TrashCan Lullabies

Blue City

2011-03-13T12:07:00.001-07:00

Control

2010-12-28T03:14:00.000-08:00

"On the most rudimentary level there is simply terror of feeling like an immigrant in a place where your children are natives--where you're always going to be behind the 8-ball because they can develop the technology faster than you can learn it. It's what I call the learning curve of Sisyphus. And the only people who are going to be comfortable with that are people who don't mind confusion and ambiguity. I look at confusing circumstances as an opportunity--but not everybody feels that way. That's not the standard neurotic response. We've got a culture that's based on the ability of people to control everything. Once you start to embrace confusion as a way of life, concomitant with that is the assumption that you really don't control anything. At best it's a matter of surfing the whitewater."

Words by John Barlow - photo by Shapeshift

Less Than Zero

2010-12-27T19:24:00.000-08:00

There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called "Los Angeles" and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.

Words by Bret Easton Ellis - photo by Cuba Gallery

Flow of Life

2010-12-27T18:35:00.001-08:00

(7/365) Flow of Life
Originally uploaded by Photography is an art...

"The facts, even when beaded on a chain, still did not have real order.
Events did not flow.
The facts were separate and haphazard and random even as they happened,
episodic, broken, no smooth transitions,
no sense of events unfolding from prior events"

Words by Tim O' Brien - photo by Jonathan Gonzalez

ArtAttacked

2010-05-19T02:10:00.000-07:00

I don’t quite know to whom I am addressing this letter, but I do know why I’m writing it and I believe that under the circumstances it is both critical and inevitable because two Iranian filmmakers, both of whom are vital to the Iranian wave of independent cinema, have been incarcerated.

Jafar Panahi and Mahmoud Rasoulof are two filmmakers of the Iranian independent cinema, a cinema that for the past quarter of a century has served as an essential cultural element in expanding the name of this country across the globe. They belong to an expanded world culture, and are a part of international cinematic culture. I wish for their immediate release from prison knowing that the impossible is possible. My heartfelt wish is that artists no longer be imprisoned in this country because of their art and that the independent and young Iranian cinema no longer faces obstacles, lack of support, attention and prejudice.

By Abbas Kiarostami

Soccerisation of society

2010-05-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

Art by Sarah Lucas

"Two"

2010-05-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

Staged and directed by Dimitris Papaioannou, music by Konstantinos Bhta

Prometheus Imprudent

2010-05-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

artwork by Kostas Tsoklis

Laurie Anderson - World Without End

2010-05-05T17:27:00.000-07:00

" I remember where I came from There were burning buildings and a fiery red sea I remember all my lovers I remember how they held me. World without end remember me. East. The edge of the world. West. Those who came before me. When my father died we put him in the ground. When my father died it was like a whole library Had burned down. World without end remember me ..."

words and music by Laurie Anderson

Sputnik Sweetheart

2010-01-16T02:44:00.000-08:00

The first time Sumire met Miu, she talked to her about Jack Kerouac's novels. Sumire was absolutely nuts about Kerouac. She always had her literary Idol of the Month, and at that point it happened to be the out-of-fashion Kerouac. She carried a dog-eared copy of On the Road or Lonesome Traveler stuck in her coat pocket, thumbing through it every chance she got. Whenever she ran across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory like they were Holy Writ. Her favorite lines were from the fire lookout section of Lonesome Traveler. Kerouac spent three lonely months in a cabin on top of a high mountain, working as a fire lookout. Sumire especially liked this part:

"No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength."

"Don't you just love it?" she said. "Every day you stand on top of a mountain, make a 360-degree sweep, checking to see if there're any fires. And that's it. You're done for the day. The rest of the time you can read, write, whatever you want. At night scruffy bears hang around your cabin. That's the life! Compared with that, studying literature in college is like chomping down on the bitter end of a cucumber."

"OK," I said, "but someday you'll have to come down off the mountain." As usual, my practical, humdrum opinions didn't faze her.

