The Melancholic Death of the White Rabbit: Chapter 4

Lying underneath the freeway and cradling the dusty shores of the bay is a stone of unusual powers. Submerged in buzzing fumes and caked in greasy feces is a stone beaten by the winds of time and mutated by humankind’s fists. A stone unlike other stones. A stone that speaks voluminous stories about an unfinished future yet imagined. A future anticipated only in the unconscious memories of a dream’s shadowy characters. A future yet crafted. The hardness of the stone still unformed, almost soft. An unrecognizable future still waiting to pave its way into the gut of our fragile species.

It is true that we no longer live in the ancient age where a human might be transformed into a pillar of salt at the instant of a wrong turn. Nor are we born into a mystical age where an omniscient being speaks the guiding, absolute Truth by way of burning bushes. We do not even live in the majestic epoch when feeble heroes (David) overcame enormous villains (Goliath). But a delicate spark of such ancient mysticism lingers in the darkest fog puddling over our melancholic modernity. We still live in a time where things breathe the puzzled allegory of prophecy. And we must not neglect these signs! Yes, we must engage in meticulous exploration. The future calls on us to practice refined exegesis of the riddles scribed onto nature’s wrinkled skin. Belshazzar ignored the writing on the wall, “numbered, weighed, divided” gleamed the symbols before the fall of Babylon.


An imprinted face of the killer stares back at us in globular strokes of white paint. And what a mysterious beast of unimaginable disfigurement! Or is it supernatural origin? His spiked skull adorns two hooked horns reminiscent of Michelangelo’s horrific Moses. An ovular beak clad with forests of teeth beams sardonically. The empty eyes spin in endless cyphers. His skull is curved in the skeletal shape of a scream or a Faustian bird.

Or, the image strangely resembles the white rabbit in demonic form. Its face is melted to the rough bone and ears charred to tree stumps of cartilage. Burnt fur settles into the recesses of the rocks among gray pebbles and plastic needles. I cannot make out the scribble of yellow paint framing the bottom arc of the teeth. Words or mere ornamentation? A signature or a title? A prophecy or an accident? The return of Belshazzar’s mistake?

I cannot make out whether its a portrait of the murderer or the murdered. Did the white rabbit paint the killer’s image in aid of our detective pursuits? Or, did he in his last moments wish to once and for all imprint his own visage in a rocky eternity upon the melting shores of the freeway?

If you were chased by your killer and knew you would not survive, what would you do? Imagine. In your last moments would you fill your heart with redemption, scribbling anxiously the portrait of your killer on nature’s palette? A just being will see the signs and avenge such unfairness of your death you reassure yourself! Your pen grows steady and you gather strength in the thought of such tales of justice and balance. Or in those last moments would you etch yourself onto the solidness of a stone that would outlast your rotting corpse? A last shadow by which others may remember you. Paint the tribute to such an astounding life on the elderly palm of this crumbled mountainside! Pray to the drenched sands of Narcissus for your future my white rabbit! A vengeance, a memory, a story told--your destiny is finitely returned.

The Melancholic Death of the White Rabbit: Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Guider to distant regions of the earth and discloser of worlds of infinite possibility, how your death renders me forlorn! A death so melancholic that we do not yet realize the extent of your passing. The wretchedness of your threaded corpse--impaled on the sliver end of a lone support beam--still requires time to be seen and felt. Our bodies lug forward listlessly in your wake, driven by a mechanical habit heavy with rust rather than the joyful spirit of volition.

Was it the Madman who guarded the entrance to the belly of the freeway who caught you in a moment of indecision? Perhaps the whooshing noise of this demonic land under the concrete behemoth freeway startled you, or the sporadic spouting from the steamy sewage pipe slowed your foot. Or, did the Madman manufacture a trap, designing it from strewn shopping cart pieces and rubber tires, powering the engine with stolen electricity from the hidden underpass wires?

