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.

Eye Dances

Disclaimer: This piece is based on a recollection of a news story from the early 00s that I've read as a kid. The funny thing is - now I can't find any verifiable information about this initiative. Zhytomyr newspapers never were into the digitization of their archives, and since I vaguely recall that it was somewhere around 2002-03 - even if I could find the source - it would have been lost to time at this point almost for sure. So it is basically a myth. Or a simulacrum, an attempt to make sense of a distant memory.

But even if it is made up - the idea is still worth thinking about for a bit. That's why I've tried to conjure it back into existence.

***
2000s were rough for the Ukrainian medical system. By then, it was still deep in the soviet paradigm, but the world around it was different, and so it was barely operating at the required level. Money and resources were always a problem. There were not enough of both. Everyone was overworked and underpaid. So there were a lot of volunteers who tried their best to make a difference.

One such group was dealing with various partially or entirely paralyzed patients in Zhytomyr City Hospital. The problem was that those patients were bored and had barely any means of passing the time in-between the procedures, which wasn't very good for their morale. What can be worse than a depressed, paralyzed person? The volunteers were there to offer moral support and some routine care.

One way or another, it all came to one particularly oddball initiative.

The idea was to make patients experience fun and the world around by moving eyes in specific patterns. It was something like eye dances. I assume that it was a part of some routine to keep eye muscles from atrophy. Albeit embellished with some sleek conceptual art presentation.

Its goal was to engage paralyzed patients who could only move their eyes. By moving them in a particular way - it would be as if they interacted with the world, digested information differently. So it would not be as sad for them to be in the permanent lockout of the world due to their unfortunate condition.

The whole thing's presentation was like an old school Fluxus score. There were randomized patterns of dots and lines with directional arrows. The sheets were probably around A4 or A5 format so that there would be quite a pattern.

One could follow it through, probably get tired by doing it and go on contemplating the experience. From this point of view - it looks like some exercise.

What is left unknowable is how it was "received" by the target audience. Or even - was it even possible to understand whether or not this thing was actually useful? For me, the whole thing seems like a huge stretch, and I doubt it was genuinely helpful. It is hard to believe that those patients were into such stuff.

I think it was one of the many ideas that were tried once or twice and then abandoned without a second thought. It is just that this particular thing was written about, and by coincidence, I happened to read it back then. Now, reading about AvantAppalachia disabled issue - the association brought it back.

Bil Sabab's got a brand new book - Da Eel (Viktlosheten Press, 2020)

I've got a new release out at Viktlosheten Press. It is called Da Eel and it is what i would like to call "bringing future back into poetry". That's a bold statement, but there is no other way to put. I mean - why even bother doing something if you don't have an ambition of making a difference?

So, what this thing is about.

Here's how my original pitch looked like:

• Da Eel is a series of abstract visual poems based on barcodes and typographic slabs.
• The idea is to create inhuman, machine-like poetry.
• The images are inspired and partially made out of Peter Saville's poster for New Order Movement.
• The original image was glitched, stretched out and squished. 
• The bits of the glitched images provided raw materials that were later edited into the presented pieces. These bits were augmented with other data visualization images like frequency heatmaps and culled into final pieces.

Later on, i wrote this:

• This series is an attempt at finding poetry elsewhere, in the poetic text transformed beyond comprehension.
• These pieces were made out of frequency heatmaps of various documents combined wth the Peter Saville visual aesthetic. 
• It an amalgamation of data visualization, enigma of inca quipu writing and the utility of industrial design. 
• It uses aesthetic qualities of the aforementioned to forge something else.

Not that hard to get around. 

The whole project took place during a tumultuous period of late April to early May of 2019. At that time i was either worried about my employment prospects or being really tired of being where i was. After 4 years spent on Roadrage - i wanted to go back to visual poetry and explore its nether reaches. Something i wasn't seeing often on vispo blogs. 

I had this thing bumbling in my head over and over again - Merab Mamardashvili's statement that there's no need to look for the philosophy in a philosophic texts - because there's none of it in them. 

So i started to look elsewhere.

The Peter Saville connection is a stretch. I was remixing his stuff back then and the whole thing started as straightforward image glitching. But as it turned out - you can't really remix the hell out of the thing by simply pulling the toggles of the image editor back and forth. It is fun but no cigar. If you really wanted to make something profound - you need to take it apart and bash bit by bit. 

But Saville provided me with the right frequency. That mess of glitches gradually turned into a blueprint. The series move away from putting together some fancy geometric shapes - now it was more or less an assumption of how machine's fairy tale book would have looked like if it went to print for some reason. That's what really kickstarted the series.

The process resembled putting together magic spells. I've figured out some sort of basic structure and started combining different elements as if it was a sentence. It was like a chant of data being captured in a moment. Something decidedly non-poetic. Exactly what i needed.

A couple of weeks later i had enough pieces for publication and that's where Viktlosheten folks entered the picture. We had a great time turning the series into a print release. 

The rest and the book you can order here. 

Vladimir Nabokov - "The Original of Laura" Index Card Reverso X's

Back in 2010 i was tasked with writing a review for then-recently published "The Original of Laura" aka unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It was a throwaway review for entertainment mag. Some context plus basic retelling of the plot. The book had a lot of buzz. Because of that it was deemed as viable for consumer review for the target audience - Zhytomyr's bohemians.

The book was terrible, mostly because it was just a jumbled mess of bits and pieces that were yet to come into any cohesion. It was raw, rough and bloody. Far from anything you can even remotely recommend or promote. You could see all of the Nabokov's style signatures but none of the grace and pace. The other problem with this book was that you can't really review it in the constraints of a 500 word piece. If you do it straight - give some context, retell the plot, recommend, not recommend, etc - it just wouldn't work because that way the book resembles a pretentious romance novel. Which it is not because it is not even there.