptured screen and added a siren soundtrack on a loop. The result, Six Men Getting Sick – which was shot on reversal film so has no negative If there are two things from Lynch’s childhood that have – is mesmerising. Painted heads grow tubes, exposed continued to influence him, it’s experimentation with stomachs and random hands; an x-ray of a torso is organic phenomena and the strangely polarised era added; the ground changes from white to black to red that was the 1950s. He loved the jitterbug, the big to purple, and fountains of white paint emerge from cars, the picket fences and the sound of planes fly- the heads and spatter the canvas. ing overhead – a child’s view of an idyllic time. But It was his next short film, The Alphabet, that gave the 50s were also about appearances: this very idyll him “the bug”. Then he made a 34-minute film based masked warring agendas – things people refused to on a dense, eight-page script (The Grandmother), and know and other, often incorrect, things they insisted by the time he came to shoot Eraserhead, which took on knowing. four years and became at one point Stanley Kubrick “All the problems were there,” he once explained, ‘s favourite film, Lynch had settled on the convoluted referring at least to the atomic bomb, and probably logic of a lifetime. The oozing mechanical chickens, to McCarthy, “but it was somehow glossed over. And the slimy foetal offspring, performing ladies in steamthen the gloss broke, or rotted, and it all came oozing ing radiators, dissolving beds, electric hair, a severed out.” In a now-famous quote published in Lynch on head. Even the theatrical, curtained room with a black Lynch, he explained that he’d grown up in “middle and white floor – a signature in Twin Peaks – was America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry already there. tree there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some Many consider Blue Velvet his greatest picture (he yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I had made the classical Elephant Man by then and discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beau- the sci-fi curio Dune); others prefer Wild at Heart tiful world, there are always red ants underneath.” or the Twin Peaks series, which was justifiably cultThe reason this has been quoted so often is that it ish. Lost Highway has fewer fans, and The Straight seems an apt distillation of Lynch’s imagination – a Story, a faithfully linear narrative, was considered version in words of the unforgettable image in Blue un-Lynchian. Velvet of a perfect lawn leading to a severed ear and the But Mulholland Drive, which so divided critics that insect-ridden earth. For those seeking weirdness in serious public rows were had over the film’s meaning, Lynch’s life, it’s almost a relief to hear that he once ›› is a work of sheer genius. It’s like a Lynch movie about ›› asked a vet for a cat’s corpse so he could dissect a Lynch movie – dream logic imposed onto dream it ( just out of interest), or that he once owned a logic, with many of his favourite themes reshuffled pickled uterus. But if you understand him as the to create a new order in homage to Hollywood. Yet son of a scientist and a housewife called Sunny, as it’s possible that, having disassembled the grammar
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of cinema so fruitfully, he has committed – perhaps condemned – his films to be forever broken down, re-syntaxed. Mulholland Drive was originally made as a pilot for a TV series, like Twin Peaks. But the ABC executive who was to decide whether or not to commission it watched the pilot at six in the morning while having a coffee and making some phone calls. He turned it down. Lynch eventually made it as a film, of course, but years later, inspired by the intuitive way he’d worked on Mulholland Drive, he dived into Inland Empire, which stars Laura Dern, Justin Theroux and Jeremy Irons, shooting it “scene by scene, not knowing”. The Lynch documentary observes him midexperiment. At one point he says: “I’m so depressed I don’t know what I’m doing.” The result was, in his own description, “the kiss of death for a distributor”. I ask him if he ever worries that he won’t get funding. “No,” he smiles benignly, “I don’t care.” Then he explains: “See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realise that film. There’s really nothing to be afraid of.” Is there a future in filmmaking that’s funded differently, I wonder? Lynch says it’s distribution that’s difficult. “Now there’s the internet, you can distribute anything. The problem is, how do you get money for it? … It’s gonna be very tough, coming up.” Are you in touch with a younger generation of filmmakers? I ask. Lynch smiles. “No, I’m not in touch with an older generation!… People think in Hollywood there’s a family, where everybody gets together talks about stuff and we all know each other, and it’s just not that way at all to me.” “How is it to you?” “I like to work, so how it is, is work.” “But you meet people in the evenings, presumably?” Lynch laughs and splutters at the thought. “I don’t meet anybody! How would you meet anyone? – you gotta go out. Where are you gonna go?” Lynch has a gratifyingly wicked sense of humour. It comes on slowly, then pans out into a big, boyish smile. As it happens, Lynch doesn’t seem to have a problem meeting new people. Last week, he got married for the fourth time – to a 26-year-old actress named Emily Stofle, who appeared without many clothes in Inland Empire. (Lynch’s long-time composer-collaborator Angelo Badalamenti calls me from Beverly Hills on
CATCHING THE BIG FISH | DAVID LYNCH
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DA LE C OOPER “DAMN GOOD COFFE!” A CLOSER LOOK AT DALE COOPER, THE COOLEST FBI SPECIAL AGENT EVER FBI SPECIAL AGENT Dale
Bartholomew Cooper is a fictional character from the ABC television series Twin Peaks, portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan. He is the lead protagonist of the series, and briefly appears in the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Cooper is an FBI agent who arrives in Twin Peaks in 1989 to investigate the brutal murder of the popular high-school student, Laura Palmer, falling in love with the town and gaining a great deal of acceptance within the tightly knit community. He displays an array of quirky mannerisms such as giving a ‘thumbs up’ when satisfied, sage-like sayings, and distinctive sense of humor along with his love for a good cherry pie (but, he also has a love for other pies or maybe all pies in general) and a “damn fine cup of coffee” (which he takes black). One of his most popular habits is
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recording spoken-word tapes to a mysterious woman called ‘Diane’ into his microcassette recorder that he always carries with him, that often contain everyday observations and thoughts on his current case. Born on April 19, 1954, Cooper is a graduate of Haverford
College. He is also revealed to be something of an introspective personality, due to his profound interest in the mystical, particularly in Tibet and Native American mythology. Much of his work is based on intuition and even dreams; this is in contrast to other fictional detectives who use logic to solve their cases. On joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Dale Cooper was based at the Bureau offices in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was here Cooper was partnered with the older Windom Earle.
