a perseverança do propósito

pretty clothes solve everything

2012-01-28T00:25:00.003Z

oscar

2012-01-25T01:40:00.003Z

lace up

2012-01-20T01:14:00.000Z

de-faced

2012-01-10T23:30:00.000Z

Make Up Your Mind from Steven Whore on Vimeo.

the daughters of the minotaur

2012-01-10T23:05:00.000Z

irma black

2012-01-10T20:39:00.001Z

Black Box from boXoX.me on Vimeo.

situationism

2011-12-30T19:57:00.001Z

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings — dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not merely a matter of images, nor even of images plus sounds. It is whatever escapes people’s activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration and correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation becomes independent, the spectacle regenerates itself.

valley

2011-12-27T19:13:00.001Z

I care because you do

2011-12-27T18:27:00.000Z

not insane

2011-12-20T00:20:00.000Z

1,000 days

2011-12-13T00:18:00.000Z

Sokushinbutsu - Buddhist ritualistic self-mummification

For 1,000 days (a little less than three years) the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another thousand days and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, normally used to lacquer bowls. This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids, and most importantly, it made the body too poisonous to be eaten by maggots. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive.

badass

2011-12-03T20:33:00.001Z

speed + light

2011-11-17T15:09:00.001Z

seeing double

2011-11-15T00:23:00.001Z

the internet of things

2011-11-10T23:42:00.001Z

(...) I’m going to take three quotes defining the Spime from Shaping Things as picked out by Tristan Ferne in, coincidently, a post about Olinda.

“SPIMES are manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. SPIMES being and end as data. They are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means and precisely tracked through space and time throughout their earthly sojourn.” [Shaping Things, p.11]
“The key to the SPIME is identity. A SPIME is, by definition, the protaganist of a documented process. It is an historical entity with an accessible, precise trajectory through space and time.” [Shaping Things, p.77]
“In an age of SPIMES, the object is no longer an object, but an instantiation. My consumption patterns are worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption.” [Shaping Things, p. 79]

“…the object is no longer an object, but an instantiation” – this sticks with me.

A spime is an ongoing means, not an end, like a thing.

As I say, I enjoy things, and working in a company where there are real product designers (I am not one).

A while ago, back when people used to write comments on blogs, rather than just spambots, I wrote about the dematerialisation of product through the expansion of service-models into domains previously centred around product ownership.

It was partly inspired by Bruce’s last Viridian note, and John Thackara‘s writing on the subject amongst others.

But now I feel ‘Unproduct‘ is a bit one-sided.

The stuff I was struggling towards in negroponte switch has become more important.

The unmet (and often unstated) need for a physical ‘attention anchor’ or ‘service avatar’ as Mike Kuniavsky puts it in his excellent book ‘Smart Things‘.

Matter is important. (...)

bray

2011-11-07T23:46:00.000Z

alan moore vs brian eno

2011-11-03T22:48:00.001Z

Alan Moore:
Welcome everybody. My name's Alan Moore. I'm a comic writer and warlock, and I'm lucky enough to be interviewing somebody that I've admired for far too long... Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk in May 1948. Pronouncing his own name gave him the breath control that he would later employ to such startling effect upon his 1975 recording Miss Shapiro. Sprung from a long line of postmen, he received a 1960's education, experimenting with a tape recorder as his primary instrument, the young artist moved to London during 1969, before bumping into a former acquaintance named Andy Mackay, somewhere along the Northern Line. Joining Roxy Music, the new band with whom Mackay was currently engaged in playing saxophone, Eno burst upon public awareness as the central pillar of the decadent, inventive, glam rock period of British pop. Setting his stall out as a non-musician, he abruptly parted company with Roxy Music to produce a string of stunning and extremely influential solo albums, casually inventing ambient music, and the trend for sampling along the way, he has worked on pivotal productions with artists who range from Devo, David Bowie, Robert Wyatt and the new wave scene, to Pavarottiand U2. One of our modern fin de siecle most extraordinary minds, his interest gleefully embracing perfume, science, futurology and ladies bottoms. I am delighted to introduce... Brian Eno.
[Audience applause]

Brian Eno:
Thank you.

AM:
Brian, I mean, given that you described yourself as a non-musician and then went on to completely transform music in the late 20th, early 21st century, should we be glad that you didn't decide that you were going to be a non-serial killer or non-dictator or...?

BE:
[Laughing]

AM:
If you hadn't bumped into Andy Mackay, where would you have ended up?

BE:
Well, I often think about this, because this particular meeting with Andy was really one of those little moments where your life can take two completely different directions. I remember standing... it was the Bakerloo Line by the way... erm, yeah, the train pulled in and I had a choice of going into that carriage or that one, and I chose the one to the left and that's how I joined a band. Now, I had been playing music before then, but I never expected to make a living from it. I was sort of imagining that I would probably end up teaching art and I think that is probably what I would have done had I got into the right hand carriage instead of the left hand one.

AM:
That would have been a tremendous loss, because I think you've probably taught more about art in your capacity as a non-musician than you would have done as a teacher. Was the Glam period as much fun as it looked?

BE:
I liked playing with clothes and make-up [laughing]...

AM:
I remember.

BE:
Many people have confessed to this, but never so publicly... and yeah, it was fun, but it didn't stay fun for very long. It wore off quickly and I realised that my time as a band member had sort of passed when I was on stage one night with Roxy and what I was actually thinking about was my laundry... [general laughter]... and I thought this is not the right job for me any longer.

AM:
Speaking about Roxy Music, I can remember... and this is a personal confession... getting on for 30 years ago, I wrote a letter to you, asking if you could be so kind as to possibly answer twenty questions for a fanzine that I was thinking of doing. I didn't manage to get the fanzine out after you had sent me back this glorious ten page letter that was so generous...

BE:
Bastard. [general laughter].

AM:
...and so I've been writhing... writhing in guilt for the last sort of thirty years easily. I remember one of the things that you said about Roxy Music was that one of the elements that was most interesting to you, was the tension. There was a tension between your vision of what the band should be about, and Brian Ferry's vision... and I was just wondering, whether that was true of that period in general?

BE:
Well, that period was the first time really that pop music had started to take itself seriously in a way. It had become self conscious, so pop music then was fifteen years old, something like that, which was just old enough for people to look back on people like Little Richard and Elvis and so on, as sort of historical figures and to start to look at them as stylistic ideas. So there was quotation from the past like that and there was also quotation from a kind of imaginary future based on science fiction and Star Trekand various other things like that. It felt like we were also trying to make a blend... I mean, I think that Brian and I were very conscious of this... of the things that we had learnt at art school... he was also at art school, he had studied with Richard Hamilton, England's, and probably the world's, first pop artist... and I studied with a lot of conceptual artists, so I was very interested in dragging the conceptual world into pop music. He wanted to put pop into pop art. It called itself pop art, but it was rather staid by comparison with what we were doing.

AM:
And not that popular!

BE:
...and not that popular. [general laughter]

AM:
Your first actual solo album was, Here Come The Warm Jets. How liberating an experience was that for you after having worked with a band?

BE:
Oh, it was fantastic. I did it very quickly. It was just a burst of energy that came out. I don't remember, for example, ever stopping to write lyrics. I can't remember how those lyrics came about.

AM:
You wrote the music first presumably, and then the lyrics afterwards, is that... ?

BE:
Can't remember! [general laughter] I honestly can't remember how a lot of those things came about. They happened so quickly. I know, for example, with a song calledBaby's On Fire that the title for that was the first thing that came along, and so then I wrote a song to justify the title.

AM:
Is it right that that was written on the actual day that you left Roxy Music, or is that just apocryphal?

BE:
No. I think that's true actually. Yeah. I was very, very high with the thought that I could now do anything I wanted. What I mostly wanted to do was to expose a lot of music that I didn't think many other people had heard. I was particularly interested in the English experimental music scene and so I then started my label called Obscure Records, basically to highlight a whole field of English music that I thought was absolutely fascinating and unique. That released Michael Nyman's first record. Gavin Bryars. John Adams. Harold Budd. I mean, I only released ten albums and about seven of them were first albums by a lot of people who became very well known.

AM:
With your solo albums, you can gradually see the songs giving way increasingly to instrumental pieces. Given that you said that you loved writing songs... but obviously people love your songs... there seems to be some kind of ambivalence in your feelings about putting words with music? Have you resolved that?

BE:
Well, I just... actually, just finished a new album which is all songs, funnily enough... the first one I've done like that for a very long time. Twenty five years or so. Song writing is now actually the most difficult challenge in music. It's very easy to make music now. I just bought a synthesiser the other day... a plug-in synthesiser... the sounds are so complex that you can just sort of hold a note down and you've got an ambient album... y'know, as long as you can be bothered to keep your finger down for thirty five minutes. [general laughter].

AM:
I'm sure we can come up with a lyric generator, or something like that...

