A Whisper Woke Me Up

The last good day of the year...a whisper woke me up. I looked outside, the solitude and calmness of it all. In a matter of moments it's 1st January 2003, a turning point...a millenium crisis that came too late. I walked outside in the frozen garden listening to the fading sound of my cell phone from up above and nothing else for miles...No more sounds of cracking bottles, nor any hysterical laughs...Everybody's sleeping now, the dawn breaks, it's cold. My cell phone finally gives up...and right before I head back home I see a young boy with Santa's hood on his head pissing the front door of the house right across the street.

Sometimes

open up your eyes and see...

(music by Kid 606, video created by Pleix)

Free Burma

F R E E B U R M A

Cities & The Sky

Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwlks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer "So that it's destruction cannot begin." And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, "Not only the city."

If, dissatisfied with the answers, someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence; he sees cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams. "What meaning does your construction have?" he asks. "What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?"
"We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now," they answer.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

(words by Italo Calvino)

Shanghai # 2

Millions of people running to the city centre each morning, hold their breath for a moment, then the moment's gone and off they go again. Gigantic TV screens show goods to buy, if someone could just switch the channel there would be images of thousands of Buddhist monks being beaten by the army not so far away from here. Everything is alright. The typhoon has weakened and turned into a tropical storm and, apart from the heat and the moisture which is almost unbearable and the frenetic traffic, everything seems quite calm. Suited Caucasians pass by, bums and small time merchants block your way, cyclists cut you off in true Chinese fashion. The city regain control after a close escape from total disaster and as we walk towards The Bund between the skyscrapers and the sick yellow sky I wonder what would happen if! Had they authorities moved all 15 millions or so citizens into a safe place and the worst typhoon of the century had stroke viciously leaving nothing on its way, who would have cried for this place? Apart from the corporations, that is!

(photo by Kate)

Shanghai

There's this city, where nothing ever ends. It just goes on forever in circles, a labyrinth, not a cm of space wasted. The city is an example of human failure or people's lack of coherence and managing of space. Your neck hurts from trying to find the horizon, the end of the skyscrapers, the start of a storm, a dawn that is struggling to find the way out of the buildings. The Chinese obsession with the 'bad spirits' that can only walk on earth in a straight row gave way for the Western obsession with modernity whose monstrous architecture flooded the city worse than a tropical storm.
Yet, if you look close enough you can clearly see how nature, no matter how oppressed by concrete it is, always comes back and the Chinese mastery of creating harmony finds its way even on this nightmarish place. There are plants bursting along the highways, small - almost tropical - parks in the midst of the traffic, a garden that shuts out the noise and invites the visitor into a short oblivion from the anxiety that surrounds this puzzled place...

Bohemian Sunset

In downtown Mexico City thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and longlapeledjackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined themselves along the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us in the night. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks for forty-eight cents in a strange tiled Mexican cafeteria with generations of marimba musicians standing at one immense marimba -- also wandering singing guitarists, and old men on corners blowing trumpets. You went by the sour stink of pulque saloons; they gave you a water glass of cactus juice in there, two cents. Nothing stopped; the streets were alive all night. Beggars slept wrapped in advertising posters torn off fences. Whole families of them sat on the sidewalk, playing little flutes and chuckling in the night. Their bare feet stuck out, their dim candles burned, all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp. On corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hot sauce onnewspaper napkins. This was the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin- childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road. Dean walked through with his arms hanging zombie-like at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes gleaming, and conducted a ragged and holy tour that lasted till dawn in a field with a boy in a straw hat who laughed and chatted with us and wanted to play catch, for nothing ever ended.

(words by Jack Kerouac, photo by Vortex Bits)

Suburban Paranoia

He has a router and a table saw
and you won't believe what Mr. Sticha saw
There's poison underneath the sink of course
but there's also enough formaldehyde to choke a horse
What's he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?
I heard he has an ex-wife in some place called Mayors Income, Tennessee
And he used to have a consulting business in Indonesia...
but what is he building in there?
What the hell is building in there?

He has no friends
But he gets a lot of mail
I'll bet he spent a little time in jail...
I heard he was up on the roof last night
Signaling with a flashlight
And what's that tune he's always whistling...
What's he building in there?
What's he building in there?

