Loveless

Per Will’s post, Team Santa Ana Winds has been busy with the sort of nonsense that reads on these sorts of blogs as uninteresting—budget locking, locations, auditions, rewrites, etc. I don’t feel comfortable talking about any of these things, both because they are boring and I have little to add to the subjects that hasn’t been seen before. When our location (LAX, really) and actors are set, we’ll put up some info and pictures.

Aside from our normal responsibilities, we continue to explore what culture our last weeks here as students in LA can provide. I enjoyed a week of endurance, watching first Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman… at LACMA and then being just destroyed by My Bloody Valentine’s 130+ dB assault at the El Rey a week later. 

Jeanne Dielman… documents, in 3 1/2 hours, 3 days of a single Belgian mother who moonlights as a prostitute. Most of the film takes place in her apartment (the men come to her place when her son is at school) and documents, silently, Ms. Dielman’s mechanical, perfected way of living that is sterile, boring, monotonous, and other adjectives we used to describe robots. After nearly 2 hours of efficient living—and we watch this woman wash dishes, boil potatoes, make coffee, clean tables, all in lengthy takes—something finally goes wrong: the potatoes burn. When Ms. Dielman is washing dishes and puts a dish on the drying rack still covered in suds, our theater gasped collectively. How could she?! It was like Michael sending Fredo out to the lake, except in extreme miniature. The film is fiction, and it does things with time we can never afford to do in 15 minutes—3+ minutes of kneading ground beef might not fly here. In capturing the peculiarities of life, though, Jeanne Dielman… is irrepressible.

My Bloody Valentine was one of the few bands allowed to break the 72-hour Coachella embargo against bands performing in Los Angeles on either end of the festival. After a 17-year hiatus, they returned last year to playing the soul-shaking shows they were apparently famous for in the first place. For their canonical album Loveless, frontman Kevin Shields engaged in all kinds of wacky behavior to get the sound just right—and for the most part, he did, with “swirling” guitars and “dreamy” melodies enveloping the listener in his still-well-constructed pop songs.

This effort seems moot in light of the band’s live show, though. Despite looking like polite pre-middle aged Britons on-stage, the band played at such an impossibly high level of controlled volume that earplugs are a necessity (and still don’t do the trick). Aside from the noise, the band fires a series of strobe lights directly at the audience, making connecting with them visually a physical impossibility if only because your eyes are constantly refreshing themselves. And the band didn’t even look like they were trying.

It was an antagonistic performance, to be sure, but I can’t shake it still. Their songs are too gorgeous, and the movements and changes in them were still audible in the fuzz of the room. They close with “You Made Me Realise,” a non-album track that escalates into 10+ minutes of pounding white noise.

Again, the sound levels were estimated at around 132-135 dB—similar to that of a 747 airplane taking off. And much like that roar is deafening but interesting in its violence, so was this quartet on stage like a 747 firing up indoors. Volume is surprisingly hard to control well, but when sustained (and its audience prepared) it’s as violent as a punch to the gut or a shaking of the shoulders. Will this be in our movie? Eh, hopefully.