BE:
Well, this is a big interest for me... lyric generators. That's something I'm working on at the moment.

AM:
Really?

BE:
Yeah. I think that's... lyrics are really the last very hard problem in music. Software... and hardware... have changed the rest of music dramatically in the last thirty, forty years. It's very, very easy to make pretty good music. I could take anyone in this room and within two hours we could make a pretty good piece of music. 'Pretty good' isn't very interesting, but 'pretty good' is possible. But writing songs is just about in the same place as it was in the days of Chaucer. Apart from hip hop. Hip hop is the only sort of break through in a way. Rap. Because it breaks away from the strict adherence to melody and beat structure and so on. But the problem of how you write a song that is in any way original is a really interesting one I think. And that's way I couldn't let it drop. I thought I can carry on doing instrumental records till the cows come home and I'd love to try doing this really hard thing and see if I can.

AM:
I'm fascinated by this idea of a lyric generator. Because it will probably just like make me completely redundant and ruin my plans for a contented retirement. How far are you along with it? [general laughter] Let's get back to the beginning here. You were born in 1948. Your great grandfather, grandfather and father were all postmen. I can see the interest in communication being established there... [general laughter]... but actually, in light of your later ambient work, isn't the main thing that distinguishes a postman's life, those kind of gloriously long stretches of silent contemplation?

BE:
Yes. I remember one of the only things my father, who was a very taciturn, Suffolk man, ever said to me about his own feelings was, "I really love getting up early in the morning, and going and sitting on Broom Heath for ten minutes before I go to work and watching the sun come up," and it was such a funny comment for him to make because he didn't seem like that kind of person at all. But I think that was a line that ran through my family. My grand father, funnily enough had a rather parallel career to me, because he was a post man, that was his main job, but his real interest was in repairing musical instruments, particularly mechanical musical instruments, which of course were the synthesisers of their day... things like hurdy-gurdies and those things that had huge brass plates that went round with waterfalls on them and so on. And he had a house full of these things. But he was also an organ repairer and he built several organs for local churches and when they scrapped their old organs he would take the pipes and gradually he built a six hundred pipe organ and the pipes were just stuck on to the ceilings and on the backs of chests of draws. There were pipes every where.

AM:
His life was a balance between that silence of the postman and interesting noise.

BE:
Yeah. Noise in either its presence or absence was a big part of his life... and of my Dad's actually. My Dad... I told you he was taciturn... well, when I was, I'd say, about thirty five... so I'd been a professional musician for a long, long time, I said to him in passing, "Did you ever play an instrument Dad?" He said, "Oh yeah. I used to have my own band." [general laughter] He'd never mentioned it before.

AM:
Fathers are strange like that aren't they? They can just keep things to themselves.

BE:
He was a drummer.

AM:
Really?

BE:
He'd never told me!

AM:
In 1975 you had presentiments of doom, not for the first time, which culminated in an encounter with what Alan Ginsberg called The Taxi Cabs of Absolute Reality, I believe... On your way to hospital after this accident you felt quite strongly that you'd brought this on yourself. Which reminded me of William Burroughs' sudden premonition on the day before he accidentally killed his wife where he was talking about being possessed by what he called the 'ugly spirit'. Do you have any thoughts about these self destructive energies. I mean, what are they for?

BE:
Yes, I do actually. I have a lot of thoughts about that. I started having a mid-life crisis when I was about eighteen... and it has continued ever since and one of the continuing narratives of that crisis is, "Is what I'm doing worth doing... at all? Is there any point in doing this?" And because I'm very interested in the sciences and I know a lot of scientists and I can see what they are doing and I can sort of understand the point of what they're doing ... I've spent a long time trying to figure out what the point of being an artist is. What does it do for us? What does it do for me? What does it do for anybody else? Could we do without it? Is it a useful job? Does it make any difference to the world?... those kinds of questions. Now, their answers quite directly affect me because I'm not intellectually dishonest enough to always answer in my own favour. So sometimes I come up with the answer... for several years at a time sometimes... where I say it really isn't worth doing. There are better ways of spending your time... and this is a sort of crisis, because then I don't know what to do and I think, "Well, the only way to find out is by trying it again and seeing if I can get somewhere different this time." And if I find myself going down the same road again I think this is hopeless. I'm in such a privileged, luxury position I can do whatever I want and I'm doing the same thing as I did before.

AM:
You talked just now about how purpose in art is something which has obsessed you. The ambient music... this was music with a social function... was this kind of a break through for you in actually finding a different way to apply music?

BE:
Yes, well, I think I'd noticed that one of the things that characterises all new forms of music is an accompanying new way of listening. Every new musical proposition, is a new proposition about what you do as a listener. So, y'know, when Elvis came along and suddenly you are aware that there was a musician who actually was alive below his neck, y'know... the suggestion that music could have a physical function, a physical job to do to make you shake and wriggle. So I think that music always suggests new social roles for itself like that, and I had noticed in the 70's that I wasn't listening to albums any more the way that you're supposed to. I hated the way albums were put together, y'know... fast track, slow track, fast track slow track... as though every three and a half minutes you needed to be sort of woken up again because your attention span was so short. I wanted music that I could use like I would use light in a room. Y'know, you don't want the lights to keep flashing on and off and changing colour and sometimes strobing. You want light... and I wanted sound like that.

AM:
Given the tremendous influence of those first ambient recordings, how do you feel about the way that the form has evolved and mutated since then with its influence probably more evident in chill-out compilations?

BE:
No, I like the whole chill-out idea. I think that's quite a good contribution y'know to suggest to people that ...

AM:
It did emerge from the actual environments at raves - what we used to call the St John's Ambulance tent... [general laughter]. Later, In 1975 you released Another Green World, going into the studio without pre-prepared material... which must have initially been quite nerve-wracking... Now I remember some time around this time you recounted an anecdote about getting lost on a high Scottish hill side at dusk, and stumbling across a swathe of flowers that were almost fluorescent in the failing light. This was quite a worrying situation being lost on a remote Scottish hill side at twilight... but you hit upon the notion that the element of risk may play some vital part in our appreciation of the beautiful. Does this tie in with the studio risks that you were taking with Another Green World?

BE:
Yeah... well, I think if you're aware that your taking a risk, you have that thing I was talking about earlier of all your antenna are out. During that time I used to book a different instrument each day. One day it would be a cello, another day a marimba, trombone... anything. I couldn't play any of them but I just... as part of my kit, I would have a little idea I'd write for myself... "Swing the microphone from the ceiling" and "Hire a trombone." So I've got two rules I'm going to use that day in the studio... and I'm going to try to make a piece of music. Now, those aren't very promising ideas actually, but the effect of that is that as soon as anything even remotely one percent promising starts to happen, you really jump on it with great enthusiasm and build on it quickly.

AM:
Your choice of luxury on Desert Island Discs was, I think, initially a life-times supply of interesting drugs... and then you thought that would probably be boring and that what you would in fact would prefer was a giant man eating spider that would... [Eno laughs]... do you remember saying this?

BE:
No, no... I don't think that's true.

AM:
Well, that's a shame, because that completely blows my question. Let's pretend... [general laughter]... that you did say that your choice of luxury on the desert island was a giant man-eating spider to keep you alert... [Eno still laughing]... to keep you creative and to force you to think of new solutions to deal with the giant man eating spider.

BE:
[still laughing]... I wish I'd thought of that but I don't think I did. I think I stopped at the life-time's supply of hallucinogenic drugs actually.

AM:
That's where I would have stopped... but if you had said that... imagine... then given the current terror saturated global situation, have we all been given the luxury of our own giant man-eating spider?

BE:
Yes. That's a very good point. Yes.

AM:
...and do you think that when the pressure's on that that does actually force people into novel and creative solutions?

BE:
There are some novel and creative solutions growing now. As people have lost faith in politics... I think particularly in this country for the last few years... they're starting to realise that if they want to do things they had better get them done together and do them themselves. One of the most... in fact the most exciting thing to me about the internet is the birth of a new democratic culture which I think hundreds of thousands of people are now participating in... making new experiments in social innovations... government... I think this is all so much more exciting than anything that's going on in politics right now. Somebody just wrote an interesting essay called The Second Superpower, based on something Noam Chomsky said... Chomsky said that there are two superpowers now. There's the United Sates and there's World Opinion... and it's the second one that interests me really.

AM:
I remember seeing a lecturer from the London School of Economics who was talking about the fact that the internet makes it much more difficult to regulate currency. He was saying that we could be looking forward in the future to a period with no currency and therefore no government.

BE:
Well I think what we'd look forward to actually is something slightly more complicated than that... which is elective citizenship. So you might choose to educate your children in Sweden, to pay your taxes in Demark, to support an English football team... that the only thing I can think of for England... [general laughter]... and so on and so on, and the idea that we are all nationals and this particular historical accident of our nationhood defines us I think is going away.