Sumire wanted to be like a character in a Kerouac novel - wild, cool, dissolute. She'd stand around, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets, her hair an uncombed mess, staring vacantly at the sky through her black plastic-frame Dizzy Gillespie glasses, which she wore despite her 20-20 vision. She was invariably decked out in an oversize herringbone coat from a secondhand store and a pair of rough work boots. If she'd been able to grow a beard, I'm sure she would have.

Words by Haruki Murakami, photo by Jasek Gasiorowski

Baraka

2009-05-12T16:06:00.001-07:00

Tokyo Moods

2009-05-12T16:01:00.001-07:00

Northern Lights

2009-04-11T04:14:00.000-07:00

JJ emails from the top of the earth.

"I'm in Canada mate, off to see and shoot the Northern Lights. I only wish things could be so beautiful, mysterious and simple. A trick of the light, shifting into the midnight sky. Yeah, it only takes a natural phenomenon to wake up my poetic self! I'm scared to fly back to a bombarded London, the silliness, the globalised economic turkey thrown upon all of us. I have to stay there for a couple of weeks then head up to Northern Scotland to catch the Aurora once again...and even if I do know that could not survive in the wilderness for more than a week, it feels nice daydreaming. Just me and my closest friends looking up trying to capture the uniqueness yet totally fluid and continuously passing effect of the Northern Lights.
I met a girl called Aurora just the other day...Here they still name their children after a trick of the light... "

(Photo From AurevoirGoodbyeSoLong blog)

Something Wicked This Way Comes

2009-03-28T07:14:00.001-07:00

Immortel

2009-03-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

Remember the sign we saw, my soul. That beautiful, soft summer morning... round a turning in the path. A disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones. Its legs in the air like a woman in need... burning its wedding poisons... like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs. I could hear it clearly with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart. One of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead.

(words & artwork by Enki Bilal)

The Speed is The Point

2009-02-26T08:20:00.000-08:00

"The speed is the point. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before the eye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless replenishment, the way the data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes shape at the other. This is the point, the thrust, the future. We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatory here, where crowds might gather in astonishment."

(Words by Don DeLillo, photo by Iain Holden)

Swimming Against Time

2009-02-20T01:41:00.000-08:00

I would like to swim against the stream of time:

I would like to erase the consequences of certain events

and restore an initial condition.

But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts

and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences;

so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out,

the further I move away from it;

though all my actions are bent on erasing the consequences of previous actions

and though I manage to achieve appreciable results in this erasure,

enough to open my heart to hopes of immediate relief,

I must,

however,

bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events

provokes a rain of new events,

which complicate the situation worse than before

and which I will then,

in their turn,

have to try to erase.

Therefore

I must calculate carefully every move

so as to achieve

the maximum of erasure

with the minimum of recomplication.

(Words byItalo Calvino, photo by Mad Alice)

'Do you trust me ...first?'

2009-02-13T10:46:00.001-08:00

The incredible shrinking people

2009-01-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

Those weary eyes. Torn, buffled, blurry, unrecognisable. We seeked modernity, we found construction deals. Now we're forced to find a new town or stay and get oblivious in the city. "You know all this nonsense about going to live in the village, deny your urban past. C'mon man it's crappy out there too. We were always city people, they don't listen to Mingus in the wilderness...you'd go nuts if you did!" says Billy who once you used to live in the suburbs, now a city centre slave stuck in a 2room apartment. "I can fit in less space you know...and i'm happy to wake up every day from car 'horns', way better than those freakin' roosters".
"I know we can all fit in less space, mate, question is how more you can shrink yourself to fit in. How small can you become by your own will!"

