Hit List
October 20, 2020
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Amy White. I am reporting to you from what is at this point a decades-spanning inquiry, what I think of as a ‘matrix of thought’ surrounding questions of earth-based and/or mineral existence and the origins of life [the scope of which extends toward the cosmic and/or interplanetary]. Here, ‘earth’ serves as a metonym for literal physical dirt, rock, soil, and/or crystalline forms, employed within this continuum of exploration that percolates [i.e., toward a diffusion of ideas through the above-noted paradigmatic matrix of thought that serves as a kind of sieve through which a sluice of particulate content passes toward a state of ever-greater complexity and refinement] within a context that I conceive of as the ‘Realm of the Static and the Vital’ – of which we are materially and/or otherwise a part. […]
October 20, 2020
The Unseen, 1980 directed by Peter Foleg (Danny Steinmann) The Unseen is a slow burn. It ambles toward a single, unnerving scene, covering all of the basic themes along the way – fear, violence, nudity, flamboyance. But most of that stuff is just noise that funnels directly toward a few moments spent with a mesmerizing abomination whose portrayal is pretty offensive even for the day. This is the nature of exploitation; cheap shots leading to a payoff that leaves you feeling icky. This is also what happens when movie-magic nerds try to develop a project of their own. In this case, two world famous special effects makeup artists penned a screenplay just to show off a disturbing character makeup they probably dreamed up between gigs. Then they passed it off to the writer of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, whose […]
July 27, 2020
In the Heat of the Night, 1967, directed by Norman Jewison Sidney Poitier imbued the characters he played with power and unimpeachable morality. But that flawlessness, which he was repeatedly expected to perform, often translated into a sort of neuter elitism which excluded the social realities of Black America. This film, In the Heat of the Night (1967) places Poitier in a similarly awkward position, playing a liberated Northerner in the Jim Crow South, where his professional expertise is desperately needed and unambiguously resented. It sounds like a decent logline, but when you consider the off screen reality of the deadliness of racism, paired with our understanding of how “liberated” those Northern cities actually are for people of color, it appears once again that Hollywood is playing out its misguided fantasy of what an upstanding Black American should be, then […]
July 27, 2020
In the unusually sweltering summer of 2011 in Boone, NC, I worked as a track attendant at Fun N’ Wheels, the High Country’s premiere tetanus-addled go-kart track and tourist trap that, judging by the plush Izzy doll in the claw machine, hadn’t been updated (or likely inspected) since 1996. The wages were low, the days were slow and I was way into it– a mostly pleasant haze of gasoline fumes and ennui. Shifts were mostly spent kicking back in one of the cars, eating gas station hot dogs and thumbing through something like a Camus novel between dozey bouts of navel-gazing as we awaited customers. I don’t recall much of the work-work, but did occasionally putter around the track to pass the time or feed rubber to a birthday party of youngins. Much to the dismay of the two frat […]
July 12, 2020
Naturally, in observance of the immensity of the Black Lives Matter movement, I’ve stalled a bit with these weekly selections and labored over how best to get back in the groove. This week’s features each grabbed hold of my ears, mind and spirit out of the blue, for whatever reasons. They’re lesser-known than most– scrappy Demigods perhaps, on the fringe but certainly no less deserving of the consideration and celebration of Titans like The Coltranes that we all know and love. They’re the type of artists that I desperately seek along the road to finding and sharing more wonderful and startling creative outposts and since they’ve been simmering in the queue for a good while, I figured it was as good a time as any to serve ‘em up. Fred E. Scott is a total enigma, but whoever he is, […]
July 12, 2020
The Fits, 2016, directed by Anna Rose Holmer, story by Anna Rose Holmer, Saela Davis, Lisa Kjerulff The Fits is a rare treat. It’s deeply considered without being pretentious, mesmerizing without sacrificing story, political without uttering a word of rhetoric. It also proves that a fantastic film can be created on a minuscule budget. This one weighs in at a featherweight, $168,000 which by the standards of practically any era of film making is chump change. It’s about eleven year old Toni who is training to be a boxer along with her older brother. Toni becomes enamored by a dance team that practices in a gymnasium close by, and eventually she trades her pugilistic ambitions for a spot on the team. But there’s something weird going on. One by one, dancers are afflicted with mysterious “fits” that have them seizing […]
