Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Most of the ‘art’ we hear about today is fashion driven by commerce. Money is just a means of exchange, a means of keeping a roof over your head and all that, but to pursue wealth for its own sake is decadent. I agree with Samuel Beckett that one has to teach oneself not to want things. One wants many things for no better reason than that advertisers train us to want them.
- John Calder being sane and heartening, from Textualities.
- John Calder being sane and heartening, from Textualities.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
DIANE SAWYER ASKS "WHO KILLED LAURA PALMER?"
ABC passive-aggressively ambush their own show, in no way confirming those persistent rumours that network pressures forced David Lynch and Mark Frost to prematurely spoil Twin Peaks. Viewers just couldn't bear the seven episodes' (seven episodes!) worth of delayed gratification, apparently. Hardly Who Shot J.R.?, was it?
P.S. Actually, I'm not one to talk. I'm binge-watching Cracker (like Twin Peaks, one of those series that aired just on the frontier of before my time) at the moment and it feels a little retrograde to artifically recreate the traditional one-weeks' repose between episodes.
Friday, August 7, 2009
INSIDE THE LEMON
Notes for landscape tones... Long sequences of tempera. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick dust - sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odour of hot pavements slaked with water. Light damp clouds, earth-bound yet seldom bring rain. Upon this squirt dust-red, dust-green, chalk-mauve and watered crimson-lake.
- Justine, Lawrence Durrell
Yeah, it's Alexandria, not Budapest, but Durrell's palette seems to apply to these close, sweaty days. I rather like it. During Budapest's long work day, the quiet streets are suspended in treacle, one-foot-in-front of the other slowed by some immense drag, the heat waves rising off the concrete emit a faint hum. Every evening, a truck comes road to water the roads (against cracked tarmac?) and and by dusk the brick dust from the VIIth's ever-present roadworks hangs pink and low.
THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHER'S DILEMMA
In the 1920s, Edward Bernays revolutionised public relations by teaching ad men to get ahead by appealing to the libidinal desires of the inherently-irrational masses.
In 2009 writer Iain Sinclair and film maker Chris Petit ("two people who have made journeys an essential part of their professions") made their first forey into advertising, starring in a short film (infomercial? public service broadcast?) for Audi. What follows is some vague psychogeographic freestyling from Sinclair and mumbled affirmatives from Petit, soundtracked by a piano set to meaningful and some "urban" trip hop musak. Oh, and they seem to be on some sort of journey (of course!) between Crosby Sands, Merseyside and, er, a place known only as "oblique" and "peculiar":
Once you get across there you're into something different. You're into something different instead of the thing he inhabits, which he keeps calling a darkness, as if there's a darkness inside the human body. I don't know what that darkness is, but it's what he wants to get away from.
But what does this destination "Oblique" matter anyway? It's the journey that counts. Indeed, despite this film's obscure marketing message, Sinclair's soulful metaphorisations of "journey" - the adman's all-time favourite trope - are really battered home.
And it's the car that facilitates this spiritual journey, much more conveniently than the crap cup of tea and ontological transformations offered by National Rail:
You go into this pod-like structure the car and everything switches down, especially when its as comfortable as this. You're into a sort of meditative overdrive instantly.
Well, I've watched the film a couple of times and what I'm getting is this: Audi offers a swaddled safe haven from the contingencies of the psychogeographic landscape.
Now, what could have encouraged this most enthusiastic pedestrian to get behind the steering wheel? Is this some new dérive? A rather complicated political manoeuver intending to protest against the privileged Left's demonisation of the car? Or, more likely, an instance of the oft-cited creative trade-off of cash v. art. At least in the film industry this kind of compromise generally results in "entertainments" (in some Graham Greene sense), not the reduction of your oeuvre into limp, baffling - and downright-contradictory - soundbites.
Weird.
EDITED TO ADD:
Being a ponderous bugger, I watched it again. I think I'd rather he shilled the car with a simple endorsement: "Hey, pedestrian! Psychoanalysing the psychosis of place is quicker with an Audi!"
In 2009 writer Iain Sinclair and film maker Chris Petit ("two people who have made journeys an essential part of their professions") made their first forey into advertising, starring in a short film (infomercial? public service broadcast?) for Audi. What follows is some vague psychogeographic freestyling from Sinclair and mumbled affirmatives from Petit, soundtracked by a piano set to meaningful and some "urban" trip hop musak. Oh, and they seem to be on some sort of journey (of course!) between Crosby Sands, Merseyside and, er, a place known only as "oblique" and "peculiar":
Once you get across there you're into something different. You're into something different instead of the thing he inhabits, which he keeps calling a darkness, as if there's a darkness inside the human body. I don't know what that darkness is, but it's what he wants to get away from.
But what does this destination "Oblique" matter anyway? It's the journey that counts. Indeed, despite this film's obscure marketing message, Sinclair's soulful metaphorisations of "journey" - the adman's all-time favourite trope - are really battered home.
And it's the car that facilitates this spiritual journey, much more conveniently than the crap cup of tea and ontological transformations offered by National Rail:
You go into this pod-like structure the car and everything switches down, especially when its as comfortable as this. You're into a sort of meditative overdrive instantly.
Well, I've watched the film a couple of times and what I'm getting is this: Audi offers a swaddled safe haven from the contingencies of the psychogeographic landscape.
Now, what could have encouraged this most enthusiastic pedestrian to get behind the steering wheel? Is this some new dérive? A rather complicated political manoeuver intending to protest against the privileged Left's demonisation of the car? Or, more likely, an instance of the oft-cited creative trade-off of cash v. art. At least in the film industry this kind of compromise generally results in "entertainments" (in some Graham Greene sense), not the reduction of your oeuvre into limp, baffling - and downright-contradictory - soundbites.
Weird.
EDITED TO ADD:
Being a ponderous bugger, I watched it again. I think I'd rather he shilled the car with a simple endorsement: "Hey, pedestrian! Psychoanalysing the psychosis of place is quicker with an Audi!"
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