2010/09/27

Nobuhiko Obayashi







Nobuhiko Obayashi
大林宣彦
Born 9 January 1938
Onomichi, Hiroshima, Japan
director, screenwriter, editor, producer

supercollider

random thoughts while preparing a supercollider concert:
-the refusal of uncritical adoration
-to be able to think intellectually, to take things apart analytically, to dissect, to do surgical work, is only thinkable due to a death moral that understands to deal with things as matter (beuys)
-thought as sculpture, thought itself as work, process as work
-embodied thoughts (steiner)
-drawings as ways of thinking
-supercollider will understand you by recreating you (at least certain algorythms), it will interpret your frequency but not the semantics of your sentences, your pitch, but not your intentions, your aesthetics but not your ethics
-the end as endless feedback cycle, the oroborus
-the voice of the machine
-the problematics of supercollider taking control of certain decisions is that it ultimately apolitizes the subject who choses to subject to "machine decisions"
-when you give away control to a machine there is no inferiority complex and you don´t feel submissive because you know you could "just pull the plug" and you are the creator of the code, but actually at certain points you can´t anymore decide for the machine to be on or off, it just runs. questioning gives way to unconsciously affirming.
-the idea of a multitude of authors that don´t know each other. in one way liquidated authorship, in another the synthesis of a "super-author"
-programs will always manifest the collective flaws and prejudices of their authors. programs can also be rascist, fascist etc. (think of the light sensitivity of certain video cameras that will not recognize someone black in dim light because white skin has been defined as the norm in its design)
-opening the curtain and showing the little midget behind the big abstract voice (wizard of oz)
-"the box with the sound of its own making"
-everything is algorhythmic and defined by the boundaries of our minds, the parameters of our conception of chaotic information
-dawning
-i ging
-does supercollider enhance communication? or rather separation?
-is serious noise serious enough?
-can supercollider break the military syntax of my sentences and poeticize me?
-is it going in circles, or getting me somewhere, or nowhere?
-can it be like a psychotherapy machine?
-is it cool or is it hot?
-is everything equal to it?
-is it a defeatist or a zen buddhist?

2010/08/22

2010/08/13

The nonchalance

of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.

r.w.emerson

2010/08/08

2010/08/06

thoughts on symmetry










magnetic field illustrations from descartes in 1644, 1930´s musical choreographies from busby berkeley, aleister crowley´s occult illustrations, athanasius kirchner´s "ars magna lucis et umbrae"from 1671...
the bond between uniformity, the occult, power, energy, flags, symbols of nations, magnetism, beauty, symmetry, geometry, kinetics, nazism, conspiracy theories, religion, machines, entropy, computers, mirrors, alchemy and twins is something i would really like to further explore.

2010/05/24

the boy who liked deer


a film by a filmmaker to love: barbara loden
she also directed WANDA, a fiction film with herself in the main role, about a woman in a nowhere, amongst characters rather strange and lost, but then again strange and lost herself, a stranger, a drifter, a lost night in between dog days of normal insanity. she has some lovely fake daisies in her hair in this film in the back seat of the car. that i remember somehow. and i love the way she doesn´t know what she wants, she doesn´t know whatever the right thing to do is, she doesn´t have any prejudices and opinions on the way people are supposed to treat you or not to treat you, how to act appropriate, "according", just the way it´s supposedly supposed to be, the way she tries to and fails sometimes, the way she wears the right and fancy looks, but can´t talk the talks, can´t think the thinkings, just drifts from one place to the next and tries to be good, in a way, somehow. the way she combs her hair.
seeing this little tender film about the boy and the deer she made makes me love her even more endlessly. the daisy girl. who made only one long film. who died of cancer. who was married to elia kazan. who was just a lovely fine character.

