Teknologiestraume

I mean, it doesn't work with macs, so it's all a bit convoluted. Anyway, as pictures are a tausend Wordsworths, here's another of Will's photoshops/ Nice little aleatory scatter.

Now Twinned With...

Hier ist ein Beispiel aus Deutsche-Americanische Freundschaft.
So far just this small step.
When the site goes up, i will post a link. Don't expect it before next Monday. Computer said, "Nah", again.

Mirand'a 1

This might not be news to all and sundry, but a small movement is still a movement. Bringing Mirand'a to a new starting point, gathering and hoping to do so before the stormclouds of winter (see later illustration) come in overhead. A dull grey saturday, in some ways a relief after the all too bright week. This is CC. More anon.

The Good Sven

These things need commemorating, as there are so few (now, sadly, one fewer) painters of light on the planet. The simple photo of Sven Nykvist, looking at something with his partner in crime, old Iggy.
God Bless 'em.

Beat / Not Beat

Thinking over this ‘beat’ thing, here’s a short list of filmmakers who would have been IN or OUT.
I think.
Note – I have only included people whose work I admire. Feel free to add and differ.

Beat:
Orson Welles
Werner Herzog
John Cassavetes
Jean-Luc Godard
Francis Ford Coppola
Federico Fellini
Terry Gilliam
Lars von Trier
Stan Brakhage
Emir Kusturica

Not Beat:
Andrei Tarkovsky
Robert Bresson
Stanley Kubrick
Martin Scorsese
Yasujiro Ozu
Roman Polanski
Bernardo Bertolucci
Victor Erice
David Lynch
Ingmar Bergman

House X

Here's novel: a frame from a film not yet shot, not yet even mooted, except inside my head. It came last night, a few days after actually a chance visit / meeting in catskill, introduction and walk-through the house in question (Old Soul Studio) and a wish to be included in any film... Beat Manifesto, you need a PLACE and an IMPULSE. (and somehow it seems to be moving towards, and a DEADLINE)... the house is the place... talk about hauntings is the impulse.... the people will fall into place, and we will have a film for Hallowe'en. Anyway, that's the theory, and making a compelling work out of stolen fragments, as today i crossed again that bridge over the creek (that last reads like a Constance Garnett translated sentence) something has to be done up here in the autumn twilight. And SOUND.
So let's see where this leads us all.
And the title came on the freeway, 'House X'. Like Song X, Generation X, and some deep thinking about credits and/or opening up to admitting partial authorship. Not anonymous, but credited and non-hierarchical.
Ah, the spirit of '82 lives on.

Steam's the Thing

A weekend spent gnashing at higher technologies, and also reading a quite entertaining but VERY badly written book (as in, small repetitive vocabulary, clunky pacing and thin, thin characters) which convinced me to abandon anything and everything invented or perfected after 1812 and revert to steam power. hence, these notes are being typed out on a 1789 vintage steampress movable type compositors' galley, and I walk to work.
Seriously, though, steam...
The good/bad book is theodore Roszak's 'Flicker', soon to be butchered and bowdlerized by Aronofsky of 'Pi' and 'Requiem' notoriety. It's dark, like a baby Burroughs tale, but has them ideas in it.

W-O-L

"When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk."

It comes late, then it's too late, then we learn from History.
Where else can you read senseless out of context quotes of Hegel?

Youth Dawn

So - in the picture above you have the clearly heard Significant Question blended from three unrelated phatic comments. The reply is the post title. the greatest thing about such apophenia is that I absolutely DO NOT BELIEVE any of this crap. But it's a perfect illustration of the way adhering to one set of arbitrary rules (with healthy dose of scepticism) can lead you to interesting inhabitual solutions. Without needing to gargle gallons of absinthe or shatter the moribund morality of exurbia
We'll get to you lot in a short while.

Epiphany or EVP?

