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)