We have a right to know...

('What's he building?' by Tom Waits)

Life/After/God

'Sometimes I want to go to sleep and merge with the foggy world of dreams and not return to this, our real world. Sometimes I look back on my life and am surprised at the lack of kind things I have done. Sometimes I just feel that there must be another road that can be walked--away from this became--either against my will or by default.

Now--here is my secret:

I tell it to you with the openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God--that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.'

(Words by Douglas Coupland, photo by Stephan Houde)

Everyman's An Island

Wine's pouring like acid rain. J. looks at me all drunken eyes. She's trying to whisper something but never comes out. "You know I walked this road before..." she finally says. "It led me right here in the middle of nowhere, and if it wasn't for you I don't know what I would end up doing. All things are already discussed, same music has been played over and over again, films have bloodied our eyes and books, who really needs them anymore. Here we at the edge of the world. A step before the abyss. What keeps us in one peace, I really wanna know. Most of the people are hanging on by ignorance (a bonafide advantage nowadays). Would it be too naive to ask you what gets you up in the morning?"
"Curiosity. I want to see future! I can't let go, there must be something there in the distance worth waiting for. Sometimes meaning lies where you don't see it, right in your face, in trivial things, looks, gestures, a change of weather, a thunder, a storm..."
"Who do you think you are, Homer, the blind poet?"
"Probably the cartoon character but that's irrelevant. You ridicule our conversation."
"I'm sorry to say that I'm probably up to here with abstraction. I want definite answers."
"There's no definite thing when you can't predict much really. Think about it! Let's say that you've been given the gift of seeing into the future. What an awful gift! I'd slice my wrists without remorse. Total Knowledge? Fuck it! It's the learning process that keeps us in one peace"

(photo by Rui P.)

Trading Cities

n Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

(Words by Italo Calvino, photo by Marielito)

Life's good...but not fair at all!

Life's like a mayonnaise soda

And life's like space without room
And life's like bacon and ice cream
That's what life's like without you
Life's like forever becoming
But life's forever dealing in hurt
Now life's like death without living
That's what life's like without you
Life's like Sanskrit read to a pony
I see you in my mind's eye strangling on your tongue
What good is knowing such devotion
I've been around - I know what makes things run
What good is seeing eye chocolate
What good's a computerized nose
And what good was cancer in April
Why no good - no good at all
What good's a war without killing
What good is rain that falls up
What good's a disease that won't hurt you
Why no good, I guess, no good at all
What good are these thoughts that I'm thinking
It must be better not to be thinking at all
A styrofoam lover with emotions of concrete
No not much, not much at all
What's good is life without living
What good's this lion that barks
You loved a life others throw away nightly
It's not fair, not fair at all
What's good ?
Not much at all
What's good ?
Life's good -
But not fair at all...

(Words by Lou Reed, photo by Zakkaliousness)

Sans Soleil: Snatches of banality

He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function it being to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. At dawn we'll be in Tokyo.

(Words by Chris Marker, photo by Mick Feuerbacher)

The Space Between Us

There are things I've never I told you, the travels I've made, the people I've met, the beauty and the ugliness of it all. In the middle of the night as I watch you dreaming I think you are probably better off without all my continuous mumbling of 'life on the road'. You'd probably think I'm making things up and to be honest it all happened some years ago, in a decade we've already passed by almost another one. Sometimes I'm not sure if everything did happen the way I remember them. But if you were awake I'd tell you a little story from Campo Di Marte, outside Florence. A train that never departed, snowflakes dancing in the late night sky, bums smoking what they could find in the waiting room, sounds from Italian pop songs of the 60s coming from who knows where...Through this stillness in time, as dawn finally broke in a frozen platform and the train was slowly leaving the station, I saw you face just as it is now. Deep asleep, in the safety of your house. Just before the engine roar tore this daydream into pieces, a girl is running to catch our coach making no sound as she hops inside. Half asleep and half insane we all continued our disrupted journey heading right to the centre of the blizzard...

(photo by Zakkaliciousness)

The People in Jazz Nightclubs

"we are a part of the loud minority
and as such we are a part of those
concerned with ... C H A N G E !"