2010/05/05

2010/05/03

ritual without myth




"One of her most recognized interactive art pieces is Baba Antropofágica. This piece was inspired by a dream that Lygia Clark had about an anonymous substance that streamed out from her mouth. This experience was not a pleasurable one for Clark. She viewed it as the vomiting of a lived experience that, in turn, was swallowed by others. In a sense, Clark seemed to view this atrocity as a way of displaying its freedom." (wiki)

manifesto antropófago

Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. 
The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.
Tupi or not tupi that is the question.
Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracos.
I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal.
We are tired of all those suspicious Catholic husbands in plays. Freud finished off the enigma of woman and the other recent psychological seers.
What dominated over truth was clothing, an impermeable layer between the interior world and the exterior world. Reaction against people in clothes. The American cinema will tell us about this.
Sons of the sun, mother of living creatures. Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: importation, exchange, and tourists. In the country of the big snake.
It’s because we never had grammatical structures or collections of old vegetables. And we never knew urban from suburban, frontier country from continental. Lazy on the world map of Brazil.
One participating consciousness, one religious rhythm.
Against all the importers of canned conscience. For the palpable existence of life. And let Levy-Bruhl go study prelogical mentality.
We want the Cariba Revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. For the unification of all the efficient revolutions for the sake of human beings. Without us, Europe would not even have had its paltry declaration of the rights of men.
The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls.
Filiation. The contact with the Brazilian Cariba Indians. Ou Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and the technological barbarity of Keyserling. We’re moving right along.
We were never baptized. We live with the right to be asleep. We had Christ born in Bahia. Or in Belem do Pata.
But for ourselves, we never admitted the birth of logic.
Against Father Vieira, the Priest. Who made our first loan, to get a commission. The illiterate king told him: put this on paper but without too much talk. So the loan was made. Brazilian sugar was accounted for. Father Vieira left the money in Portugal and just brought us the talk.
The spirit refuses to conceive spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. Necessity of cannibalistic vaccine. For proper balance against the religions of the meridian. And exterior inquisitions.
We can only be present to the hearing world.
We had the right codification of vengeance. The codified science of Magic. Cannibalism. For the permanent transformation of taboo into totem.
Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers. The halt of dynamic thinking. The individual a victim of the system. Source of classic injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetfulness of interior conquests.
Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays.
Cariba instinct.
Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation I coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism.
Against the vegetable elites. In communication with solitude.
We were never baptized. We had the Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Acting the part of Pitt. Or playing in the operas of Alencar with many good Portuguese feelings.
We already had communism. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notia
Notia Imara
Ipeju*
Magic and life. We had relations and distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms.
I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him.
The only place there is no determinism is where there is mystery. But what has that to do with us?
Against the stories of men that begin in Cape Finisterre. The world without dates. Without rubrics. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.
The fixation of progress by means of catalogues and television sets. Only with machinery. And blood transfusions.
Against antagonistic sublimations brought over in sailing ships.
Against the truth of the poor missionaries, defined through the wisdom of a cannibal, the Viscount of Cairo – It is a lie repeated many times.
But no crusaders came to us. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating up, because we are strong and as vindictive as the land turtles.
Only God is the conscience of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of all living creatures. Jaci is the mother of vegetables.
We never had any speculation. But we believed in divination. We had Politics, that is, the science of distribution. And a socio-planetary system.
Migrations. The flight from tedious states. Against urban scleroses. Against Conservatives and speculative boredom.
From William James and Voronoff. Transfiguration of taboo into totem. Cannibalism.
The pater familias is the creation of the stork fable: a real ignorance of things, a tale of imagination and a feeling of authority in front of curious crowds.
We have to start from a profound atheism in order to reach the idea of God. But the Cariba did not have to make anything precise. Because they had Guaraci.
The created object reacts like the Fallen Angel. Ever since, Moses has been wandering about. What is that to us?
Before two Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil discovered happiness.
Against the Indian de tocheiro. The Indian son of Mary, the godson of Catherine of Médicis and the son-in-law of Don Antonio de Mariz.
Happiness is the real proof.
No Pindorama matriarchy.
Against Memory the source of habit. Renewed for personal experience.
We are concrete. We take account of ideas, we react, we burn people in the public squares. We suppress ideas and other kinds of paralysis. Through screenplays. To believe in our signs, to believe in our instruments and our stars.
Against Goethe, against the mother of the Gracos, and the Court of Don Juan VI.
Happiness is the real proof.
The struggle between what we might call the Uncreated and the Created – illustrated by the permanent contradiction of man and his taboo. Daily love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Cannibalism. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into a totem. The human adventure. Earthly finality. However, only the pure elite manage to realize carnal cannibalism within, some sense of life, avoiding all the evils Freud identified, those religious evils. What yields nothing is a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is a thermometric scale of cannibalist instinct. Once carnal, it turns elective and creates friendship. Affectivity, or love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers. We arrive at utter vilification. In base cannibalism, our baptized sins agglomerate – envy, usury, calumny, or murder. A plague from the so-called cultured and Christianized, it’s what we are acting against. Cannibals.
Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand virgins in the land of Iracema – the patriarch Joa Ramalho the founder of Sao Paulo.
Our independence was never proclaimed. A typical phrase of Don Juan VI – My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does it! We expel the dynasty. We have to get rid of the Braganza spirit, the ordinations and snuff of Maria da Fonte.
Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, defined by Freud – in reality we are complex, we are crazy, we are prostitutes and without prisons of the Pindorama matriarchy.
Note: *"The New Moon, or the Lua Nova, blows in Everyman remembrances of me" from The Savages, by Couto Magalhaes.
(1928 by Oswald de Andrade)