June 14, 2020
(This post was meant to happen three weeks ago, so forgive the nonsensical opening, which made perfect sense when the ground was saturated. – Lump) Okay, one week of rain behind us…and another week of rain lies ahead. Rather than immersing myself and you, dear readers, in languid overcast vibes again, I aim to straight-up vaporize the clouds with flaming-hot HEAT from the Equatorial South. First up, we have a triumphant rascal of an album by Tito, a “progressive band” from 1977 Mexico and currently a favorite gem, mined from one of many late nights trawling YouTube. In its sub-30 minute expanse, Quetzalcoatl completely rewires my perception of Mexican music; It’s cinematic and psychedelic, tender, odd and improbably sprawling despite being a patchwork of cosmic synth vignettes. Interestingly, while drinking deep from the full album (easy and recommended), I started […]
June 14, 2020
Selected this week by artist/writer Chris Vitiello READING IS A PART OF ACTIVISM. Baraka never pulled a punch in his life and wrote terrific plays and collaborated with jazz musicians. He was controversial too – his poem “Somebody Blew Up America?” was criticized as anti-Semitic… and defended as anti-Zionist… and prompted the governor of New Jersey to end the poet laureate program for the state since he couldn’t legally fire Baraka from the post. Baraa was a giant and wrote fucking HARD. Get his books and seek out video online of him reading with musicians behind him. – CV
June 14, 2020
There’s no way to pin Ganja and Hess down because it defies every expectation you might have for the exploitation horror flick that it’s promoted as. It’s about a wealthy anthropologist, Dr. Hess Green (played by Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead fame) who is a vampire. Hess falls in love with his dead assistant’s widow, Ganja Meda, played by Marlene Clark (Billy D Williams’ wife at that time, in the real world). Its director, Bill Gunn was an African American playwright and novelist who, when approached to make this movie, had no interest in doing a vampire movie, and instead used the trope as a metaphor for addiction. The result is an exceptionally weird horror, romance that undercuts the unrelenting whiteness of the vampire myth and lampoons, with almost no effort, the painfully Eurocentric Hammer vampire films […]
June 14, 2020
Inspired by the onslaught of overcast days this week, I’ve been diving deep into the dirge. The first selection is a procession of raw, lysergic New Age (or, perhaps more aptly, “dark age”) cuts (truly no pun intended) from Bobby Beausoleil, infamous member of the Manson family, and perpetrator of what would be the first in the Manson-related murders of 1969. While incarcerated in the 1970’s, Beausoleil formed The Magick Powerhouse of Oz band and arranged a score for Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising a perfect sonic amalgam of arthouse and grindhouse inclinations, Beausoleil’s kaleidoscopic score sprawls from medieval waltzes and dreamlike nocturnal synthscapes to lush psychedelia and acid-fried desert rock. While I’d prefer to not give Beausoleil this credit, what makes Lucifer Rising so compelling to me is its perfect distillation of the atrophying countercultural crescendo of the late […]
May 22, 2020
This week’s selection comes from artist/hedonist, Norman Gaille. This is THE classic compendium of old Hollywood scandals, written by child actor turned underground queer film legend and occultist, Kenneth Anger. Perversion is his forte, and this book is without question a necessary addendum to his films. It’s pretty outdated by today’s standards for shock, but it’s still wonderfully trashy, irreverent, sensational, and a lot of times, outright false. What I love is that all of the shit that Anger made up in this book, or rumors that he recounted without checking a single fact, are now ingrained in Hollywood urban legend. That’s a serious legacy, better than any painted masterpiece, sitting in moth balls in a stuffy museum. Read it in one sitting, then give it a place of prominence on the back of your toilet for your friends to […]
May 22, 2020
This movie is one of a kind. For its star, Rock Hudson, and its director, John Frankenheimer, it represents an expansion of risk that goes well beyond what was, at the time, deemed reasonable for two Hollywood establishment super egos. The endeavor is a blend of science fiction, noir and horror that aims beyond the conceptual expectations of those genres. In it, a wealthy banker pays to be “reborn” by an underground identity reconstruction boutique that quietly caters to the miserable, rich. The all expense payed package gets him a fake death (cadaver included), extreme facial reconstruction, in-depth psychiatric evaluation and placement in the new life of his dreams with every detail fully considered. It’s a great premise; so weird and implausible that all is forgiven even as the jowly, sour, fuddy-duddy, played by John Randolf, enters the procedure with […]