Fred Spencer and the Great Work

 

 

 I never mentioned Hockney on here before yesterday, but I've mentioned Fred Spencer, with good reason. He used the internet as I feel it should be used, broadcasting hope, sharing his sadnesses, and living without embarassment. I'm glad he got back together with Sharon, as evinced in the video above, even if she's not interested in taking trips, and he definitely is. Of course he is. He's a pioneer. One of the first wave of YouTube celebrities.

  Long after the video that made them both famous, Fred kept proving content creation wasn't just a job for him, but a calling. For over a decade he used this new platform to make whatever he wanted, whether it was Music Videos...

 

 Satire...

 

 

 Or whatever this is...

 

 

 

 And the initial attraction of his output for me, obviously, was that so much of it was bafflingly bad. Or baffling and bad. Or bad and baffling and charming. And raw. Laziness was no impediment to his creativity, clearly. Fred would just throw the doors open and wait for poetry to happen – or to risk happening but then get derailed by him thinking about sex, then stopping thinking about sex but then thinking about volcanoes, as in the video below, which generates an emotion I have no name for.

 

 

 Once relegated to life aboard the mobile home "Starship Betty" however,  after his initial split from Sharon, he started to document a real life and, as I've written here before, I became genuinely engaged by and grateful for the candour of those unsponsored video diaires. I was sad to hear when things with Sheryl Ann hadn't worked out...

 

 

 And when I shared my condolences in the comments, Fred was generous enough to reply. Then, a decade later, once things seemed happily patched up with Sharon, my comment received a second reply...

 

 

 And that's how I learnt Fred Spencer had pasta way. 

 I couldn't find any confirmation of his death online, but that only made me realise how small a digital footprint he left outside of his own channel. 

 I've put off writing this for over a year – possibly because I've had, you know, as I'm sure a lot of us have, actual people I deeply love pass on in that year – but I knew I wanted some part of the internet to commemorate the passing of this particular Fred Spencer. And so here it is. He always kept things personal, and kind, and weird, and I hope his work stays up forever, because I honestly think it epitomises a kind of Internet before the fall, a pole star of the lived experience shared fearlessly, and a paradise we can return to whenever we like. In spite of all the algorithms trying to turn us into Hamlet, this invention is still ours, to do with whatever we like, for as long as we can pay attention to each other. Thank you. Where you've gone, I don't know, hope it's warm and sunny. Here's David Lynch.

 

Hat Hat Bang Bang

 

In which I belatedly honour THE film of 2023...

 

 (A placeholder's good for more than one day, right?)

 The summer evening I saw "Oppenheimer" I remember I raced hime to get to work on a version of this, inspired perhaps by Nolan's ruthless deployment of the formula: Man plus Hat times Cinema equals Importance. But I couldn't find an untreated soundtrack to the trailer I wanted to mix into it, and it wasn't really synching, and so I moved on. For the rest of the year however I continued to ponder just what that script had meant when targets other than Hiroshima were being dismissed by those men sat round the table as "too small". It was just a throwaway line, but how can a civilan target be "too small"? Noone ever explained that. This was well before thousands more non-combatants would be bombed to death with America's blessing in the Autumn. Anyway, cut to the end of year and I had another look at the edit, and decided it didn't really matter that it was shit; no less effort had gone into it than the idea deserved.

 

 

 

Also for your consideration: "There are some things you can't film" Yoshishige Yoshida

 

 And working on the mash-up further wouldn't stop anyone actually thinking that one film was a cinematic milestone and the other a risible vanity project, but I was still bugged I couldn't get an untreated soundtrack. Then, tonight, someone on F*c*b**k – already having gone into some length about how much they loathed the charmless Great Man narrative of "Maestro" – started watching "Oppenheimer" for the first time, so I decided to dust this off and join in, and here it is. Tone is tone, isn't it? Where did Michael Flatley go so wrong? Nowhere.

 

And: "When the horizon is at the top, it's interesting" David Lynch (as John Ford)

Black Lagoon. Black Lodge. Whatever.

 Most images of Millicent Patrick online show her cradling the head of the creature she designed (although she wouldn't be fully credited for thirty years) and the most viewed of these is cropped and tilted so it looks like the two are dating...

 Before

 

 After

... which is why I've opened this post with a publicity still of Patrick actually designing, but that's not really what I've come here to talk about.

 I'm still in France. Dad screened 1954's "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" for me a couple of nights back (we watched "The Shape of Water" the following night and "The Lighthouse" the day before, so this year's Christmas viewing has been a triple-bill of mer-person erotica). I'd never seen it before, and even though I'm already a fanatic for those early Universal Horrors, it was a smarter film than I'd been expecting, not least in its use of 3D. Here's a still from the opening scene - if you can't make out what it is, it's because you're not seeing it in enough dimensions...

 That's a claw reaching out of the screen. Not the jump scare you might expect, but the fossilised hand of the creature's primordial ancestor, completely still. Staring at this through my 3D specs I imagined audiences of the fifties likewise watching it hang in front of their faces, waiting for the gigantic thing to flinch. Which it doesn't. Because it can't. It's dead. It's the past. But it might... and it's always been there and that's what's scary, although only in 3D. Something I love about Universal's best monster movies is how impossible it is to read too much into their goofy iconography, how easily they carry out their duties to the mythic. This particular creature for example was generated in an atomic explosion far larger than the norm, depicted in this second still from the movie's prologue. Again it doesn't impress nearly as much in 2D...