2010/04/28

amit dutta


"A little child dreams... or rather hallucinates the history of his village and childhood. In his poetic narration the child builds a string of legends and myths. Kramasha is a treat to both the ears and the eyes. In his most magnificient attempt Amit Dutta manages to make the viewer taste and smell everything in the film. On a personal note, I am in love with the film" (iitbidcfilmclub.blogspot.com)
Kramasha from India—a dazzling, virtuoso piece of mise en scene in 35-millimeter, full of uncanny imagery about the way the narrator imagines the past of his village and his family. Camera movements, compositions in depth, colors, editing, changes in focus: these are important parts of Dutta's technical arsenal, marshaled together to yield a highly suggestive synthesis of documentary and fiction in which the main preoccupation is a myth of origins.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader.

loie fuller




Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (Mark Leckey) from Anon. on Vimeo.

2010/04/13

moore

lovely random things i remember from a lovely sound and music teacher i once had named mr. moore:
where do you start from: the middle or the edge of nowhere?
to hear and receive the ear has to send out particles and give.
a membrane as open and sharing cells of interaction.
his love for open software like linux, but total inability to figure it out.
bells.
is a river still the same after a drop dripped in?
trying to explain the turing machine. or granular synthesis.
his love for the name "trieste" and the melancholy way he imagined the city to be.
the magic of tape and loops.
his soft and humble and always a little lost voice.
i always felt too good coming out of his classes. as if some blueish, soft light had shone on all things and left a memory of something wonderful.

2010/04/12

folk tales from mississippi

prison songs



janis and tom


the proof that anything goes together when you want to funk it together.

2010/04/11

the love and the lakes


love is always connected to some shady water. that´s a truth.

2010/04/09

dead phantasy lovers



words i like

gravy
stew
dick
rick
tonight
chew
shambles
jumble
gargle
flu
cincinatti
whoop
poop
coil
apt
apartment
humble
croatia

