Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 3d, after henry, attention theory of value, cinema, dominic angerame, editing, experimental, film, harold edgerton, joan didion, jonathan beller, strobographic cinema, stroboscopic photography, stroboscopy, synaesthesia, the new inquiry, writing, xerox, zines
From The New Inquiry, Joan Didion from “After Henry”:
“What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental: the editor … was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it.”
I like this a lot. Stroboscopic photography, too, is fascinating. From what I understand, the camera’;s shutter is left open, and a strobe light is set to the desired frequency. A picture is essentially taken, and imprinted onto the same frame every time the strobe light flashes. It seems well suited to capturing movement; human bodies dancing seem especially beautiful.
Following Didion, I suppose the strobe light is the editor, to the dancer-as writer. Illuminating, clarifying, revealing: not just in the immediate moment but the same kind of stroboscopic image of what a piece, and the writer’s movements through it, could be? There’s a strange and lovely jouissance here too. Or perhaps it is that everything shot; penetrated, if you will, with a mechanic lens or kino-eye has the same sense of heightened transgression that’s only made undeniably apparent in this kind of image?
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Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: beer, braxis, brotest, BURP, censorship, comite invisible, consumerism, dubai, dystopia, electrodes, film, image, internet, invisible committee, l'insurrection qui vient, new school in collaboration, occupy everything, sleep dealer, surveillance society, the future, tiqqun, university of minnesota
Ignore the start picture – the video at the end is a Tiqqun one from 2001, and well worth watching. It’s dedicated to the lost children; here’s some other lost children in the hipstershapes of the Bro University Radicalization Project (BURP) which focuses
on redirecting the socially repressive forces of alcohol towards spontaneous anarchy, salutes the snap attack on sober conformity, a non-hierarchical attempt to liberate U spaces in favor of their natural free-form Bro-ness and Duder-tude, with chillaxing required for any kind of mutual aid, Miller or Bud.
This in turn begs the crucial question: BROTEST + BEER(Y) + BRAXIS = BURP??. Tiqqun’s invocation of electrodes is anyway fascinating in that the short was made in 2001, and is uneasily echoed in this year’s dystopian film Sleep Dealer, set in Mexico. I won’t rehash it here, but in brief, it depicts a near-futurist world of hypersurveillance and control, and a hypercapitalism that succeeds in total virtual alienation. Exploited workers thus ‘plug in’ to machines to remotely work across the border in America, through nodes in their bodies – put in by the technified coyoteks (!). The nodes themselves strongly resemble the 1/4 jack holes where you would plug a lead into a guitar or bass – it’s interesting to map this back to the connections that humans have with their own favourite shapes of wood (as opposed to perhaps a forest). In a final cessation of humanity, people can even leech and commodify their own emotions and memories (hello, NGO-industrial) and even plug into each other’s nodes – via a computer of course.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 1990s, as if, dead time, fashion, film, future gutter status, headspace, rage against the machine, rags, rnc 2008
The last few weeks have been kind of strange, kind of characterised by a weird pre-apocalyptic silence (that has nothing to do with election hyperventilation). Sleeping every three days, and when I do sleep, missing whole days. I have been semi-repulsed by fashion over the last near-year or so yet I find my self drawn to it and everything visually embodiable lately. And maybe mostly, the 1990s and the films, and fashion that went with it (and I suspect there’s so so much I’m missing).
Things I remember like plaids around the waist and docs and small-print florals and dungarees and neon sneakers and dark lipstick on coffee cups (I’m becoming my mother) and really really wanting to be a riot grrrl. And things I don’t like the ubersleek gorgeously clean minimalism of the early side of the decade. Of course it’s retrospective nostalgia, but didn’t things seem mad fun? Like this Amy Grant video (the hat!), and remembered slushies, astroturf, pink bougainvillea and little-kid fashion shows in somebody’s Jumeirah back garden. I really miss Dubai right now, or at least its more-is-more excesses, maybe it’s the same thing.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, ☭☭☭, banksy, cctv, china, civil liberties, film, FISA, free speech?, privacy?, spy bill, street art, surveillance society, western freedoms
[photo by view-askew]
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So everyone’s all up about their western freedoms and civil liberties, post-Sweden. The FISA affair can only mean another little Democratic heartbreak, though perhaps nothing will top the ‘Public Finance? Eh, No Thanks’. Chris Dodd remains a kind of baller though, or as much as once can be while still plugged into recementing electoral politics? While they’re busy buttressing up the telecoms anyway, some more cctv related stuffs, including a Manchester band that filmed a video entirely on CCTV, for want of cash. Is this what post-lofi looks like?
In Montreal, even the fashion police are in on the act, using it both to track suspected criminals and, ridiculously, monitor the brand spreading of corporate logos. I wonder if it would make people start dressing more consciously – a kind of Hearst/ Condé Nast elevator effect? Hopefully those ridiculous Louis Vuitton and Gucci monogrammed prints will be the first to come under fire? |
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Above is a sweet stencil found in Marseilles by Tai Bright. It’s a little scary how similar they are in shape. I guess photography can be kind of violent though, with all the shooting terminology?
