描写

Immemory Now Supports OS X

I claim for the image the humility and powers of a madeleine. Chris Marker’s seminal hypermedia work Immemory has been re-released in a format compatible with OS X. This is very good news for Marker fans: Immemory is an important work, which has languished for the past few years in the ‘dead media’ pool: the original version, from the 1990s, required MacOS ‘Classic’ to run. There doesn’t seem to be a discount for those of us who purchased the original version, but Immemory — unlike most ‘multimedia CDROMs’ of the time, is actually [appropriately, from recollection] worth paying for twice. …

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Yugen…

And yes, yugen… To achieve the end of yugen, art had sometimes been stripped of its color and glitter lest these externals distract; a bowl of highly polished silver reflects more than it suggests, but one of oxidized silver has the mysterious beauty of stillness, as Seami realized when he used for stillness the simile of snow piling in a silver bowl. Or one may prize such a bowl for the tarnished quality itself, for its oldness, for its imperfection, and this is the point where we feel sabi. […] The love for the fallen flower, for the moon obscured …

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The Flower of Stillness

A fragmentary translation of Zeami [世阿弥 元清]’s The Nine Stages of the Noh in Order served as both inspiration and creative headfuck for me during my time in Tokyo. As an outsider to the performance tradition in which it’s founded, The Nine Stages is opaque, yet provocative: the image of the Flower of Stillness — snow piling in a silver bowl — abides with me, and in my work. The Nine Stages of the Noh in Order Higher stages Flower of the miraculous – transcends power of speech and working of mind due to the yugen of a master actor. …

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Crowds…

How few crowd shots I have. Those there are, are mostly compositions of faces, foreshortened by a long lens, flattened into a single plane. And not an absence of crowds, only, in my pictures — absence of the space for crowds, absence of space itself. What the world is: bodies & light.

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Stuck/Black Ice

At Anne-Fay’s, in swine flu quarantine limbo. So no shots of Nando’s performance at EYHO last night, which saddens me. Instead, been catching up on mailing-list reading and thinking about images, in halt compensation for inability to go out and make them. More on that later, but first a note to self, bookmarking a short thread on the Empyre list’s discursions around Relational Aesthetics this month. Reminded me I’ve never read Barthe’s Camera Lucida, so have a 2nd-hand copy on its way from Amazon… of which, I would be very interested to read James Elkin’s “Camera Dolorosa” in History of …

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Film Noir at Dalston Superstore

The Film Noir crew took over both floors of the Superstore on the hottest Friday night of the year. Severino’s and Helen Noir’s back-to-back sets of take-no-prisoners, hands-in-the-air afterhours disco and electro set the basement on fire. Fabulous. Pix here.

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Film Noir at Ghetto

Helen Noir and Philippos N downstairs, Dickie Beau, A Man To Pet, Ingenue St. John and Nando Messias upstairs. Pix here. We’re counting down the days to their Dalston Superstore takeover — July 3rd.

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Hoof and Horn: Nando Messias as Faun

These shots of Nando as the Faun, are the first in a series I’m calling Hoof and Horn. Inspiration? Madame Yevonde‘s Goddesses series, Helen Chadwick, the Ballet Russes, the London underground club scene, the pagans and neo-pagans of Southwark (to whom I owe the project title). The abiding desire: a loosely-framed context within which to lure some of my favourite subjects off the stage, away from the dancefloor, and into the studio. Nando is first. We’ll see where this goes as a project, and I’ll write more about the concept later… This week I’ve also been documenting a performance Nando …

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Horse Meat Disco CD

The release date approaches. Quinton at Strut has sent me through the almost-final layout for the CD and accompanying booklet. It looks amazing. Strut is renowned for its attention to detail, and the HMD release does them proud. The CD will include a 20-page booklet, which features some great background on Horse Meat and its founders/residents. It also includes around 20 photos from my archives, and some new shots they commissioned from me especially for this release. The artwork also includes nice photos from Marius Hansen and Peter Podworski. You’ll have to wait until release day to get your hands …

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Dickie Beau: Blackouts

Last night, Dickie performed all three of the performances which comprise his Blackouts series, at the RVT. Pix here.

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