At some point, Cooper would be placed under the authority of FBI Chief Gordon Cole, which sometimes meant being handed the mysterious ‘Blue Rose’ cases. Some time after Cooper joined the Bureau, Earle’s wife, Caroline, was a witness to a federal crime. Earle and Cooper were assigned to protect her, and it was around this time that Cooper began an affair with Caroline. However, one night, whilst in Pittsburgh, Cooper let his guard down - and Caroline was murdered by her husband. Cooper’s former partner had “lost his mind”, and was subsequently sent to a mental institution. Cooper was absolutely devastated by the loss of the woman he would later refer to as the love of his life, and swore to never again get involved with someone who was a part of a case to which he was assigned. RD
01 02 03 04 05 06 TWIN PEAKS (1990)
BLUE VELVET (1986)
WILD AT HEART (1990)
THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980)
ERASERHEAD (1977)
INLAND EMPIRE (2006)
STARRING:
STARRING: ISABELLA
STARRING: NICOLAS CAGE
STARING: ANTHONY
STARING: JACK NANCE AND
STARING: LAURA DERN AND
KYLE MACLACHL AND AND
ROSSELLINI AND KYLE
AND LAURA DERN
HOPKINS AND JOHN HURT
CHARLOTTE STEWART
JEREMY IRONS
LARA FLYNN BOYLE
MACLACHLAN
A TOWN WHERE everyone
AFTER FINDING A severed hu-
YOUNG LOVERS Sailor and
I AM NOT AN ANIMAL! I am a
HENRY SPENCER tries to
AS AN ACTRESS starts to
knows everyone and nothing is what it seems.. THE BODY OF A young girl (Laura Palmer) is washed up on a beach near the small Washington state town of Twin Peaks. FBI SPECIAL AGENT Dale Cooper is called in to investigate her strange demise only to uncover a web of mystery that ultimately leads him deep into the heart of the surrounding woodland and his very own soul..
man ear in a field, a young man soon discovers a sinister underworld lying just beneath his idyllic suburban home town.. A MAN RETURNS to his home town after being away and discovers a severed human ear in a field. Not satisfied with the police’s pace, he and the police detective’s daughter carry out their own investigation. THE OBJECT OF his investigation turns out to be a beautiful and mysterious woman involved with a violent and perversely evil man.
Lula run from the variety of weirdos that Lula’s mom has hired to kill Sailor. LULA’S PSYCHOPATHIC mother goes crazy at the thought of Lula being with Sailor, who just got free from jail. Ignoring Sailor’s probation, they set out for California. However their mother hires a killer to hunt down Sailor. Unaware of this, the two enjoy their journey and themselves being together... until they witness a young woman dying after a car accident - a bad omen.
human being! I...am...a man! BASED ON THE true story of Joseph Merrick, a 19th-century Englishman afflicted with a disfiguring congenital disease. With the help of kindly Dr. Frederick Treves, Merrick attempts to regain the dignity he lost after years spent as a side-show freak.
survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child. IS IT A NIGHTMARE or an actual view of a post-apocalyptic world? Set in an industrial town in which giant machines are constantly working, spewing smoke, and making noise that is inescapable, Henry Spencer lives in a building that, like all the others, appears to be abandoned.
adopt the persona of her character in a film, her world starts to become nightmarish and surreal. A BLONDE ACTRESS is preparing for her biggest role yet, but when she finds herself falling for her co-star, she realizes that her life is beginning to mimic the fictional film that they’re shooting. ADDING TO HER confusion is the revelation that the current film is a remake of a doomed Polish production, 47, which was never finished due to an unspeakable tragedy.
MARS 2012 | RAIN DOGS | 31
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SUBVERTING REALITY | ANDREW LEWICKI
ANDREW LEWICKI SUBVERTING REALITY Article Paul Baines, Photo Andrew Lewicki
HE KNOCKS OUT A GREAT line in visual punnery, subverting the familiar, exorcising form from function, hyperrealising the mundane, and generally messing with his audience’s minds. Lewicki’s work is well known in and around L.A, he was even featured in Frieze Magazine a couple of years ago, but for some reason that eludes me he hasn’t broken into the big time. Maybe the art’s world is losing its sense of humour, perhaps pop has lost its pizazz, or maybe life is just plain unfair. Who knows. Still, I am sure I am not alone in my appreciation for his highly original and visually stunning work. At times the dysfunctionalism of Lewicki’s sculptures remind me a tad of Marcel Duchamp, the Godfather of Post Modernism. For example Duchamp’s ‘assisted readymade’ entitled ‘Bicycle Wheel’ which can no longer function as either as a bicycle or a chair, it hangs, devoid of function, in the viewer’s gaze. Much like Lewicki’s 2010 piece ‘Accordion Obscura’, which essentially neither functions as a camera nor an accordion but appears as an impotent hybrid of the two. Lewicki’s Petit Déjeuner’ (2008) on the other hand is a hybrid ceramic piece that merges the a lemon juicer with an ashtray. In truth it retains its functionalism as an object, being able to squeeze juice and contain cigarette ash, however the aesthetic notion of the two merged together is instinctively repulsive. He has also
produced works such as ‘Concrete Lego’ which offers up a decent slice of home-grown nostalgic surrealism, and does again retain a proportional sense of function, and technically, perhaps even more efficiently than a row of traditional builder’s bricks. I’m not sure how intentional the reference, but it also throws one’s mind back to Carl Andre’s ‘Equivalent VIII’ commonly referred to as ‘The Bricks’, which caused a great deal of controversy when The Tate purchased the sculpture, and was seen by the general public as a terrible waste of money. The irony is that Andre’s experiments with the abstract balance between the spiritual and the material, one that manifests as harmony, proportion and pure order, provided a parallel with the Tate’s own history. Having been build and funded by the sugar tycoon Henry Tate who made his fortune manufacturing identical cubes of the sweet stuff for public consumption. Lewicki’s transposition of a famous cookie manufacturer’s
branding to a cast iron manhole cover in his ‘Oreo Manhole Cover’ (2010) subverts the familiar, and undermines the subconscious consensus that forms and runs society itself. Especially in a capitalist society. Our childhood is transfused with a flickering internal movie of first moments, the art of identification and visual association fuels the engine of capitalism, and in
particular the notion of consumer choice. We associate with products as deeply as we do with our families and friends, our brightest and darkest moments in life, our internal dialogue that continues to assess a spectrum of human experience. Some so deeply, as with one’s favourite brand of biscuit, or a mundane piece of street furniture, that we consciously ignore their visual and emotional impact on our lives. That is until its presence has been removed. Leaving one hungry and at the bottom of a street sewer. The merging of these two objects, both highly pedestrian in nature, forms a bubble of logic in the mind, something akin to a criticism against over elaboration, or a celebration of minimalism. His earlier works such as his ‘Walnut Skate Ramp’ (2007)
