Bolshevism vs Americanism
“He said there are only two great diseases in the world to-day—Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your...
View ArticleThe instinct for chaos had entered
“Even in the machine, there should be equality. No part should be subordinate to any other part: all should be equal. The instinct for chaos had entered. Mystic equality lies in being, not in having or...
View ArticleOtherwise he would collapse inwards upon the great dark void
“…life was a hollow shell all round him, roaring and clattering like the sound of the sea, a noise in which he participated externally, and inside this hollow shell was all the darkness and fearful...
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Do not make a noise
A New Spanish Grammar; or, The Elements of the Spanish Language (1800).
View ArticleLight either burns or scratches film
“Light, lens concentrated, either burns negative film to a chemical crisp which, when lab washed, exhibits the blackened pattern of its ruin or, reversal film, scratches the emulsion to eventually...
View ArticleI love flashing lights warnings from films and TV shows
Warning: This film contains flashing images and stroboscopic sequences This one is from A Field in England by Ben Wheatley. I remade the original intertitle that I had because it was a bit small for a...
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We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music
The Paris Review: Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135
View ArticleRetinal response to rapidly changing frames
“They rejected subjectivism, expressiveness, narrative, and direct social reference and focused instead on the medium’s formal and material properties … flicker films were about retinal response to...
View ArticleIn structural film sound does exactly the opposite
“If one of the main functions of sound in traditional filmic mimesis is to ‘naturalize’ the image and anchor it in the real, in structural film sound does exactly the opposite. It openly contradicts...
View ArticleThe interminable murmur of the world and the hiss of static
“Before a message comes on, there is the interminable murmur of the world and the hiss of static; at once no sound and (potentially) all-sounds, murmur and static indicate that the channels are open,...
View ArticleSo sublime, hand me a cigarette and a towel
It’s that time of the year in which everybody writes best-of-the-year lists, all I have to say this year is this, paraphrasing Matt Zoller Seitz: “Other series were more comprehensible, and nearly all...
View ArticleBut this will be the end of our civilisation
“But this will be the end of our civilisation, when people will not work because work has become so intolerable to their senses, it nauseates them too much, they would rather starve. Then we shall see...
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Creativity today
“Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.” Pattern Recognition, William Gibson.
View ArticleThe creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull
“Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the...
View ArticleInfrasound
“This weapon is fully described in The Job, published by Grove Press of New York. So much for the commercial. Infrasound is sound at a frequency below the level of human hearing which sets up...
View ArticleInto each life some rain must fall
“…it seems to me that rain is a mirror of one of our key emotional states: not a negative one at all, but deeply necessary – just as necessary as joy. Water, after all, both reflects us, and brings...
View ArticleRain is essential to my sense of identity
In the first page of Rain: Four Walks in English Weather, Melissa Harrison writes: “…rain is as essential to our sense of identity as it is to our soil.” She is writing about the English countryside,...
View ArticleHarmony was a capitalist plot to sell pianos
—Do you perform often? —Only at poor attended concerts for postgraduates. —That’s a shame, why do you think that is? —Because once you move away from tonality and harmony the audience is very small....
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