The American holiday trifecta has already passed its first hurtle, Thanksgiving. Now the sluggish traffic and unruly Wal-Mart tazing begins in earnest and a skittish mummified shamanic Pisces like me turns naturally inward, for movies are the best way to avoid holiday shopping lines. All those commercials that try so hard to become a patronizing life coach for Americans, using the "we" not to mean their company but you the viewer + them, united: "we don't settle for anything less," and "we're always pushing just a little further" like they already know you, like David Manners telling Mina "we're going to forget all about these dreams, and think of something cheerful, aren't we?" in DRACULA (1931), or a narc would if he suddenly appeared at the edge of your druggy circle trying to imply he's always been part of your inside clique. But "we're" going stay inside, like an urban hermit, and savor the poison path, the peaceful darkness of the amniotic sac couch bog. One century soon, some decadent Warsaw university students will dig us up and put us in a nice preservative solution isolation tank. Rummaging through our fanny pack he'll find our secret stash of mushrooms both psilocybe and 'flybane' (i.e. fly agaric or Amanita Muscaria) and then eat them, so he can bond with us, and we'll warn him about the crazy woman fixing to devour his soul, SZAMANKA (or She-Shaman) is her name... and like so many hot girls in cold climates, she's fucking crazy. She's the one who killed us!
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(PS - All the collages in this post are made by me - so don't expect to see them in the actual film, I was just trying to help clarify the madness a little bit, on Zulawski's behalf, by throwing in some druggy Polish film stills with Bosch 'n shrooms hallucinations)
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Speaking of shrooms: amanita muscaria are currently legal, and it's easy to see why if you ever tried them --they're gross. Too many can make you feel poisoned, not enough can make you feel like you're not getting off - and just the right amount gets the colors enhanced and the sweaty glow feeling of being connected to the world, but they also make that world smell like urine. You're supposed to drink your urine once they 'pass' through you, and then you get really high - but no thanks, bro. I have yet to do that, so can't comment. Maybe they were better in Poland or Siberia, 2,500 years ago, when the locals noticed the reindeer rummaging through the snow for them, wolfing them down and getting drunken crazy on them (apparently they used to drink the reindeer urine, which---I guess makes it all right? (Who was the first laplander who figured that out? "Dude, I was drinking reindeer urine, you know, like always, and I suddenly noticed...").
Either way, age has not diminished their power: a few thousand years in the bog and the anthropologist, played by Boguslaw Linda in SZAMANKA still gets off on them (literally and figuratively). But he learns the hard way: once you've submitted to the full stripping away of persona layers, divested yourself of all attachment, unmade the trappings of self, remembered your own birth, bathed in the white light of pure love, and forgiven everyone everywhere, then what? Life goes on without you. No one gets where you're coming from, or quite buys your mystic conversion. Your fiancee thinks you're nuts, and the people who do get your message, who feel the same cosmic light, are gross. They wear sandals and patchouli and eat too much garlic and look anemic from not eating meat. "We" sure don't want to hang out with them, too often.
So we turn to the nest of sweet isolation, a few cool cats to cuddle with, and an endless supply of DVDs. There's so much great trippy shit out there. No matter how 'gone' we get, Chile's Alejandro Jodorowsky, America's David Lynch, and Poland's Andrzej Zulawski can always guide us in a holding pattern 'til the rest of the world slowly catches up and we sink down into the post-Thanksgiving depths of Mordor Xmas. To that end, we save SZAMANKA for when we're delirious or have been in the cave so long we've forgotten there's even an outdoors. Zulawski doesn't even need to show us anyone actually taking the drugs. The shit's in the celluloid.