(Video: 'Loud Minority' by United Future Organisation)

Buildings On Fire

Jump off
Your buildings on fire
I'll catch you
I'll catch you
Destroy all that is keeping you back
And then I'll nurse you

(Well, It's All BJORK To Me)

Cities In Dust: The Mad Masters

The following is an email I got from an old friend of mine from film school. The last time I'd heard of him was a couple of years ago when he went into a doc production as a DoP. He had sent me an email then, mentioning that he could be coming to my city to shoot some footage. He never did and I completely lost him until now...

Dear Pyke

as you probably know I'm photographing this doc for some years now. It's a project for a doctorate anthropologist and in the beginning what we tried to do is reverse Rouch. A new (?) notion of ethnography or urban ethnography if you like that would take us in busy cities around the world to watch the melting pot of modern society. I remember discussing a similar project with you so I thought you'd be interested. First, I started to realise that the anthropologist (don't get me wrong he's a good friend and a remarkable man) is almost overpowered by the image. I should have warned him, I know. Simply put, he creates an academic formula through this film by trying to manipulate the people he's interviewing. Subsequently he's not recording reality he's making it happen pulling the strings. In doc history this is all but rare but this is not a Broomfield or Michael Moore doc. If scientists (and of that particular discipline) are 'cooking' up human behaviour just to make an impression and get a Uni chair, we can't say a word no more about the colonial (fascist) imagery of the giant networks.
Through digital technology practically anyone can shoot a video but tell me what ever happened to subjectivity? Call me naive, but what ever happened to Jean Rouch's idea of ethnography on film? Technology liberated us only to be drown again into this gigantic pit where everyman's an island. Images are so plenty that we're sick of them. Disposable, out of any historical context, snapshots of the huge 'Nothing' thtat surrounds us. The images I'm producing they're not mine anymore even if I did shoot them. Edit them anyway you like and they become the complete opposite from the truth I tried to freeze. Truth becomes a big lie with a click of a button.
Now either I disown what I've spent two years shooting and go on making my own docs (creating yet another remote island) or stop right here and go to work in another field! Not much of alternatives, right?

Louis
Paris, August 2007

(video excerpt from "Les Maitres Fous" by Jean Rouch)

Cities & Desire

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

(Words by Italo Calvino, photo by Geoffroy Demarquet)

Dystopia

It's hard to remember when or who started all this! Seems like little by little men elected by the people has fucked up our cities big time. In the name of modernity they built up taller and taller buildings to block our view, hide the sun and decrease the air supply. For every little cm of space grabbed from us they give back bars, clubs and cafes so we can keep on consuming and forget the peasant life our fathers were so anxious to get rid of. Our fixation with modernity is limited in stressed lifestyles, dreams of escape to places where poverty lies for us to feel better and evolved. We do give back some crubs to these communities...after all tsunamis have ruined places we would never afford to go but hypothetically we can...if we sell our house, car and soul to the devil.
It's hard to remember who started it but little by little Dystopia is consuming us and there is no end in height...there's always some more space up to build another floor!

(video: 'My Kingdom' by The Future Sound of London)

Passage

I woke up in another town again. As I fell into deep sleep 2 hours ago stranded inside a train stopped in God knows where, I was somehow sure that it would take much more time to reach my destination. As I'm heading to the nearest bar in the station I take a quick glimpse of the old clocks hanging above my head. It's 6.03. Inside the bar a yuppie 30 something is reaching for his wristwatch inside his briefcase, finds it and wears it on. The bartender is reading 'Il resto del Carlino', mumbles something about the new signing of the local team then stares at the weather report on a tiny screen that hangs from the ceiling. As I'm leaving the station, the cleaners are brushing lazily while a couple of students stare at the departure board for far too long. Fog has covered everything outside,and the moist makes my hair soft. Bus drivers inside their vehicles are ready for another climb up to the rush hour, some smoking the first cigarette of the day, others reading the morning papers, or starting their shift with an engine growl. As the city wakes up I'm observing 5 or 6 old people making a dangerous passage from the one side of the rail to the other. It's too cold to make the whole round so they shortcut through the high velocity lines...