2010/04/08

lucifer


"Satan (Hebrew: הַשָׂטָן ha-Satan ("the accuser"); Persian "sheytân"; Arabic: الشيطان ash-Shayṭān ("the adversary") - both from the Semitic root: Ś-Ṭ-N) is an embodiment of antagonism that originates from the Abrahamic religions, being traditionally considered an angel in Judeo-Christian belief, and a Jinn in Islamic belief. Originally, the term was used as a title for various entities that challenged the religious faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible." (from wikipedia)
i really wonder why someone is considered "evil", who simply refuses, says no, who questions, who is the most beautiful, eloquent and witty of all angels, a "light-bringer", but who will not bow and obey and instead follows his own passions and rules in his own right.
i like lucifer much more than any other angel and i like the hermits, anchorites and eremites who live by themselves in their own places and do what they want to do and don´t give a dang about what the dominating, hegemonial gods or juggernauts or idols or politicians tell you to do. i emphatically praise and like niceness and kindness and friendliness and generosity. but i´ve actually never ever read that lucifer was ungenerous or not nice, the only thing that is written is that he refused to bow before god and obey his will to worship man. but lucifer was made of fire and man was made of clay. so why should fire worship clay? doesn´t make much sense to me. fire makes clay stable and makes it last. clay needs fire.
lucifer, i like you, the fallen angel, the morning star. i like the night. i like the antagonist, the questioner, the doubter, the refuser, the holdout. i like the snakes and the apples and seduction and deviancy and trespassing and leaving the boundaries of the garden to go into the woods or the ghettos. why live in monaco when you can live in some place like kokkola? why stay with adam when you can have fun with a talking snake?

tiny tim

"Herbert Khaury (April 12, 1932 – November 30, 1996), better known by the stage name Tiny Tim, was an American singer, ukulele player, and musical archivist. He was most famous for his rendition of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" sung in a distinctive high falsetto/vibrato voice (though other performances reveal a broader vocal range). He was generally regarded as a novelty act, though his records indicate his wide knowledge of American songs. He had no official middle name, though some web sites report it to be "Butros", his father's first name, while during his televised wedding his middle name was given as "Buckingham". His headstone reads "Khaury/Herbert B/Tiny Tim/1932-1996".
Tiny Tim was born In New York and grew up in an old apartment building in Washington Heights in Manhattan. He was the son of a Lebanese father (Butros Khaury) and a Polish Jewish mother (Tillie Staff). When he was five years old his father brought home a wind up gramophone and a 78 rpm record that featured a 1905 recording of Henry Burr singing "Beautiful Ohio". Young Herbert immersed himself in the music of the past, listening for hours in his room to Rudy Vallee, Al Jolson, Henry Burr, Irving Kaufman, Billy Murray, Ada Jones, Byron G. Harlan, and Bing Crosby. Khaury began singing and playing the ukulele in his natural voice, but it was not until 1952 that anyone paid him any attention. In a 1968 interview on the Tonight Show, Khaury described the discovery of his high voice: "I was listening to the radio and singing along as I was singing I said 'Gee, it's strange. I can go up high as well.'" He then entered a local talent show and sang "You Are My Sunshine" in his newly discovered voice, and it brought the house down. From there Khaury began to experiment with different stage names like Darry Dover, Vernon Castle, Larry Love, and Judas K. Foxglove. He finally settled on Tiny Tim in 1962 when his manager at the time, George King, booked him at a club that favored midget acts."(from wikipedia)

2010/04/07

2010/04/06

why does it so often need a car crash in western societies to realize the holiness of life before death, the splendor of a great goat cheese, the magnificence of spending the money and not saving anything, of making fools out of yourselves, going out and finding mates, of not giving a dang, of doing it for fun and doing it anyways no matter what, of living freely, of giving yourself away to a thrilling book or lover or tree or wind, of enjoying the touch of a loved one and the sensation of a new day till the pit of the core?
i don´t know either.

2010/03/29

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to Dog.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from Dog and nearer to the Dust.

T.S. Eliot (from The Rock)
(i exchanged God for Dog. God seems too ungraspable and odd. Dog may seem odder, but at least i feel more familiar to that word)

mystery

Daring to lift my eyes
towards the dry treetops,
I don't see God, but his light
is immensely shining.
Of all the things I know
my heart feels only this:
I'm young, alive, alone,
my body consuming itself.
I briefly rest in the tall grasses
of a river bank, under bare
trees, then move along beneath
clouds to live out my young days.

[Pier Paolo Pasolini; from Il Stroligut, n. 1, Casarsa, August 1945]

il vangelo secondo matteo



how i love this film.