AM:
I remember in this letter I've been wracked with guilt for, for the past thirty years, you also mentioned something which I thought was a wonderful way of using a library. You'd take along numbers...

BE:
Yeah, well, I used to get the numbers from the car... I'd choose a car... the last car I saw before I went into the library, and then I'd use that as the Dewy number for pulling out a book.

AM:
So it would be upon some subject that was completely at random, and would introduce you to an area of knowledge that you might of previously have been shying away from.

BE:
Like breast feeding, for example, was one of them I remember... [general laughter]... I had been shying away from that actually... I hadn't faced up to my inner-mother.

AM:
But I glad you were able to get over your denial there, y'know... In this same year, 1975, you teamed with Peter Schmidt, to publish Oblique Strategies, that were cryptic instructions that were designed to jolt the stalled creative mind out of it's rut.

BE:
It started with me when we were working on the second Roxy Music album, I noticed that every evening when I went home I would think of things I had forgotten to remember in the studio. And these were not things like "Put on a guitar solo"... [general laughter]... they were more like things like "If you listen from outside the door, you hear things you don't hear in the studio." Or "If you listen to all the quieter details of something that's sometimes a nice way of hearing things." So I just started making a simple list of these. It turned out that Peter Schmidt, who was a painter, had been doing something similar, and we looked at our ideas and what was interesting was that they were remarkably cross applicable. So we started to think that maybe we could come up with a kind of universal set of cards that gave you some strategies you could use in difficult working situations to kind of knock yourself out of the furrow that you might have inadvertently got yourself into. Some cards... their ideas have entered the culture so much that you don't need to say them any longer. Other ideas still seem fresh.

AM:
So "Honour thy accident as your hidden intention" that has...

BE:
That was the first one for me...

AM:
That is the one that has probably pervaded the culture more strongly the other ones. I've certainly used them myself for writing comics or for writing. Do you still use the cards yourself or...?

BE:
Yeah.

AM:
Yeah?

BE:
Yep.

AM:
So, your methods haven't sort of changed...

BE:
In fact I pulled one out this morning. It said, "Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency." Which is what I'm trying to do.

AM:
Well, you're certainly doing that. That's fantastic.

BE:
I didn't even change my clothes!

AM:
In 1976, you commenced a string of remarkable collaborations with David Bowie, starting with Low. What was it like working together on those albums? Did you have a sense that this is something quite momentous?

BE:
We played together in what must have been a great show I think at The Rainbow. He was headlining. Roxy Music was support band and it was a real sort of battle of the bands thing and all the music papers couldn't decide who'd been best. But it was a good show though. But I didn't know him well. He went through a very bad period in the mid-70's with cocaine and apparently he said to me sometime later that he'd usedDiscrete Music as the sound track of his recovery. He'd only been listening to that one record over and over and so that was sort of the basis on which we started to work together. That was all done very quickly as well. It's very hard to remember in an detail what we did. There's an Indian saying, “The fruit ripens slowly, but falls suddenly,” and I think there was some... a lot of ideas that he'd had and that I'd had that had been ripening for a long, long time and suddenly when we met in that studio... whoop... it all came together, really without any discussion or any argument that I can remember at all.

AM:
Between 1978 and 1983 you were living in New York and you created your video paintings I believe, [Mistaken] Memories Of Mediaeval Manhattan? This was a response to what you saw as an escalating spiral of hysteria in music videos where every new music video had to have more nuns and Nazi's and explosions...

BE:
Actually it was not so much a reaction to pop videos, that stuff I was doing, it was more a reaction to what was called Video Art, which it seemed to me was entirely enslaved by Hollywood, either by trying to be like Hollywood or desperately resisting being like it in any way at all. So you got terrible Video Art shows where some not very attractive looking artist was staring at a camera, flabby and naked for forty five minutes... of course in black and white because colour was Hollywood, y'know... so it was sort of reducing every thing to its least sensual and least beautiful... I thought what you could do with video which nobody had done, was to make paintings that happened to change, and that's where all my sky films came from. They were at natural speed. They weren't sped up or slowed down. They were of what I saw out of my window. And it was very interesting, when I used to make those things people would to come round to my flat sometimes, they could sit looking out of the window if they wanted to but they always sat looking at the video of the view outside the window... [general laughter]...

AM:
From your guest appearance on Father Ted...

BE:
A bit of a highlight that.

AM:
...from some of your comments in the diary [A Year With Swollen Appendices] that you kept for a year and also from many of your own lyrics, there is an incredible sense of humour, and its obviously something that you do have an interest in. British comedy - what are your thoughts?

BE:
Actually, I think that is our great export, comedy. I think British comedy is really very good indeed. Much better than British football, actually. What I like about it is that it's very experimental. It really does pull in ideas from everywhere. If you think of The Goon Show which was radio Dadaism really. I can remember my Dad, a postman, being totally gripped by The Goons, and it was about as experimental as anything that was going on in the culture at the time... and then Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, who are the two characters that Bowie and I always slip into whenever we meet... [general laughter]...

AM:
That conjures quite an image.

BE [In the voice of Pete 'n' Dud]:
"We only ever talk to each other like this... so... done any new music lately?"... [general laughter]. It's true. We hardly ever have a conversation in any other voice in fact... [more laughter]... so next time you listen to Heroes...[more laughter]... "We could be heroes Dud... just for one day."

AM [Also, in the voice of Pete 'n' Dud]
"Funny how the ambiance seems to follow you round the room..." [more laughter]

BE:
[laughing]... That's a good ending!

AM:
Could I have a very big round of applause please for the remarkable... Brian Eno.

[A very big round of applause]

Alan Moore was interviewing Brian Eno. The series producer was Jane Berthoud.The producer was Tilusha Ghelani.

left and right, or the necessary distance

2011-10-21T19:11:00.000+01:00

beneath

2011-10-18T20:15:00.000+01:00

leggs

2011-10-09T19:01:00.000+01:00

wonder why

2011-10-03T01:34:00.000+01:00

elizabeth on the floor

2011-10-03T01:23:00.000+01:00

nevermind

2011-09-27T00:47:00.000+01:00

heavy weather

2011-09-26T00:47:00.000+01:00

tuxedo

2011-09-15T23:12:00.000+01:00

The entire span of every era of the much beloved and legendary Tuxedomoon - from their early beginnings in San Francisco through their many years in Europe. Impressionistically filmed in both grainy black & white and psychedelic color, by group co-founder Steven Brown. Fits together like a perfect 15-year dream.

sleep tight

2011-09-15T22:59:00.001+01:00

la peur

2011-09-15T22:28:00.000+01:00

là où va le regard

2011-09-11T16:48:00.000+01:00

fearsome iconography

2011-09-05T23:58:00.001+01:00

"The self-decapitated goddess holds her own severed head in one hand, a scimitar in another. Three jets of blood spurt out of her bleeding neck and are drunk by her severed head and two attendants. Chhinnamasta is usually depicted standing on a copulating couple."

small is beautiful

2011-08-21T22:50:00.000+01:00

HORSE GLUE from small time inc. on Vimeo.

The Black Dog's Progress from small time inc. on Vimeo.

redrum

2011-08-21T02:03:00.000+01:00

c'est photo mais graphique

2011-08-20T00:08:00.001+01:00

city on acid

2011-08-18T00:12:00.000+01:00

o primeiro dia

2011-08-15T12:59:00.000+01:00

more human than human

2011-08-15T12:46:00.000+01:00

codex

2011-08-11T15:38:00.002+01:00

Codex Seraphinianus

Many of the pictures are grotesque and disturbing, but others are extremely beautiful and visionary. The inventiveness that it took to come up with all these conceptions of a hypothetical land is staggering.

Some people with whom I have shared this book find it frightening or disturbing in some way. It seems to them to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility. There is very little to fasten onto; everything shifts, shimmers, slips. Yet the book has a kind of unearthly beauty and logic to it, qualities pleasing to a different class of people: people who are more at ease with free-wheeling fantasy and, in some sense, craziness. I see some parallels between musical composition and this kind of invention. Both are abstract, both create a mood, both rely largely on style to convey content.

Douglas R. Hofstadter

the secret garden

2011-08-10T17:39:00.001+01:00

waiting for the miracle

2011-08-09T22:39:00.002+01:00

chris von

2011-08-08T17:44:00.000+01:00

capitán

2011-08-08T00:42:00.001+01:00

Capitán, los afanes son engaños,
Vano el arnés y vana la porfía
Del hombre, cuyo término es un día;
Todo ha concluido hace ya muchos años.
El hierro que ha de herirte se ha herrumbrado:
Estás (como nosotros) condenado.