... but what you're actually looking at is the moment before the Big Bang (underscored by the first verse of Genesis), a hell of thing to throw in an audience's face on a first date. Claws emerging from the darkness are a staple of horror movies from at least "The Cat and the Canary" onwards, but to have that claw emerge not from a false bookcase but from the same waters that produced the rest of us provided a very different context. Basically this film had me at "In The Beginning." I'd like to write more about those old Universals; I picked up a lot of touchingly remastered classics on the Finnetour. You can see for yourself the opening scene zoom all the way in from bang to claw on youtube here but you really need 3D to fully appreciate what was attempted, as I said. I wonder if David Lynch was a fan...

The Cowboy and the Frenchman (David Lynch, 1988, "Whut the Hell...?")

 

 Well yee-hah! Back in 1988, it turns out that stone-deaf David Lynch – THE great artist of unsettling alien hospitality – decided to make a film from the HOST's point of view for once, a gorgeous little project for... 

 Actually, before I go on, if this sounds like your kind of thing and you've half an hour to spare, then watch it here first. Very much not the kind of thing Lynch would make nowadays, but SO MUCH the kind of thing he made back then, it's funny to see just how starkly his mood has changed (his stuff's still fun, but not nearly so silly. This actually makes quite a nice companion piece to "Tomatoes Another Day", now I think of it.) 

 And no, all I was going to say before I cut myself off was that this piece was actually commissioned by a French television station for a season "The French as seen by..." And the reason I cut myself off was that I only learnt this fact after I'd watched the piece and can't be sure I'd have enjoyed it as much if I'd known before. 

 Conversely though... if I hadn't known beforehand that it was directed by David Lynch I might not have enjoyed it AS MUCH. I don't think I was cutting the film more slack, I just think that, this way round, I was seeing more in it. More than if I'd known it was a film made specifically for an audience with English as a second language in order to address views on the French (which it beautifully doesn't do anyway). Authorship though, hm...

 

Another point of reference for Money's machine now I think of it

Happiness: An Apology

It turns out that contrary to my twitchy, unproofed posting last night there may indeed be such a thing as tender sadness... So behold (and in memoriam) the "Smokers' Corridor" at 6:00pm, June 30th, 2006:

 

Now this passage through which I pass into work each morning must be known simply as "the Corridor". And that's that. The end.

At work today they put me in the "Bubble."
It is a closet-like, triangular room with a two-way mirror that enables you - by the depression of a foot-pedal accompanied by shrill, pre-recorded screaming - to superimpose your own face onto the reflected faces of punters lost in the Mirror Maze adjacent. Scarily. Like a film by David Lynch in fact, if you found the right face. The Bubble's a little claustrophobic though, I think because of the shape more than the size. Rooms shouldn't be triangular.

If prison cells were triangular... spacious but still triangular, still a shape that no room in which you are to spend a great deal of time normally comes in... would it be more difficult to become institutionalized? - I just thought: You can't smoke in prison anymore. Or was that the case anyway?

And so much for the Smoking Ban deadline I had set myself. I was meant to have finished my radio play about Frida Kahlo. I haven't even started it. Nobody knows who she is.

And so much for setting fire to myself in Parliament Square in protest... I could probably have managed the dousing, but would never have struck the match. Imagine standing there, defeated and stinking of fuel. And imagine the journey home, desperately trying to remember the least flammable route.

Here's that picture closer up:

good grief

Here, for all broadbanders, is a clue to the subject of today's post:

Yes, it is of course David Lynch's "Inland Empire", which I saw last night at the new NFT Studio, a screen in a large box in the middle of a bar that had once served as a mock-up of a Hollywood Sound Stage for the now extinct Museum Of the Moving Image. Apt.
 

When watching something very bad and long (like the Star Wars Christmas Special, say, or Ray Dennis Steckler's "Rat Pfink a Boo Boo") there will, if you are lucky, come a point where the part of your brain entrusted with its host-being's self-preservation effectively gets its coat and crawls out of your ear, leaving you all of a sudden blissfully unsusceptible to such hectoring priorities as consequence, intention or the passage of time (to feel its full effects therefore, it is vital to abstain from popcorn, or indeed anything that might run out and recall you rudely to your place in time and space.) It is this euphoric state that is the true attraction of "Trash". Not the kick of finding something cheap to laugh at. And thankfully, there are now boffins like Lynch (well, one boffin like Lynch: Lynch) who have managed to distill and refine this so-bad-it's-good high into something far more - like the critics are saying - "pure".

Now I don't like that word - I think purity in art is a pretty spurious notion. But it's the first word that comes to mind when describing the attraction of something done badly but with heart (which is absolutely not what "Inland Empire" is… It is peerlessly surefooted. It is magnificent. That is my point. I'm just saying it evolved out of Trash, it didn't Adam and Eve itself.) Maybe when critics talk about "purity" they actually mean novelty. They are simply seeing something untainted by any resemblance to anything seen previously. And while "Inland Empire" is strung with all the old Lynch favourites - the sudden appearance of a scary face... the inexplicably happy prostitutes... the confused and terrified witness to something confusing and terrifying... the brutal, arbitrary shifts in Hollywood lifestyle... the phobia of having a stranger strike up a conversation with you - all these old tropes are executed more convincingly, and indeed less camply, than Lynch has ever managed before. And so the film is a novelty. A sublime novelty. A sublime novelty with, I'd like to note, a candid understanding of sadness. And a sadness that manages to be pervasive without ever lapsing into tenderness.

Sadness isn't tender. It is a polluter. Sadness is madness. It is absolutely the same thing as madness. Sadness is madness.

So here, finally, is the beautiful and talented Danny Schlesinger (Homer Simpson in the most seen of the many real-life Simpsons virals) who I saw the three nights ago in The Lounge, taming wild balloons.