and ‘Gold Plated Handrail’ lavish the functionalism of the skater environment with an unnecessary degree of quality, materially speaking, elevating them to status symbols. Something that culturally, within the skater community, would be seen as a perversion of the sport’s ideology. Yet in context, at least from an outsider’s perspective, the association of this particular subculture within a greater and highly materialist mainstream culture, seems fitting. Andrew Lewicki is one of those artist who should be big. I mean at the top of his game. But he isn’t ››
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ANDREW LEWICKI | SUBVERTING REALITY
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SUBVERTING REALITY | ANDREW LEWICKI
“Maybe the art’s world is losing its sense of humour, perhaps pop has lost its pizazz, or maybe life is just plain unfair. Who knows.” ›› and I have no idea why. He knocks out a great line in visual punnery, subverting the familiar, exorcising form from function, hyperrealising the mundane, and generally messing with his audience’s minds. Lewicki’s work is well known in and around L.A, he was even featured in Frieze Magazine a couple of years ago, but for some reason that eludes me he hasn’t broken into the big time. Maybe the art’s world is losing its sense of humour, perhaps pop has lost its pizazz, or maybe life is just plain unfair. Who knows. Still, I am sure I am not alone in my appreciation for his highly original and visually stunning work. At times the dysfunctionalism of Lewicki’s sculptures
remind me a tad of Marcel Duchamp, the Godfather of Post Modernism. For example Duchamp’s ‘assisted readymade’ entitled ‘Bicycle Wheel’ which can no longer function as either as a bicycle or a chair, it hangs, devoid of function, in the viewer’s gaze. Much like Lewicki’s 2010 piece ‘Accordion Obscura’, which essentially neither functions as a camera nor an accordion but appears as an impotent hybrid of the two. Lewicki’s Petit Déjeuner’ (2008) on the other hand is a
hybrid ceramic piece that merges the a lemon juicer with an ashtray. In truth it retains its functionalism as an object, being able to squeeze juice and contain
cigarette ash, however the aesthetic notion of the two merged together is instinctively repulsive. He has also produced works such as ‘Concrete Lego’ which offers up a decent slice of home-grown nostalgic surrealism, and does again retain a proportional sense of function, and technically, perhaps even more efficiently than a row of traditional builder’s bricks. I’m not sure how intentional the reference, but it also throws one’s mind back to Carl Andre’s ‘Equivalent VIII’ commonly referred to as ‘The Bricks’, which caused a great deal of controversy when The Tate purchased the sculpture, and was seen by the general public as a terrible waste of money. The irony is that Andre’s experiments with the abstract balance between the spiritual and the material, one that manifests as harmony, proportion and pure order, provided a parallel with the Tate’s own history. Having been build and funded by the sugar tycoon Henry Tate who made his fortune manufacturing identical cubes of the sweet stuff for public consumption. Lewicki’s transposition of a famous
cookie manufacturer’s branding to a cast iron manhole cover in his ‘Oreo Manhole Cover’ (2010) subverts the familiar, and undermines the subconscious consensus that forms and runs society itself. Especially in a capitalist society. Our childhood is transfused with a flickering
internal movie of first moments, the art of identification and visual association fuels the engine of capitalism, and in particular the notion of consumer choice. We associate with products as deeply as we do with our families and friends, our brightest and darkest moments in life, our internal dialogue that continues to assess a spectrum of human experience. Some so deeply, as with one’s favourite brand of biscuit, or a mundane piece of street furniture, that we consciously ignore their visual and emotional impact on our lives. That is until its presence has been removed. Leaving one hungry and at the bottom of a street sewer. The merging of these two objects, both highly pedestrian in nature, forms a bubble of logic in the mind, something akin to a criticism against over elaboration, or a celebration of minimalism. His earlier works such as his ‘Walnut Skate Ramp’ (2007)
and ‘Gold Plated Handrail’ lavish the functionalism of the skater environment with an unnecessary degree of quality, materially speaking, elevating them to status symbols. Something that culturally, within the skater community, would be seen as a perversion of the sport’s ideology. Yet in context, at least from an outsider’s perspective, the association of this particular subculture within a greater and highly materialist mainstream culture, seems fitting. RD
MARS 2012 | RAIN DOGS | 35
A CLOSER LOOK AT ABSTRACT ART | CONRAD KELLY
abstract art is
SHIT
Modernity, it seems, has robbed art of 20,000 years of development. By Conrad Keely, Illustrations by Andreas Aasen
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I RECENTLY VISITED two
museums in Sydney, Australia: the National Gallery, which housed an impressive collection of Victorian-era masterpieces, and the Museum of Modern Art. Walking through the fourth floor of the latter, we passed by one installation piece. It was a pile of coal on the ground. This, I thought, is what modernity has reduced art to- a pile of coal on the ground. Modernity, it seems, has robbed art of 20,000 years of development. Some
modern artists I’ve spoken to don’t even feel it necessary to look back upon the development of art. Art, as far as they’re concerned, started in the 20th century, when someone declared “anything can be art.” Anything can be art? Visual art is about ways of seeing. It’s one of those explicit truths whose simplicity makes it easy to forget or take for granted. When studying art on a theoretical level, we are often challenged to define art and the question is turned into to philosophical one: can it be defined,
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and what, after all, is art? These attempts to over-intellectualize something which is fundamentally intuitive have led many to believe this is a complex, or even unanswerable question. But the truth is that art is definable. It does, and has, served a function for thousands of years now. It is concrete, living, and in many cases, quantifiable. During the 20th century, a conspiracy took place to viciously defame the merits of the old academic art style. Gallery owners, drive by profit and greed, chose to back abstract expressionist painters because of their far more prolific output. No longer held by bounds of pressentation, they could finish a canvas in one day, where the old masters might spend one year on a canvas, sometimes longer. The result was “modern” art. Within this art form, the artist’s idea, or “concept” takes precedent. Most of us were probably taught in art clas that we outh to be free to “express” outselves. And as wonderfully as this might serve to turn