(photo by Nikolai Zhelyazkov)

The Invisible Cities: "Cities & The Dead"

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies, and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark.

From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say "It's down below there," and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam.

(Words by Italo Calvino, photo by Renato Corradi)

Pantone

A friend of mine who used to call himself 'Charlie' is sitting before me outside a shopping mall drinking orange juice. "Why is it that we're always feeling as if we are about to collapse, and then we go on stronger than ever! Our society is built upon this, my friend. Nothing ever works around here. Nothing ever did! What keeps this country from falling apart? Our community is governed by corruption and lies, we suspect, hate and envy each other, the country is being run by complete imbecilles and yet there's always one man/woman in every corner who rescues us and gives us back our dignity, our hopes, the will to create and 'prosper'. It's conscience. In every randomly pick of, say, a hundred bastards there will always be at least one bastard with conscience. And even when he/she collapses, he/she will back next to start all over. This bloodline of people hidden in the obscurity of an office, a farm, a boat, a plane etc derives from ancient times to keep you in the right track when you stray and hold you tight when you're about to fall on your arse! Personally speaking, this is what fascinates me about human beings; no matter how bad things are there's always one to keep the head up for the rest of us..."

(Video is 'Pantone' by To Rococo Rot)

Transformations # 2

"Life in the city has changed me..." T. says in a buzzy cafe we often retreat during peak hours. "I'm not the real me, you know. I'm a different person, one I hate and could harm if push comes to shove! How did we ever come to this! Is this natural progression? Maturity?". While he's talking he holds his spoon in a gentle way like a 'maestro' directing an invisible chamber quartet into a increasingly fading adaggio! "Sometimes when I think about the triviality that surrounds me, the little nothingness that consists of my 'creative' hours at work, I'm certain that there must a be a way out. This can't be it! My life! I became the faceless passer-by I used to -not- notice through this glass, I drift slowly into invisibility even from myself...and the more this transformation devours me the less I tend to resist. The realisation of the change doesn't make me a better man for myself while I seem to become more acceptable as a citizen. I'd never imagined that invisibility would ease my way into society and yet this is what is all about. A vicious circle that transforms people into statistics while rips their soul in order to include them into a gigantic faceless pit where even a supposed individuality is part of this theatrical performance we call modern life..."

(photo by Cyjanopan)

That's Entertainment

A police car and a screaming siren -

A pneumatic drill and ripped up concrete -
A baby waiting and stray dog howling -
The screech of brakes and lamplights blinking -
that's entertainment.

A smash of glass and the rumble of boots -
An electric train and a ripped up 'phone booth -
Paint splattered walls and the cry of a tomcat -
Lights going out and a kick in the balls -
that's entertainment.

Days of speed and slow time Mondays -
Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday -
Watching the news and not eating your tea -
A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls -
that's entertainment.

Waking up at 6 a.m. on a cool warm morning -
Opening the windows and breathing in petrol -
An amateur band rehearsing in a nearby yard -
Watching the tele and thinking about your holidays -
that's entertainment.

Waking up from bad dreams and smoking cigarettes -
Cuddling a warm girl and smelling stale perfume -
A hot summers' day and sticky black tarmac -
Feeding ducks in the park and wishing you were faraway -
that's entertainment.

Two lovers kissing amongst the scream of midnight -
Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude -
Getting a cab and travelling on buses -
Reading the grafitti about slashed seat affairs -
that's entertainment.

(words by Paul Weller, photo by Mohain)

Game Over

The cables are mixed/the telephone wires flicker/the sky looks just like a fractal/computers working unplugged and with no battaries/alcohol is being consumed/cigarettes are smoked/figures around me fade/the fog rolls in/money grow wings and fly out of the window/so do my hopes in (and for) this world/my dreams get worse/my hair grow longer/my eyes are wet/i'm chocking/the window is shrinking/and the door is locked/less oxygen/dead end in TombRaider/ my hands are shaking/my body is weak/and my mind ransacked

(Video: Game Over, music by Ken Ishii)

Static

I met this bloke on a night bus in London back in the early 00s. He was a universal traveller, one of those braindead types who 'circled the globe for things we haven't tried before'. He took Garland's Beach literally and couldn't stop catalogising every drug he did, where, when, its cost, the side effects. He told me about a stop-over in Pyongyang and the airport security 'morons' that didn't let him sleep in the airport. He slagged off all asian people as he went on about sex in Thailand, pot in a Godforsakentown and all the useless details he thought that would amaze me. As the bus approached Lewisham I couldn't help but thinking that the guy next to me, no matter how many travels he'd made and the people he'd met, he was the most static person I've ever come to meet! It's not the miles you leave behind that matter but the understanding of what you see...

