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Exhuma - 2024, S Korean
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 417
I finished watching this today. A South Korean horror film about a Geomancer (Feng Sui) and Shaman (*Local Equivalent) who are engaged to remove a longstanding hereditary curse against a Korean who now resides in the US and is trying to save his son.
And so digging into the past the first unearth one skeleton, then another, and another, and every skeleton they unearth bringing them to an even more insoluble - or trying - passage, first a ghost, then a "spirit", and from here ...
Well done, and interesting (to me) if only for the rites and superstitions of the South Koreans, their links to "Primitive Superstition" and still prevalent beliefs in ghosts, demons, spirits, worthwhile, not great, but curious. I don't know how many ghosts, spirits, demons there are, in Nelson, in the Valley, but they are surely outnumbered by the number of Geomancers and Shamans we have, and surely some of them are competent. We'll be seeing soon enough...
The Place of Dead Roads - William S Burroughs
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 340
He violates every Taboo, and I should too, and while I'm not opposed to pornography (literary, otherwise) he does push my buttons a bit. First of all, the flavour, not mine exactly. And second of all, while I appreciate his transgressive approach I prefer Henry Miller - wherein he only goes so far, enough to generate social outrage, but then drops it and moves it on in other directions. Burroughs, well, he's obsessed.
But this - as Burroughs himself observes - is the point - to so habituate us to what is taboo, forbidden, that it becomes the new normal. And maybe he was warning us, only - well, look at the world, we all missed the point.
It took me a while to get his humour, interspersed as it was with his gruelling pornography and philosophy, Jokes like “Bumsell”, the French Aristocrat, a hundred others, his time-jumping, the references to “Bring out your dead” - Python, or Carlos Castaneda, juxtaposing Beau Brummel and Somerset Maugham, referencing “Psychic discoveries behind the Iron Curtain”, following a narrative that jumps freely and without warning between countries and and characters and times and points of view can be a bit difficult. He's formidably well read, informed by and given the initial chapter that somehow put me in a different time and setting, Kim Carsons in the Wild West, I’m stuck, confused, but that was his intention, by design, high comedy when you can bypass the violent imagery, and I forget that for a time we were contemporaries, he died in 1997, damn, I could have probably found him in Tangiers when I visited and paid my respects, although, being younger and considerably more handsome probably would have had my admiration misconstrued, his obsession with Centipedes, young admirers, heroin...
I'm reading him in the library, coming to the lurid bits, feels a bit like surfing pornography on a screen where everyone can see, so it has to wait until I’m home, I want no protesting that “it’s not to my taste”, yet despite all this he's a genius that reminds me of Thomas Pynchon, he's inspiring me, referencing countless rabbits that I waste far too much time pursuing...
His ideas, brilliant, he's - despite being a junkie - considerably more alert, attuned, than I am (Heroin VS Alcohol, Heroin +10).
And I have to remember that all this knowledge was hard-won through book learning, watching films, television, no internet then, and I can appreciate how few references I’m probably getting, how my appreciation only sees but a portion of the whole man, and I'm in awe.
So, a long read, although when I got a few pages in it flew quicker, and while I'm reading the books painfully out of order I'll come again to them, in order next time, and try and make sense of his philosophy, admirable and demanding a bit more of my attention than I have to spare...
Flow - 2024
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 289
This, on the list, although in discussion with the boy I rather failed: "It's an animated Latvian film about a cat trapped in a Flood".
He's impressed by the diversity of my cinematic tastes. Now of course, no spoilers, you can watch the trailer here:
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZccxuj2RY
If you were inspired to watch it you will probably enjoy it. The animation, great, the haunting presence and reminders of humanity, the implied spirituality and evolution of the creatures the Cat encounters, the personalities of said creatures (well depicted, without being too anthropomorphic, 'Disneyfied'), the questions it suggests - or raises - are curious.
So, despite being a little off my beaten track it was good and "off my beaten track" was rather the point.
The Midnight Prospector
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Other
- Hits: 432
Winter passes and all my prospecting is done on YouTube.
A couple months yet before I have my jeep, before the weather is good enough to get out and about.
So I've found a new channel, I'll call it "The Midnight Prospector", because he's out looking for pegmatites in various counties in Colorado, and while he's finding stuff (usually feldspar and smoky quartz crystals) it's never "Great" and never in quantity enough to pay for the expedition. But he's got a "method" to his madness, which he charts out, shows how he's prospecting the veins, how he's looking for the miarolitic cavities, how he's determining whether he's getting closer (to fuck-all, generally) or farther away...
Anyways, I watch them. They're OK, and at least he's finding - "discovering" - stuff, not great stuff, but stuff.
It's a new take on how I should be working the field.
The "Midnight" comes in because for some dumb-ass reason he overstays his time on the mountain and half of his prospecting is done in the dark, by headlamp, before he heads back to camp. Not in just one video, but several. Which is such an inane thing, but, there you have it, such is the age we live in...
3 months. I check for jeeps daily on YouTube, work out my magical financing, 3 months and I'm up the mountain, finding my own shit, and there's shit to be found, mark my words...
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