J. L. Borges

angel psicopata

2011-08-04T02:43:00.000+01:00

burns likes hell

2011-08-04T01:50:00.002+01:00

the bergen street incident

2011-08-03T23:54:00.000+01:00

weaving words

2011-08-03T23:08:00.001+01:00

The Craft of Verse: The Norton Lectures, 1967-68

"The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry."
Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse

For Borges (1899-1986), the central fact of life was the existence of words and their potential as building blocks of poetry. In this series of six long-forgotten lectures given at Harvard more than 30 years ago, he insists that reading (in English, primarily) gave him more pleasure than writing. Most of his examples are taken from English-speaking writers, such as Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, Whitman, and Frost. Borges developed a passion for the study of Old English, with its abundant metaphors, harsh beauty, and deep feeling (though not, he admits, for its deep thought). He dislikes the history of literature, which he feels demeans individual works, and he is generally wistful for a future when we are no longer overburdened by history. He champions the primacy of storytelling and prefers the epic to the novel, which he finds "padded." He also argues that one of the great poverties of our time is that we no longer believe in happiness and success and that happy endings seem commercial or staged. Some of his ideas are quirky, but it's still a privilege to have access to one of the most distinctive literary voices of the century.

principles of truth

2011-08-03T21:07:00.002+01:00

I. THE PRINCIPLE OF MENTALISM - “THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental.”

II. THE PRINCIPLE OF CORRESPONDENCE - “As above, so below; as below, so above.”

III. THE PRINCIPLE OF VIBRATION - “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

IV. THE PRINCIPLE OF POLARITY - “Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.”

V. THE PRINCIPLE OF RHYTHM - “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.”

VI. THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSE AND EFFECT - “Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the Law.”

VII. THE PRINCIPLE OF GENDER - “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.”

mainstream

2011-08-03T17:24:00.001+01:00

dirty minds think alike

2011-08-01T19:57:00.000+01:00

angels and demons

2011-07-24T14:53:00.001+01:00

exposed

2011-07-20T00:38:00.000+01:00

je t'aime moi non plus

2011-07-18T01:29:00.000+01:00

false sequence

2011-07-18T00:47:00.000+01:00

a street named desire

2011-07-16T21:49:00.000+01:00

pure gauld

2011-07-12T23:41:00.000+01:00

hand and feet

2011-07-12T17:46:00.000+01:00

the brooch reloaded

2011-07-12T13:42:00.001+01:00

outro verão

2011-07-12T00:34:00.000+01:00

protection

2011-06-26T00:04:00.000+01:00

never let me down

2011-06-24T23:28:00.000+01:00

dazzlement

2011-06-24T22:50:00.002+01:00

“When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.”

in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

books are the natural food for thought

2011-06-24T19:56:00.003+01:00

Johann Hari:
" The book -- the physical paper book -- is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all.
[...]
A book has a different relationship to time than a TV show or a Facebook update. It says that something was worth taking from the endless torrent of data and laying down on an object that will still look the same a hundred years from now.
[...]
That's why we need books, and why I believe they will survive. Because most humans have a desire to engage in deep thought and deep concentration. Those muscles are necessary for deep feeling and deep engagement. Most humans don't just want mental snacks forever; they also want meals.
[...]
We are the first generation to ever use the internet, and when I look at how we are reacting to it, I keep thinking of the Inuit communities I met in the Arctic, who were given alcohol and sugar for the first time a generation ago, and guzzled them so rapidly they were now sunk in obesity and alcoholism."

no protection

2011-06-23T01:29:00.000+01:00

junji

2011-06-21T01:24:00.000+01:00

a m a r a n t e

2011-06-19T01:35:00.001+01:00

tritone

2011-06-19T01:30:00.000+01:00

the red room

2011-06-19T01:17:00.000+01:00

klein blue

2011-06-17T00:19:00.001+01:00

CLOROX BLUE by Steven Klein from atas_komunne on Vimeo.

t. ott

2011-06-16T01:22:00.000+01:00

A man sits in a pub as his cigarette slowly burns. The end.

2011-06-14T00:46:00.000+01:00

[...]
What has changed in The Last Century is time itself; in a reversal of cinematic norms, filmic time is transformed into photographic time: movement becomes stasis. The familiar notion that photography is a ‘frozen moment’ or a ‘point’ along the time-based ‘line’ of film has only been challenged relatively recently by moving images of motionless subjects in avant-garde films by Andy Warhol or Straub/Huillet and by Chris Marker’s stop-motion movie of photographic stills, La Jetée of 1962. Yet Taylor-Wood’s impulses are just as close to Caravaggio’s desire to subvert his medium’s inherent limitations, in his case by painting dynamic compositions that have the potential to destroy the picture’s stillness with imminent movement.
[...]

numinosum

2011-06-13T02:21:00.000+01:00

“It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.”

Carl Jung

se todos os anúncios de câmaras fotográficas fossem assim

2011-06-12T03:54:00.000+01:00

erased

2011-06-12T03:47:00.000+01:00

Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final

2011-06-11T01:35:00.006+01:00

cassini

2011-06-08T15:04:00.001+01:00

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

wear me

2011-06-08T00:29:00.000+01:00

horror movie

2011-06-08T00:00:00.001+01:00

Loom from Polynoid on Vimeo.

any moment

2011-06-07T23:47:00.000+01:00

0
ANY MOMENT PREVIOUS TO
THE PRESENT MOMENT

1
THE PRESENT MOMENT AND
ONLY THE PRESENT MOMENT

2
ALL APARENTLY INDIVIDUAL
OBJECTS DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED
BY YOU AT 1

3
ALL OF YOUR RECOLLECTION AT 1
OF APPARENTLY INDIVIDUAL OBJECTS
DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED BY YOU AT
0 AND KNOWN TO BE IDENTICAL
WITH 2

4
ALL CRITERIA BY WHICH YOU MIGHT
DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MEMBERS OF 3
AND 2

5
ALL OF YOUR EXTRAPOLATION FROM
2 AND 3 CONCERNING THE DISPOSITION
OF 2 AT 0

6
ALL ASPECTS OF THE DISPOSITION
OF YOUR WON BODY AT 1 WHICH
YOU CONSIDER IN WHOLE OR IN
PART STRUCTURALLY ANALOGOUS
WITH THE DISPOSITION OF 2

7
ALL OF YOUR INTENTIONAL BODILY
ACTS PERFORMED UPON ANY MEMBER
OF 2

8
ALL OF YOUR BODILY SENSATIONS
WHICH YOU CONSIDER CONTINGENT
UPON YOUR BODILY CONTACT WITH
ANY MEMBER OF 2

9
ALL EMOTIONS DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED
BY YOU AT 1

10
ALL OF YOUR BODILY SENSATIONS
WHICH YOU CONSIDER CONTINGENT
UPON ANY MEMBER OF 9

11
ALL CRITERIA BY WHICH YOU MIGHT
DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MEMBERS OF
10 AND 9

12
ALL OF YOUR RECOLLECTION AT 1
OTHER THAN 3

13
ALL ASPECTS OF 12 UPON WHICH
YOU CONSIDER ANY MEMBER OF 9
TO BE CONTINGENT

Victor Burgin, "Any Moment," (1970)

has the world pushed us too far?

2011-06-07T23:33:00.003+01:00

"The principal focus of The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) is the sexual arousal of the central character at both the idea and the spectacle of the total degradation, humiliation, mutilation, torture, and murder of his naked victims.
(...)
It is the Board’s conclusion that the explicit presentation of the central character’s obsessive sexually violent fantasies is in breach of its Classification Guidelines and poses a real, as opposed to a fanciful, risk that harm is likely to be caused to potential viewers."

"Is there such a thing as self-exploitation? And what's to distinguish simple exhibitionism, and those who would leverage it for profit, from a legitimate, artistic, and maybe spiritual exploration of the body's limits? (I'm including "spiritual" because ecstatic states similar to those depicted in the horror flick Martyrs are briefly, but convincingly, touched upon.)
(...)
It's interesting, for example, that the height of Insex's popularity overlaps with the rise of bondage and fetishistic torture in U.S. horror films--just a coincidence? And don't forget that this was also the age of the caught-on-camera sexual humiliations at Abu Ghraib and U.S. debate over the "soft" tortures of Guantanamo. Again, maybe these specific historical and political items aren't that relevant to the events and ideas presented in GSH, but the fact remains that while watching the film you'd never know that any of its compelling themes might intersect with the wider world."

la mirada asesina

2011-06-07T00:01:00.001+01:00

banda de criadores

2011-06-05T03:29:00.005+01:00

cover up

2011-06-04T17:30:00.000+01:00

em bicos dos pés

2011-06-04T00:13:00.000+01:00

O salto alto é sinónimo de sexo. O pé arqueado e tenso cria uma silhueta eroticamente carregada, pelas acrescidas elevação e exposição do corpo. O salto alto é fálico, mas supinamente feminino, obrigando a portadora a uma postura mais erecta, mais elegante e mais consciente de si própria, tornando-a simultaneamente vulnerável e em controlo. O stiletto, a quintessência do salto alto – fino e o único que faz justiça à perna feminina, sendo uma sua continuação e conclusão/início, num traço único e perfeito –, é um símbolo tão poderoso quanto contraditório – pode ser elegante, vulgar, submisso, agressivo, subversivo ou convencional. A sua peculiar história é exemplo dessa natureza paradoxal como obscuro objecto de desejo.