The former, I'm afraid, for the old lady souls out there. Re-that moment in the edit when suddenly... today it was from a picture manipulation, I have to get a flow into these images, bacause a flow there is, inside somewhere.
So toying with the idea of making motion a sine qua non, if at least figures or camera are moving, but no use if neither. Which doesn't exclude playing with speeds, frames and so forth. So, I worked on a very small section of the log crossing, and slowed some (the American birdsong suddenly becomes Brazilian) and heard new voices speaking, robbed of their individual timbres, the several voices in clamour yielded up only one voice in slow-mo. A deep disturbing voice which asked a rhetorical question, and was given a self evident answer. Tomorrow i experiment further. the lines, of course, bear cryptic comment on the 'action'. of our lives.
Phrases for you tomorrow. Picture from Miranda. The vast set we didn't need to build yet of the European network.

Neoteny & Negritude

It is Taima's fault, for setting up the problem with the observation that all students of film (filmmakers) go through all of the stages of film history as they learn their craft. Short, silent, edited to simple narrative, then what? the problematic is in what order are the stages fed to the students (bearing in mind the rant below, effectively denying History, and in addition, what are the linear stages anyway? Where would Stan Brakhage go? Are 14 year olds obliged to watch Bergman? Will the general audience take kindly to the FACT that all mainstream cinema since 1979 (Raging Bull) has been hollow, empty and nocive?
Or (another Taima clarification) that MTV has a main effect of setting up annoying black stereotypes as icons to aim for (with guns?) thus (I quote) re-establishing the class divide in American (and World) society by peddling the image of a) blacks b) poor people and c) poor black people, as stupid, duplicitous and greedy, easily bought off with the second-hand trappings of white middle class status (cars, coats, women as ciphers, 'bling').
But try telling that to your average teenager. The hips don't lie. But there must be an awful lot of smart, disenfranchised African-Americans out there with huge, justified grudges to bear. I shall seek them out and form an alliance of the angry.
You have been warned.

World Trade Centers

Well, like a lightning bolt from Hell, it came to me in the Mitternacht. What happened (already installed and accepted) to education and health care (no basic service, pay as you cough specialist care for those who can) is now - via the agency of the internet (remember, structurally designed to be de-centralized and flexible and free) is now happening to Culture. That is, it's being fragmented and privatized. What used to be ‘out there’ and available, if you cared to catch it, or which filtered in even if you didn’t realize you were actually catching it is now only available on a pay-as-you-consume basis.
This isn’t clear. Too many complex sentence clauses
What it is, is this: Bob Dylan has just released a new, long-awaited (or not) studio album. Go to amazon.com to buy it. But, he’s also released a small run cd called ‘Blues’ which is only available through Barnes & Noble. O.K. if you have a local B&N in town, [NB this is a compilation of previously released songs, which must be a record for recycling - though these are the albums most peope will buy, play and hear] or over the net. But what if you live outside of the US? Well, no extra Bob’s for you. Course, Mr. Zimmerman also plays private corporate events for a fee, which humble non-corp mortals are not invited to (which is the whole point). Not that I’m carping at Dylan, who has certainly given enough, released enough, and still performs enough for any interested person to catch him and his works. The point is, remarkably, once again culture is becoming fragmented and specific, unavailable (?elitist?) and no longer fulfils its function of bonding and drawing together diverse individuals around a common idea or enthusiasm. What inaccessible geography restricted in the past, however, (Tuvan head singing; Aborigine drumming) is now accomplished through the barrier of money. Added value comes from exclusivity. Like Rolexes and Chanel No5. And if you cannot buy into that new club, then you must content yourself with the freely available bundle of channels and products, greatest hits and abridged magazine extracts - or to put it as plain as I can – the crap that is force-fed everyone as ‘mass culture’. WalMart, McD, universal information channels (TV, movies, leisure press) coming from one basic source, deemed as consensus.
The evils of a society are always found in consensus.
Anyway, it’s the 5th anniversary of 9/11 today, and the morphing of a supposedly open and expansive (in the best sense) society into a closed, fearful and conniving society seems to be going very nicely, thank you.
Fly which flag?

