CINEMA: SPACE AGE COLLAGE, TIRADES, THEORY, & CONFUSION
“The raw material I had to work with when shooting Gomorrah was so visually powerful that I MERELY FILMED IT in as straightforward a way as possible, as if I were a passerby who happened to find myself there by chance.”
"I didn’t want to make a film against “the System,” but about “the System.”
Claire Denis: "Our brains are full of literature - my brain is. But I think we also have a dream world, the brain is also full of image and songs and I think that making films for me is to get rid of explanation.
Because there is, I think, you get explanation by getting rid of explanation.
I am sure of that."
Additionally, [Celebrity Novelist] has drawn perhaps 5,000 hamsters with Photoshop, Microsoft Paint, and pen/marker since graduating from New York University in May 2005 with a degree in journalism.
When asked, "Why hamsters?" at a reading last September, [Celebrity Novelist] reportedly mumbled something like "I don't care about hamsters" before qualifying incoherently and then saying, "I don't own any hamsters" both defensively and wistfully. But a few months later, during a presentation titled [Celebrity Novelist]'s Drawing Style" at Kansas City Art Institute, [Celebrity Novelist] reportedly orated at length and fluidly about how he likes hamsters "a lot" because "they're the most minimal animal, their heads are also their bodies," adding that he also likes megamouth sharks and toy poodles and, somewhat jarringly, that "ocean sunfish are like hamsters but fish and a lot bigger."
Bresson: Getting close to things may be the way to perceive supernatural things. The supernatural is always in reality, it is something real to which we approach as much as possible.
"The climate crisis is the result of the very uneven pattern of economic development that evolved over the past two centuries, which allowed today's rich countries to attain their current levels of income, in part through not having to account for the environmental damage now threatening the lives and livelihoods of others."vs. Malthusian Fascists
"But the per-capita figures (of GHG emissions) rolled out by the "climate justice" proponents hide a real elephant in the room that few want to acknowledge and discuss: the huge surge in population growth from about the end of the Second World War, and most of this in developing countries."The practical solution: use green nano & cloning technology to create Dinosaur Preserves in the tundras where the excess populations can be eaten on the pretext of eco-tourist adventures. These could be shown on the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, etc.
Phallustrade: It is an alchemical product, composed of the following elements: an autostrada, a balustrade, and a certain amount of phallus. -- Max Ernst
For example in 1924 when I proposed the fabrication and circulation of objects appearing in dreams, I envisaged the accession of those objects into concrete existence as more of a means than an end, despite the unusual aspect they might assume. Certainly I was prepared to expect from the multiplication of those objects a depreciation of those whose convenient utility (although often questionable) encumbers the supposedly real world; this depreciation particularly seemed to me very apt to release the powers of invention, which in terms of all we know about dreams, are magnified when put in contact with objects of oneiric origin, truly tangible desires. -- André Breton
“Algorithms and social media replacing the work of Publishers & Editors; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.”
Antonioni: What interests me now is to put the characters IN CONTACT with things, because what counts today are things, objects, matter.
SPEER: The building on the Zeppelin Field was begun at once in order to have at least the platform ready for the coming party rally. To clear ground for it, the Nuremberg street car depot had to be removed. I passed by its remains after it had been blown up. The iron reinforcements protruded from concrete debris and had already begin to rust. One could easily visualize their further decay. This sight led me to some thoughts which I later propounded to Hitler under the pretentious heading of "A Theory of Ruin Value". The idea was that buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that "bridge of tradition" to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler had admired in the monuments of the past. My "theory" was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, and hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years, would more or less resemble Roman models.
To illustrate my ideas I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognizable. In Hitler's entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler's closest followers. But he himself accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principles of this "law of ruins."
Malinowski: The sole purpose of the EXCHANGE is to draw relationships closer by strengthening the ties of reciprocity.
Pasolini: Naturally in the language of advertising as well, the homologizing, and I would say, creative principle is technology which is therefore the absolute supremacy of communication, and thus the slogan is the example of a type of "expressivity" so far unknown. Its premise is, in fact, expressive, but through repetition its expressiveness loses every characteristic of its own, is fossilized, and becomes totally communicative, communicative up to the most brutal finality. So much so that the way of pronouncing it also possesses an allusiveness of a new kind that might be defined with a monstrum definition -- expressiveness of the masses.
Debord: The reigning deceptions of the time are on the point of causing us to forget that truth may also be displayed by means of images. An image that has not deliberately been separated from its meaning can add great precision and certainty to knowledge.
In briefest summary, I was writing programs on the SWAC in 1953 at UCLA. At the time, the SWAC was one of about a dozen computers in the whole U.S. When I first hoked up the word -- to distinguish programs from hardware, of course -- people said, "Huh?" I explained that 'soft' meant changeable. People then and for years later kind of sneered "Software...[pause]...I see..."Digital turns all cultural durity into software. I suppose that's what people mean by the New Age.
Detaching Islamic law from the grip of the nation-state and emphasizing its sacrificial nature, Osama bin Laden effectively transforms the militant's obedience of Sharia into an act of sovereignty. The law is no longer embodied in a set of institutions that must be submitted to, but manifests itself in militant acts that possess the force of law in their own right. Yet what makes these acts sovereign, more than their independence from institutional authority, is that they neither claim nor defend any interest, but rather destroy interest itself in spectacular gestures of sacrifice uniting both perpetrators and victims into a single humanity. In other words, militant acts are sovereign because they are spendthrift: deriding the protection that law normally extends to interests of various kinds and instead sacrificing life itself as the ground of all interest. In this sense, the militant act is law-making rather than law-abiding, albeit in the most anarchic of ways.All true of course, with the slight caveat that the LAW that bin Laden is in submission to is not Sharia, but the Law of the Spectacle. He is as much a servant of the spectacle as Rupert Murdoch. A guerrilla of separation. And his "followers" want nothing else but TO APPEAR at long last as True Muslims of the Spectacle, even if that means their erasure-in-the-world as carbon based life forms. After all, the militant is always uncertain of his status, his commitment is always in doubt, he might in his heart remain a secret, asthmatic, debauched playboy revanchist. Such things can only be settled by suicide in the eye of the camera.
We don’t need novelists telling us about the surfaces of being a human being. We’re bombarded with surfaces 24 hours a day now.
--------Jonathan "Tell em Johnny Boy is Here..." Franzen
The first time I painted from a photograph, I did so in a mixture of exhilaration and fear, partly because I was strongly affected by contemporary Fluxus events, and partly also because I once did a lot of photography myself and worked for a photographer for eighteen months: masses of photographs that passed through the bath of developer every day may have created a lasting trauma.
I have decided not to make "Frankenstein in 3D" and instead make a musical comedy for the entire family entitled "CHOCOLATE AND GUMMI BEARS".