(photo by Yannis Kontos, 1 and 2)

The Time Of Your Life

"Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking that we're dead. That we died a couple of years ago, back when I was a rock and roll star. And that all this is Death's last joke. That we're living one last dream, before the lights go out. And then I think, so what's new? And I roll over. And sooner or later I go back to sleep..."

(from the graphic novel 'Death: The Time of your Life' by Neil Gaiman, published by Vertigo)

Jacob's Ladder

"The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life; your memories, your attachments. They burn 'em all away. But they're not punishing you, he said. They're freeing your soul. So the way he sees it, if you're frightened of dying and holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. It's just a matter of how youlook at it, that's all."

('Louis' played by Danny Aiello quotes a philosophic-theologic theory by Meister Eckhart in Adrian Lyne's film "Jacob's Ladder")

(Photo By Geoffroy Demarquet)

The Invisible Cities: "Inferno"

And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

(Words By Italo Calvino, photo by darkness has fallen)

Tightrope

"Last night I dreamed I died and that my life had been rearranged into some kind of theme park. And all my friends were walking up and down the boardwalk. And my dead Grandmother was selling cotton candy out of a little shack. And there was this big ferris wheel about a half mile out in the ocean, half in and half out of the water. And all my old boyfriends were on it. With their new girlfriends. And the boys were waving and shouting and the girls were saying Eeek. Then they disappeared under the surface of the water and when they came up again they were laughing and gasping for breath.

In this dream I'm on a tightrope and I'm tipping back and forth trying to keep my balance. And below me are all my relatives and if I fall I'll crush them. This long thin line. This song line. This shout. The only thing that binds me to the turning world below and to all the people and noise and sounds and shouts. This tightrope made of sound This long thin line made of my own blood.
Remember me is all I ask And if remembered be a task forget me. Remember me is all I ask And if remembered be a task This long thin line. This long thin ine. This long thin line. This tightrope. Remember me is all I ask And if remembered be a task forget me. This long thin line. This long thin ine. This long thin line. This tightrope made of sound."

(Words by Laurie Anderson, photo by Geoffroy Demarquet)

Heat

"It's one of these Saturdays. So hot you can feel your skin burn, the whole town is ready to explode and no one in sight. Welcome To GhostTown again. You haven't got any plans for tonight so you rush to the supermarket to hide in the air conditioned corridors, buy a beer or something and wander endlessly, catching glimpses of bored to death faces and sad employees. There's a girl with pink hair talking loud on her mobile, an old couple shuffling through the vegetables, an under aged father with a naked baby in hand, his under aged wife a few steps behind checking the expiry dates on some milk cartons. My brother shouts from across the corridor "get some coronas and lemons, grab as much as you want", then I see him checking prices on air ventilators. I don't want to leave the super market, I can't stand the smell of the road melting and the deserted town before me is withering, far from the comfortable emptiness I was glad to witness in the same circumstances last summer. I think the heat is worse than ever. There's a sick atmosphere down here. And vulnerable minds plot their way into evil deeds tonite..."

