Dreams Burnt Down # 2

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

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

Hidden Cities

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

(from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)

Planet Manga

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

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

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

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

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

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

United Future Organization feat. Mark Murphy

Journey Inwards

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

music by LTJ Bukem

Alone in Kyoto

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

Eyes mark the shape of the city

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

Point of view point

music by Cornelius

Brazil

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

Is This The Modern World?

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

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

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

"...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

"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

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

Telephone and Rubber Band

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

TimeLord

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

"It's a beautiful day..."

(video: Spacewalk by Lemon Jelly)

Lighthouse Keepers

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

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!!!"

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

9th & Hennepin

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

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;

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