Os primeiros precursores dos saltos altos foram descobertos num túmulo em Tebas, no Egipto, e datam de aproximadamente 1000 A.C. Esses saltos provavelmente conferiam (literalmente) um alto estatuto social a quem os usasse, ideia que foi aproveitada na Grécia antiga por exemplo por Ésquilo, ao montar os seus actores de teatro em sapatos de plataforma com diferentes alturas, para indicar o estrato social de cada personagem. No Oriente existia o mesmo simbolismo, tendo o imperador japonês Hirohito sido coroado em 1926 com sapatos de plataforma com uma altura de 30cm. Mas por outro lado, as cortesãs japonesas calçavam tamancas com 15 a 30cm, as concubinas chinesas e as odaliscas turcas usavam sandálias de salto alto – provavelmente para impedir a sua fuga dos haréns – e as prostitutas da Roma antiga eram conhecidas pela altura dos seus saltos. A moda europeia do salto alto deriva da “chopine” italiana, um estilo de sapatos montados num cilindro com 15 a 42cm de altura. Algumas chegavam aos 75cm, e as senhoras que as calçavam tinham de se apoiar em bengalas para conseguir andar. Em 1430, as chopines foram proibidas em Veneza, mas já nada podia parar a moda. O salto alto tal como o conhecemos hoje apenas data de meados do século XX, quando a tecnologia e o design se uniram para criar o stiletto, mas a sua “invenção” é atribuída a Catarina de Médicis no século XVI, quando se mudou de Florença para Paris para se casar com o rei; devido à sua baixa estatura, usou saltos altos na sua boda e com esse gesto incendiou os círculos aristocráticos europeus com a nova moda: um pequeno passo para Catarina, um salto gigante para a mundaneidade. Os sapatos de salto tornaram-se populares também junto dos homens e das trabalhadoras sexuais da época. No século XVII, o Parlamento inglês castigava como bruxas todas as mulheres que usassem saltos altos para seduzir homens no intuito de casar com elas. Na sua biografia, Casanova confessou o seu amor pelos saltos, que ajudavam a revelar as pernas das mulheres. Luís XIV tornou-se fanático pelos saltos altos e proibiu o seu uso a quem não pertencesse às classes privilegiadas – sob pena de morte. O “Salto Luís” foi inventado por Luís XV no século XVIII, sendo ainda muito usado na moda feminina contemporânea. A maioria dos sapatos de então era feita de couro ou de veludo espesso, e numa variedade de cores diferentes. Muitos eram simplesmente de enfiar, mas outros apertavam-se com uma tira ou uma fivela no peito do pé. As botas até à coxa também estavam na moda e eram muitas vezes elaboradamente decoradas e presas ao gibão por ligas. Após a Revolução Francesa, a altura dos saltos baixou durante um certo período – o novo governo não tinha fundos e muitas fivelas de sapato foram doadas para a causa! No século XIX, os saltos altos chegaram aos EUA, importados dos bordéis de Paris devido ao sucesso que tinham junto da clientela que preferia os serviços das meninas que os usavam. Os sapatos de designer tardam até ao século XX e só nos anos 50 é que se tornam mais ligeiros e ganham o salto alto de stiletto e a ponta bicuda. Estas fantasias trazidas à vida pelo talento e imaginação de criadores como Vivier, Perugia, Salvatore Ferragamo e Charles Jourdan, libertaram as mulheres da moda utilitária e pesada dos tempos da guerra e permitiram-lhes brilhar com a sofisticação e elegância por que ansiavam – ou com que fantasmavam. Os saltos foram crescendo e tornando-se mais ousados, sobretudo quando usados por Marilyn Monroe ou Jayne Mansfield, duas notórias “bad girls”. Nos anos 70, a associação do stiletto ao sexo e à morte tornaram-no num objecto fetichista no meio artístico, louvado e imortalizado, entre muitos outros, por Allen Jones, Eric Stanton e Bill Ward, e fotógrafos como Helmut Newton. Os “power dressers” da década de 80 trouxeram-no de volta para a arena da moda, sobretudo como acessório fundamental da nova classe executiva feminina, dura mas elegante; hoje em dia, saltos desenhados por Manolo Blahnik, Christian Louboutin, Jimmy Choo, e Gina são símbolos de estatuto e até de celebridade. E as imagens de moda são imagens de saltos altos – "fashion is the artisan of mascarade”.

Destas lições de história, importa reter, essencialmente, duas coisas: primeiro, que a altura “vertiginosa” de alguns saltos actuais empalidece quando comparada com alguns dos seus ilustres predecessores; segundo, que o salto alto é um objecto de poder sexual. Sejamos claros: de excitação sexual.

As mencionadas elevação e exposição do corpo não representam mais do que a captura de um movimento, de um acto (de entrega ou de procura). Significam tensão, e portanto vida. Quanto mais altos os saltos, maior a tensão e assim maior a relação que se pode estabelecer com a pessoa. Eles significam assim um acto de entrega, ao estabelecerem um vínculo directo com o observador, derivado da tensão percebida por quem os usa – uma mulher de saltos altos está mais consciente, próxima, do seu corpo do que nunca, move-se de maneira pensada e, no extremo da imagem, parece estar em apuros (de cair); mesmo que não se mova ou não se possa mover - por estar atada, por exemplo; não há bondage sem saltos altos; e nem sempre eles significam vulnerabilidade (“Madame's heels are designed to cause damage”) –, ela fica "vestida" com os sapatos, condição necessária e suficiente para fugir ao detestável "naturismo" e mostrar um gesto consciente sobre o próprio corpo – uma mulher vestida é sempre mais desejável do que uma totalmente despida. E uma mulher apenas calçada está plenamente armada. É todo um filme que se desenrola diante dos olhos maravilhados de um observador – mesmo que a criatura esteja imóvel (nesse caso, todo o potencial de movimento latente se desenrola na sua mente febril). Assim, dado que essencialmente os saltos provocam, estimulam, são o desejo, eles desempenham um papel determinante na nossa sociedade – a sua aparente inutilidade é um convite sensual que encerra em si toda uma panóplia de possibilidades.

Os saltos altos são o cume da civilização, se a quisermos simbolizar através de um único objecto.

Não se podem usar em qualquer lado – é necessário um contexto, um grau de sofisticação no ambiente que rodeia a portadora, para nele se enquadrar. Sobretudo, nem toda a gente fica bem de saltos altos. Existe uma selecção natural que apenas favorece os mais belos espécimes – a civilização, aparentemente cruel, é apenas pragmática. Se quisermos, uma certa noção de sexo pode ser reduzida à simbologia dos saltos: exposição e elegância da fêmea, excitação sem consumação (a consumação é o fim do sexo), precisão de imagem e tacto, e naturalmente a ligação aos pés, membros simbólicos por excelência de todo o corpo feminino. Usam-se tanto nas melhores ocasiões sociais, cenários comuns para a comunicação entre espécies e antecâmara para o coito, como em privado, onde permitem explorações infindáveis e encenações que comunicam directamente com o subconsciente; como objecto em si, representam o arquétipo da fêmea, podendo ser usados por mais do que uma – transcendem a presente utilizadora para representar todas as potenciais utilizadoras, tal como uma máscara (existe pensamento mais excitante?). E o melhor de tudo: este mundo pulsante de excitações e febres pode ser comprado numa vulgar loja. Bem, os melhores sapatos (com os saltos mais altos) não se encontram em lojas vulgares…

in Umbigo #11 (2004)

l'amour fou

2011-06-02T19:09:00.000+01:00

books: the future reloaded

2011-05-31T01:25:00.001+01:00

Because the only way we can get on with our business is if we finally bury publishing’s corpse and rechannel the energy we’ve spent propping it to build something new. Something that serves the needs not of editors, or marketers, or publishers, or shareholders, or the culture industry, but of writers and readers, who together are recto and verso of the literary community, which is to say, the only thing that matters.
[...]
Literature isn’t a 6-year-old dyslexic girl who has to be drilled on the difference between b’s and d’s and p’s and q’s. Literature isn’t weak. It’s strong. It isn’t given. It takes. It isn’t protected. It protects. And, finally, literature cannot be saved, because literature saves us. When it no longer saves us, it is no longer literature. Perhaps it was once and has lost its relevance; perhaps it never was; the distinction is one we can and should argue about, and if we don’t reach a conclusion that’s a good sign, because a book about which everyone in the culture says the same thing has lost its ability to say anything about the culture—just as a literary classic, to borrow a phrase from the beleaguered Mark Twain, “is a book that everybody talks about but which no one has read.”

