bv (what can't be cop…): much obliged, mr. wb. what's your esteemed opinion … Walter Benjamin (what can't be cop…): Dear Madam,
I was joyed to find your Web Blog that … bv (the story of stuf…): Tnx, Ken! Looks like a great resource. As pointed o… Ken (the story of stuf…): You can also join the Cradle to Cradle online Commu… bv (a scanner darkly): Yo Bas - maybe it does boil down to the flat protag…
Virginia Woolf's fifth novel 'To the Lighthouse', published in 1927, is one of her most experimentally modernist works. The book's genius is hard to summarize, except by saying that reading it is a uniquely immersive experience. To ask what the novel is about is not an easy question either. Putting it philosophically, 'To the
Lighthouse' may be said to be about the time and space between people. Bear with me while I try and explain...
On the surface, 'To the Lighthouse' is a portrait of the Ramsay family during a summer stay on the Isle of Skye. At the center is Mrs Ramsay, mother of eight children, famed for her beauty and with a dominant, radiant character that holds the whole family together, along with a number of guests. Her husband, Mr Ramsay, an eccentric scholar searching for abstract truth, is her opposite in many ways, but also her complement. Among the Ramsay's guests are an angry young academic, an old poet with laudanum stains in his beard, and a young, independent woman aspiring to be a painter.
However, there is not much story to speak of: very little 'happens' in the book, nor is there much dialogue. The novel 'takes place' almost entirely inside people's heads, shifting from one
character to another and describing their thoughts and perceptions. Without guidance from an objective, omniscient narrator, this multiple stream of consciousness may seem daunting, but its effect is to bring the book's characters to
life 'from the inside' in a way that few conventional stories ever manage.
Proust and Joyce pioneered stream of consciousness writing, but Woolf perfected it, and only Beckett, in his monologues, ever rivalled her in conveying so vividly and realistically the hermetic realm of thoughts, emotions and impressions, both trivial and profound, sometimes only half-formulated, going on
inside people's heads at any moment.
This post got rather out of hand, lenghthwise, so read more here.
the last concern
Sequence
To sleep, with the moon in one eye and the sun in the other,
Love in your mouth, a lovely bird in your hair,
Adorned like the fields, the woods, the routes, the sea,
Around the whole world so lovely and adorned.
Flee across the landscape
Through branches of smoke and all the fruits of the wind,
Stone legs with sand stockings,
Held by the waist, all the river's muscles,
And the last concern on a face transformed.
Paul Éluard's 1926 volume 'La Capitale de la Douleur' ('The Capital of Pain', or 'The Capital of Sorrow', depending on the translation of 'douleur') is considered one of the central texts of Surrealist poetry. It was also a source of inspiration for the film 'Alphaville' (see earlier post), which quotes extensively from it.
Éluard, a central figure in the Parisian Surrealist movement, wrote an incredible amount of poetry (see his bibliography), characterized by a great intensity and immediacy - though often bizarre and obscure as well. Like with other Surrealist art, his poetry is perhaps best experienced as a series of dream images to get lost in. As Éluard wrote in another poem: "I had my landscape and lost myself there."
A number of Éluard's poems translated in English can be found here. And one of his poems translated by Samuel Becketthere.
Surprisingly little of the work of Bert Haanstra, the old Dutch master of poetic documentaries, is available online. There is a collected works DVD box, but why isn't there a website showing - at least - his shorter work? From their descriptions they all sound very interesting, films like 'Panta Rhei', 'Rembrandt, Painter of Man', 'Cité Idéale' (his collaboration with Lewis Mumford) or even his commissioned work for Shell.
Fortunately, two of his short documentary gems show up on youTube: 'Glass' (1958) and 'Zoo' (1961; cut up in two parts).
Both are awesome examples of a genre that hardly exists anymore: the wordless documentary, using purely visual observation, in this case perfectly edited to a jazzy score. The former makes glass blowers look like jazz musicians, and in the latter the difference between zoo visitors and residents is comically blurred...
rififi
Rififi is French slang for 'trouble', 'brawl' or 'rough-and-tumble'. The word was made popular by the 1955 film 'Rififi', or in full 'Du Rififi chez les Hommes', based on the novel by Auguste Le Breton and directed by Jules Dassin. François Truffaut commented that "out of the worst crime novel I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I have ever seen." Indeed, 'Rififi' is the archetypical heist film, realistic and intelligent, and hugely influential from the French Nouvelle Vague all the way to Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs'.
The film's production history is interesting: American director Dassin had already made a number of noir films in the US when he was forced in exile from Hollywood during the Communist blacklist years. He settled in France, where - still obstructed by Hollywood's long arm - he managed to get 'Rififi' made on a tight budget without any stars. Ironically, the distinctive tough and seedy atmosphere (including a lot of abuse of women and drugs) that makes 'Rififi' still gripping today probably would have been way too controversial for '50s Hollywood.
The story is set in the underworld of Paris, where Tony le Stephanois, just released from prison with a tuberculous cough, is persuaded to do a major jewelry store heist with three colleagues: Jo le Suédois (Joe the Swede), Mario Farrati and César le Milanais (played by Dassin), the suave safecracker who's flown in from Italy for the job. In a classic three act setup, the story follows the extensive preparations for the heist, the successful burglary itself, and the aftermath, when the whole plan goes awry. As befits a film noir, there's no getting away clean - it always ends in blood...