(photo by Murat Sekerci)

Dreams Burnt Down # 2

2008-12-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

Makes you feel much older
Sublime the blind parade
It wrecks me how they justify their acts of war
They assemble, they pray
Take good care of what the priests say
'After death it's so much fun'
Little sheep don't let your feet stray
Happiness is easy
Joy be written on the earth
And the sky above
Jesus star that shines so bright
Gather us in love
Guilt upon their shoulders
How well the cause evades
Infecting your religions, claiming pacts
It's easy to shoulder the blame
Happiness is easy
Try to teach my children
To recognise excuse before it acts
From love & conviction to pray
Happiness is easy

(words by Talk Talk, photo by Suhaib Saleb/Reuters)

Dreams Burnt Down

2008-12-16T18:26:00.000-08:00

So we finally made it! Thousands years of evolution, art,science, wars and lessons well learned, urban guerrillas, religion fallout, egos tripping at the gates of hell and we find ourselves before the sight of 15 year old gunned down by a police hatch man! It's not his fault...it's ours! "The kid died of our own collective neglect" says Arlo amongst coughs and police sirens, "now everybody wants a part of him for his own cause. A second burial if you ask me..."

(Artwork by Enki Bilal)

All Things to All Men

2008-12-07T04:37:00.001-08:00

Hidden Cities

2008-12-03T16:21:00.000-08:00

In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the squeares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its way toward the outside.

Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the center, the old narrow girlde of the walls from which the withered spires rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of the first Olinda and of all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are always blossoming--though it is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.

(Words by Italo Calvino, photo by Mitchell Miller)

Welcome To Tokyo

2008-11-10T06:29:00.000-08:00

(from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)

Planet Manga

2008-11-06T05:48:00.000-08:00

He wrote: Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains, tied together with electric wire she shows her veins. They say that television makes her people illiterate; as for me, I've never seen so many people reading in the streets. Perhaps they read only in the street, or perhaps they just pretend to read—these yellow men. I make my appointments at Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku. The graphic genius that allowed the Japanese to invent CinemaScope ten centuries before the movies compensates a little for the sad fate of the comic strip heroines, victims of heartless story writers and of castrating censorship. Sometimes they escape, and you find them again on the walls. The entire city is a comic strip; it's Planet Manga. How can one fail to recognize the statuary that goes from plasticized baroque to Stalin central? And the giant faces with eyes that weigh down on the comic book readers, pictures bigger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.
At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.

Excerpt from Sans Soleil by Chris Marker, photo by Matthieu Kasimiri

Full script can be found here

Bye Bye Pride

2008-11-05T06:36:00.000-08:00

A white moon appears

Like a hole in the sky,

The mangroves go quiet

In la brisa de la palma

A teenage rasputin

Takes the sting from a gin,

When a woman learns to walk

Shes not dependent anymore

a line front her letter, may 24...

And out on the bay

The current is strong

A boat can go lost.

(Words by The Go-Betweens, photo by Stefano Orazzini)

After Dark - Deny's Cafe

2008-10-30T09:59:00.000-07:00

The music playing at low volume is “Go Away Little Girl” by Percy Faith and His Orchestra. No one is listening, of course. Many different kinds of people are taking meals and drinking coffee in this late-night Denny’s, but she is the only female there alone. She raises her face from her book now and then to glance at her watch, but she seems dissatisfied with the slow passage of time. Not that she appears to be waiting for anyone: she doesn’t look around the restaurant or train her eyes on the front door. She just keeps reading her book, lighting an occasional cigarette, mechanically tipping back her coffee cup, and hoping for the time to pass a little faster. Needless to say, dawn will not be here for hours.

She breaks off her reading and looks outside. From this second-story window she can look down on the busy street. Even at a time like this, the street is bright enough and filled with people coming and going—people with places to go and people with no place to go; people with a purpose and people with no purpose; people trying to hold time back and people trying to urge it forward. After a long, steady look at this jumbled street scene, she holds her breath for a moment and turns her eyes once again toward her book. She reaches for her coffee cup. Puffed no more than two or three times, her cigarette turns into a perfectly formed column of ash in the ashtray.