A CLOSER LOOK AT ABSTRACT ART | CONRAD KELLY
every human being into an artist, this really isn’t what art has ever been about. In fact, it is important to remember that art as expression is a recent development- at least, the artist’s personal expression. Throughout history, it served three very specific functions — it exemplified an ideal represented an object, or narrated a story. Even the first paintings done in caves were not abstract exercises in self-indulgence, but beauiful, sometimes sublimely realistic representations. I decided to try an experiment. A friend of mine has a four-year-old
daughter who is bright for her age. I asked her to give me her opinion of which paintings she preferred. First, I would hold up a piece of realism, say, Alma-Tadema’s “Spring.” Then, I would hold up an abstract work, say, a Pollock or a Rothka. Without fail, each time she showed disinterest or perturbation in the abstract work and tended more to remark on the “prettiness” of the realistic piece. This led
me to wonder, “Were we taught how to appreciate abstract art?” If so, it would appear that its appeal is intellectual rather intuitive. Its purpose is to alienate those “not in the know,” (i.e.-the uneducated) and create an artistic elitism. But art, in my mind, ought not to be an elitist thing at all, but rather serve to elevate all of humanity. I believe the beauty of the academic artistc tradition is endangered. No longer are students taught the fundamentals of draftmanship and representation, but rather to “tap into their feelings” or even “defy the rules,” without ever having been tuaght them. Especially this farce called “installation,” in which the observer is meant to glean, from a haphazard collection of objects, the artist’s true intent. Honestly, do we really care? Do the unadulterated eyes of a child see abstract art for what it really is: a bunch of paint thrown randomly on a canvas? Is a four-year-old child really going to see allegory to the artist’s pain, or is she simply going to see a pile of coal on the ground? RD
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MOVIE REVIEWS
DOWN BY LAW
By Vincent Canby, (The New York Times) Directed by: Jim Jarmuch Starring: Tom Waits, John Lurie, Roberto Benigni Released: February, 1986
JIM JARMUSCH IS AN AMERICAN original. He’s as singu-
lar as ‘’Bob’’ Frost, Sam Shepard and Nicholas Ray, each of whom is evoked - in one way and another - by Mr. Jarmusch’s darkly comic, lighter-than-air ‘’Down by Law,’’ which provides the 24th New York Film Festival with a truly festive opening tonight at Lincoln Center. Like ‘’Stranger Than Paradise,’’ which introduced Mr. Jarmusch to the American public in 1984, ‘’Down by Law’’ wears a furrowed brow on its long face, which doesn’t initially identify it as a comedy. However, Mr. Jarmusch’s comedies, which might be described as existential shaggy-dog stories, look and sound like those of nobody else making movies in America today. The act of watching one may even
be therapeutic: it cleans the mind of all the detritus acquired while responding in the preconditioned ways demanded by most other films. ‘’Down by Law’’ is an upper, though you probably won’t realize this at first. It’s been photographed by Robby Muller in the rich, almost liquid, black-and-white tones that recall films like ‘’The Big Heat’’ and ‘’The Asphalt Jungle.’’
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It’s about three seemingly expendable misfits - a small-time pimp, an out-of-work disk jockey and an indomitably cheerful Italian tourist, who seems to have disembarked in the wrong country without knowing it. The setting is contemporary New Orleans, though the
city looks as if it had recently been ransacked by Union armies, and the Louisiana bayou country, where chance encounters are as life-enhancing as they are life-threatening in the city. When first met, in separate sequences, both the pimp, Jack (John Lurie), and the disk jockey, Zack (Tom Waits), are on their way to the slammer, though neither has any reason to know this yet. Late at night, lying in bed in a sleazy room in the French Quarter, Jack listens without interest as his companion (Billie Neal) quotes her mother’s analysis of America. ‘’She used to say it’s a big melting pot, because when you bring it to a boil, all the scum rises to the top.’’ ‘’Down by Law’’ is a fable of poetic density. It’s so much
of a piece that it’s not easy to separate and identify the components that make the movie what it is. The performances by Mr. Lurie, Mr. Waits and Mr. Benigni are extraordinary. However, they wouldn’t exist had they not been photographed by Mr. Jarmusch and Mr. Muller in the kind of deep-focus that permits the three to be on the screen at the same time, in the
same frame. In this way they are able to act and react to one another - in a way that just isn’t possible when the camera keeps intercutting between the actors. Early on, Mr. Jarmusch’s characters, and the world they
inhabit, remind one of the plays of Sam Shepard, but the similarity is superficial. Unlike Mr. Shepard’s characters, who have their roots in the theater of Ibsen, Mr. Jarmusch’s travel light. They carry very little in the way of historical baggage. Their pasts are unimportant. They take their shapes from their present circumstances, and from the way they are seen by the camera in their environment -mostly at a comparatively cool distance. Mr. Shepard’s Americans have cut themselves loose from
the safety of middle-class life, and must come to terms with their sense of dislocation. In ‘’Down by Law,’’ Jack, Zack and Roberto seem to have been classless forever, floating always (as they are seen in the film) off the shore of a foreign land they’ve never known or understood, where a logical system of rewards and punishments still exists. They give us not the actuality of life but a dream impression. ‘’Down by Law’’ works on the mind and senses in a completely different fashion. It’s an unqualified delight, from its elegiacal opening shots to to its unexpected last scene, which is funny in itself as well as a wicked pun on ‘’Bob’’ Frost’s now somewhat tired ‘’Road Not Taken.’’ RD
WEIRD, WICKED AND WEIRD FILMS WE LOVE
RAISING ARISONA By Henrik Sheehan
Directed by: Joel Coen Written by: Ethan Coen Starring: Nicolas Cage, Holly Hunter and Trey Wilson Released: February, 1987
RECIDIVIST HOLD-UP MAN H.I. McDonnough and police
woman Edwina marry, only to discover they are unable to conceive a child. Desperate for a baby, the pair decide to kidnap one of the quintuplets of furniture tycoon Nathan Arizona. The McDonnoughs try to keep their crime secret, while friends, co-workers and a feral bounty hunter look to use Nathan Jr. for their own purposes.