White Riot

Veteran readers of these posts will no doubt appreciate my Frank and Ernest consternation upon arrival at the new, leaner, sleeker Indie today. Or was it just jet lag? Whichever, though I thought I was prepared for most eventualities, what I expected not was white coats. Unusual sartorial outfit, with a whiff of the placebo, but their main effect (to say not a word of their affect) is to make even a casual conversation sound like a comedy or melodramatic script reading. Quite extraordinary, somewhere between Monty P and E.R. Thus, when Joe says 'I'm gonna pop his eye out with this spoon' one can almost believe him.
The cross-cultural fertilisation of the garments (neither rent nor rented at the moment) is to suggest the image posted above, to wit, Alec Guinness in the 1951 film (free gift for the person correctly identifying the clip)... which began brightly, but ended, if I remember aright, in tatters. Is this Mr. G's pisgah vision of the future? Still... Nice to be back in the land of the barmy.

Dulce Domum

How could that day have taken 22 hours? Mad woman on the plane kept up a grating whine for seven of those hours, but all quite amusing really, and this from some dungeon just to keep you interested. G'night.
and let us mourn old Steve Irwin. He was a good onion.

Fry the Frag

Maybe it’s the distance. Maybe it’s the quantities of whisky drunk last night. Maybe it’s talking with Adam K. again after such a time. d) all of the above. Perspective on Amerika seems to have come. Without suggesting that what we have here (Urop) is any better / more hopeful / a path to follow. As we’re all down that same road. Heading down. Beautiful beaches in the Crimea covered knee deep in picnic detritus, because, hell, we’re on holiday. (Passing cultural offensiveness, New Eastern Europeans are now leaning on the ‘we suffered under communism, so we can now do what the f*** we like’ quite as much as arrogant and vapid young New Yorkers lean on the holocaust, to the despair of their own grandparents)
Anyway, allegations (untrue) of anti-anything notwithstanding, there is also a niggling flashpoint in that friends of mine have forwarded a general e-mail exhorting me to fly the stars and stripes on September 11th – which I shall certainly NOT be doing – with the added nudge that we should fly the flag every single day… and they’ll be around to check up on me, no doubt. I know it’s adolescent, but it does tempt me to fly the Iraqi or Palestinian flag. (I won’t, don’t worry, neighbours). So, now back to business sort of, as I have been thinking about edyukayshun. Despite my arrogance and cynicism, I find the American education system rather good. It’s such a clearly marked divide between system and culture. The system has been organized and built with intelligence and good intentions. Hell in a handcart. But there’s no culture of education, so, promptly at 2.30 every weekday, everything built up just dissolves away, is dissolved away in an acid rain of cupidity. Make money, make money, makemoremoney. Against that incessant drumming, a few half hours spent empathizing with Gilgamesh, or figuring out layers in a Japanese print only makes you into a vaguely fey curiosity.
Or, as we discussed it last night, if you somehow are immune or allergic to this, you go crazy. Or, vice versa, if you are crazy enough, make yourself crazy enough, systematic derangement of the senses as Old Arthur had it, you can develop an immunity.
Over here, this virus is raging eastward. Britain has garnered some kind of resistance, usually by being Bolshy and Clockwork Orang-y, too fat, lazy, violent and stupid to do as you’re told, on the notion that the kick in the face is better for you in the long run than the hand in your pocket. Or your hand in everyone else’s pocket, it’s a sad sort of prognosis, just deciding which hand goes into which pocket, isn’t it?. And no kind of career for a right thinking young man or woman.
OK then, what else do we have to offer? Something better than sitting at the cash desk of a 7-11, I hope … or sitting outside a 7-11 with a cardboard sign around our necks. I’m no Silent Bob. To mis-quote another Bob, all is not lost, Cinderella, all is not lost. Not yet. Not when Al Gore can make a comeback via MTV. Sheesh.