Laurie Anderson's Farewell to Lou Reed
November 7th, 2013
Via Rolling Stone: "I'm sure he will come to me in my dreams and will seem to be alive again. And I am suddenly standing here by myself stunned and grateful. How strange, exciting and miraculous that we can change each other so much, love each other so much through our words and music and our real lives."
November 3rd, 2013
"I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyze the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.” —Andrei Tarkovsky
A great talk by Terence McKenna
October 20th, 2013
Via YouTube: "Join Terence McKenna, author, explorer and philosopher for a think along deconstruction of the deepening worldwide weirdness. With his characteristic hope and humor, McKenna examined time and its mysteries, the nature of language, the techniques of ecstasy, high technology and virtual cyberspace, the role of hallucinogenic plants in shamanism and the evolution of human cultures, and the foundations of post-modern spirituality. The lecture and discussion was didactic, syncretic, challenging, eclectic, eidetic and irreverent intellectual adventure."
Thanks to Manu Burghart!
by Ulrike Ottinger
July 29th, 2013
Via Dennis Grunes: "In Berlin, She—the only name the film gives her—wanders on a drunken binge and in an alcoholic stupor in Bildnis einer Trinkerin. Aller jamais retour [Portrait of a Female Drunkard. Ticket of No Return], at its best a remarkable film from West Germany written, directed and cinematographed by Ulrike Ottinger. She is richly, elegantly dressed and statuesque, and mute as in a dream, although there is attached to this no sense of handicap; She is complete as is. The captivating encounters and episodes through which She moves generate a swirl of Surrealism and zaniness. Unless one is New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, Ottinger’s lovely piece is exceptionally hard to resist. One opens one’s eyes and welcoming arms to it.
Why does She drink? We may infer that she is attempting to blur the coldness and harshness of the non-egalitarian nature of West Germany’s capitalistic system. In a wonderful shot, seeking exit from the airport terminal, She finds herself face-to-face with a working-class woman who is washing the glass barrier that stands between them; She subsequently adopts as her companion a homeless woman pushing her worldly belongings in a shopping cart—a shabbily dressed sister who is as taken up with alcohol as she. She herself suddenly becomes the secretary-receptionist for a business firm; her boss castigates her for drinking the booze intended for his clients. Social and economic injustice is reason enough to hit the cognac.
The film becomes somewhat attenuated and repetitious, taxing the genuine smile it has put on our face, but concludes with a stunning image of She stumbling through a crystal corridor that multiplies her image in bits and pieces, brilliantly evoking the fractured identity that is the culmination of living in a capitalistic society which does its best to divide those who should be sharing a mutually supportive existence. (Breaking or broken glass is a motif throughout the film.) One cannot be oneself in such a world, because one needs others to be oneself: equal others.
Some compare Ottinger’s film to works by Fassbinder, but, early on, there is more the spirit—and the ubiquitous glass—of Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), and thereafter the influence, above all, of Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966) kicks in."
from David Ogilvy
July 28th, 2013
Via Brain Pickings: "...here comes some priceless and pricelessly uncompromising wisdom from a very different kind of cultural legend: iconic businessman and original Mad Man David Ogilvy. On September 7th, 1982, Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled How to Write and found in the 1986 gem The Unpublished David Ogilvy (public library):
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:
1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want."
Thanks to Manu Burghart!
Terre Thaemlitz at Gewölbe
June 29th, 2013
The crowd was in bliss during and after DJ Sprinkles' five-hour set at Gewölbe in Cologne. But there is so much more to it. Go figure!
Bill Cunningham New York by Richard Press
April 17th, 2013
Via Zeitgeist Films: "The Bill in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns On the Street and Evening Hours. Documenting uptown fixtures (Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Brooke Astor, David Rockefeller—who all appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between, Cunningham’s enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham New York is a delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of a dedicated artist whose only wealth is his own humanity and unassuming grace."
by Mark Jacobson
March 30th, 2013
Via Vulture: "There were levels to this game, as I would learn from Kevin McLeod, writer and video-game designer, whose lengthy Shining essay is one of the reigning texts on the topic. McLeod, who declined to appear in Room 237 because he 'didn’t want to be included with a bunch of cranks' (but wound up liking the film anyway), and I had much in common. A pair of Queens boys, we both saw The Shining the night it opened, the then-12-year-old McLeod in the company of his mother at the now vanished Sutton Theatre on East 57th Street. We hit a snag, however, when I referred to Kubrick as 'one of the three or four' greatest filmmakers ever. After a long period of silence, McLeod said, 'Stanley Kubrick is not one of the three or four greatest filmmakers! Stanley Kubrick is a philosopher the equal of Heraclitus, a visual artist on the level of a Da Vinci.' Kubrick combined 'all the great talents of a Velázquez and a Caravaggio,' McLeod contended."
January 12th, 2013
Via Open Culture: "Stanley Kubrick didn’t like giving long interviews, but he loved playing chess. So when the physicist and writer Jeremy Bernstein paid him a visit to gather material for a piece for The New Yorker about a new film project he was writing with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick was intrigued to learn that Bernstein was a fairly serious chess player. After Bernstein’s brief article on Kubrick and Clarke, Beyond the Stars, appeared in the magazine’s Talk of the Town section in April of 1965, Bernstein proposed doing a full-length New Yorker profile on the filmmaker and his new project. For some reason, Kubrick accepted. So later that year Bernstein flew to England, where Kubrick was getting ready to film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bernstein stayed there for much of the filming, playing chess with Kubrick every day between takes. When the piece eventually ran in The New Yorker it was appropriately titled How About a Little Game?"
Here is a link to the interview.
Thanks to Manu Burghart!
by Leos Carax
January 2nd, 2013
Via Dangerous Minds: "In his exhilarating new film, Carax seems to have tapped into cinema’s Akashic Record and brought it to Earth in distilled form. From the opening scene where Carax unlocks the door that opens onto the theater of his brain to the Amen choir of limousines at the end, Holy Motorsis as pure as cinema gets. It is about the thing it is, not the thing it is about. It’s reference point is itself. Carax will pull any rug from under any scene to remind us that we are watching a movie and to glory in the artifice of it all. Holy Motors embraces the history of cinema like a drunken poet throwing his arms around the alphabet. The result is a mercurial mindfucker of a movie. (...)
Carax is a Tantric Master fucking the sacred machine of his art with deep fluid strokes. He uses cinema like a particle generator creating a red hot beam of alchemical fire directed at the very center of the viewer’s pineal gland. His intent is to get you high and he does. He draws you to the screen like a moth is drawn to light. He draws you to the screen like a camera is drawn to a woman’s face, or the stars, in their sparkling suicidal glee, are drawn to blackness. He draws you to the screen with the precision of a Bunuelian razorblade tearing open the curtains of your eyes. (...)
One of many goose pimple-inducing moments in Holy Motors is this musical interlude, an accordion cover of R.L. Burnside’s Let My Baby Ride."