It must have been the fastidious Troll! Have you heard of that wide-eyed Troll who patrols the entrance to thresholds? He planted a garden rich in engineered seeds, watered his crop with guzzling waste, and cultivated roses in the filth of it all--was it he who offered the rabbit to his gods? Was it this robber of imagination who required a sacrifice to construct his gravely altar honoring the specters of the forgotten past? Did he wish to strike vengeance and fear in the hearts of all who could not believe his previous mythological predictions? All who laughed carelessly in his face and spat at his boots? And what will become of us now, the bearers of dead white rabbits and compelled believers in porcelain gods? By what creative powers might we invent a destiny still unwritten and a future worth living? By what means will we gather a courage never before demanded for humankind?

Oh, what dissemination I trick myself into believing! If the white rabbit is dead then only we could have killed the beast. Yes, you and I--we are his murderers! The troll has built a tomb for his lord in this illuminated garden of excrement. And he has forgotten his own graveyard, leaving its nurturing to the deadening drone of the cars on the freeway and the fleeting pounding of the trains that come and go like clockwork. The open toothed sepulcher takes nourishment in the sewage spilled forth from the city's most dreadful underground arteries. And it bathes in the shit, the dirtied plastic, the oily purple waters of the bay's shore.

But how did we do this? How could we pollute the entire sea with our excrement? Who gave us the rag to muddy the the skies? What were we doing when we chained the stars to the earth? Where is it moving now? Forward, forward, endlessly forward? Towards mass produced horizons? Is there any other direction? Are we not straying even through an infinitely organized nothing? Do we not feel the horrendous grumble of heavy space? Has it not become hotter? Is night not continually closing in on us? Do we need not yet feel the divine composition of the white rabbit? White rabbits, too, decompose. Springs of inspiration may be drank up and pissed out.

Yes, the white rabbit is dead. The white rabbit remains dead. And only we could have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, us most pathetic murderers of all murderers? What was most adventurous and outstanding of all the world has yet seen has bled to death under our waste: who will wash the blood from our hands? What unadulterated water is there left for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games could we ever invent anymore? Is not the despair of this deed too hopeless even for us? Must we ourselves not become white rabbits to even appear worthy of it?

Upon the horizon of the junkyard docks, a makeshift, stuffed white rabbit bobs in the blinding skylight. It sways in a dissonant percussive rhythm like the chopping of a sail's broken mast in the shifting winds.

Hybrid Worlds - Where Animation and Live Action Meet

The employment of animation in live action film introduces a rupture of evident artifice to the screen. Film typically relies on a disseminated form of presentation, divulging the viewer as voyeur into an apparent reality through the perspectival boundaries of the camera lens and hidden editing of scenes. What is left for the viewer is an experience that makes invisible the creative process and crafted architecture of the work. By contrast, animation produces the opposite effect, displaying in its very appearance the constructed and imaginative character of the visual art.

The Surrealist Belgian painter, Rene Magritte, is perhaps the most famous for taking up the aesthetic thematic of the deceptive character of visual representations with his treachery of images (La trahison des images 1928-29)series. The paradigm example is the landmark painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This Is Not a Pipe), which makes manifest the contradictory elements inherent in representative, visual art.



The tension engendered by juxtaposing elements of live action with animation parallels the antagonistic characteristics intrinsic to the creative capacities of the human spirit. Is there a more effective way to express the surrealism of dreams and hallucinations or the exaggerated qualities of cartoonish characters and cliched themes? How else might one exhibit a human being's ordain ability to inflict the world around us with fantastical myth or even sensible meaning? The hybrid world affirms without hesitation the artifice of art, the inherently deceptive character of visual representation that tend towards making invisible its own productive process. And the more adventurous among us might even generalize such an argument over to perception as a whole.

In the newly released music video for Kid Cudi's lonely stoner single "Day N' Nite", the director (who is it?) uses rotoscope to drape live footage over with costume-like illustration. The effect is one of herb induced hallucination partly forged by a healthy dose of city life paranoia. Broad plains of color divided into boldly outlined geometrical shapes act as transitions between each individual scene of illusion.