'Rififi' owes much of its fame to the heist scene: a breathtaking half hour long (!) sequence in which the four break into the jewelry store. The whole burglary is executed in utter silence - without any music - and every step of the operation is shown in detail, building up an absolutely nervewrecking suspense. The scene also creates a great respect for the professional skills of these crooks: as one newspaper headline puts it, they pull off the "most daring coup since the Rape of the Sabines!"
However, after the heist the plan starts to unravel. One of them, César, is careless and unwittingly betrays them to a rivalling gang. In the ensuing 'rififi' over the money, one by one they are all killed. (To compare: this would be the point where 'Reservoir Dogs' started, focusing on the same theme of distrust and human weakness.)
The final scene is another piece of great filmmaking. Tony, the last survivor, shot in the gut and dying, is driving his godson and the money back to safety. The scene somehow manages to convey simultaneously the giddy exhilaration of the child riding in an open car through Paris, and the exhausted, almost hallucinatory attempt of Tony to stay on the road. Here Tony's perseverence attains a tragic quality that most later film noirs could only make into pastiches or caricatures.
It looks like a Hollywood remake is on the way. (It would be interesting to know what Dassin, who recently died, would have thought of that.) Be sure to watch the original before it comes out!
galaxie 500
Having recently rediscovered Galaxie 500, it's amazing to find how undated their music still sounds, and how little known they remain.
As has often been remarked before, Galaxie 500 were "criminally overlooked" during their brief lifetime in the late '80s. Influenced by The Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3, they created three albums of seminal dream pop, full of slow-motion guitars and morose, world-weary lyrics, which would in turn influence a whole generation of shoegazers. After that, singer Dean Wareham went on to form Luna and Galaxie 500 was all but forgotten until their albums were rereleased some years later.
It's hard to say which is their best, or most lasting, album. While 'This Is Our Music', more mellow and spacious, may be their strongest collection, both 'Today' and 'On Fire' contain more of their incredibly catchy songs. (Between those, Bagatellen makes an eloquent case for 'On Fire', calling Galaxie 500 the "non-Pixies".)
Picking a favorite song is even harder. 'Parking Lot', 'Tugboat', 'Blue Thunder', and 'Listen, The Snow Is Falling' (a Yoko Ono cover) all come to mind. But 'King of Spain', with its self-delusional lyrics (inspired by Gogol's short story 'Diary of a Madman'?) and sad-but-smiling tone, might best sum them up.
No I'm the King of Spain, I'm smiling to myself
I'm laughin out aloud, I'll never cry again
Yeah I'm the King of Spain, I'm smilin to myself
I'm laughin out aloud, cause I'm the King of Spain
Youthful despair never sounded so whimsical again until Belle & Sebastian.
One of Akira Kurosawa's last films, 'Dreams' ('Yume') is made up of eight dreams from his own life. In the stunning segment called 'Crows', an art student steps into a painting by Vincent van Gogh and finds the artist (curiously played by Martin Scorsese) painting in a field.
From the moment 'Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing' comes to life, Kurosawa blends the 'real' and 'painted' world of Van Gogh in a beautiful exploration of the artist's imagination. The sequence ends on the three divergent roads of 'Wheat Field with Crows', where Van Gogh chose "the one less traveled by / and that has made all the difference."
Enjoy...
the thousand yard stare
...crackle-drenched yearning and bustling syncopations haunted by the ghosts of rave...
...weird soul music, hypersoul, lovingly processing spectral female voices into vaporised R&B and smudged 2step garage. Voices are blurred, smeared, pitched up, pitched down and pitch bent until their content becomes irrelevant and they whisper their saccharin sweet nothings into the void.
Which goes to illustrate that reviewing music is an art in itself, with a highly specialized vocabulary often verging on lyrical poetry. The music described here is Burial's second album 'Untrue', reviewed by Kode9, who's been releasing Burial on his Hyperdub label.
Like 'Burial', his selftitled first album, 'Untrue' has been filed under dubstep, mostly because of the association with Kode9 (whose own album with the Spaceape, 'Memories of the Future', pretty much defined the genre). In fact, Burial is hard to label, ranging from ambient to drum 'n bass and everything in between, all awash with "crackle-drenched yearning". Or, again quoting Kode9:
Burial carves out a sound which sends the dormant slinky syncopations of uk garage, via radio interference, into a padded cell of cushioned, muffled bass, passing through the best of Pole's Berlin crackle dub.
Adding to the mystery and underground feel of these albums that came out of nowhere to become critics' darlings in 2006 and 2007 is the fact that the London-based musician behind Burial remains anonymous - insisting that his tunes speak for him, just as he insists on his own 'amateurish', outsider way of making music. In his own words, from an in-depth, fascinating 2006 interview:
There's no 'musicianship' in my sound, that's the enemy of my tunes. Fuck Rhodes chords, fuck that noodle stuff. There's been a lot of times when producers I’ve liked have gone all 'musician' on me and just produced shit, not underground.
'The Car Test' started with me boring the fuck out of my mates, trying to play tunes. The car test was 'do they sound good on the car stereo at night time, driving through London?' That’s 'The Car Test.' Some Detroit tunes have that too, that distance in the tune. The 'thousand yard stare' in the tune.
Needless to say, both albums contain plenty of that thousand yard stare.
