Friday, February 18, 2005

 

don't touch me; i am electric!

Thank fuck Zach figured out hyperlinks! Dude--these Wire radio shows are fucking great. I've gotta start listening to Resonance on a regular basis again. And WZBC as well, although unfortunately all my friends' shows are during my classes. I can't believe you didn't like El Topo; I must convert you to the cult of Jodorowsky. Perhaps Holy Mountain will do it (I'm probably gonna break down and order the DVD soon). I'm told it's much crazier.

So, I just finished my Teach for America application. Yeah, I know. Shut up. I have no real expectations from the whole thing. I'm thinking of interning at Cambridge Community Television (which is actually more of a co-op sort of thing where I work for a few hours a week and get access to all their facilities in return, but whatever). Nicole had better get a job there so she can be my boss. Invasion of the avant-garde! (Hey, we can get a show where we sit our dumb asses in front of a camera and have endless stoned discussions about whether or not non-narrative film exists! That's community television, right?)

I think I've linked this in an obtuse manner awhile back, but the jahsonic blog is fucking killer. Recent topics: transgressional fiction (including a special post for Dennis Cooper), Drugs (and our right to them), and an entry on this 18th century artist named Piranesi whose stuff is very bizarre (for the time). I dig this jahsonic dude's style, as well--no long winded explanations of what this and that mean to him, just links, pictures, and short descriptive blurbs. And fuck, what taste! The rest of the site is worth investigating as well.

Hot fuck, we've watched some fantastic shit in Avant-Garde, and I'm a jerk for not talking about it. Here's a list, with some notes for the truly exceptional stuff.

Week 1: Introduction to Ways of Seeing and Structural Film

The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes -- Stan Brakhage
This is on the DVD, but it's pretty damn good. I mean, it's Brakhage let loose in an autopsy room. FUN!

Morning, Serene Velocity, and Eureka -- Ernie Gehr
Serene Velocity is intense; basically it examines the zoom lens; starting in the middle, it flicks back and forth* four frames at a time, along all the different settings of the lens, from a fixed camera position looking down a long institutional (i.e. school) hallway. So gradually the difference between alternations gets bigger and bigger. Trippy. Eureka reappropriates a 1905 single-take film shot from the front of a trolley on Market St. in San Francisco, rephotographing it and slowing it way down. A bit tedious--er, excuse me, "meditative"--but interesting.

Remedial Reading Comprehension, What's Wrong With This Picture? and Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present -- George Landow
Landow's films are sort of hard to describe. It's a weird blend of found footage and optical printing, very focused on making you think about how film is manipulative. It's structural, but not rigid like Gehr's stuff. A bit more organic, with some social commentary instead of sorta dry investigation of the cinema apparatus.

Week 2/3: Hollis Frampton

From the Hapax Legomena cycle (I, II, III, IV, V, VII): Nostalgia, Poetic Justice, Critical Mass, Travelling Matte, Ordinary Matter, Special Effects
Here's a quick bit from Fred Camper, to save myself the trouble. I would add that Nostalgia is a series of photographs placed on a hot plate and burned. The narration corresponds to the next photo to be shown, and is narrated by Michael Snow. Travelling Matte is filmed on video and consists of Frampton holding his hand in front of the lens, letting only a tiny circle of light through. Conceptually interesting, but also really freakin' long. Whatever. Special Effects is great; the only image is a dotted white box on a black background that vibrates around while a sci-fi synthesizer goes batshit on the audio track. It's actually very funny.

Frampton's writing is pretty brilliant as well... seek out "A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative" and "A Lecture". Actually, I can email the .pdf to y'all if you want it. A used copy of his book, Circles of Confusion, goes for about, oh, $250 bucks, so short of the library...

Week 4: Diverse Experimental Approaches

Blues, Corn, Fog Line -- Larry Gottheim
A bit like Warhol's stuff, except without people, and in color. Single long takes, observing changes in a bowl of blueberries in cream, some corn, and a foggy landscape.

Highway Landscape, Science Fiction, Print Generation, Sky Blue Water Light Sign -- J. J. Murphy
The others are interesting in their own right, but Print Generation is fucking great; basically Murphy took a one minute diary-ish film composed of one-second shots and had a whole mess of contact prints made, each one from the next, until all the emulsion was essentially gone. Then he structured the film so that it starts out completely abstract, then images slowly reveal themselves, then the loops fade back into abstraction. He used the same process with the sound (a la Alvin Lucier), recording and re-recording ocean noises and playing them unaltered during the abstract parts, then fading into distortion, then returning to regular mimetic sound at the end. I love this process idea, here and in other works, and the whole thing is just a beautiful experience (it's fifty minutes long).

Table Top Dolly [Breakfast] -- Michael Snow
Exactly what the title says: a long table covered with breakfast goods, which the camera dollies in on. As it moves forward, it pushes everything on the table ahead of it, eventually compacting it all at the end of the table. Another brilliantly simple idea--as the camera "eats" breakfast, it also compresses the original space into two dimensions, flattening the image like a photograph. It's creepy to watch all the products dance around on their own as the camera pushes them, as well.

The Lighted Field -- Andrew Noren
Examines light (duh). We didn't get to watch it all.

We watched some great stuff (Pat O'Neill, Bill Brand) this past week as well, but I'm gonna hold off on posting about it.

