Ian McKellen and The Fleshtones - Sonnet XX

Online readings are all the rage right now. Musician are giving concerts online, poets are recording their performances, live book readings pop up here and there. The future is here. I was dreaming about it for years.

Things went so far that even Sir Patrick Stewart is reading Shakespeare's sonnets on Instagram.

But it is not what this post is about. Patrick Stewart is great at performing Shakespeare's sonnets, no argument here, but he can't hold a candle ещ other esteemed Shakespearean actor - Ian McKellen.

The story goes. Back in 1987 Andy Warhol had a show on MTV. It was aptly titled "Fifteen Minutes" and it was all about capturing zeitgeist the hard way. One of the episodes featuring the band Fleshtones. They were gearing for a tour to support their new album, so a segment on a Warhol show was just what they needed. Eventually, they taped two segments for the show.


One segment was a glorified lip-sync of their bulldozer lead single  "Return of the Leather Kings."



The other segment featured a band jamming in the background while Ian McKellen performs a Shakespeare's sonnet 20 while wearing the most unfashionable jacket ever as if he was Serge Gainsbourg. 




McKellen performs the sonnet with so much subtle swagger and it gels so well with the music - you instantly want them to record an entire album like that. Just because it is so simple and yet so cool. Things just can't get any better.

The resulting track was later released on the "Fleshtones Present: The Big Bang Theory - Time Bomb!" compilation. The credits went like that: Zaremba / Milhizer / Spaeth / Warren / Streng / Shakespeare. 

Helen Zaltzman's "nmiigea" aka John Lennon's "Imagine" in reverse alphabetical order

Check out this interesting take on John Lennon's Imagine by Helen Zaltzman. "nmiigea" is a reinterpretation of the song with the lyrics arranged in reverse alphabetical order. Why? To "quell anxiety and stress and sleeplessness". The whole thing is presented in the form of an aspirational lyric read-out with soothing guitar muzak in the background.

"nmiigea" is a total conversion of the source material, the song is hijacked and reconfigured into something else to the point of losing any semblance of its original form. Reverse alphabetical order approach completely eviscerates the narrative of the song and consequently evaporates any themes it was transmitting. Instead you get a roundabout incantation of the words devoid of prior coherence. The mental connection to the source material provides space to think about the relativity of the matters.

Some words are repeated over and over, the others only happen once or twice. Either way, there is a gaping chasm in the midst. You know what it is and ahe words are there and they are spoken but they don't come together as they should.

One way of perceiving the piece is by concentrating on the sound of the word. It works from my perspective/ Since english is my second language i'm to able to distance myself enough to take the spoken words as sounds first and words second (makes me rather tolerant to silly lyrics).

The other viable option to let the stream of words to go in and form incidental images, narratives, phrases as you perceive it. The resulting permutation may go places or stomp around the source material - depending on your mood.

As it is - "nmiigea" is an interesting rumination on the way words bear meanings and how these meanings transform in the context and form then narrative. It is an exercise in excising the thick of it. What if there is no apparent context, no narrative to hold it together. What does it mean then?

Cyberpunk poems at X-Peri

Great news! Several of my cyberpunk poems from The Songs of the Great Tits got published on X-Peri blog.

https://x-peri.blogspot.com/2020/03/volodymyr-bilyk-excerpts-from-songs-of.html

Reassessing Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man (2000)

The Invisible Man is a bulletproof concept. On the one hand, it is pure gimmickry. On the other hand, the set-up provides enough room to explore the human condition and psychology of the individual with an unfair advantage over the rest of the world. The 1933 adaptation is just that - if you are going to make a film about an invisible man - this is the way you can do it - it is equally a commercial spectacle and intricate character drama.

The subsequent adaptations didn't exactly cleared the bar at the drama department but offered more of Invisibility Mayhem of all flavors and sometimes with Chevy Chase making Jeff Goldblum impression.

This year is marked by another Invisible Man adaptation directed by modern horror master Leigh Whannell. After a couple of months of casually avoiding watching the new adaptation of H.G. Wells' Invisible Man - I finally did it... and it was ok.

Invisible Man 2020 is not really a movie about The Invisible Man, it is more of an abusive relationship drama with a mystery peppered in, but as a gimmick, the invisible man works for the benefit of the story. It makes it different, which already an accomplishment. At least it is unusual to add all the invisible man shenanigans to the relationship drama. But it doesn't add much to the story. It is a cog in the plot, which is a damn shame because this concept deserves better than this.

So why not revisit the other Invisible Man movie that came twenty years ago and was actually about the Invisible Man?

Pictures from Exhibition: Kodifikaciju Maksla

My works were presented at the exhibition title Kodifikaciju Maksla (translates as Codification of Arts) curated by Gundega Strautmane. The exhibition took place at Liepājas Latviešu biedrības nams in Liepaja, Latvia.

