Marcell Iványi’s lovely short film, Wind. Good articles in p.o.v magazine from a few years ago. Can’t find a copy anywhere (I saw it at a festival) [edit: 2013: here’s a copy on YouTube], although there were at one point rumours online that its included on a Hungarian VHS of Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Strange world.
(Quoted in the July 2003 World of Interiors (p.119)): Don’t look at it — just glance! Sometimes in a mere glance one can see more than in the close scrutiny of a thousand details.
Intense sun today. Dwelling on the rhythms in Bridget Riley’s Composition with Circles 1 (1998) which I was fortunate enough to have been able to buy with some options, back when having options meant anything…
We were in Brittany a few weeks ago, and visited the salt fields of Guérande. There were no paludiers in evidence, only acres of neatly tended salt ponds. Guérande salt comes in two kinds — one grey and very moist, and the other the brittle, pinkish fleur de sel (‘the caviar of salt’), which is ludicrously expensive if you don’t buy it at source. Or you can make it yourself: the following directions, quoted in Salt. A World History, are from Cato’s De Agricultura: Fill a broken-necked amphora with clean water, place in the sun. Suspend in it a strainer …
Attended the launch of the BFI’s Digital Test Bed at the NFT this morning — currently Europe’s only test laboratory for digital cinema. They are justifiably proud that they can now play everything from nitrate to pure digital feed (demonstrating the former with a lovely technicolor excerpt from The Harvey Girls (1946), and the latter with a live connection to ‘The Hall of Edoras’ set for The Return of the King in Wellington, New Zealand, with Jim Rygiel, Weta’s digital effects supervisor). I had to leave before the tour, but from their press pack, it looks as if they have …
Peters argues that SETI was to the 20th century what the spritualist movement was to the 19th, with serious researchers in both fields resolutely pursuing the inner strangeness of their chosen quests, and yet missing the point that all communication is inherently strange: SETI research reminds one of Thoreau’s quip about those who tried to measure the depths of Walden Pond: “They are paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness.” (p. 257) Curiously, he doesn’t directly reference Carl Sagan’s Murmurs of Earth, effectively the ‘sleeve notes’ for the gold-plated records launched …
Thoughts after John Durham Peters’ book Speaking Into the Air — a History of the Idea of Communication
A nice walk through the East End last night to DorkBot London in Limehouse. The highlights: Peter Cusack’s LF magentic audioscapes of Highbury and Islington underground station (south-bound platform, I think), and The Institute of Applied Autonomy‘s fine collection of DARPA website scrapings and repurposing of military technology and aesthetics for urban activism. Crucial performance requirement for their GraffitiWriter robot: it has to move faster than a cop. Very good stuff. Cheap beer, too.
It’s Friday afternoon, with a hangover. Today the best thing on the Internet is The Catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell. Lovely. Oh and it’s raining as well…