Audio:
Boom Bip + Dose One -- Circle
The Soft Pink Truth -- Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Soft Pink Truth?
Christian Marclay -- djTRIO
cLOUDDEAD -- cLOUDDEAD
Excepter -- KA
Jan Jelinek -- Improvisations and Edits: Tokyo, 09/26/2001
Mouse on Mars -- Radical Connector
Psychic TV -- Themes
DJ Rupture -- Special Gunpowder
Morricone -- L'Uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo
Tarwater -- Silur
Les Georges Leningrad -- Deux Hot Dogs Moutade Chou


* As I typed "back and forth," Dose One said it on the third song of Circle ("Dead Man's Teal") by him and Boom Bip. Life is weird sometimes.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

 

"Two cripples make one John Wayne"

Shit! In the course of searching for Jodorowsky stuff, I came across a few interesting websites, most exceptionally: xploitedcinema. They sell a box set of El Topo and Holy Mountain! It's put out by the same Italian company as those Warhol DVDs Zach got; it's region-free, but unfortunately in PAL. There's a ton of other stuff in there: in the 'Art-House' section alone they've got some of that Warhol, a ton of Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Pasolini, Fellini, Un chant d'amour by Genet(!), the French Un chien andalou/L'age d'or set, a complete set of Jean Vigo's films, a La jetee and Sans soliel set from Chris Marker, a version of Man With a Movie Camera featuring a score by Michael Nyman, Sweet Movie by Makavejev(!)... I'm gonna stop now because this is going to get out of control. Man, I need a region-free DVD player! Fuck you Zach!

also: revok seems to be based on the same principle as 5minutesonline.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

 

delicious desert weirdness

So let's see, at this point I'm about 45 minutes into El Topo and so far there has been: the gory aftermath of a massacre, group rape of some monks, a castration, and a blind yogi/guru gunfighter with a symbiotic henchman duo consisting of a guy with no arms who carries around another guy with no legs on his back. Oh yeah, and the main character takes his totally naked seven year-old son with him for about the first half hour.

[edit] After reading that over, I realized I should mention that the dubbing is hilariously awful and far from "convincing." I should also mention that the second half of the film is about ten times more fucked up. All persons residing in my vicinity should note that I am willing to watch this film again, but only if there will be ingesting of tasty mind-altering food concoctions.

Expect copious Jodorowsky links in the near future.

Monday, February 07, 2005

 

corn upon corn upon corn

Brilliant interview with Michael Pollan on Alternet--he goes from explaining how journalists are handcuffed when Democrats and Republicans agree on an issue to how corn is the key to the American food chain:

"If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it – and what we eat is mostly carbon – comes from corn. A Chicken McNugget is corn upon corn upon corn, beginning with corn-fed chicken all the way through the obscure food additives and the corn starch that holds it together. All the meat at McDonald's is really corn. Chickens have become machines for converting two pounds of corn into one pound of chicken. The beef, too, is from cattle fed corn on feedlots. The main ingredient in the soda is corn – high-fructose corn syrup. Go down the list. Even the dressing on the new salads at McDonald's is full of corn."

ALSO: Zach, perhaps it will sooth your frazzled United-States-Murder-Capital-located mind to know that someone was shot outside the Paradise last Friday (he died, I learned today). Or maybe you'll just be terrified everywhere you go. Have fun!
 

hi brendan

I fixed the link to how to install soulseek on a mac in the post below. Y'know, I'll probably end up talking to you before you see this, but email me (eawhite at our lovely university) and i'll invite you to this thing. Why the fuck not? We all have exciting internet/music/film/drugs/school/the-world-is-going-to-end-because-crazy-people-are-only-getting-crazier type stuff to share, right?

Speaking of which, here are some nice Chinese propaganda posters. I'm particularly fond of the outer space stuff, ESPECIALLY the frightening ASTROBABIES located at the bottom of the page who receive flowers from space bunnies, dance with creepy space imps, and love their astropets so much they take them along on their fantastic adventures.

And of course, there's plenty of ambiguous sexuality, err, or rather, "revolutionary friendship." Yeah...

Saturday, February 05, 2005

 

fun with russians

"Students!

Avoid giving out the chance distortions of the dilettante striving for innovation, for the 'dernier cri' of art. The innovation of the dilettante is a steamship on the legs of a chicken.

Only in craftsmanship have you the right to throw out the old.

Everyone together!

As you go from theory to practice remember your craftsmanship, your technical skill.

Hackwork on the part of the young who have the strength for collossal things is even more repulsive than the hackwork of the flabby little academics."

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

 
"A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face. To that end, then, I offer the pious: A PENTAGRAM FOR CONJURING THE NARRATIVE"

--Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video, Texts 1968-1980 (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983), 13-21.

(quite possibly the best thing i've ever read)

ALSO:

"In a dream sequence William Burroughs encounters Christian F in a Jarmanesque city dump, they wonder off to the sound of 1000 tape recorders fading out. Einheit returns to H Burger and records the music, which he later experiments with back in his loft. Is it possible to reverse the effect of this music, to discover anti-Muzak? He visits an electronics repair shop run by William Burroughs. Wondering the city, Einheit comes across a group of urban pirates lead by Genesis P-Orridge, who appears with a shaven head and wearing a Priest collar..."

(apparently a wee bit of synopsis from an early 80s german film called decoder)

&&&&:

"Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, "Music, what are you, really?" you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you're tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you're hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear."

(i can't figure out if this is for real or not, but it's bizarre and interesting and i definitely heard kraftwerk's 'computer world' buried in the mix somewhere)

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