In another light example of this strategy, director Eric Wareheim produces a frenzied dance number for Flying Lotus' "Parisian Goldfish" off his acclaimed 2008 Los Angeles album on Warp Records. Innocent gyrating figures transform into over-sexualized cartoon porn stars on the backdrop of flashing disco lights tending towards vertigo spasms of love. Beware.




Perhaps one of the most famous instances of the hybrid world is Robert Zemeckis' direction of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988. A fantastic dual world populates the film. Illustrated personages called "Toons" and their related ontological dimension coexist alongside the human world. The interplay of live action and animation displays the power dynamic between two conflicting ways of being (toon and human). And the phenomenal movement infused in tension, release, and synthesis of the toon / human dimension might encourage one to reflect on the capacity for the imagination, more specifically artistic creation, to take on its own life.



A year later in 1989, French auteur Alain Resnais critiqued the conventional distinction between low and high art in his controversial film, Je Veux Rentrer a la Maison (I Want to Go Home). Resnais exemplifies the beauty inherent in cartoon characters possessing a sublime quality equal to that found in great works of literature like Flaubert and Balzac. Cartoons are breathed into existence by the swiveling of simple lines, two-dimensional coloring, and geometry, gracing the silver screen with strangely agile figures that belie the laws of physics.

Ari Folman's critically acclaimed "Waltz with Bashir" exhibits the most radical use of animation informed by live footage. The imaginary war-torn hallucination of a soldier's search for his lost memory is abruptly made manifest in its ultra-sensitivity by a climactic clipping of live footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon.

Hybrid worlds permit an unparalleled aesthetic strategy for drawing out antagonisms, conflicts, and imaginative artifice, guiding the viewer in a sensual experience without delusion of its means. Any other notable examples?

The Sound-Image: Floating Points' Radiality

Sound and light are unique physical phenomena that tend to belie our direct tactile grasp. The ear perceives a sonic source of extended spatial distance, often of unknown source, by capturing and amplifying the vibratory waves in the air. The eye is perched at the heights of an Olympian mountain. This small organ of manifold layers might see things originating from enormous distances, even stretching time in looking millions of years into the past while gazing into the stars.

How might one touch the sharp brightness of the sun's radiation? In what way might one come to hold onto a melody that dissipates like a phantom a moment after being heard? Try to put into words the substantial quality of sound or an inkling of light's tactile sensibility.


Perhaps this refusal of strict objecthood is a reason why light and sound have both been associated with supernatural sources, and divine powers, throughout history. In Ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus robs fire from the gods and gives the gift to human beings. Take the invisible voice of a strange, omnipotent God booming awfully from the burning bush. Or further back, consider the immediate creative power of some great Being producing entities with his spoken words, stating in simple grammar for instance, "Let there be light."

Such meditations on sound and light arise from my viewing of a new Floating Points music video, Radiality, constructed under the direction of Hayden Bannochie & Alex Pissourios. Working from the title of the composition, the music video attempts to weave together a central converging point, a structural radius, where sound and image in a particularly modern context magnify sensual form.

In the beginning there was darkness. Darkness glides along melodic chords, opening its eyes into the static cut scene of an electricity tower looming over skeleton trees. A filtered burgundy orange air washes over the static. Our modern age is one of a proud Prometheus that grants us the force of electric fire to harvest the energy to warm our bodies.

The radius of such industrial fire is dynamic. It twists and turns with the rhythmic dissonance of a watery slap bass and piercing bolts of light that crash onto the screen like falling rain on a win shield. Brooding chords wither along zigzagging laser lines drenched in the smoggy haze of sunset. The electricity tower pulses synthesized swirls of burning drums, eventually broken down into its infrastructure-- the collaborating lines of twisting geometry-- bending into a vertigo of angles. Building in momentum dabbling computer signals work their way harmoniously into the dithering melody, rising and falling like spasmic breaths of air.

