Brrrlak!

I have been listening to the all-woman a cappella African group Zap Mama as a kind of holiday music. Also just discovered Shuggie Otis (pictured above) who wrote and performed Strawberry Letter 23 at the age of fifteen. The 1967 new wave film “2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle” is taking me multiple nights to regarde. Ostensibly the action follows a Parisian woman in her day to day routine. She prostitutes herself for extra money. The attitudes of the city towards the Vietnam War (and America) and the uncertain future (in an age of atomic weapons) provide the backdrop as do Paris’ highways, cranes, wreckers, and apartment buildings. The director Jean-Luc Godard lurks beneath the surface of the glimmering pond, whispering…

“What is art? Form becoming style; but the style is the man; therefore art is the humanizing of forms,” and, “There is increasing interaction between images and language. One might say that living in society today is almost like living in a vast comic strip,” and, “If you can’t afford LSD, try colour TV.” Several decades removed, I suggest you try internet.

The woman, Juliette Janson, and her son, Christophe, have conversations like this:

Juliette Janson: “In my dreams I used to feel that I was being sucked into a huge hole. Now I feel I’m being scattered in a thousand pieces. Before, even if it was a slow process, I would wake up all at once. Now I’m afraid there’ll be pieces missing.”

Christophe: “I had a dream last night, you know. I was walking all alone at the edge of a cliff. The path was only wide enough for one person. Suddenly I saw two twins walking toward me. I wondered how they would get past. Suddenly one of the twins went towards the other and they became one person. And then I realized that these two people were North and South Vietnam being united.”

This is the kind of film that I watch with one eye elsewhere, at the ceiling, tracking the meta data as it floats by in the technicolor stream. Its not a warm swimming pool. The only way in is to jump. In the disorientating frigidity one sees a city licking its fur, rebuilding, and the form of the water freezes into ice.

“All I remember is it happened. Maybe it’s not important. Maybe it was when I was with the guy from the metro going to the hotel. I had a funny feeling. I thought about it all day. The feeling of my ties to the world. Suddenly I felt I was the world and the world was me. It would take pages and pages to describe it. Volumes and volumes. A landscape is like a face. We’re tempted to say, ‘I just see a face with a certain expression.’ But that doesn’t mean its an extraordinary expression nor that you’ll try to describe it. We may feel like saying that its this or that. ‘She looks like Chekhov’s Natasha.’ ‘Or the sister of Flaherty’s Nanook.’ But you’d be right to say that you can’t describe that with words. Still, it seems to me that the expression on my face must mean something. Something that stands out from the general design. I mean from the sort of form outlined. Its as if you could say that this face has a certain expression. And then… And then? Actually, its this one. For instance… exhaustion.”

In a few days my sister and I will brave the new winter and the highest recorded wind speeds on Earth, to visit Agiocochook, the “home of the Great Spirit.”