The passage of time.

Roll on 2013. Always room for another lizard to eat itself.

Midwinter Totem

The Little Island

Shinkolobwe

Love everything

This, for example:

Kunstformen Der Natur

Eliane Radigue

A Portrait of Eliane Radigue (2009) from Maxime Guitton on Vimeo.

Eliane Radigue has been the soundtrack to my recent mental stewing, and any calm I've maintained throughout is calm she's drawn out of me and reflected back. Go to 01:10 to have your heart won by this genius (if you haven't the time to watch the whole fascinating thing).

In the morning

More on Father Henry

A few more words about Father Henry.


 "'Cold' was to him merely a word;  and if he stopped up the door, or livened up the lamp, it was for my sake he did it. He had nothing to do with 'those things' and this struggle was not his struggle: he was somewhere else, living another life, fighting with other weapons.
He was right and I was wrong in those moments when I rebelled against his existence and insisted rashly that he 'could not live like this.' I was stupid not to see, then, that he truly had no need of anything. He lived, he sustained himself, by prayer.Had he been dependent only upon human strength he would have lived in despair, been driven mad. But he called upon other forces, and they preserved him. Incredible as it will seem to the incredulous, when the blizzard was too intense to be borne, he prayed, and the wind dropped. When, one day, he was about to die of hunger- he and the single Eskimo who accompanied him- he prayed; and that night there were two seal in their net. It was childish of me to attempt to win him back to reality: he could not live with reality.
I the 'scientist', was non-existent beside this peasant mystic. He towered over me. My resources were as nothing compared to his, which were inexhaustible, his mystical vestment was shelter enough against hunger, against cold, against every assault of the physical world from which he lived apart. Once again I had been taught that the spirit was immune and irresistible, and matter corruptible and weak. There is something more than cannon in war, and something more than grub and shelter in the existence of this conqueror of the Arctic.
If, seeing what I have seen, a man still refused to believe this, he would do better to stay at home, for he had proved himself no traveller."

-Gontran De Poncins in Kabloona.

Dos Gatos: A Challenge

I challenge anyone to listen to this through headphones without moving any part of your anatomy in time with it.

(...you may find it easy at first, but wait until 1:56)

Videos

The Tibetan Book of The Dead as explored by the national film board of Canada, NHK and the voice of Leonard Cohen.

"When you are born, you cry, but the whole world is overjoyed. When you die, the world cries, but you may find...the great liberation."

An IPA ditty

dʒɛŋhəs kɑn, dʒɛŋhəs kɑn, wɪl ju mɛri mi?
ajv hərd əbawt jɔr mɑŋgəl hɔrdz, so wajld ænd blədθərsti.
ajv hərd ju sajərd ə θawzənd sənz, pərhæps wil mek wən mɔr?
o pliz, pliz mɛri mi dʒɛŋhəs kɑn, ju hɛlmətəd mæn- hɔr.

Also.

From an old file I found.

Video Archives: WWOOF's greatest ever spokesperson

Salif Keita

One of the week's best lastfm discoveries:

Budleigh

Seagulls to the left of me

 

and seagulls to the right.

Rocksteady

Further Kabloona-isms

"I pointed, we moved towards it, and there was no doubt about it: that black dot was a man. In this land of one million square miles inhabited by six thousand men, the sight of a human being is overwhelming; it creates an emotion that is like a seizure, difficult to describe."

"I am going to say to you that a human being can live without complaint in an ice-house built for seals at a temperature of fifty-five degrees below zero, and you are going to doubt my word. Yet what I say is true, for this was how Father Henry lived; and when I say 'ice-house for seals' I am not using metaphorical language. Father Henry lived in a hole dug out by the Eskimos in the side of a hill as a place in which to store seal meat in Summer."

A Portion Of Jagger Craziness

Watched Performance recently, still trying to piece together what I make of it. Think it'll take a few more viewings but for now this is one section of it that keeps resurfacing in my brain.

The thing turned towards you.

"Their word for polar bear is tara-i-tua-luk,'he who is without shadow' (though the polar bear is also

called 'the eternal vagabond'.

There is a sort of poetry of the concrete in their speech that is very moving. Thus, mi-kse, the

word for 'reality/ is literally translatable as 'the thing turned towards you.'"




- Gontran De Poncins on Inuit languages in 'Kabloona'.

Stuck in my head all week.

A Role Model

According to the caption beneath this photo from the book Home Work: Handbuilt Shelters, this young man is no more than fourteen years old. To my eye it would appear he's in the advanced stages of keeping it real, and for this reason Mickey is my role model of the week.

Found at an honesty-box stall selling a local variety of citrus called the Ponkan.

Janokuchi

From the disposable camera I used in Yakushima, southern Japan.

Tale Of Tales

I decided to revisit this animation the other day, and did not regret it.

"Tale of Tales, like Tarkovsky's Mirror, attempts to structure itself like a human memory. Memories are not recalled in neat chronological order; instead, they are recalled by the association of one thing with another, which means that any attempt to put memory on film cannot be told like a conventional narrative. The film is thus made up of a series of related sequences whose scenes are interspersed between each other. One of the primary themes involves war, with particular emphasis on the enormous losses the Soviet Union suffered on the Eastern Front during World War II. Several recurring characters and their interactions make up a large part of the film, such as the poet, the little girl and the bull, the little boy and the crows, the dancers and the soldiers, and especially the little grey wolf (Russian: се́ренький волчо́к, syeryenkiy volchok). Another symbol connecting nearly all of these different themes are green apples (which may symbolize life, hope, or potential). Yuriy Norshteyn wrote in Iskusstvo Kino magazine that the film is "about simple concepts that give you the strength to live."- Wikipedia.

Why Mexico Is A Lucky Bastard

.

Flatten

An interesting short film I chanced upon:

Flatten

George's Exit

Cranes

Took a very long walk this evening round the harbour lookin' at cranes.

 

2B2

Save Richard

Help a crab save Richard.

Festivale

                                      

                                      

Photographs from the two festivals I attended in Shikoku near the end of May- Hatafes in Shimantou and Tanbo De Arto near Zentsuji.