(short for Edwina), a policewoman who falls in love with “Hi” (short for H.I. McDonnough), while she’s taking his mug shots. She’s infertile and he’s a habitual robber of convenience stores, and their folksy marital bliss depends on settling down with a rug rat. Unable to conceive, they kidnap one of the newsworthy quintuplets born to an unpainted-furniture huckster named Nathan Arizona. A Harley-riding bounty hunter gets on their trail and things start to get dangerous. It’s the story of “Ed”
A LIFE AQUATIC
By Henrik Sheehan Directed by: Wes Anderson Starring: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett and Willem Dafoe Released: February, 2005
– even when their heroes are undergoing mental and spiritual agonies – that it seems counterintuitive to call them obsessive. Perhaps a better term might be insistent, or even politely insistent, given the atmosphere of self-effacement that settles over them. So maybe it’s less important that Anderson’s films dwell almost maniacally on the problematic relationships between fathers or father-figures and sons (or, in one case, daughter) than that they do so with selfconscious bashfulness. Even when the larger-thanlife characters (Gene Hackman’s Royal Tennenbaum in The Royal Tennenbaums or, in the new The Life Aquatic, Bill Murray’s Steve Zissou) find themselves momentarily boastful over a vaunted achievement, they immediately thereafter find themselves excusing some slip up inextricably bound up with the glory. WES ANDERSON’S FILMS ARE SO GENTLE
The secret world in The Life Aquatic is, in a sense, the secret world of the sea, at least as it’s explored by Steve Zissou (Murray). Sort of a low-rent Jacques Cousteau, Zissou has fallen into a personal and creative (his newest film bombs at a swank Italian film festival)
Colourful and unconventional slapstick comedy. Ex-con Hi
following the death, by shark of an older cohort, the diver Esteban du Plantier (Seymour Cassel). The underwater explorer has resolved to salvage his career and his sense of responsibility to Esteban by filming the hunt for the shark, an exotic, never-before-seen behemoth Zissou dubs the “jaguar shark.” Despite the singularity of his prey, Zissou intends to dynamite to oblivion in an obvious act of catharsis. Zissou himself becomes the hunted, at least allegorically. On board his rickety boat and joining his rackety crew is Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a pilot for a Kentucky airline who just might be Zissou’s son (no one is sure). Another pursuer is a pregnant journalist, Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett), who resolutely resists Zissou’s not inconsiderable charms but who falls for Ned.
and ex-cop Ed meet, marry and long for a child in the wilds of Arizona. When Ed discovers she’s barren the God-given solution is presented: to snatch a baby from a set of quins. Thus begins a series of kidnappings, capers and rum goings-on that revolve around the helpless yet universally-loveable child. Hi’s convict friends, his boss, and even the Lone Biker Of The Apocalypse become involved in the ever-twisting plot in the quest to own the baby. RD
There’s another filmmaker who makes a significant contribution. Henry Selick, the stop-motion animator director who made James and the Giant Peach and Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, is here responsible for the fanciful creatures that stock the waves and seashores. Naturally, they include the giant jaguar shark that finally makes an appearance, but also include such delightful contributions as striped “sugar crabs.” The Life Aquatic wouldn’t be as good a film without him. RD
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MOVIE REVIEWS
THE ARTIST
By www.imdb.com Directed by: Michel Hazanavicius Written by: Michel Hazanavicius Starring: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo and John Goodman Released: Mars, 2012
HOLLYWOOD, 1927: AS SILENT MOVIE star George Valentin
wonders if the arrival of talking pictures will cause him to fade into oblivion, he sparks with Peppy Miller, a young dancer set for a big break. Outside a movie premiere, enthusiastic fan Peppy Miller
literally bumps into the swashbuckling hero of the silent film, George Valentin. The star reacts graciously and Peppy plants a kiss on his cheek as they are surrounded by photographers. The headlines demand: “Who’s That Girl?” and Peppy is inspired to audition for a dancing bit-part at the studio. However as Peppy slowly rises through the industry, the introduction of talking-pictures turns Valentin’s world upside-down. RD
EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP By www.imdb.com
Directed by: Banksy Starring: Banksy, Thierry Guetta and Space Invader Released: 2010 Genre: Documentary/Comedy
THE STORY OF HOW AN ECCENTRIC French shop keeper
and amateur film maker attempted to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner. The film contains footage of Banksy, Shephard Fairey, Invader and many of the world’s most infamous graffiti artists at work. Banksy is a graffiti artist with a global reputation whose
work can be seen on walls from post-hurricane New Orleans to the separation barrier on the Palestinian West Bank. He fiercely guards his anonymity to avoid prosecution. An eccentric French shop keeper turned documentary maker attempts to locate and befriend Banksy, only to have the artist turn the camera back on its owner. Includes footage of Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Invader and many of the world’s most infamous graffiti artists at work, on walls and in interview. As Banksy describes it, “It’s basically the story of how one man set out to film the un-filmable. And failed.” RD
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THE DEPARTED
By Henrik Sheehan Directed by: Martin Schorcese
COLIN SULLIVAN (DAMON) is
introduced to organized crime by Irish mobster Frank Costello (Nicholson) in the Irish neighborhood of South Boston. Costello trains him to become a mole inside the Massachusetts State Police. Sullivan is accepted into the Special Investigations Unit, which focuses on organized crime. Before he graduates from the police academy, Billy Costigan (DiCaprio) is asked by Captain Queenan (Sheen) and Staff Sergeant Dignam (Wahlberg) to go undercover, as his family ties to organized crime make him a perfect infiltrator. RD
WEIRD, WICKED AND WEIRD FILMS WE LOVE
RESERVOIR DOGS By www.imdb.com
