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over-communication

...Over-communication -- that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture and its members to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but of losing all originality.

-- Claude Lévi-Strauss ('Myth and Meaning', 1978)

the horizontal elevator

'De Kortste Eeuw' ('The Shortest Century'), Orkater's current music theatre piece, is in their own words "a big, allegorical and absurd location-based show in Amsterdam with an apocalyptic theme and much and many-colored music."

The story: some people at a New Year's Eve party on the top floor of a skyscraper get stuck in a flood of Biblical proportions. With the water, tensions rise... They sing, quarrel and reveal their fears... Things get out of hand, somebody gets shot... They await the end... And then the allegorical elevator repair man appears...

The coolest thing is the horizontal elevator (Problem: how to put an elevator on a stage? Solution: make it horizontal. Brilliant!) -- but that gets stuck after the first scene.

Not my kind of apocalypse, even with the big band.

a passing glimpse

I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't;
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt--

Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth--
Not lupine living on sand and drouth.

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.

- Robert Frost (from 'West-Running Brook', 1928)

dalí & disney's destino

"A simple love story, where boy meets girl," Walt Disney described his animation project with Salvador Dalí in 1946. For Dalí it was "a magical exposition on the problem of life in the labyrinth of time." The project was called 'Destino', after a Mexican ballad, but only 20 seconds of animation were ever realized.

In 2003, almost 60 years after their collaboration, the envisioned film was reconstructed from storyboards and sketches. The result is a 6 minute moving surrealist painting / poem which puts both Disney and Dalí in a new light.

See 'Destino' @ the All Dalí exhibition in Boijmans van Beuningen.

More 'Destino' info and images:

- 'The Destiny of Dalí's Destino'
- 'Disney Animates Dalí's Flick'
- 'Destino' @ IMDB

assorted shorts

Some cool short films to watch online @ Channel4.com:

- Copyshop (Virgil Widrich, '01): Kafkaesque short about a man who makes photocopies of himself, with nightmarish results.

- The Oath (Tjebbo Penning, '97): Stylish film about a death row prisoner attempting suicide, only to be rescued for his execution.

- The Italian Machine (David Cronenberg, '76): Hilarious early Cronenberg camp - no horror, just 70's machine fetish.

entrepeneurial madness

The documentary Georgi and the Butterflies (winner of the Silver Wolf at IDFA '04) is the bittersweet portrait of Georgi Lulchev, director of a Bulgarian psychiatric institute, who tries to make the home profitable with one far-out business idea after another.

Watch it online here (Bulgarian with Dutch subtitles).