leben-brd

a laconic, formally stringent documentary on how german people prepare for the unforeseeable events in life, take cautions, calculate risks, ponder on insurerancies and practice living life in the supposedly expected, state-approved, licensed way.

harun farocki films couples in courses learning how to wash new born babies in the synchronized choreography the nurse teacher propagates, families learning how to communicate with each other, policemen preparing acquaintances with deliquents by playing deliquents themselves in trials and rehearsals with each other, didactic role plays forced on unemployed people, to practice how to present and sell themselves to society.

all kinds of produced and dogmatic, uniform, identity creating behaviour patterns are being naturalized, normalized and taught to the people who annex and incorporate these, making of their universally ignorant, chaotic existences, trained "professionals", disciplined and empty counselors of the so-called relevant issues in life.

i found it incredibly tragic how the trust in their own feelings and sensations of being alive was completely subordinated to the false desire to obtain patriarchal approval, all the seals and stamps in the passports, the money back guarantee operation manual to life, -and i do think that the militarized institutions of society, most schools, colleges, offices, factories and families are doing just the same by controlling and not allowing the color to drip outside the outlines.

this kind of conversely reminds me of my days at steiner school as a kid, when i wasn´t allowed to draw outlines because everything was supposed to drip all over the place on the soaking wet water color paper we were given, that i used to despise, because i was so attracted by geometrical forms, rulers and outlines at the time. -the same dogma the other way around, i guess.

i remember one annual report stating "jana is very fond of water color painting, but she does not use the light colors, takes mostly dark pigments and tends to dry her paper with her shirt sleeve".

whatever.

anyway: -a great and hard to watch movie.

the best i´ve seen this year, allthough it is an oldy from 1990.

bravo, harun farocki.

jacques vaché

"without him i might have been a poet. he blasted this conspiracy of obscure forces in me that consider themselves something so absurd as a vocation."

andré breton about jacques vaché, who died in a january in 1919 at age 23.

dripping

not knowing how to do it

just somehow and for no special reason remembered how i thought about artists when i was small.

my mom would take me to museums every once in a while and i remember how i would often think that painters were people who didn´t know how to paint and that´s why they became artists.

it´s really strange that today my opinion hasn´t even changed so much, although my respect certainly has. not knowing how to do something correctly, not being able to do it the right way means knowing too much.
a series of failures as a series of inventions.

FACES

i have been obsessed with faces since i can think. one of my favourite cassavetes´films is also named "faces" and i love the chapter on faces by deleuze in "1000 plateaus". too good. 

-but what i didn´t know until the internet showed me was that there is a real "desease" called pareidolia describing a phenomenon when some people start to see faces everywhere. it´s closely connected to paranoia and schizophrenia, -both of which i must admit i am very attracted by as well. -anyways, pareidolia is also something very "normal" considering our manners of cognition and epistemology: the moulding of forms and order out of chaos, projecting meanings and sense on to the senseless and coincidental, animating the world and establishing coherences, recognizing and associating and so forth, telling stories and connecting the disconnected, trying to make sense of one´s life and surrounding world. 

-nonetheless, i was stunned, no stupified, by the magic and richness of imagination and the splendid forms and structures that nature does create. i love the people who can discover the faces and consider pareidolia one of the best obsessions. here´s a link to a group on flickr who collect the pictures: www.flickr.com/groups/facesinplaces

the big bad wolf

the werewolf, the wolf children, the wolfman, the big bad wolf.

no other animal has been so mystified, a projection of so many fears and supposed savageness gotten out of control.  a victim of domestication, of disciplination, of persecution, of systematic extermination.   

i heard they are slowly coming back, the wolves. from the woods in poland, so they say.

i saw one in a park this winter. he was sleeping all day and lay like a dead man in the snow. doing nothing. just completely still. 

looked like he was reenacting beckett.

a traumatized and lonely lonely wolf he was.

they are very shy, they told me, and very tender with their babies. 

where have all the wolves gone?