2010/03/28

boring

he said to her: "now that you know all these things about me, it´s only a matter of time until you´ll be bored by me."
she wasn´t estranged by anything as much as by lovers who tried to entertain her, show her something "special", go to specific places like going on "vacation" together or doing athletic movements in some kind of synchrony, go to what is considered an "event", see spectacles, go to some water and say "romantic" words to each other.
the only thing she looked for in a lover was to be bored and to exist side by side without having to perform the choreography of love like trained apes in a zoo.
like the old people who stand by windows all day long, supposedly watching "nothing" happen, she liked watching "nothing" happen.
once a man she loved came to visit her from far away and all they did was walk down streets. ugly streets. short streets. long streets. streets with nothing to see. when he left, he said: "i saw nothing in your town. it was great."
there´s nothing worse than "adventurers".
i hate travelling and explorers (levi-strauss).
she just liked spending time.

2010/03/25

random bits of so-called dialog

a: i coughed on your breast
b: it doesn´t matter. my breast is silent.
like god.
a: god is silent?
b: well...
hello god?
...
yes.
a: oh.
b: is this supposed to be romantic?
a: i guess. yeah.
b: are you going to recite a poem now?
a: yeah.
b: should we make love after?
a: i guess so.
b: yeah.
b: one day i´ll show you the house where i was born.
a: until then, can i make love to a model of the house?
b: to please yourself?
a: well. not exactly. but yeah.
b: okay.
a: do you like burnt cookies?
b: no. i´ve heard the burnt stuff causes cancer.
a: so i´m gonna get cancer?
b: well i use cancer causing nail polish. so now at least we can get cancer together.
a: yeah.
b: i really don´t understand this thing about truth and manipulation. i think i need to get a big philosophical book about the problem.
a: i don´t think a book is going to help.
b: yeah. everytime you find out more about the philosophy of the problem it makes it more and more problematic.
like i learned nothing in school.
a: that´s nice.
b: are you breaking? (while cycling down a hill)
a: yeah. my breaks are kind of broken.
b: express yourself. don´t repress yourself.
a: should we go and meet my friend c?
she always lets me eat freely.
b: i like to live freely.
freeeely.

2010/03/21

2010/03/20

symmetry


symmetry is something satisfying.
seeing symmetrical phenomena seems to please some kind of natural obsession with things that mirror each other.
ornaments are symmetrical. faces are symmetrical. leaves are symmetrical. houses are symmetrical. most animals are symmetrical.
except for one fish: the scophthalmus rhombus
both of his eyes are on one side.
you got to love the scophthalmus rhombus

2010/03/15

jonah and the great fish


more than any other name i love the name jonah (after that it´s oskar and then piet). and i love great fish.
when i die one day, may there please come a great fish that will devour me and may someone please write a short story about my little death and call it jana in the fish?
but i kind of doubt there are still these kind of fish around in these godless days of hedonistc pleasuredomes. i´ve heard a lot of fish have turned into hermaphrodites because of all the women´s pee, with all the hormons from their birth control pills inside, that contaminates the water.
a wee little hermaphrodite fish then. i´ll take you that way, too.

2010/03/14

erwin blumenfeld







erwin blumenfeld, jewish-german photographer and writer born in a january in 1897 in berlin, died in a july in 1969 in rome
-his pictures look so modern as modern can be, but are all from the 40s, imagine that!
wikipedia rather laconically and aridly says about blumendfeld:
"In the 1930s, he published collages mocking Adolf Hitler. In 1936, he emigrated to Paris. With the German occupation, he was interned in a concentration camp in 1940 because he was Jewish. In 1941, he could escape to the USA. In the 1940s and 1950s he became famous for his fashion photography, working for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and also for artistic nude photography. In the 1960s, he worked on his autobiography which found no publisher because it was considered to be too ironic towards society, and was published only after his death."

blumenfeld wrote literature, was engaged in collage, sketching, painting, photography, antifascism, anarchy, atheism and he was very little, -or rather short. he said he never ever wanted to be a "poet, never an artist, never a hero, just always and always a human".