[...]
From where I stand, I can see a world not so far into the future in which books are sold only by authors or small collectives through one or two or three online portals that charge a nominal fee for their service rather than gobbling up the lion’s share of revenue.

Dale Peck

sol enganador

2011-05-30T01:09:00.000+01:00

the eye is a lonely hunter

2011-05-29T20:48:00.001+01:00

seven

2011-05-26T11:26:00.000+01:00

O cinema está em estado de decomposição acelerada e as partes em que se (de)compõe podem ser facilmente encontradas na Internet, sob as mais diversas formas. As longas-metragens são realizadas e produzidas de forma cada vez mais modular, por oposição a uma unidade de forma e sentido (“o filme era fraco, mas aquela cena foi espectacular”) e todo o aparato que lhes diz respeito pode ser dividido até à exaustão, desde intervenientes a imagens específicas, a fim de melhorar a sua exposição aos media – para além de trailers, temos teasers e mesmo preview teasers, sempre mais pequenos e sempre revelando mais do que deviam. Esta febre de revelação atinge o seu auge na net, tanto a nível de conteúdos como de rumores sobre conteúdos. Todas as pessoas envolvidas numa produção podem ser focadas ou desfocadas em qualquer fase (mesmo antes de haver sequer produção) consoante as necessidades de marketing. E a Internet precisa de tema de conversa ininterrupto, é um read-show aberto 25 horas por dia e noite, onde as notícias se criam incestuosamente e se canibalizam a galope.

Há demasiados filmes. Temos assim de recorrer ao saber acumulado por outros para podermos chegar a algum tipo de juízo nós mesmos. Nos dias que correm, a Internet pode ser considerada a principal fonte oficial para se falar sobre cinema, substituindo as arcaicas revistas ou a televisão. Falar sobre cinema é substancialmente diferente de ver cinema, desde logo porque é possível discorrer longamente sobre filmes que nunca vimos. E infelizmente o tema é entendido como muito mais fértil que os objectos-fluxo que lhe dão corpo e sentido – existem muitos sites exclusivamente dedicados a assuntos “cinematográficos” que pouco ou nenhum interesse demonstram por filmes em si.

O cinema é a sua própria história e tal como as outras artes ele não é senão narrativa. Uma narrativa que atinge hoje o ocaso e cujo declínio da sua influência global coincide com o advento das comunidades em rede. “A Internet é a nova televisão”, diz David Lynch, que continua a fazer filmes, para além das experiências no seu laboratório/site. A relação entre a Internet e o cinema tem sido ambígua e marcada por equívocos e surpresas, mas eles estão juntos na aurora e crepúsculo das imagens.

A net irá salvar o cinema que interessa e a voragem de informações (embaladas por empresas de comunicação de alcance global) e opiniões (assholes, como dizia Eastwood) arrasta-nos inexoravelmente, já que nos tornámos todos em junkies de novidades e sobretudo de imagens novas (ainda há?). A actual concorrência de meios de comunicação é desleal mas vai convergir em tempo acelerado e desmultiplicar-se em míriades de plataformas móveis, cada qual com o seu ângulo específico. Neste momento o computador é o grande caldeirão de verbos e imagens, antecipando-se e sobrepondo-se à experiência cinemática. Deixemo-nos escorregar preguiçosamente por uma mão-cheia de sítios, evitando contudo as arenas de desperdício semi-verbal que dão pelo nome de fóruns.

Twitchfilm.com é elegante e o mais simpático sobre filmes independentes e de culto, dando destaque aos lançamentos asiáticos mas estendendo-se a outras partes do mundo (entre os muitos colaboradores, destacam-se dois especialistas na cinematografia turca e até um na portuguesa), pequenas mas sempre interessantes produções com temas fantásticos, incluindo curtas-metragens, sucessos de box-office de além-mar e festivais sobre all of the above.

Para pessoas sérias que apreciem o cinema japonês contemporâneo para além de filmes de terror para adolescentes (mas também os incluindo), Midnighteye.com é a sobriedade e clareza incarnadas, com críticas actualizadas, entrevistas com os realizadores, actores e técnicos mais importantes e análises fundamentadas por um gosto genuíno pelo cinema nipónico. E onde se pode igualmente encomendar um livro sobre Takashi Miike, o que é sempre bom.

Para se estar a par da actualidade americana em geral com descontração e cool, Joblo.com satisfaz plenamente, com notícias, críticas e alguns dos comentários mais descomplexados, bem-dispostos e acertados da web, uma variedade apreciável de assuntos e o duplo bónus de incluir inteiramente grátis um sub-site dedicado a filmes fantásticos e de terror – Arrow in the head- e um site irmão sobre as actrizes mais curvilíneas da actualidade – MovieHotties. Viva o Canadá.

E depois vêm quatro sites tão históricos quanto específicos. Primeiro, o arcano Aintitcool.com, fundado pelo mega-geek Harry Knowles, que respira cinema a sério e cujo site ficou conhecido por postar notícias sobre visionamentos prévios supostamente secretos e determinar o sucesso ou funeral de vários projectos. Com um jargão algo desconcertante e uma apresentação agressiva, o site vive essencialmente à base de pequenas notícias, críticas ou rumores, por vezes de quase pré-cognição. Exemplo: depois de ter mencionado vezes sem conta o próximo projecto de James Cameron e aventado as mais delirantes hipóteses para o tema, o próprio Cameron telefonou a Harry para o pôr a par do que se estava a passar (estavam a falar de Avatar). Knowles tornou-se uma referência, influindo activamente em argumentos de filmes, organizando o seu próprio festival independente de cinema em Austin, entrando em filmes, participando em programas de televisão, sendo amigo de realizadores e actores e até produzindo filmes de série B. Para além disto, alguns colaboradores fazem parte da indústria, estando bem posicionados para saber o que se passa e sendo geralmente bem-escreventes.

A seguir, a Imdb.com, a auto-proclamada base de dados de cinema da Internet pode tornar-se tão viciante como as notícias do dia. É sem dúvida útil – por exemplo para relembrar a carreira de humor inglês pré-House de Hugh Laurie ou exactamente quantos filmes produziu Roger Corman -, algo sobrevalorizada e com uma secção de coscuvilhices obscenas do business americano.

Para quem gosta de números e estatísticas, o Boxofficemojo.com é o mais indicado, permitindo comparar resultados entre filmes e carreiras de actores e realizadores, numa fascinante viagem no tempo e na realidade – como por exemplo quanto dinheiro fez Blade Runner quando estreou ou qual o filme mais rentável dentro do sub-género “lobisomem”. O site oferece igualmente críticas argutas das estreias mais próximas.

Finalmente, puramente em termos de imagens o Apple.com/trailers apresenta os trailers actualizados de melhor qualidade da net, ponto final. Existem muitos outros sites de trailers, mas voltamos sempre a este. Todos os dias.

Apesar de uma visita a estes locais aprazíveis – entre dezenas de possibilidades mais específicas aos gostos perversos de cada qual - possa fazer brilhar a conversação numa ocasião social elitista – com um comentário incisivo sobre a dobragem em groenlandês da mais recente animação infantil sobre a vida de Kierkegaard ou a qualidade dos efeitos especiais do segundo terço do teaser do próximo filme de retro-ficção científica baseado no diário de um discípulo de Philip K. Dick - , não se deve ignorar o valor e necessidade de leitura de ensaios sobre cinema, como os publicados na Film Comment ou até – horror! – na Cahiers du Cinéma; e naturalmente a experiência pessoal da coisa-em-si, ou seja, ir a uma sala de cinema para descobrir de que raio estamos afinal a falar.

in Umbigo #20 (2007)

a silhueta do desejo

2011-05-26T10:41:00.002+01:00

O espartilho é uma das peças de vestuário mais influentes e poderosas de todos os tempos. Iniciático, tanto oculta como dá a mostrar e impõe a sua vontade ao restante vestuário, como um imperador nas sombras. O aparente paradoxo subjugador do olhar e da carne torna-o um perfeito conciliador dos sexos – os homens-visuais e as mulheres-sensações juntos no mesmo deleite, a qualidade apaziguadora da admiração tornando suportável/desejável o desconforto. No jogo das dualidades, o espartilho é um exemplo justo das contradições humanas entre o que se deve ver e o que se deve esconder, o que se protege e o que se cobiça, a intimidade e a promiscuidade, a submissão e a dominação, o prazer e a dor.

Historicamente, a ideia de espartilho existe desde os tempos primordiais em que as mulheres usavam peles humedecidas em redor do torso, que, uma vez secas, apertavam as suas formas – presumivelmente para melhor atrair os machos dominantes. Com mais ou menos tecnologia envolvida, desde o couro e o tecido às barbas de baleia e ao aço, a engenharia do espartilho sempre foi uma arte tão delicada como robusta, permeando a história do vestuário com a sua influência nem sempre reconhecida, mas sempre presente, com destaque para o século XIX, onde reinou sem oposição, e consequente ressurgimento fulgurante no século seguinte.