I first discussed Zulawski's SZAMANKA in conjunction with Carrie Matheson and Claire Forlan's awesome Dewar's ad while back in November of 2012, during that previously discussed enlightenment breakthrough awareness state I wrote "from boxes heart-shaped shapelessness, bags tossed as rubbish into the Warsaw mud, flown, Angus, darlin' - rather, a punk-en down Dalle Betty Blue-blackened bird spazzing through anthropology classes as her lover pilfers thousand year-old psilocybe and Amanita Muscaria mushrooms from a mummified shaman's pockets. Each wodka shot or peanut butter-covered stem tracking each punch and drunken stumble dream pie like meth and coveralls to grinding mechanical factory sex atop crumbling swamp corpse; grinding academics in their dancing and beer spillage and moving far away from the needle tip distance twixt the ancient fungal shaman's last expression train down through more more the turn style jumps, coiffed, jumps back through and gay references hurtled like Jack Benny's Polish theater troupe, bombed and built anew under which in the shelter Zulawski slept as a child. (more)
I don't remember writing that and I'm miles away from that galactic alignment euphoria, but I dig my crazy jive poetry as if it's from a long lost twin. I'm finding references to everything from T.S. Eliot to SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS to the obscure Lou Reed song, "Billy." But I wouldn't write like that again if I could. I'm too jaded. I was on a holy fool pre-apocalyptic role back this time in 2012, as seen in The Scrooge Satori, all without a single mushroom, And I would never have made the TO BE OR NOT TO BE connection in my current cave-bound form. Yet when else is a Polish theater troupe the main character of a comedy film set and shot in 1942 Hollywood?
Before you answer, quick imagine Roman Polanski urchins skittering through the Warsaw sewers while Germans shell the city above and Russians wait on the outskirts, until the Resistance is wiped out, so they can step in an Iron Curtain the place. What a bum deal. Poland gets screwed double, so who can blame them for being depressed? A little urine.... clears them of this deed.
Am I going somewhere with this, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? Shamans are waiting for you to exhume their ancient stashes! Did you hear in the news that a 747 recently crashed in a cemetery in Poland? The Polish officials have so far retrieved 2,000 bodies! (1)
SZAMANKA (1994), aka SHE-SHAMAN, is one of them. Great judicious synthesizers underwrite Andrzej Zulawski's uber-bizarre panic movement-ish meditation on the nature of primitivism, Neanderthal train sex momentum, insanity, eating brains to gain that person's knowledge, and the lack of mores or coherence in 90s Warsaw. And the script was written by a woman! Manuela Gretowska co-founded the Polish Women's Party and ran for office... So best believe it's way darker sexually than even Zulawski would normally go. But thanks to his own 'maturer' madness, he makes a pretty good movie around it, way better than that punk Jean-Pierre Leaud was making in LAST TANGO IN PARIS (below, overlaid by me with a Bosch detail for easy decoding).
I mention this because Zulawski and Gretowska clearly know SZAMANKA is a lot like LAST TANGO IN PARIS, and that star Iwona Petry looks and foams at the mouth like Beatrice Dalle in BETTY BLUE which lest we forget ends with Dalle going totally crazy, getting electroshock, and winding up smothered with a pillow by the man who loves her ala saucy Jack in CUCKOO'S NEST. As with Bertolucci's film, Zulawski's crazy roving camera chases sexy nutcase Petry, running everywhere--onto trains, off of trains--upstairs and down--and at times there's obscene perverse men leering from every corner and it begins to almost seem like some perverse sexual nightmare. Fat bugs, these men are ready for the maw of a Kali mantis like Beatrice Dalle's in her holy trifecta - BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE. One of her anthropologist lover's pals notes of her weird behavior that some people are "God's fools, with souls so big there's no room for brains," Iwona Petry's character is known as "the Italian" but is at least smart enough to realize they're talking about her, and to knock over their table accordingly. So while Boguslaw Linda goes on his lecture, she's illustrating his tales of Neanderthal shamanism by mouthing a display case and "careening through the streets of Warszawa like a culturally inept marathon runner who's afraid of clowns" (2). While he pursues a doctorate in medicine, she's studying engineering at the same school, so it's a metaphor to the division of labor and culture in Poland, and of woman's sexuality as something so archaically Precambrian as to devour the entirety of Apollonian civilization in a single sparagmosticated brain bite.
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| this is your brain on drugs |
Zulawski's been there, too. Petry and Linda know all the tricks, and maybe so has Gretowska, I'd imagine, because in SZAMANKA even engineering lectures weld sexual-reproductive organs on to the curriculum in ways that would probably blow Cronenberg's mind.
"Zulawski said the animus inspired by his film was mainly directed at his uninhibited actress. The press “hated her and destroyed her, and she disappeared.” He has not made another movie in Poland since: “This country is still in the Middle Ages.” - J. Hoberman NY Times March 2nd, 2012 (my birthday!)