(Words by Haruki Murakami, photo by Kalua k Krynska)

Halloween Parade

2008-10-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

Theres a down town fairy singing out proud mary As she cruises christopher street And some southern queen is acting loud and mean Where the docks and the badlands meet This halloween is something to be sure Especially to be here without you Theres a greta garbo and an alfred hitchcock And some black jamaican stud Theres five cinderellas and some leather drags I almost fell into my mug Theres a crawford, davis and a tacky cary grant And some homeboys lookin for trouble down here from the bronx But there aint no hairy and no virgin mary You wont hear those voices again And johnny rio and rotten rita You'll never see those faces again This halloween is something to be sure Especially to be here without you Theres the born again losers and the lavender boozers And some crack team from washington heights The boys from avenue b and the girls from avenue d A tinkerbell in tights This celebration somehow get me down Especially when I see youre not around Theres no peter pedantic saying things romantic In latin, greek or spic Theres no three bananas or brandy alexander Dishing all their tricks Its a different feeling that I have today Especially when I know youve gone away Theres a girl from soho with a teeshirt saying I blow She's with the jive five 2 plus 3 And the girls for pay dates are giving cut rates Or else doing it for free The past keeps knock, knock, knocking on my doorAnd I dont want to hear it anymore No consolations please for feelin funkyI got to get my head above my knees

But it makes me mad and mad makes me sad And then I start to freeze In the back of my mind I was afraid it might be true In the back of my mind I was afraid that they meant you

The halloween parade At the halloween parade

See you next year, at the halloween parade

(Words by Lou Reed, photo by bugged out cars @flickr)

Thin Cities

2008-07-17T00:20:00.000-07:00

Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, shouwers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo's white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think that the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructable, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.
Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Armilla cannot be called deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the jets of the taps, the spurts, the splases, the sponges' suds.
I have come to this explaination: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla have remained in th posession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing.

(Words by Italo Calvino, photo by Ruip)

Impressions

2008-07-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know it's hard to live in the city...It's about survival, y'know? U get hopeless, suicidal, cannibalistic, melancholic, panicky and all sorts of weird stuff. There's a trend going on the last couple of years with strangers falling in love with strangers. People meeting others briefly on the subway, in a traffic jam, in a crowded bar well past midnight. Since they're too scared of rejection they comunicate via the personals section on a popular free press newspaper (and self crowned Pope of the urban lifestyle). They sign these hopeless love declarations as 'The blue-haired girl', the 'moronic tall guy with glasses' the 'ring ding ding' , all sorts of names and - mainly - facial features. I can't figure if that's plain stupid, romantic, sad, beautiful or just pathetic but i enjoy the idea of a love that flickers for a second before it's swallowed forever in the faceless streets of this city.
It's just an interval before u get your daily fix of your hopeless, suicidal, cannibalistic, melancholic and panicky inner self, a scream of the infinite possibilities that never materialise ... and then when u least expect it, as you walk home after a hard day's work u listen Impressions, the Fused Up cover of the Coltrane classic, coming out of a window and it makes your day...and you suddenly love the city, the smells, the sounds, the people...Didn't I mention it earlier...well...u get psychopathic in the city as well...

Artwork by Enki Bilal

Stolen moments

2008-07-03T15:44:00.001-07:00

United Future Organization feat. Mark Murphy

Journey Inwards

2008-06-30T06:28:00.001-07:00

Excerpt from "Made In Hong Kong" (1997), directed by Fruit Chan

music by LTJ Bukem

Alone in Kyoto

2008-06-26T03:21:00.001-07:00

Excerpt from "Lost in Translation"
directed by Sofia Coppola, music by AIR

Eyes mark the shape of the city

2008-06-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.

Our line of sight chooses an area of concentrated brightness and, focusing there, silently descends to it—a sea of neon colors. They call this place an “amusement district.” The giant digital screens fastened to the sides of buildings fall silent as midnight approaches, but loudspeakers on storefronts keep pumping out exaggerated hip-hop bass lines. A large game center crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar; teenage girls with brilliant bleached hair, healthy legs thrusting out from micromini skirts; dark-suited men racing across diagonal crosswalks for the last trains to the suburbs. Even at this hour, the karaoke club pitchmen keep shouting for customers. A flashy black station wagon drifts down the street as if taking stock of the district through its black-tinted windows. The car looks like a deep-sea creature with specialized skin and organs. Two young policemen patrol the street with tense expressions, but no one seems to notice them. The district plays by its own rules at a time like this. The season is late autumn. No wind is blowing, but the air carries a chill. The date is just about to change.

