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