Politicamente, foi um dos estandartes das primeiras feministas como símbolo da opressão machista e mártir na fogueira das ideias adversas ao progresso, sendo substituído pelo soutien. Curiosamente, a sugerida incomodidade provocada pelo espartilho nunca se manifestou em termos de igualdade ou disparidade entre os sexos durante o longo período da sua preponderância, mas apenas quando a própria moda contra ele se revoltou, “libertando” as mulheres dos seus atilhos.

Socialmente, o espartilho foi sinal de estatuto - se uma mulher espartilhada era incapaz de realizar qualquer tipo de tarefa prática é porque obviamente não precisava de o fazer – , castidade – as mães espartilhavam as filhas como protecção/correcção, dando perversamente aso a fantasias febris - e condicionador de relações - uma forma de dominar comportamentos mais levianos, obrigando a portadora a exercitar um apertado auto-controlo, sinal de estabilidade mental e emocional – donde a dicotomia em língua inglesa entre “straight-laced” e “loose women”. Em 1886, um anúncio dos espartilhos Warren prometia que toda a gente admiraria uma jovem devidamente equipada e, mais ainda, que assim ela em poucos dias conseguiria um casamento respeitável!

Do mundo da arte, destaquemos duas imagens, já do século XX: a fotografia de Horst P.Horst de uma jovem loura com um espartilho de Mainbocher, um ícone de ressonâncias clássicas; e a de Jeanloup Sieff, com uma elegância nouvelle-vague de modernidade desarmante. Ambas focam a silhueta espartilhada como coluna de força que dispensa quaisquer outros elementos de composição – incluindo a portadora humana, único acessório numa paisagem despojada.

A força iconográfica do espartilho deve-se essencialmente à sua natureza sexual, contudo. Ele é um símbolo de feminilidade, o arquétipo do corpo da mulher materializado numa armadura/prisão, que o divide ao meio - razão pela qual também é tão atraente para os homens, quer os de outras épocas, quer os que se querem parecer com mulheres. Em várias culturas o uso de espartilho masculino é um rito de passagem e a cintura pequena era considerada na moda nos séculos XVI e XIX, ligações culturais que explicam a sua popularidade junto dos “Primitivos Modernos” e adeptos da “body-modification”. Que outra peça obriga tão completamente as mulheres a serem “mais” mulheres, lisonjeando-as ao mesmo tempo que as imobiliza? Ao realçar o peito e as ancas, as duas zonas erógenas mais proeminentes, o espartilho é um convite (visual, táctil e... cruel, porque evidencia simultaneamente a distância e dificuldade do objectivo) ao prazer e está ligado à imagem da fertilidade – os estrógenos, as hormonas sexuais femininas, ajudam a acumular gordura nas nádegas, tornando a cintura opticamente mais pequena. A mensagem seria algo como “não estou grávida, mas sou fértil”. Não é a delgadeza alcançada o factor vital, mas sim a proporção.

A ritualização associada ao espartilho tornou-o numa peça de eleição dos subgrupos sexuais mais alternativos e a sua fetichização natural transformou-o num símbolo simultaneamente transgressor e afirmativo de uma sexualidade confiante. A moda do século XX ilustra bem esta condição aparentemente contraditória. Nos anos do pós-guerra, por exemplo, o luxo estava associado à culpa, razão pela qual a coleccção de Dior de 1947 foi considerada escandalosa, pela quantidade voluptuosa de tecido usada e pela extrema feminilidade dos modelos de cintura de vespa. As mulheres desconfiavam de quaisquer roupas que toldassem a sua liberdade de movimentos recentemente conquistada e o uso de espartilhos foi considerado então fora de moda e depois puramente fetichista. Mas a alta costura gosta de ter amigos em lugares baixos, e o flirt contínuo com as cinturas de ampulheta é bem visível em Gaultier, Lacroix ou McQueen, para apenas citar alguns criadores que re-imaginaram o espartilho como símbolo de luxo, avant-garde e sofisticação. Em épocas de falta de imaginação ou inspiração, ele tornou-se numa “amuleta” regular para estilistas e consumidoras.

O uso normal de espartilho não é desconfortável nem doloroso – a sensação mais parece de um abraço longo e abrangente, que suporta e corrige a postura, cadenciando a respiração e aumentando dramaticamente a consciência do torso. A aparência melhorada motiva naturalmente a auto-estima. E o apertar extremo dos atilhos (o chamado “crush-lacing”, não aconselhável por períodos de tempo muito longos) causa uma pausa na respiração e uma consequente excitação erótica. Evidentemente que se pode pensar que as sensações de dor/prazer provocadas transformaram a sensualidade victoriana “reprimida” em puro masoquismo – o que era, naturalmente, adequado a uma senhora de então. Este constrangimento é particularmente apreciado pelos cultores SM e da imobilização erótica, por parte de dominadoras (imagem da armadura e invencibilidade) e de submissas (a vergonha de usar um espartilho por baixo das roupas de trabalho, de se passear pela casa apenas assim vestida, ou a efectiva limitação de movimentos). Ethel Granger primeiro e actualmente Cathie Jung, alcançaram a notoriedade no submundo das pulsões fetichistas com as suas cinturas de 38 centímetros, medida extrema disputada por várias outras pretendentes ao trono de rainha-vespa. O desafio secreto da sensação de se conseguir apertar mais uns centímetros é um dos estímulos mais fortes para as mulheres se revestirem de bom grado desta segunda pele; tal como ir ao ginásio, os resultados compensam. Quem escolhe usar um espartilho não tolerará desconforto ou uma servidão forçada, e a crescente aceitação de comportamentos sexuais alternativos permite a exploração plena das muitas aplicações do espartilho, tal como o seu uso por cima da roupa se revelou uma peça de vestuário muito sexy e atraente. Objecto-mulher por excelência, o espartilho faz parte integrante da indumentária do Desejo.

in Umbigo #14 (2005)

trans-europ-express

2011-05-25T16:40:00.000+01:00

heat me

2011-05-24T22:26:00.003+01:00

on fire

2011-05-23T23:31:00.002+01:00

“Sometimes a wind blows ,

And the mysteries of Love

Come clear”

(D.L)

O olho ajusta-se à iluminação direccionada, aos contrastes entre a semi-obscuridade dos recantos e o brilho ofuscante que banha certos objectos, o ouvido imbui-se da sonoridade morna e insistente, e ambos se deixam contaminar pela tactilidade que emana das paredes, do solo e do ar – o ar está a arder e este é um pedaço do universo Lynchiano, um universo de onde por vezes não se volta.

Ao longo de um corredor da exposição de David Lynch The Air Is On Fire na Fundação Cartier em Paris, imagens a preto e branco sucedem-se com a cadência de um ritmo orgânico, representando corpos implodidos ou manipulados pela acção do fluir do subconsciente do artista. Desenhos e pinturas inscrevem-se nos mais diversos suportes, reflectindo a espontaneidade do impulso criativo de David Lynch, que gosta de se sentar num diner de esquina em Los Angeles e pensar e rabiscar no papel de mesa ou no guardanapo ou numa caixa de fósforos as ideias/formas que assomam ao seu espírito disponível. Esta disponibilidade da mente para se deixar emboscar pela energia do mar subterrâneo do subconsciente, concretizar as ideias colhidas na criação de uma relação entre narrativa e imagem e assim esforçar-se para criar uma empatia entre as pessoas e entre estas e o universo, constitui a base do trabalho de Lynch – com os resultados que se conhecem e o tornaram único, as imagens e as personagens que nos assombram desde que por ele fomos iluminados.

Lynch costuma afirmar que faz filmes para proporcionar ao público um local para sonhar. Para além disso, assegura que em noventa por cento do tempo que está a realizar, não sabe intelectualmente porque é que está a fazer o que faz. Estas afirmações fulcrais são iluminadas pelo entendimento que Lynch aprendeu a contar histórias sobretudo a partir das suas influências como jovem estudante de pintura (actividade que manteve paralelamente e em alternância com a de realizador) – concretamente as obras de Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock, Robert Henri e Edward Hopper. Desde muito cedo que Lynch apreendeu como a narrativa pode levar-nos à verdade e uns aos outros, se nos fizer sonhar. O paradoxo fundamental, contudo, é que a lógica da narrativa pode empurrar a expressão artística para um sistema de convenções e limitações que constitui por sua vez um obstáculo para a mente sonhadora. Tal como Bacon identifica a narrativa como uma expressão da vontade humana e torna o objectivo da sua arte a vontade de perder a vontade própria (“the will to lose one’s will”), Lynch refere a sua determinação em “sair da frente do caminho da tinta e deixá-la falar”, postura que adopta igualmente como realizador, procurando encontrar maneiras de reter a vontade consciente e levar para o ecrã a verdade do sonho. Esta ligação ao subconsciente é essencial para evitar que as convenções e os clichés a que necessariamente levam coisas como a linguagem abafem a liberdade e criatividade de uma obra artística. Quando realiza um filme, através de processos como a meditação, Lynch procura libertar-se para receber ideias, imagens e impulsos a que de outra forma não conseguiria aceder (ele referiu-se ao procedimento como uma forma de “pesca”). Sonhar significa, assim, um “deixar-se ir” consciente. E este “deixar-se ir” implica uma comunicação, a abertura de uma passagem, entre a “realidade” ilusionista (a imposta por processos puramente racionais, falsamente confortável – a Laura Palmer ferida na cidade de Twin Peaks) e a “verdadeira” realidade (percebida diferentemente por cada um – a Laura Palmer visionária, redimida, do Black Lodge), numa viagem não isenta de perigos e perplexidades.