The central theme of the exhibition is codification of language and its artistic exploration and application. The duration of the exhibition is March 4-30. March 6 was marked by the discussion on the subject matter.

My contribution to the exhibition was pure luck. I've been posting various visual interpretations of Roadrage poems on Facebook groups once in a while and one of them caught Gundega Strautmane's attention. We started to talk about it and she asked me whether i can provide her with information for her scientific work about artistic codification of language. It was an honor to me so i gladly gave everything she needed.

Some time later she was asked me to take part in the exhibition and here we are. I gotta thank her for giving me a reason to write down scattered musings about those pieces. Not sure i would've done it otherwise.

So - I've got four different series featured on the show. But before showing photos, i would like to explain what this whole thing is about.

Tom Cruise's Savagest Moment - Lucio Fulci's Aenigma 1989

Tom Cruise is one of the few modern Hollywood actors who channels the spirits of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. His increasingly elaborate setpieces rely less on drama on more on cinematic techniques and physical prowess - they awe, something Fairbanks and Flynn were going for too. Unlike folks like Dwayne Johnson, Cruise manages to remain somewhat relatable and plausible in his stunts. And these long sentences are here to more or less kick things off to something completely different.



This clip is from the Lucio Fulci 1989 flick titled Aenigma. It is a splatter schlock fest about ghosts and death and sleaze from the master past his prime and up his own ass. But it doesn't really matter because this movie features Tom Cruise. Kinda. In fact, Aenigma features what is probably the savagest moment that ever featured Tom Cruise. Or if being exact, Tom Cruise's image.

The episode depicts a woman climbing on a window. She is trying to figure out who is calling her name and where the sound is coming from. She looks around standing windowsill, the voice comes from the back, she turns around and looks at the wall with Tom Cruise 1986 Top Gun publicity still.

The voice says "Kim! Kim! I'm waiting for you". And then the ravaged ghoul ghost appears, the woman is engulfed in horror, shrieks and falls off the window down on the ground to her death.

At the same time, the ghost casually disappears. We are left to gaze at Tom Cruise for another moment. This whole thing doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And it is good. I like how random it is. It just stays with you as a nugget of nonplus.

Madonna - Justify My Love - Lenny Kravits backing vocals only

Sometimes an exclusion of one of the central elements of the song may result in its drastic transformation. To the point the song turns itself inside out and becomes something else - something more creative.

Such is the case with Madonna's "Justify My Love".



The original version of Justify My Love bears a distinction of Madonna trying out new things with mixed results. She teamed with Lenny Kravitz who definitely did not lifted the drumbeat from Public Enemy and definitely did not borrowed the rest of the song from Ingrid Chavez. One of the most distinct features of the song was that Madonna did that annoying whisper sprachtgesang also known as "breathy spoken passages" filled with pretentious thoughts about love, passion, sex, dedication, devotion and so on. The delivery is fine, but the content is so banal and narrow-minded - it brings the song down.  

This particular version makes one crucial change that throws the song off the cliff into the realm of outside. It excludes Madonna's vocals and pushes to the foreground Lenny Kravitz' unfiltered backing vocals. Simple, yet effective change that flips the balance of the song and drastically improves it.

Now it is as if Jandek embraced his Daniel Johnston side while channeling the hallowed wholesomeness of DNA and Half Japanese. Also, in this form, Justify My Love is probably the second best thing Lenny Kravitz ever was a part of. (First will always be Neil Cicierega's Fly Away Lyrics, you just can't top that one).

It is fascinating how much difference such change can make. The exclusion of lead vocals turns the song from a pseudo trip hop wannabe steaming sensual sex jam into a sloppy, clumsy, awkward, lame outsider pop song. What is interesting is that it is not detrimental to the listening experience. By leaving the central part, the vocals, the song somehow just recalibrates itself and stays more or less intact. It is mostly the same and yet it is a completely different song.

Instead of a song that tries too hard for its own good, there is a song that just can't really express what it is trying to say. The author just lacks the verbal instruments of expression to make it not even comprehensible but plain eligible. But he persistently tries to do something with what's he's got in hopes that it will eventually work out.

That creates an intrigue. On the one hand, you know what this song is about, you are familiar with the original version. On the other hand, because of the lead vocals missing, the narrative changes. You don't have that gently crass stream of consciousness monologue ploughing through your ears - you have a man indistinctly mumbling, moaning over the steady backbeat and carcass of melody.

This way the song is basically a musical recreation of unintelligible, unknowable "screaming into the void". It is pointless in of itself but it is distinct in its pointlessness. You just need to experience that thing through and through and probably contemplate about it for a moment or so.