(photo by Pawel Beniutek)

The Land Between Solar Systems

When adolescence comes, u lose your childhood piece by piece. It's an impairable damage to your imagination, a settle to conformity. Nothing seems to matter anymore except some financial parameters such as lawns (this grassmoaner is out of order again so u go back at the store and buy a new one) and loans! Suddenly sunrise means nothing, staying up late could be a disaster leaving u walking wounded next morning etc. The magic is gone. Films you once treasured seem naive, music you once adored do not affect u and the people u used to know are hidden enemies or just burnt out. Fried. Like U. Yet there r moments frozen in time that come back to haunt u and leave u stranded between the 2 worlds. A beach house when u were a kid...listening to the crickets sing and thinking "this is the sound that the stars make...". U see nothing but the midnight sky so every sound u hear should be from up above, and only seconds after u r deep asleep. Waking up many years later, sounds are well distinguished. Crickets r those filthy little creatures. Stars too die. There's a perfect explanation 4 everything. Except 4 the void deep inside u never managed to fill and the more u knew the less you felt. Damned answers, why there has to be always a rational explanation. Why can't the stars make a fucking sound anyway?

(Song "The Land Between Solar Systems" by MUM, directed by cudrlo)

Destination

In the space between our cities, a storm is slowly forming.

Something eating up our days, I feel it every morning.
Destination, destination.

(Words by The Church, photo by Joseph Koudelka)

The Coma

"And for a while something that I knew was pure hallucination gripped me entirely, as the cars on the road became tumbling blocks of concrete and the road became tumbling foam, and the engine noise became the roar of a torrent that enveloped me..."

(from Alex Garland's novel 'The Coma')

Crash Essay # 3

"How Can You Think Clearly In A Record Shop?"

by Matt Worley

Pop, of course, is built on daydreams conjured up in suburbia. Pop comes from the outside looking in, from howling at the moon, from wanting a way out. Pop is a dream mass-produced, packaged and re-packaged, replicated, copied and sold back to us. It is the sound of creativity spawned from boredom; a source of ideas raised only to be pillaged. Pop is the last gasp before the day job get you, a scream in the face of nine to five, a futile alternative to washing the car. Pop is an inevitable failure, a second of brilliance and a lifetime of grey. Pop is disappointment in multiple.

(artwork by Andy Warhol)

- Filoistron -

I've been blogging for more than a year now. In this one, others, with different aliases, diverse target groups and themes, stuff I'd never let my family and friends know about! In all of my blogs and in forum discussions I tend to be to melancholic about life in the city and its semi-paranoid modern inhabitants. This is partly because of a change towards worse I experience every day. An ugly transformation. There are things though, that I'm more than glad to notice. Mundane gestures, some nanoseconds of humanity that makes my mouth break. A couple cycling around the lake, some boys playing soccer in a deserted park, a girl's imaginative dj-ing in a small bar packed with students dancing to music they weren't even born when it first came out. Away from the posers you see in regular meeting points, pretentious yet ignorant dj's, soulless places and stupid local Council notions about public spaces.

"There are bird tracks And nothing in the sky; Something lived, left, And left something." (William Wharton) ...

(photo by Minas Papadopoulos)

Pigs In Athens

Athens, Greece. Sunday June 17th, Eject festival with Madness, Beastie Boys and Underworld. 50 (according to newspapers, many more said people who were there) non paying pigs entered the ex Olympic estate where the fest was held, torched it, wounding one member of the Underworld and destroying the concert for thousand peaceful (and paying) music lovers (or at least for those who did not develop the mob mentality and did not steal everything they could). U See, Athens is not the idylic place to be. Self proclaimed 'anarchists' -without a clue of any real anarchic theory- 'supported' by a puppet government of complete morons (and a dangerous and complete idiot minister of public order) have turned the country upside down the last couple of years.
The video posted is Jumbo by Underworld, the band that didn't play because of the chaos inside the arena and the fact that one of them was injured by a humanAnimal. This is what those pigs destroyed that night!

GhostTown

(Video: Atlantic City by Bruce Springsteen, directed by Arnold Levine)

The Fight Club

"Stop & Start. Rip it up and start again. Urban paranoia. Endless posing, posturing, sterilisation of the mind. This is a fight, an ongoing struggle between body and mind. With no balance you're just about ready to explode silently into nothingness and stay there for years. The more powerful you get the more insecure you become, unarmed, braindead, unsatisfied, with tired eyes from a rusty visual experience, hidden behind the illusion of safety. The real and only enemy is yourself. The only one that can and will hold you back is you, stuck in the triviality of the moment, a moment that can last forever.
If I only could beat myself and in the hours of need win me, I could break through and escape...Just as the city lights are turning off and the morning comes I can really make it this time and hope it'll last".