While sound travels in waves, light betrays such easy classification. In fact, light is the only physical phenomenon that can be measured as a wave or a particle, depending on the reflective stance of the observer. Perhaps such a dual physical make-up is what allows light to manipulate the sensual effect of music, informing the feel of vibration while making its invisibility more tangible.

In Radiality, Floating Points explores the physicality of the sonic and visual phenomena. Bass heavy synth wrangles the chest mirrored by the piercing quality of abrupt splashes of light that bother the eyes. However, the radiality of sonic-light also strives to reenchant our sterilized impressions of mechanical electricity and factory sound with the enigmatic immateriality that influenced the ancients to reflect on the supernatural. Grasping the infinite in such phantom-like phantasmagoria is an impressive, if not sublime feat.

Make sure to turn the sound UP when listening and make the screen as large as possible. This video demands full perceptual attunement.




Floating Points will release an album soon, stay tuned!

The Wash

Lying at the corner of 6th St. and Folsom in a nearly petrified state of waste are the remains of a car wash. Simple in stature, the rectangular car wash is open ended, a collapsed sunroof to the heavens, stations for manual cleaning neatly mounted at entrance and end. The building grazes the corner sidewalk much like a Taco Truck, transgressing typical boundaries of commercial space, edging ever closer into the intimacy of the streets where pedestrians walk in bipedal fashion rather than ride on four wheels.

A place where drivers dismount their steel steeds, breathe in the cosmic gases of industry, and pay a couple green bills for their robot's purification. A structure for meditation. A robot cleaned and a mind restored. What to make of an abandoned car wash in the historic auto district?


Much like human beings, robots require occasional cleansing by ablution. Detailed rituals of purification have been developed to remove clods of filth from the robot, refreshing its thickened skin to a softened stage of premature innocence.

Rolled onto a conveyor belt apparatus, initial baptismal waters lightly wash over the surfaces of the soiled vehicle. Only the exterior receives these water blasts, which increase in vivacity and pressure as the rolling machine grows accustomed to the cleansing ritual. A soapy residue churns out from socket furnaces and piping to envelop the robot in a wispy, sud concoction.


Once thoroughly johnsoned & johnsoned, spongy cobalt creatures--dressed in the furry hair that recalls nothing less than an elderly smurf--spin spasmodically, gently lacerating the vehicle with their rubbery tentacles. Although slightly painful for the robot, the rapid whippings break up knots of dirt still intact after the ablution soaping. The filth amalgamates in preparation for a final vacuuming from gyrating suction necks, whisking the sludge into the sewer's oblivion with billowing chokes of gas. Alas, a car manifests itself, stammering for destination, yearning for concrete, beckoning contenders, anticipating a medley of primary colored lights.

Sanguine Sunday is Independent

Sanguine Sunday is now independent of Crooks and Grannies. All further episodes and posts can be found on domain of the eponymous title. Updates come twice a week, once upon a time, on Sunday.

Tune it. Kick in the door. Grind it out.

A Waltz into Trauma

By mistake I saw Ari Folman's animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, Waltz with Bashir, back in October. Let me clarify, I was in the dreadful city of Brussels, completely exhausted from three days of sleepless travels, and had just escaped along with my companion a meddlesome Belgian--which was not too difficult considering his morning drunkenness, broken leg, and freshly slashed face--who insisted on showing me the main shopping district.


We surreptitiously ducked into a local movie theater, choosing to watch the next available screening, Waltz with Bashir. After the fat Belgian lady working at the counter finally agreed to sell us tickets (she did not think we should see an Israeli film with French and Flemish subtitles while she stupidly identified the Hebrew language film as in Arabic), we settled into our seats and enjoyed a moment's of rest before the start.

I never fell asleep. Waltz with Bashir opens suddenly with frothing yellow-eyed hounds running through nondescript Israeli streets, knocking down everything in their path, coming to a stopping point outside a lone square window where an unshaven man blankly stares into the monsters that haunt him. The nightmare begins.