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino Writers: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary Starring: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen Released: 1992
SIX CRIMINALS, WHO ARE STRANGERS to
each other, are hired by a crime boss Joe Cabot to carry out a diamond robbery. Right at the outset, they are given false names with an intention that they won’t get too close and concentrate on the job instead. They are completely sure that the robbery is going to be a success. But when the police show up right at the time and the site of the robbery, panic spreads amongst the group members and one of them is killed in the subsequent shootout along with a few policemen and civilians. When the remaining people assemble at the premeditated rendezvous point (a warehouse), they begin to suspect that one of them is an undercover cop. out an armed robbery on a Diamond warehouse. The police are after them so quickly that they suspect they have a rat in their company. This film starts right before the robbery, with flashbacks to before the robbery, and to the planning of the crime. We are also introduced to the main characters in flashback mode. Plenty of fast action, and plenty of blood and gore. A gang of thieves carry
They were six strangers, assembled to pull off the perfect
crime: Mr. White, a professional criminal; Mr. Orange, a young newcomer; Mr. Blonde, a trigger-happy killer; Mr. Pink, a paranoid neurotic; Mr. Brown; and Mr. Blue. Hired by mob boss Joe Cabot and given fake names so no one could identify the others, they thought there was no way their heist could have failed. But after a police ambush, killing Mr. Brown and seriously injuring Mr. Orange, the criminals return to their rendezvous point (a warehouse), and realize that one of them had to have been a police informant. But who? RD
A CLOCWORK ORANGE
By Lucia Bozzola (Rotten Tomatoes) Directed by: Stanley Kubric Screenplay: Anthony Burgess Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee and Michael Bates Released: February, 1971
STANLEY KUBRICK DISSECTS the
nature of violence in this darkly ironic, near-future satire, adapted from Anthony Burgess’s novel, complete with “Nadsat” slang. Classical music-loving proto-punk Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his “Droogs” spend their nights getting high at the Korova Milkbar before embarking on “a little of the old ultraviolence,” such as terrorizing a writer, Mr. Alexander (Patrick Magee), and gang raping his wife (who later dies as a result). After Alex is jailed for bludgeoning the Cat Lady (Miriam Karlin) to death with one of her phallic sculptures, Alex submits to the Ludovico behavior modification technique to earn his freedom; he’s conditioned to abhor violence through watching gory movies, and even his adored Beethoven is turned against him. Returned to the world defenseless, Alex becomes the
victim of his prior victims, with Mr. Alexander using Beethoven’s Ninth to inflict the greatest pain of all. When society sees what the state has done to
Alex, however, the politically expedient move is made. Casting a coldly pessimistic view on the then-future of the late ‘70s-early ‘80s, Kubrick and production designer John Barry created a world of high-tech cultural decay, mixing old details like bowler hats with bizarrely alienating “new” environments like the Milkbar. Alex’s violence is horrific, yet it is an aesthetically cal-
culated fact of his existence; his charisma makes the icily clinical Ludovico treatment seem more negatively abusive than positively therapeutic. Alex may be a sadist, but the state’s autocratic control is another violent act, rather than a solution. Released in late 1971 (within weeks of Sam Peckinpah’s brutally violent Straw Dogs), the film sparked considerable controversy in the U.S. with its X-rated violence; after copycat crimes in England, Kubrick withdrew the film from British distribution until after his death. Opinion was divided on the meaning of Kubrick’s detached view of this shocking future, but, whether the discord drew the curious or Kubrick’s scathing diagnosis spoke to the chaotic cultural moment, A Clockwork Orange became a hit. On the heels of New York Film Critics Circle awards as Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, Kubrick received Oscar nominations in all three categories. RD
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IMAGE CREDIT: TRUMANSOFT.BLOGSPOT.ES
MUSIC REVIEWS
TOM WAITS: BAD AS ME By The Guardian
Record Label: ANTI records Released: 2011
SIXTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD ARTISTS releasing the 17th studio
album of their careers have normally earned the right not to make things easy for anyone. That theory should go double for song men such as Tom Waits, a bloodyminded old goat not overly given to the vagaries of commerce or fashion. He sings with a gulletful of acid reflux. He wears hats like it’s 1947. There is only the one (unofficial) dubstep remix of his work online and it’s not half bad. And yet Waits’s latest album is a primer of what a reality TV show host might call his best bits. It is the sort of disc you can hand to a Waits novice or sceptic with the confidence that this collection of brawlers, bawlers and bastards (as he characterised the three-way split in his work on his 2006 compilation) will do the job of conversion. All Waits is here, more or less: the barfly, the romantic, the curmudgeon, the method actor and the self-parodist. Only the clangorous experimentalist of The Black Rider is missing. Laughing along with Waits isn’t hard. “Yerrr the sayme kinda bad as muy!” he yowls on the lurid, cartoonish title track, keeping up the appearance of a dissolute lowlife despite being a happily partnered-up man whose missus helps him write this stuff. Indeed, the terrific second track rues
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the lack of men “raised right”, like someone ringing into a 5 Live phone-in. “Satisfied” is another hoot. Taking its cue from the infa-
mous Rolling Stones track, Waits demands satisfaction, but more in the florid style of an 18th-century duellist. “Now Mr Jagger! And Mr Richards! I will scratch where I been itching!” he blusters, as the very same Mr Richards struts and frets conspiratorially along on his guitar. Having cropped up as a guest on previous Waits albums, Richards lends a hand on four songs here, and it’s easy to imagine Waits as having written “Bad As Me” as a love song to this twin soul. For all the excellent clowning around, Bad As Me is, chiefly,
