Saturday, April 27, 2013
Sunday, April 21, 2013
a chrysalis on one's astrolabe
The monarch caterpillars have disappeared. They were eaten by the spring birds or, like this guy, climbed up a ladder propped against the house to set up their alchemist chamber on the underside of the siding.
They've set up everywhere.
I've never heard it to be so, but one would think having a chrysalis on one's astrolabe has got to be a good thing, like it will steer your ship toward the magical or something like that.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
The music of 4/15/2013 - 4/20/2013
Once every six months or so, I remember that new jazz music is being created. Also, there is a new original-lineup Black Sabbath and the early indications are that it doesn't suck. Like, even at all. The world is abloom with possibility! Explore!
It is Record Store Day, BTW. Go get you some! I had to wait in line to get into my local record store. Here is what was going on inside.
Record Store Day Action vine.co/v/bUItplnZXad
— Alex V. Cook (@cookalexv) April 20, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
"Blue Polaroid"
I've been carrying my camera everywhere lately, what with this beautiful weather and vibrant civic events like Better Block BR and the Baton Rouge Blues Festival and even a Civil Rights Forum where John Seigenthaler told us that some bookies helped finance the Freedom Riders. Each time I forgot my memory card in the little slot on the side of my computer at work.
And today I remember it and fail to realize the camera is set on some "Blue Polaroid" setting when I remember the card and am feeling arty on my walk home. I did what I can in PhotoShop, turning my world into vintage icing.
I'm doing this in lieu of discussing Hour of the Wolf, Bergman's sole horror movie. Despite watching it roughly twice in a couple of spurts, I still don't know what happened. Did Max Von Sydow shook Liv Ullmann and make her a ghost? Did the old lady turn into his spurned lover? The bookies financing the civil rights movement makes much more sense. I liked it but didn't understand it. Like with PhotoShop, it's the best I can do.
Watch The Hour of the Wolf (1968, Ingmar Bergman) in Horror | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
Friday, April 12, 2013
Persona, and a eulogy for Google Reader
Enigmatic still from Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966), a film constructed of countless enigmas.
The Internet, y'all. I love that you can just up and watch a classic nervous breakdown any time you want.
Just as the great painters love a landscape or a bank of flowers, the great filmmakers love the wrinkles of sheets and the billowing of clouds the sun-dappling of ripples and how a face and a person and a life is just a thing you linger on to justify shooting reels of sheets and clouds and ponds.
From the Wikipedia entry:
Bergman wrote Persona during nine weeks while recovering from pneumonia.[2] During filming Bergman wanted to call the film A Bit of Cinematography. His producer suggested something more accessible and the title of the film was changed.[3]
Persona is a work of architecture first, a ductwork and scaffolding of lives arranged in a peculiar way to achieve stark beauty. It's a literal one-person dialogue for most of the film, a mirror into which one wants to cast a cement block just to disrupt the maddening one way reflection, the devastating blow the ego to realize the mirror isn't looking back.
What I didn't get were the weird little experimental stunts.
First this... vine.co/v/btlpJrYBgxF
— Alex V. Cook (@cookalexv) April 13, 2013
...and then this happens. vine.co/v/btlwB3mK1OHDon't get me wrong; I love experimental film stunts, but for a film fraught with stillness in every sense, these kinds of things are really puzzling. There is plenty of mediation/meditation through media: reading books aloud, watching footage of the Vietnamese monks self-immolating themselves on a hospital TV. The gist is that there is a beloved actress who suddenly stops talking, and she is being cared for by a nurse who cannot stop. They go to a summer house where feelings get hurt just like if they were talking to each other.
— Alex V. Cook (@cookalexv) April 13, 2013
Isn't that how Echo, the woodland nymph of the myth, bit it? Zeus needed her to stop talking about herself so he could dominate the conversation like a damn God, so he doomed her to only repeat others. Kinda what happened to the Internet, actually.
If you know any code, the echo command in PHP, the language in which most interactive pages are written, is the one that actually makes things appear on the page. Nothing happens without an echo.
Once, the Internet was the domain of kooks ("When you point finger, three finger point back at self," said my old Tai Chi instructor). that needed that endless broadcast, needed to never stop talking to no one and now it is social. What you put out doesn't exist unless it is repeated.
I was going to write a eulogy for Google Reader, but it is the death of an entity no one knows. None of my media savvy students know what an RSS feed is, or what subscribing to a website is (was). With subscriptions, you didn't have to be friends with people or follow them or encircle or anything, you just signed up for their subscription. It was presented in whatever context the author intended.
This has given way to the social share, the endless cocktail party of social media. I like cocktail parties, and can manage to keep talking about myself through the best (and worst) of them, so I'll make it fine, but I cannot help but think about the voices that just want to be heard as they are. I got into this wanting to be one and wanting to hear the others.
I don't know how to tie this back to Persona, so I won't try. I'll just let this tangent be a puzzling, momentary break in the film, a place where the devil appears for just a second and then we get back to the business of sharing our nervous breakdowns.
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