(Words by Haruki Murakami, photo by Altus@Flickr)

Subbacultcha

2008-06-20T04:31:00.000-07:00

Point of view point

2008-06-17T06:42:00.001-07:00

music by Cornelius

Brazil

2008-06-17T01:27:00.001-07:00

Opening sequence of the film "Brazil" (1985) by Terry Gilliam

Is This The Modern World?

2008-06-07T16:34:00.000-07:00

Over the past two years we've seen Virgin sell flights to China on the back of the Great Proletarian Revolution; Che bars and Revolution bars packaging Guevara and Lenin as a theme pub for facile media types; Kate Moss sport a Che T-shirt; Miss Selfridge adorn its shop floor with Soviet-style worker models; Red or Dead sell shoes under the gaze of Vladimir Ulyanov and Mao; style mags celebrate Paris '68 without referring to its politics; empty gestures from the People's Wardrobe; Harper's Bazaar send Naomi on a photo shoot to Cuba; Professor Head revel under the shadow of Baader's gun. A desperate desire for resonant - but sellable - symbols has permeated all areas of our 'lifestyle culture'. Consequently, our high streets and designer salons are awash with 'bourgeois anarchists' who claim they're not interested in politics while surrounding themselves with images of a generation who actually gave a shit.1 1. As soon as revolt is defined, it has provoked the measures for its own containment.. A. Trocchi

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Pol Pot Noodle

2008-06-06T17:06:00.001-07:00

In the Nineties, the Bolshevik revolution provides the backdrop to a vodka commercial rather than the blueprint for our seizure of the means of production: Che advertises the internet. In everyday life, the actual term 'revolution' is now more likely to denote a change in banking practice than a transfer of power. As such, the most radical concepts in opposition to the capitalist spectacle are emptied of meaning and put back into circulation in the service of alienation - they become advertising slogan

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Prada Meinhoff: Carnaby Street Preachers

2008-06-06T05:34:00.000-07:00

A predilection for radical chic has been omnipresent throughout late twentieth century culture - Warhol's Mao Tse-Tung, Joe Strummer and the Red Brigade, the Stone Roses' lemons, Public Enemy and the S1W, Black Grapes' Carlos etc. etc. etc. Concurrently, the astute revolutionary has always retained a sense of 'pop' - be it Lenin's celebration of cinema or the Red Army Faction's penchant for crushed velvet flares and white Mercedes. More recently however, due respect has been eclipsed by shallow parody as the once inspirational become an empty aesthetic for ad lads and art school fashion designers - people who, if their subject matter had their rightful way, would be swinging from the nearest lamp-post. The revolutionary has been repackaged as fashion accessory, and where Victorian dinner party hosts once invited Marx or Engels 'round for nibbles, today's chattering classes book a holiday to Cuba and purchase situationist style clothing from London's more fashionable boutiques

(Artwork by Scott King, words by Matt Worley)

Disappear Here

2008-06-03T17:32:00.000-07:00

"...the newspapers kept stroking my fear. new surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. evidence suggested that we were not doing well. researchers gloomily agreed. environmental psychologists were interviewed. damage had "unwittingly" been done. there were "feared relapses." there were "misconceptions" about potential. situations had "deteriorated." cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. the populace was confounded, yet didn't care. unpublished studies hinted that were all paying a price. scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be very worried. no one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. and no one argued back. no one challenged anything. anxiety was soaking up most people's days. everyone had become preoccupied with horror. madness was fluttering everywhere. there was fifty years of research supporting this data. there were diagrams illustrating all of these problems--circles and hexagons and squares, different sections colored in lime or lilac or gray. most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. you couldn't help being both afraid and fascinated. reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn't seem very important in the long run. we were doomed. we deserved it. i was so tired..."