an album full of compassion, anger and sorrow – the stuff that puts Waits on the same page as upstanding Bruce Springsteen and the emotional surgeon Leonard Cohen, as well as bad old Nick Cave and professional drunks the Pogues. “Pay Me” tells the story of an exile with a woozy weep that sounds both sentimentally Irish and quintessentially French. “They pay me not to come home,” Waits rasps stoically. There are compromised men hitting the road here, failed relationships starting again (in “Chicago”), and lovers trying to rekindle their spark. The terrific “Kiss Me” is all vinyl hiss and jazzy antiquity, with Waits doing his gruffest
bluesman growl. The warmongers and bankers get it in the neck so hard, you can’t help but punch the air. “Talking at the Same Time” rues the downward turn of the economy with restrained elegance, while “Hell Broke Luce” is a lot angrier – a Waits-own rap set to left-right marching and machine gunfire. Indeed, Bad As Me’s 13 tracks fairly rip along, alerting a new generation that there are few as fine as Waits. RD
WEIRD, WICKED AND WEIRD MUSIC WE LOVE
PJ HARVEY: WHITE CHALK By Henrik Sheehan
Record label: Island Records Released: 24 September 2007 Artwork by: Rob Crane & Maria Mochnacz
own otherwise peerless standards, PJ Harvey’s eighth studio album, White Chalk, is a triumph of both micro and macro level structure, tremendously heady in its content and convention- and expectation-defying in its form. Harvey is rarely an easy listen, but White Chalk is her most deliberately difficult work, rife with unnerving imagery set against an austere, chilling interpretation of Victorian chamber music. There are few hooks, fewer verse-chorus-verse structures, and no traditional percussion (Jim White provides the off-kilter drum-beds) to speak of. And Harvey, trading in her guitar for a not-quite-in-tune piano, sings in an affected, breathy timbre entirely in her upper register. The cumulative effect is at once off-putting and captivating; consider the album’s striking cover, as well, and White Chalk is truly a masterful example of sustained tone. EVEN WHEN MEASURED AGAINST HER
More impressive, though, is the album’s critical fecundity.
DAVID LYNCH: CRAZY CLOWN TIME By Mike Powell; November 8, 2011 Record Label: Play It Again Sam Released: 2011
as being “weird,” suspend that thought for a moment. That weirdness – the visceral, surrealistic imagery and fragmented plots in his movies – is exactly what we as viewers want from him. You probably like it weird now and then. I do too. It’s what thrills us, confuses us, and keeps us coming back for more. One of the elements that defines Lynch’s films is the way he uses music, especially music from the 1950s and early 60s. Seemingly innocuous songs are set in relief against scenes of violence or desperation in ways that reveal some latent passion that might be hard to hear on oldies radio. The era is crucial: Slowdances and big-bad-wolf blues are styles whose tensions are born of repression. Making your sexual desires known was not much of an option in the 1950s, so the music worked via metaphor and concealment and, as IF YOU’VE EVER THOUGHT OF DIRECTOR DAVID LYNCH
a result, quaked with subterranean energy that had no safe outlet. Lynch’s scenes provide that outlet. When he uses a song as soundtrack, he transforms it. Music in his movies arrives at high-water moments. Dennis Hopper does himself up in lipstick to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” before assaulting poor Kyle MacLachlan in Blue Velvet, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring sob to Rebekah del Rio’s performance of Orbison’s “Crying” inMulholland Drive, and Jack Nance, saddled with his horrible alien baby at the edge of domestic sanity in Eraserhead, is serenaded by a tiny, grotesque woman inside his radiator. In these scenes, the music is used in the same way that we as listeners often use it: to pump ourselves up, to give us space to emote, or to find solace. Lynch’s sense of music is intuitive that way, and probably one of the most plainly sympathetic aspects of his movies.
Harvey’s difficulty has long been a source of her appeal with critics—in particular, the confrontational gender politics that drove her first few albums—and White Chalk is perhaps her most dense, thematically richest work. She’s repeatedly proven that she can do explicit; here, she uses ambiguity to her advantage. Switching between first and third person, she complicates any kind of an autobiographical read—a dodgy prospect to begin with, but especially with Harvey—and writes fictions that depict deep fracture and both physical and spiritual violence. RD
Crazy Clown Time, while technically a proper debut full-
length, is far from the first time Lynch has had a hand in the actual writing and performing of music. He was making noises with Alan Splet as early as Eraserhead, and has done soundtrack work on nearly every movie he’s directed through 2006’s Inland Empire.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
MOTORPSYCHO AND STÅLE STORLØKKEN By Den Norske Opera og Ballett
Where: The Norwegian Opera & Ballet Oslo, Norway When: 11. November, 2012 Price: 345 NOK
AFTER MORE THAN 20 YEARS TOGETHER, Motorpsycho is
today more vital and artistically challenging than ever. With their double album The Death Defying Unicorn, the group has embarked on its most ambitious project to date with a work that is the culmination of close collaboration with keyboardist and arranger Ståle Storløkken. On 11 November, Motorpsycho will star in the Main House together with Trondheim soloists’ violinist Ola Kvernberg and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. The concert will feature lighting and
visuals by Pekka Stokke. This will be the biggest production in the history of Motorpsycho, a concert that will mark a new creative peak in the group’s unique career. RD
LUCIAN FREUD – EXHIBITION
Lucian Freud Exhibition London Where: National Portrait Gallery, London When: 09 February 2012 - 27 May 2012
AS PART OF THE CULTURAL OLYMPIAN LONDON festival for
2012, a Lucian Freud exhibition takes place at the National Portrait Gallery. Bringing together a selection of his most famous works, this London exhibition is bound to be yet another highlight of what is set to be a major year for cultural greats.
