HOLY WAR
Flash/One Car Funeral (Instrumental)
Recorded August 2010
Friday, January 13, 2012
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Bowed Piano and Universal Brotherhood
All those hands! It amazes me there are still new things, everywhere.
Reading Schiller's "Ode to Joy".
Freude, Freude, treibt den Raeder
In der grossen Weltenuhr.
When I think of universal brotherhood, I think about Whitman asking why are all the best poets are nationalist poets, alluding to Goethe. America and Germany both being sort of fabricated and disintegrated nations, respectively. Are these intense feelings of universal brotherhood really an expression of profound loneliness and awareness of the emptiness of national boundaries? The beginnings of capitalist atomization? Maybe this is why Hopper is always sited as the ultimate expression of the American national character. There's real empathy, and there are grand delusions. I had always associated these feelings with anti-nationalism, universal humanhood. Are loneliness, jingoism, and universal brotherhood the same emotion with different cognitive superficialities pasted on top? The difference in outcomes is not superficial.
Those who dwell in the great circle,
Pay homage to sympathy!
It leads to the stars,
Where the Unknown reigns.
Other thoughts: Looking for examples of turquerie in contemporary American culture. Appropriating for the purposes of colonization.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Bahram Bayzai
A year ago or more I was watching an Iranian documentary, "Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!" The film is very good, and I should talk about it at length, but one of the things that keeps me thinking back to it is a certain scene. There is a clip of two women walking down a street in Tehran as the tracking camera floats along with them, like in a Tarkovsky film.
The scene can be found at exactly 1:07:50
Haunting right? All this time later, I finally decided to just email the director Massoud Bakhshi and he wrote me back right away.
The film is "Kalagh" or The Raven, by a director named Bahram Bayzai. He is one of the auteurs of the pre-revolutionary Iranian New Wave, and judging from the few clips I've seen, a fellow disciple of the Tarkovsky/Parajanov cult of dream projection cinema. A lot of this comes down to a familiar use of "sculpting in time", or figures and ideas floating in and out of the frame as our gaze moves along with the tracking shot.
Here is an example from Bashu, The Little Stranger:
Excuse the vaguely Scandinavian incoherence here, but note the atmospheric similarities to Tarkovsky's "Sacrifice". Move past the credits and look at these mirror shots at 01:23.
Apparently, he is best known for his absurdist plays and his 1971 film Ragbar (Downpour), which I should be looking for soon.
As a final thought, there should be a better name for the uncharted emotional territory that Absurdism as a genre encompasses. It is bigger than the irrational. Surrealism of its kind speaks directly to a super-cognitive area of the brain, and is wordlessly understood. This is different than fish on bicycles, or randomness for its own sake. It is parallel communication of some kind, and deserves its own consideration as an artistic technique.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Monday, June 15, 2009
Bruegel
Settling into a new apartment in Logan Square. Must have watched "The Conformist" three times this weekend. Coincidentally, there was a de Chirico painting hung at the Gallery Cabaret. Also rediscovering Bruegel. His "Hunters in the Snow" was featured in Solaris, of course. His tower of Babel has always been a favorite. I have always tried convincing Vincent to use it as his logo for Let It Build.
This website is amazing! I have always been expert at crossing my eyes.
http://www.jim3dlong.com/renaissance-28.html
This website is amazing! I have always been expert at crossing my eyes.
http://www.jim3dlong.com/renaissance-28.html
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