(Words by Brett Easton Ellis, photo by Aleks Veledzimovich)

Touch of Evil

2008-06-01T02:51:00.001-07:00

"Shadows from the buildings creep along the parking cars
While the women spank their babies and the old men just drink all day in bars
And the people that never see it always end up as the ones who've seen it all
And the liquor store is crowded, while an empty phone booth rings another call
And the hills that used to all seem green now look an ugly brown
And no one ever found any movie stars on the stormy side of town
Where it keeps rainin all the time..."

Words By Stan Ridgway, clip "Touch of Evil" by Orson Welles

Blueberry Nights

2008-05-22T13:43:00.001-07:00

(Scene from 'My Blueberry Nights', directed by Wong Kar Wai )

Telephone and Rubber Band

2008-05-13T02:57:00.001-07:00

(Sounds by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, video curated by jivevids@youtube)

TimeLord

2008-05-08T02:20:00.000-07:00

And the rain makes a sound like the asteroids

There are worlds made of ice in the clouds

I'm receiving transmissions they broadcast long ago

They remind me of things I have seen
All the people and cities and crowds

And the rain is so strange in the Milky Whey

I see cloudscapes of purple and green
Candleabras are shooting off firework displays
And I'm writing the things I have seen
People shopping and sparks from a train

(words by Momus, photo by George Vasilakopoulos)

Spacewalk

2008-05-04T18:57:00.001-07:00

"It's a beautiful day..."

(video: Spacewalk by Lemon Jelly)

Lighthouse Keepers

2008-05-04T03:10:00.000-07:00

There's a lighthouse on the upper side of this blog. It was chosen on purpose. This blog as much as anyone's blog - opinion - way of lifestyle is a lighthouse. Some are remote, weathered, sea battered, others are well preserved but they're all beautiful in the eye of the beholder. The content of these 'lullabies' is a blurred mix of cultures and represent a context within a context. Pretentious as they may be, they sprung out of - what I thought it was - a dying lifestyle, and set to be a beacon of life as seen from a rooftop in the heart of the city. Reading other people's blogs and freepress newspapers I discovered there is an ever growing amount of 'Lighthouse Keepers'; rooftop observers of a wrestless city. People looking down, feeling a vibe and in love with the chaotic urban landscape down below. From the kids practicing parcourt in shopping malls, to bohemian wannabe writers, failed actors and lonely employees there's a world goin' on up above...

(Photo By Aleks Veledzimovich)

Silver & The Hidden Cash

2008-04-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

A band sprung out of a dirty highway returns to the scene of the crime tonite when the clock strikes midnight in Ioannina, a town just southeast of Texas and northwest of Koutselio. Do yourself a favour and catch a gig yet to be legendary just like those which preceded it.

" Well, I had the carburetor, baby, cleaned and checked with her line blown out she's hummin' like a turbojet. Propped her up in the backyard on concrete blocks for a new clutch plate and a new set of shocks. Took her down to the carwash, check the plugs and points. Well, I'm goin' out tonight. I'm gonna rock that joint..." (Boss)

OFFICIAL SHC page - SHC MySpacePage

"I CAN'T STAND THE QUIET!!!"

2008-04-08T12:12:00.001-07:00

Sequence from the film 'Simple Men' (1992) by Hal Hartley

9th & Hennepin

2008-04-05T19:23:00.000-07:00

Well, it's 9th and Hennepin
All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes
And the moon's teeth marks are on the sky
Like a tarp thrown all over this
And the broken umbrellas are like dead birds
And the steam comes out of the grill
Like the whole goddam town is ready to blow
And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos
And everyone is behaving like dogs

And the horses are coming down Violin Road
And Dutch is dead on his feet
And all the rooms they smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there
And I'm lost in the window
And I hide in the stairway
And I hang in the curtain
And I sleep in your hat

