dresdner frauenkirche
Dresden, eastern Germany's 'Elbflorenz' (Florence on the Elbe) has a
new Frauenkirche, complete with its famous 'Steinerne Glocke' (Stone Bell).
Once the skyline dominating pride of Dresden, the
church was destroyed (along with everything else) in the Allied bombing
in WWII. It took more than fifty years and the fall of the GDR (a
parking lot had been planned there) before reconstruction began, and it was
finally reopened a month ago.
Note the darker stones: original ones, salvaged from the rubble and kept in storage numbered and catalogued all those years.
Too bad the snake of people waiting to see the inside coiled around the entire square, at below zero temperature.
blue bob
Sure i knew David Lynch was involved in music, creating soundtracks for
his films ('Eraserhead') and writing lyrics for Julee Cruise (used in
'Twin Peaks') and Jocelyn Montgomery.
But somehow i'd missed 'Blue Bob' (2002), a collaboration between Lynch
and his long-time sound engineer John Neff. An "industrial blues"
album, 'Blue Bob' was "based on the pounding machinery of the
smokestack industry and the raw amplified birth of rock and roll."
Of course, it's as moody and dark as anything from Lynch-land. The
instrumental tracks especially play like a soundtrack. In fact, 'Blue
Horse' sounds a lot like it came from 'Lost Highway', and a version of
'Mountains Falling' was used in 'Mulholland Drive'. But it also rocks,
like primitive Rammstein.
As Lynch allegedly told Neff: "I want beats like machines, like dogs on PCP -- when they bite down you feel it."
people's poses
Strange how powerful some of Rineke Dijkstra's
simple, frontal portrait photographs are. Awkward adolescents on the
beach or in the park, young soldiers in uniform, bloody matadors after
bullfights, mothers after giving birth -- all looking into the camera
with a mixture of defiance and shyness, vulnerability and
self-consciousness. Maybe it's because they're all so obviously posing,
and never entirely succeeding.
For lack of a good site, check examples @ Google Images.
Or go see the exhibition @ Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
(Btw, don't miss her video pieces, especially 'Buzzclub/Mystery World', showing hilarious clubbing kids.)
entuziazm
Dziga Vertov's 'Entuziazm: Simfoniia Donbassa' ('Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass', 1930) was one of the first sound films
in the Soviet Union. If Vertov's classic 'Man with a Movie Camera' is a
bombardment of images, 'Enthusiasm' is a bombardment of sound,
experimenting with music, sync sound and dialogue.
Celebrating the first Five Year Plan,
'Enthusiasm' documents socialization and industrialization in the
Donbass region in the Ukraine, "fulfilling and overfulfilling the Plan
on the sound-cinema front."
At its best, it creates music out of industrial noise (a bit like 'Eraserhead'), though at other times the cacophonic marching music gets just a little too, eh, enthusiastic.
More info: here (in Italian and English) and here (contains samples of the written score).
mythomania
Oliver Sacks, in his collection of neurological case studies 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat', recounts the story of a mythomaniacal patient. Like many of Sacks' cases, it reveals as much or more about 'normal' people as about the patient.
We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative -- whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a 'narrative', and that this narrative is us, our identities.
If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story -- his
real, innermost story?' -- for each of us is a singular narrative,
which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in
us -- through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions;
and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically,
physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically,
as narratives -- we are each of us unique.
To be ourselves we must have ourselves -- possess, if need
be re-possess, our life-stories. We must 'recollect' ourselves,
recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.
(...)
Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative,
[the patient] is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy -- hence his
ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania. Unable to maintain
a genuine inner world, he is driven to the proliferation of
pseudo-narratives, in a pseudo-continuity, pseudo-worlds peopled by
pseudo-people, phantoms.
(...)
For here is a man who, in some sense, is desperate, in a frenzy.
The world keeps disappearing, losing meaning, vanishing -- and he must
seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually
inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness,
the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.