ASTRUP FEARNLEY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
London galleries seem to be pulling out all the stops for
IMAGE CREDIT: LUCIAN FREUD
exhibitions during 2012 to accompany the sporting achievement of the London Olympics, and the National Portrait Gallery is no different. Showcasing the portraits of Lucian Freud, who is seen by many in the art world as the greatest modern realist painter, the gallery invites you to view his astonishing collection of work. Central to the work of the artist is his work on portrai-
ture and this Lucian Freud exhibition London event is the very first dedicated to that specific theme. Renowned for his no hold barred, warts and all kind of style, Freud has garnered a multitude of fans around the world, with his graphic, visceral, almost tangible manner of portraying people. RD
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www. afmuseet.no
When: 29.09-29.09.2012
ASTRUP FEARNLEY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART is a privately
owned museum, which presents temporary exhibitions of international art. First opened in 1993, the museum has since established itself as an important institution for presentation of contemporary art. After over 18 years in Dronningensgtate 4 the museum closed its doors 31.12.2011. In September 2012 the Astrup Fearnley Museum reopens at Tjuvholmen in Oslo, in a new museum building designed by world-renowned architect Renzo Piano.
WEIRD, WICKED AND WEIRD STUFF WE LOOK FORWARD TO
KAIZERS ORCHESTRA
www.norwegianwood.no Where: Norwegian Wood, Oslo, Norway When: Saturday, 16 of June Price: 645 NOK
at Underwood-stage, in 2003 they took the step up on the main stage Saturday, 16 June 2012 occupies the Norwegian Wood as the leading and best-selling rock band both on record and stage. It is with very great pleasure Norwegian Wood may wish Kaizers Orchestra welcome back to Frognerbadet. IN 2000 THEY PLAYED
GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL
www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk
2011 was the year when Kaizers Orchestra definitive
rock took over the throne in Norway - 2012 is the year when the band consolidate their position. Their last two releases, “Violeta Violeta Volume I” and “... Volume II” both went straight to number one on the charts. “Violeta Violeta Volume I” was a total of 35 weeks on the charts, while “... Volume II” at the moment is in its 11th week. Both were among the country’s best-selling releases of 2011. The single “Dream on Violeta” a-listed on both the P1 and P3, as well as a number of other radio stations, and has become the band’s biggest radio hit ever. This is almost exactly one year after the (single) “Heartbreaker” equaling the previous record. Kaizers Orchestra is not only the most popular rock
bands, they are also the nation’s leading concert attraction. 9. april 2011, the band sold out Oslo Spektrum, which resulted in the concert DVD “Live In Oslo Spektrum”, the biggest selling music DVD in Norway in 2011. The first week of March the band will play three sold-out Sentrum Scene in Oslo. The reason is simply that for the moment, probably the country’s best live bands. Or to quote Stein Østbø review to roll 6 in VG, the Kaizers Orchestra concert for 45,000 people at Roskilde in the summer of 2011: “It was unbelievable, the migration of Roskilde Sletta the Orange Stage, which took place a few minutes before Kaizers concert. RD
What: is a performing arts festival that takes place near Pilton, Somerset, England, When: 2013
GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL IS THE LARGEST greenfield music
and performing arts festival in the world and a template for all the festivals that have come after it. The difference is that Glastonbury has all the best aspects of being at a Festival in one astonishing bundle. It’s like going to another country,
a hip and thrilling Brigadoon that appears every year or so. Coming to Glastonbury involves a fair amount of travel, and probably a queue to get in but, when you get past these impediments, you enter a huge tented city, a mini-state under canvas. British law still applies, but the rules of society are a bit different, a little bit freer. Everyone is here to have a wild time in their own way. The Festival site has distinct socio-geographic regions. The more commercial aspects are around the Pyramid, Other and Dance stages, which feels as if the West End of London a Saturday night has been removed to a field and thoroughly beautified. Unlike the West End, visitors are on every guest list, from the night time cinemas to the biggest gigs. But that busy whirl of excitement is not to everyone’s taste. To accomodate the more laid-back reveller,
more chilled out areas like the Jazzworld and Acoustic areas are in easy walking distance. If that’s still not the relaxed state a Glasto-goer is after, there’s also family oriented areas like the Kidz Field, the Theatre and Circus fields. And if you’re into the more alternative, less noisy aspects of festival life, you can always head up to the Field of Avalon, the Tipi Field, and the Green Fields. At the top of the site is the Sacred Space - the stone circle is a modern construction, but it has already seen as much celebration and ceremony as some of its forebears. Sun-up on a Sunday morning, with drums and torches and chanting and an astonishing measure of joy from the sleepless revellers at the Stone Circle is a glorious sight to behold. The Festival takes place in a beautiful location - 900 acres in the Vale of Avalon, an area steeped in symbolism, mythology and religious traditions dating back many hundreds of years. It’s where King Arthur may be buried, where Joseph of Arimathea is said to have walked, where leylines converge. And the site is ENORMOUS - more than a mile and a half across, with a perimeter of about eight and a half miles. Then there are the people, thousands of them in all their
astonishing and splendid diversity! There is only one common characteristic of a Glastonbury-goer - they understand that Glastonbury Festival offers them more opportunity than any other happening to have the best weekend of the year or even of a life-time, and they are determined to have it! RD
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“A Rain Dog is a dog caught in the rain, with its whole trail washed away by the water so he can’t get back home. A stranded dog, who wants nothing better than to get home.” — TOM WAITS