And no one brings anything small into a bar around here
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
One for every year he's away she said
Such a crumbling beauty
Ah, there's nothing wrong with her a hundred dollars won't fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
Till you're full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who'll listen

And I've seen it all
I've seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train

(Video by JacobMendel, words and music by Tom Waits)

Ascension Day

2008-04-03T05:04:00.001-07:00

He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads

(Words by Chris Marker. Clip: music By Talk Talk , shot and edited by Pyke)

Υπάρχουμε...Συνυπάρχουμε;

2008-04-03T02:41:00.000-07:00

Του ΓΚΑΤΖΜΕΝΤ ΚΑΠΛΑΝΙ

«Το Λονδίνο είναι φιλόξενη πόλη», μου λέει ο Κούρδος ιδιοκτήτης του «Rose Supermarket». Βλέπω την ταμπέλα στην είσοδο του μαγαζιού του: «Αγγλικό- τουρκικό- ελληνικό- αφρικανικό- καραϊβικό μαγαζί τροφίμων». Ο ιδιοκτήτης χαμογελά με την επισήμανσή μου. «Σκέφτομαι να προσθέσω και πολωνικό φαγητό», λέει. «Τώρα μένουν αρκετοί Πολωνοί στη γειτονιά μας». Εκτός από τον δήμο, και πριν από αυτόν, την πολυπολιτισμικότητα εδώ τη ρυθμίζει η αγορά, που τρέφει και τρέφεται από τους μετανάστες. Αναρωτιέμαι εάν όλοι αυτοί οι πολιτισμοί συνυπάρχουν μεταξύ τους ή υπάρχουν απλώς ο καθένας για λογαριασμό του.

Photo by Anna Gostkowska

A Whisper Woke Me Up

2007-12-21T06:20:00.000-08:00

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

2007-10-07T11:12:00.001-07:00

open up your eyes and see...

(music by Kid 606, video created by Pleix)

Free Burma

2007-10-04T08:51:00.000-07:00

F R E E B U R M A

Cities & The Sky

2007-10-02T03:20:00.000-07:00

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, photo by Kate)

Shanghai # 2

2007-09-30T10:51:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-28T22:50:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-12T11:40:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-24T14:17:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

'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

2007-08-23T18:49:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-08-19T23:35:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-16T16:23:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-14T15:21:00.001-07:00

"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

2007-08-10T19:32:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-09T00:36:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-04T06:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-04T06:07:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-02T16:55:00.000-07:00

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"

2007-07-30T19:50:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-30T19:03:00.001-07:00

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

2007-07-25T15:10:00.001-07:00

"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

2007-07-23T03:47:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-05T15:04:00.001-07:00

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

2007-07-05T14:31:00.001-07:00

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

2007-07-04T12:30:00.001-07:00

"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

2007-07-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

"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"

2007-07-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-06-27T15:03:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-06-26T11:52:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-26T02:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-24T22:37:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-06-19T14:18:00.000-07:00

"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 -

2007-06-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-18T11:07:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-18T02:40:00.001-07:00

a Judge Dread comic book, people trying their last hand...in ghost towns...ex supermodern shopping malls reduced to miserable and abandonded gamble temples..."whitewhashed windows and vacant stores"...everything falls apart...dreamsleftfordead...unfinished sentences and continuous mumbling...a friend I haven't seen for so long...fried...unrecognisable...blank eyed...with fingers orange yellow...and a trashcan lullaby tearing apart his mind...

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

The Fight Club

2007-06-18T01:26:00.001-07:00

"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

2007-06-17T06:38:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-15T11:25:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-15T01:53:00.000-07:00

...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

2007-06-14T17:23:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-14T10:03:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-12T02:00:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-06-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

"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

2007-06-06T01:56:00.001-07:00

Narrated by Alexandra Stewart.

Written & Directed by Chris Marker

"Sans Soleil"

2007-06-06T01:36:00.000-07:00

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...