Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: DaDa!

The album cover being a modified detail from Dalí's Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire is a return tribute to Dalí, who was a major Coop fan and declared his act "musical surrealism". Dalí made a First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper's Brain, the story of which is the best thing you'll read all year.

Everyone knows Alice Cooper for his pioneering theatrical stage show and his slew of classic anthems from "Eighteen" to "Elected" to "Poison", but the thing that really stabs you in the neck as you delve into the Cooper catalogue is how eclectic it all is, like a Ween album strung out over half a dozen decades. The first two albums are as uncommercial as it gets, weird psychedelia with odd melodic gems jutting out randomly like teeth out of a Briton's gums. Then there's the era of unimpeachable classics from Love it to Death through Billion Dollar Babies or even Welcome to my Nightmare (depending on how charitably you view Muscle of Love), but even this hit-making hard rock era has its oddities like the dark jazzy atmospherics of "Blue Turk" or the James-Bond-meets-King-Crimson pastiche of "Halo of Flies". Then you've got disco parodies and showtunes on Goes to Hell, sci-fi new wave on Flush the Fashion, hair metal, industrial and more. For every wild left-turn that crashes in flames, there's one that pays off in spades, but by far the oddest and greatest Alice album is one he doesn't even remember writing or recording at all. Just as Bowie's cocaine album (Station to Station) was his best and bleakest, so too was the Coop's. Now I'm not saying you should dabble in white powder for the sake of a tune. I mean, fuck it, Minor Threat coined straight edge and their Complete Discography is one of the few punk discs that holds up after half a spin. But just as LSD seems to inevitably lead to inane surrealism and heroin to insomniac self-pity, cocaine seems to have a distinctly dark and empty energy you wouldn't guess from something that has adults bouncing off the walls like kids on Halloween candy.

Not that DaDa doesn't have laughs - "I Love America" is almost tryhard in its comic aspirations, though redeemed by the fact Cooper actually meant it - but there's a sort of desperation in the laughter, like a guy trying to distract himself from gnawing despair with a good time. The synthy opener is weirdly beautiful and almost goth, but Cooper sounds like a for-real mental patient on it, far from the theatrical madness of "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". "Enough's Enough" sounds like it was inspired by Midnight Cowboy, a tale of an abusive monster of a father taunting his boy now that his dear old mother is no longer there to protect him, set to a dissonently bouncy bit of new wave that reflects the awful glee in the bad dad's jibes. "Former Lee Warmer" is a tale of a mute, mentally retarded brother kept locked up in a family home that makes those Phantom of the Opera organ tones you'd hear in haunted house parodies actually creepy again. "No Man's Land" is actually hilarious but the casual mention of "my other personalities" brings chills back to a superficially comic scenario. "Scarlet and Sheba" is like some kind of twisted BDSM tango that evokes a dungeon with the scent of candles heavy in the air. "Fresh Blood" takes a startling detour into funk and seems to describe the unhappy lot of a Renfield stewarding a vampire from kill to kill amid the festivity of an uncaring city. "Pass the Gun Around" is a raw sketch of the end of the road against the grandest, most ostentatious arrangements on the album, with a Dick Wagner solo that sounds like David Gilmour having the worst nightmare of his life. Maybe Alice just doesn't want to remember.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Miraculous Virgin!

Me reading my own blôgge posts.

I first saw Czechoslovak kino Panna zázracnica, or The Miraculous Virgin, on YouTube without subtitles. Given that the subject matter orbits the now-obscure nadrealist scene - a Slavic cousin of surrealism - this was an entirely appropriate way to experience it and one I recommend unironically. The Dalí himself was fond of saying that confusion was the best and purest form of communication, to which end he would speak in four different languages, switching abruptly mid-sentence like a Mr Bungle song. Dalí's erstwhile dickriders tried to kick him out of the surrealist mOvEmEnT for the thoughtcrime of preferring Franco over the inarguably far more murderous alternative, to which he replied thus:

Posers eternally, irrevocably stumped, schlonged, rekt, shrekt, BTFO the fuck out and on suicide watch.

Nadrealism likewise did away with much of the prosaic safe-edgy hipster commie baggage that weighed down the less notable pretenders to the surrealist throne in severing the perceived umbilical cord between surreal art and the discredited theories of Marx and Freud, allowing it to easily outshine the more western-based iterations of surrealist schtick, and The Miraculous Virgin is withering in its contempt for the red orthodoxy that had overseen and crassly micromanaged artistic expression in the eastern bloc cinéma prior to the Czechoslovak New Wave. In one scene a pompous party hack lectures a hapless sculptor that his statue of the red tyrant du jour looks too much like a priest and not enough like a secular bureaucrat BUT TOTES AWESOMESAUCE.

The kino is loosely based on a novel but is as close to pure cinéma as it gets in its flights of celluloid fantasy through the world of an art scene neither you nor I (be honest) had remotely heard of prior. The plot, not that it matters, concerns Anabella (Jolanta Umecka), a dream waifu clad in mourning black who becomes archetypal muse to the nadrealist clique as they agonise over their art and the absolute state of society and so forth.

>tfw gf nevermore

In the end the crowd of horny artistes chase Umecka away, to the consternation of Michael Ironside doppelgänger Raven, who peevishly sulks at their behaviour as ungracious. While it's clear that he's supposed to give voice to the auteur's pretentions of sensitivity, this angle has aged poorly and plays into the modish prudism of the soyjak/chudjak Yin-Yang that makes up the currentyear+9 zeitgeist. Better to see the artists' lamentation of their irrepressible libido in the bittersweet terms of myth - for, after all, what makes it sad that they chase her away is precisely that she's a hot goth girl to begin with.

Sure, the right woman brings out the animal in man, but animals are noble and cool.

In this context, they're like Orpheus, doomed to lose his Eurydice by the very love that compelled him to seek her rescue. This isn't even really a stretch, since one of the protagonists is named Tristan, after another famous avatar of tragic male infatuation. Still another clue might lie in the kino's repurposing of Jean Cocteau's famous mirror gag from The Blood of a Poet - the first part of, you guessed it, the Orpheus Trilogy.

This sort of intertextual wiki-walking is what "media literacy" might mean if it hadn't been co-opted to mean licking the boots of didactic H*llywood scolds.

Unsurprisingly, Virgin was banned following the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and remains little-known in the west and the English-speaking world. If you're a fan of Dalí and Cocteau (and if you're not, why are you here?), you owe it to yourself to Czech it out.