Still in the Middle Ages. I agree, half of America is right there with them, and as Petry's performance is clearly meant to have a certain 'the whole Cro-Magnon Thing passed my evolution by" -style idiot savant savage ambivalence, she's a living contradiction to everything the Texas Board of Education--and by weird extension the International Film Critics Circle-- holds dear, he said, reading aloud from his notebook while running it under water in the sink, then dripping the blue inky runoff all over her naked body. Clearly, he (Boguslaw Linda) is tripping balls. But it's for science! And he doesn't need a frickin' medical research hothead like Charles Haid (in ALTERED STATES) or a creep like Bruce Dern (in THE TRIP) as a 'guide,' in fact Zulawski doesn't even feel the movie needs a shot of him actually taking the mushrooms. He's just suddenly on them, and we're left to guess how many he took or how long ago or which kind. He doesn't even need to mention reasons at first that his doctoral thesis is going to be an attempt to locate the ancient shamanic spirit within modern paranoid schizophrenics, realizing that "drugs, hunger, danger, darkness" -the constants of life in the dark ages--kept these primitive humans in a paranoid schizophrenic state 24/7. In other words, they were all the time, like most of us only are when tripping. To prove this point, Boguslaw starts slowly devolving along the same lines, craving that mystical union via any ceremonial sex magic or 2,500 year old mushrooms he can find.
In that sense, no one does it quite as shamanistically correct as old Andrzej Zulawski. Jodorowsky is , by contrast, too bawdy-vulgar, Emir Kusturica too eccentric-whimsical, Lynch too straight, and Gilliam too bent. None are the types to take "fucking flybanes" at their science lab and pitch a doctoral thesis to their advisor and future father-in law while rolling around on the floor in the hospital chapel, to offer a unique fusion of the dramatic, forward-thinking, mystical, druggy, and socio-political all without whimsy, vulgarity, weird-for-weird's sake-ism, or any semblance of humor... or drama...
Maybe Poles, stuck in those Middle Ages, just don't give a fuck. They sidestep altogether the things that trip up America--for all its talk of freedom--in unhackable tendrils of churchy censorship and the compulsive need to to exposit onto the rubes. These students don't need to worry about narcs or rubes -- due to the joys of free socialist education, all are educated, and all hate the government. If they find some shrooms in the ancient pocket of the exhumed shaman, they're going to do them. And wait for the shaman in the dish to make the first move. And they're going to hide that they did them from even us, so you have to know what the signs are. And the signs are, apparently, indistinguishable from 'everyday' Warsaw life in the 1990s.
Dude, I've been on all sides of that equation, everyone except the mummified shaman. And that, according to my spirit guide, is what's waiting in fall 2015. Because let me tell you, without our space mushroom brothers as co-workers, we'll never get off this rock in any conveyance other than space ships. What's it gonna be, Hollywood? More big dollar-intensive conveyances just to wind up back with Jessica Chastain in the Pre-Raphaelite TREE OF LIFE shirt reflection, where we could have been all this time through some simple deep breathing meditation and/or a handful of nonlocal mushrooms?
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| these are Amanitas not psilocybe cubenses, but they're prettier |
By the power of Terence McKenna, I hereby confirm that psychedelic mushrooms are standing by, ready to work hand-in-stamen with the next generation of psychonauts. The future's alien skies are limitless. Let the shrooms be your NASA and orbit is instantly transcended. Just first make it past the screaming terror breakwaters of your Scrooge tomb slab; breathe and pray your way past the hottie primitive from the Middle Ages eating your brain on drugs as it sizzles apart in the heated pan of pure consciousness; and the cancerous cops inside the marrow of your bones will melt away like dew in the desert.
On the other hand, maybe the dollar-intensive conveyances would be better, frozen forever 'til some far gone destination is arrived at, comfy in the couch-like peat bog of the 'old freezarino' in deep empty space, til the Boguslaw archeologist computer rifles our pockets and bids our mummy husks defrost. Alas, not even INTERSTELLAR sleep lasts forever. No matter how long they drag it out, the exhuming from the bog of cine-dream will inevitably occur, and one will wake up to house lights and the terror of an empty screen, once more reflecting like a DOS prompt on your empty helmet. Fucking flyboys...
1. Old Polish JokeS
2. The great Yum-Yum, House of Self Indulgence (5/30/13)
3. i.e. the Warsaw-set WW2 comedy thriller To Be or Not to Be
Jodorowsky is from Chile.....
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