Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2019 March 13 • Wednesday

Here's a magazine I never heard of before, called Sofilm. I always like to take a look at newsstands in other countries, for comics or interesting magazines. Since this had Robert Mitchum on the cover, it was an immediate purchase.

Inside is what appears to be a decent feature on Mitchum, with some lesser seen photographs and even a couple of his poems (in English and new French translation).

There's a cute play on words in one of the headers: "Bob et le flambeur", a twist on the title of the famous Melville movie Bob le flambeur.

The magazine is nicely designed and the content looks like it might be rewarding, though of course I don't actually know much French.

There's a feature on the Yellow Vests, an interview with James Caan and a brief editorial that looks like it quickly and unfussily dispatches as silly and wasteful the tedious monstrous "art" thing called DAU.

I mean really, talk about unambitious. Of course the whole thing is on a huge scale but it's really the least challenging thing you could ever decide to do.

You want to get a bunch of money from a Russian billionaire to recreate an oppressive totalitarian environment so you can shoot over 700 hours of abuse and misery and boredom? The DAU guy did it.

But that's easy. This is torture porn on a Mount Rushmore scale. Not good, or new, or well done, or meaningful, just large.

Suppose they'd gone the other way? What if they wanted to spend three years with an immersive cast living on set and in character 24/7 but create the opposite of one of our real world nightmare states?

What if they created a cinematic world in which everybody was taken care of and fulfilled and free to live as they wanted to in a community that was designed to benefit everybody?

That would be a lot harder to pull off, and probably a lot less appealing to most billionaires, considering the lack of sadism and abuse of power.

And even if such a project were only partially successful, it would be dangerous in a way that DAU could never be, by presenting ways in which every society could change for the better.

Instead we just have jumbo-size torture porn and dull misery, some faked, some real, all pointless.

Which reminds me, I have a new modern art piece that's even bigger and longer running than DAU. It's an installation but it's also "found art". It's called The Mall of America. Maybe Brian Eno can make some Muzak for it.