(Photo by Steffen Ebert)

KinoEYE

What would Dziga say about our hypermodern kinoEyes? Nothing he didn't experiment with back in the 20s! I see him in every film director, advertiser, photographer, man, woman, child. I see him when I drive around town just as everybody is about to wake up. Up on the roof where old ladies lay their laundry to the sun, in the cafes, in crowded university rooms, in buses, planes, trains and automobiles. I can feel his words coming through my mind "capture life no matter how ordinary it might be". Write about it, film it, talk it senseless with a friend, start a conversation with a passer-by, capture your trivial existence, make something pretentious on film that your unborn children will laugh at someday. Do it, be it! Don't seize the day! Just watch it unfold...

(Video is an excerpt from Dziga Vertov's "The Man With The Movie Camera. Music By The Cinematic Orchestra)

Transformations

It's been so long since I started this journey, I can no longer remember where I'm heading. Just miles and miles of endless roads, bar restaurants, houses, people...Cities change just like I do. Some of them invite me to let go, leave a beard or something, start smoking again. And then I move on to places where I have to wear a tie all day, eat sandwitches with stupid names, attend meetings and kiss drunk girls at awful rooftop parties. "Hey, I think I've seen that face before. Here. Maybe somewhere else". The sunrise find me with a glass of wine in my hand, in a house I don't recognise, in a city I don't remember with some people I can't recall their names. There's a mirror on my bathroom I haven't looked at for days. And I wear a sticker badge on my shoulder with my name on it. "Is this the city I don't have to shave?".
Buildings start to change shape, people start to look the same, my face gets rougher and the old lady at the first floor who used to look at me with a funny frown when I first came stopped noticing when I'm moving up the stairs...I think...I'm becoming one with the surroundings...

(Video: Some Kind of Kink by Red Snapper)

No City Is Built Twice

...The City/no city is built twice/the long wall down at Athens, the olive trees/five hundred years of tillage/burning. "not these men"/i.e., mourn/not these//and yet no city is ever built again/

poem "Montezuma" by Diane De Prima

(photo by StuckInCustoms)

Amphetamine

Rock 'n' roll isn't what it was supposed to be. Drowned into narcissism, its everending nothingness, posers instead of artists etc...Then there's Steve. Far from iconic. Not his "generation voice". A man in between. Of What? I went to see his London show some years ago. Alone. @ The Borderline. He reminded of an energy I thought was gone. A "youth I'd thrown away". A lyricism I'd traded for sarcasm through my academic "daze". A genuine love for the beat I was so sure I'd mastered and lost in in between. Suddenly I switched a Wilco lyric in mind: "If I ever was myself ... I really was that night...". Here's to the Miracle 4 then!

(Video : Amphetamine by Steve Wynn & The Miracle 3)

The Carnival Is Over

Outside
The storm clouds gathering,
Moved silently along the dusty boulevard.
Where flowers turning crane their fragile necks
So they can in turn
Reach up and kiss the sky.

(Music & Lyrics By Dead Can Dance, Video Directed By Mark Magidson)

"Crash Essay" # 2

"American Esperanto"

by Matt Worley

By which people around the world, from the Dutch to the Russians to the Japanese, speak English in an American accent; by which MTV defines indigenous culture; by which the war is fought against terrorism (when 7-11 became 9/11); by which we all wear Nike baseball caps; by which we all reveal our emotions on live TV; by which freedom is synonymous with economics; by which the west is best; by which the $ predominates; by which all determination is defined by an 'open door'; by which murder becomes a national characteristic; by which Christianity becomes a fundamentalism; by which a world series never leaves a country's shores; by which gluttony is a hobby; by which ignorance is bliss; by which the only good commie is a dead commie; by which the future is dead; by which creativity is shackled by the free market; by which god, guts and guns; by which freedom comes in a choice of fizzy drinks; by which business owns the presidency; by which the ghetto remains; by which 'soccer' is ignored and the worst world cup was '94; by which rock'n'roll emerged from the underbelly; by which civilization is surrendered.