Os seus filmes foram quase sempre recebidos com estranheza pelo público, pouco habituado a estar disponível para cancelar a sua percepção de formas narrativas convencionais e repetitivas, com os seus lugares “seguros”, e abrir canais de recepção às pulsões mais perturbadoras (mas também mais vitais, mais verdadeiras e, no caso de Lynch, essencialmente positivas) que resultam do choque de subconscientes. Essa estranheza – que pariu a expressão descritiva “lynchiano” - biforcou-se em posições opostas que, a maior parte das vezes, perpetuaram equívocos relativamente à obra de Lynch. Por um lado, os puristas das primeiras obras (Six Men Getting Sick, The Alphabet, The Grandmother e Eraserhead) sentiram-se “traídos” pela Hollywoodização de Lynch (nomeadamente por O Homem Elefante e Dune); os outros rotularam-no de estranho, perverso, voyeurístico, subversivo (o que ele não é), mas sempre com o gosto culpado de o adorarem sem que (ou justamente porque não) o percebam. Ora, David Lynch nunca alterou substancialmente o seu veio criativo e postura como autor ao longo do seu percurso artístico (até INLAND EMPIRE, uma pequena revolução no seu universo pelo uso do vídeo digital, que certamente ditará a forma da sua evolução).

A escolha em criar filmes em Hollywood (e, em diferente escala, o investimento no site de Internet) traduz a sua percepção das contradições, energias e intensidades que existem na cultura de massas e na capacidade (e oportunidade) do filme de Hollywood em potenciar a abertura da cultura às suas verdades, através da mistura heterogénea da autoridade do racional e da autoridade do não-racional, que por exemplo Bacon e Pollock criaram nas suas obras – ao serem menos ordenados em termos racionais, reflectem a forma como realmente percebemos/intuímos (o real). Longe de poder ser considerado um freak (foi convidado por George Lucas para realizar O Regresso do Jedi), senhor de um carisma considerável, Lynch faz parte de uma tradição de um pequeno grupo de realizadores de Hollywood que, tal como ele, no seu tempo foram considerados chocantes ou excêntricos, quando na verdade estavam a criar novas possibilidades para a expressão artística. Dos seus ilustres precursores, destacam-se Alfred Hitchcock e Orson Welles que, parecendo estar isolados em Hollywood, a estavam a mudar para sempre. A sua ligação a Lynch é relevante na medida da influência que atribuíram ao subconsciente na moldagem da sua visão pessoal, mais do que o controlo que se sabe que impuseram às suas produções – existem muitas diferenças de estilo de realização, reflectindo também as respectivas épocas e políticas de estúdios, mas o que nos importa é que o resultado no ecrã das suas obras (em maior ou menor grau) traduz a luta pela expansão da narrativa, pela sua qualidade mais devedora do sonho, no mesmo sentido que Lynch lhe atribui.

A tensão criada pela colisão entre elementos narrativos e não-narrativos na pintura (uma herança de Bacon), a que podemos acrescentar as possibilidades sonoras do cinema (essenciais na compreensão do seu universo), permitem a Lynch vislumbrar um local (um “third place”, se quisermos ironicamente usar a expressão da publicidade da Playstation2, para a qual ele contribuiu com anúncios inesquecíveis – incluindo um monólogo de um esquimó cego sobre o que é a visão) que escapa à sobredependência da razão e dos seus clichés, onde o olhar (e a percepção) flui livremente, num movimento perfeito. É conhecida a sua predilecção pela forma do corpo do pato, como modelo de circuito de energia narrativa. A sua elegância e forma de S que evocam um fluxo incessante, ecoam uma empatia entre olhar e forma, a forma que a Arte incarna quando a herança cultural do artista e a Natureza entram em diálogo – e a presença da Natureza sente-se em toda a obra do homem de Montana, com destaque para Twin Peaks e Veludo Azul, com o vento sublime a manifestar a existência do ar como elemento unificador primordial, aquele que está simultaneamente dentro e fora de nós, que nós controlamos e que nos controla. Mas é o olho do pato que desafia o nosso entendimento em como as partes se encaixam, o ponto focal em que nos detemos aquando do nosso passeio visual, dado que destoa vibrantemente do resto do corpo – constituindo simultaneamente o ponto de onde tudo emana. Este “olho-do-pato” é um elemento essencial nos filmes de Lynch, consistindo no preciso momento em que o protagonista é despojado da sua vontade em favor da torrente de acontecimentos que o envolve, prelúdio para a conclusão do filme, mas não no sentido tradicional de clímax (normalmente dependente da vontade do herói). Exemplos destas cenas de “olho-de-pato” são a da casa de Ben em Veludo Azul; aquela em que o Homem-Elefante vai a um espectáculo de pantomima no filme do mesmo nome; e aquela onde Sailor e Lula descobrem uma rapariga a morrer num desastre de automóvel em Um Coração Selvagem. Na aparência gratuitas, todas elas sublinham o momento decisivo em que os heróis aceitam perder o controlo e assim tender para um desfecho positivo, ou rejeitam essa perda e iniciam uma descida para o desespero (caso de Fred/Bill Pullman em Auto-Estrada Perdida, por exemplo, cuja recusa em abdicar da posse de Patricia Arquette o leva justamente a… perder-se). Se conseguirmos ultrapassar o medo cultural que um tal momento nos provoca (e provoca), trata-se na realidade de um momento feliz, porque nos leva no caminho da verdade.

Devemos mergulhar na escuridão mais abjecta para conseguir encontrar as verdades mais puras, à semelhança de um percurso iniciático. E apesar das aparências, David Lynch é um optimista. Ou não tivesse ele lançado uma marca de café espresso com o seu nome.

in Umbigo #21 (2007)

le chat blanc

2011-05-22T20:06:00.000+01:00

Margot Fonteyn as Agatha in a 1948 production of Les Demoiselles de la Nuit, a ballet about a young musician who falls in love with the beautiful Agatha - who changes into a white cat at midnight.

et sic in infinitum

2011-05-22T03:43:00.000+01:00

The primordial darkness of the universe at the moment before creation, as represented in a plate in Robert Fludd’s 1617 Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica, atque Technica Historia (The Metaphysical, Physical, and Technical History of the Two Worlds, Namely the Greater and the Lesser). The words Et sic in infinitum (“and like this to infinity”) are written on all four sides of the square.
Courtesy Wellcome Photo Library.

o labirinto infinito

2011-05-22T00:51:00.001+01:00

"The universe (which other calls the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal book case. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances."

Jorge Luis Borges

prophecy

2011-05-22T00:34:00.000+01:00

“In the time of sinful, soiled, and corrupt custom—in the future— The demons and spirits of the Planets will infest the world. At that time, the Demon King Pehar will be very powerful and dominant [his teachings will spread afar]. Thus he said. Because of the powerful influence of the Demon King Pehar, the cases of insanity and nervous disturbance will be many, the cases of violent death will also be great in number.
At that time half of the populations [of all nations] will become insane; most of the people will cut short their own lives by themselves (suicide); and at that time China will become a dark land.
Powerful men and wealth will follow the steps of the evil spirits and their three cousins; all Tibet will be broken into small pieces.
At that time, here in the Snow Country, the life and breath of the lamas, the officials, the teachers, the kings, the high officers, and those who follow the Buddhist teachings will be taken away (and persecuted). All the good teachers and virtuous persons will be cut in the middle by the evil demons. People will suffer excessively.”

Padmasambhava

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air"

2011-05-20T15:55:00.001+01:00

god has no redeeming features

2011-05-20T00:39:00.000+01:00

gestos

2011-05-19T01:16:00.001+01:00

out of balance

2011-05-09T00:37:00.001+01:00

La Madona Amordazada y La Rata Cúbica

2011-05-03T02:21:00.000+01:00

le piége de la femme

2011-04-30T17:40:00.005+01:00