Director Ari Folman tells the story of himself, a middle-aged Israeli filmmaker who lost his memory of fighting in the 1982 Lebanon war at the age of 19. The scene of the hounds, a recurring nightmare told to the aged Folman by a fellow soldier, jump starts his psychological journey to recapture his own memory of the war. The result of this journey is the creation of Waltz itself, an imaginatively construed world outside of our earthly dimension. Art director and illustrator, David Polonsky, and director of animation, Yoni Goodman, execute richly colored, chiaroscuro illustration that recalls the aesthetic quality of graphic novels.


Folman's film becomes a reflection on the dynamic nature of his fractured memory, as he investigates the reality of the blocked experiences by seeking out, and conducting interviews, with others present alongside him during the war. We witness Folman's live interviews (two dubbed over for the sake of anonymity) that take place in illustrated bars, rural homes, or a car, splicing immediately over to the recalling of dreamy sequences of escape and hipnotic meditations on horrific war scenes. The soundtrack propels this pschyedelic discplacement of experience, ranging from rhythmic drum claps mirroring the movements of a racing heart during night terrors, ironic pop music chanting about the thrills of bombing Lebanon reflecting the soldier's experience of returning from war to a land of general normalcy, and the incessant machine gun fire--chilled by the silence of death.

How does one recount the atrocities of war? What creative form might inch towards capturing the its reality, a reality that by its very natue eludes our grasp? A reality that human nature resists, repressed into the realm of myths, denied and blocked up in the subconscious. How might one detail the journey of recollecting this lost memory, divided and traumatized by its origin? Waltz thrusts the the unreal into the real, seamlessly layering hallucination with brutal fact, the construction of memory with some truth to be remembered. There might be no more exacting medium than animation to disclose such interplay between the imaginary and the real, and the complete breakdown of these categories when taking up the horrors of war.

Throughout the narrative we see repetitive sequences of the younger Folman wading in the sea outside of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps where Lebanese Phalangists massacred thousands of Palestinians in vengeance of the assassinated president-elect of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel. Folman struggles with his guilt, coming to acknowledge the fact that he, and otherIsraeli soldiers, permitted the Phalange militia men to enter the camps. They stood by a few hundred yards away, perhaps unable to believe the sure signs of the massacre right before them.

In the dreamy state Folman rises to the shores with his troupe. They dress in fatigues under dreary, yellowed sky lit by flares and walk sullenly into the dilapidated, blown out buildings of West Beirut. The sequence repeats on end throughout the narrative, reaching a corner turned where hijab adorned women scream in terror, yell, and then the whirling sound of silence. Again and again the audience witnesses this scene, anticipating the view of atrocity, dreading the moment, and again and again, the impending fact is cut off from us.


Folman faces the problem intrinsic to any documentary of atrocity; how does a director disclose such brutality without turning it into a spectacle? How might a filmmikar avoid transforming such horrors into phantasmagoria for our own entertainment, seated in cushioned theater chairs, our bodies circuited into a lit up screen that affords a vicious movement of suspense and drama.

In the final scenes of Waltz Folman transitions abruptly from the magestically powerful animated world into gritty, documented footage of the massacre. We see bodies stacked and beginning to rot, rubble and human parts indistinguishable, the spilled entrails of a ferocious massacre. And just for a moment we are taken to this time and place, thrown violently outside the bounds of the protected camera lens, enveloped within the horror.

Somehow Folman's animated, hipnotic dimension prepares us for this task, doing consistent labor on our sentiments, shaping our abilities to imagine the impossible, and fooling the body's defense mechanisms into accepting the most unreal of all realities. For a moment, the veils of the spectacle fall back, the protective cognitive system breaks down, just a moment enough to grasp the absolute terror.

Folman's final work is nothing short of a masterpiece, a compelling anti-war documentary that achieves the most exemplary of moral efforts: to disclose the genuine reality of horror and trauma, hoping to guide us to feel the obligation of working towards its demise.