(painting by Jasper Johns)

"Crash Essay" # 1

"What You Get Is No Tomorrow"

by Matt Worley

Perhaps there is more to admire in failure and the failed. Perhaps, in the uncompleted or the rejected lie the seedings of genuine originality. Maybe the fragmented life contains moments that remain untainted by the rounded, sanitised ordinariness of completion. If so, here's to glorious failure, to the attempted but discarded, to the misunderstood, the rejected and the dispossessed. Here's to those who aspire to nothing and so expect nothing, who forge their own criteria and reject the expected. Here's to the on-going struggle, and a pox on all those who feel they've "achieved"...

(Photo by Lantos Istvan)

Sans Soleil (1983) part 1

Narrated by Alexandra Stewart.

Written & Directed by Chris Marker

"Sans Soleil"

This is a still photo from Chris Marker's "Sans Soleil". A town in Iceland covered in ashes from the erupted volcano. The town was built on its "feet". This story is not even the film's central piece but the opening and closing sequence. "Sans Soleil" is a globe trotting film essay unlike anything you've ever seen by a director who is a true film visionary and an unsung hero of the moving image. The film is uploaded split in 10 parts on YouTube by a user. Don't watch it at work though. It might seem a little pretentious to some people but try to follow it. For all those who are really intrigued by cinematic experience and haven't heard of it yet ...watch carefully and let yourself go. You're about to witness something really different even for today's high standards in visual culture...

Flite

By The Cinematic Orchestra

Ashes of Modern Life

She talked and talked...about us being the "ashes of modern life". "Over-educated and under-employed", killing time between "their" void and ours. And then she disappeared again. For years. I heard she's moved to a Mediterranean island with a much older hippie, making drums out of sheep skin for living. Tanned and so let go you can hardly recognise her. For all my indifference and partial envy, at least she meant what she was saying! (Hey! I'm a cityboy and a total mess and menace when left alone on the countryside)

(Photo by aCherryBlossomGirl)

September Songs - Speak Low

"Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we're swept apart, too soon
The curtain descends, everything ends too soon, too soon
Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon"

(music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Ogden Nash)

Sliding Through The City

Early Saturday morning, outside Liverpool St station in London. The station looks deserted. There's gonna be hell coming to these parts in a couple of hours. Transit places. Very dangerous to people who are unsure where they're coming from and not having a clue where they're going. A galaxy of hypothetical routes. Constant change. If you haven't slept at all strange ideas go back and forth in your mind. "What would happen if...". When both the place you left and the place you're about to go are not where you want to be rise the doubt in your tired self.

Now you're really in a transit.
"Expected early in the morning". Train to Stansted Airport. Sleepyheads. Plane ticket. Same Route. It's just one big decision. The galaxy of opportunities go down to just one, the usual. No alarms and no surprises. So tired. "What would happen if..."

(photo by Thomas Hawk)

The Ice Storm

"When you think about it, it's not easy to keep from just wandering out of life. It's like someone's always leaving the door open to the next world, and if you aren't paying attention you could just walk through it, and then you've died. That's why in your dreams it's like you're standing in that doorway... and the dying people and the newborn people pass by you... and brush up against you as they come in and out of the world during the night. You get spun around, and in the morning... it takes a while to find your way back into the world".

From The Film "The Ice Storm" (1997), script by James Schamus based on the novel by Rick Moody. Directed by Ang Lee

(photo by Dietrich Bojko)

Italo Calvino - The Invisible Cities

Kublai asked Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us."
"For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of light in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said."

(photo by Manfred Leiter)

Giant Sand - Yer Ropes

The Road To God Knows Where...

Cowboy Bebop Jazz

The Invisible City: Ghosts Of Things To Come

For Amalia

A woman Vs. medical indifference...AMALIA'S BLOG (for greek speaking readers)

(Photo by Pyke, "Port of Sayada, NW Greece")

Arcade Fire - No Cars Go

Between the click of the light and the start of the dream

A lonely beach in Kefalonia

There's this wonderful beach on the south of Lixouri. Not many people go there, it's hard to reach on foot, no beach bars, pounding dance music or sun umbrellas. I hope people don't fuck this up as well...

(Photo by Pyke, "Kefalonia - SW part")