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Seasonally expressive
It's November, and you have Novemberitis, don't you? Season affective disorder. A deep sense of emptiness, abandonment and futility which only art or tantric sex can fill. Well, what are you doing for the next fourteen hours? No, we're not going to have tantric sex. I'll tell you what you're doing. Here's the thing. You're going to spend the next fourteen hours watching -- and being utterly lifted and inspired by -- these seven two-hour films by the wonderful Robert Ashley. He made them in the 1970s with composer friends like Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley. The first hour of each piece is an unconventionally-filmed interview, the second a music performance.
You're going to do this and, like the man in the early Laurie Anderson song "Structuralist Filmmaking" (one of my picks when Kenneth Goldsmith from ubu.com asked me to select my Top 10 Resources from the site last month), you're suddenly going to realize that -- well, let me print the whole lyric:
"I had this dream, and in it my mother was sitting there cutting out pictures of hamsters from magazines. And in some of the pictures the hamsters are pets, and in some of them hamsters are just somewhere in the background. And she's got a whole pile of these cedar chips -- you know the kind, the kind from the bottom of hamster cages -- and she's gluing them into the frames of the pictures. She glues them together, and frames the pictures and then hangs them over the fireplace. That's more or less her method. And suddenly I realize that this is just her way of explaining to me that I should become a structuralist filmmaker. Which I had, you know, planned to do anyway."
That's right, these fourteen hours are going to make you a structuralist filmmaker. Or whatever, you know, you had been planning to do anyway.
Speaking of Laurie Anderson, though, if you're seasonally sad you might want to avoid France Culture's two part Laurie Anderson sound diary, Nothing in my pockets. Although it's interesting to be a fly on the wall as Laurie goes with Lou Reed to Sri Lanka to try ayurvedic massage, it's somewhat depressing if, like me, you love her early, funny pieces.
You're going to do this and, like the man in the early Laurie Anderson song "Structuralist Filmmaking" (one of my picks when Kenneth Goldsmith from ubu.com asked me to select my Top 10 Resources from the site last month), you're suddenly going to realize that -- well, let me print the whole lyric:
"I had this dream, and in it my mother was sitting there cutting out pictures of hamsters from magazines. And in some of the pictures the hamsters are pets, and in some of them hamsters are just somewhere in the background. And she's got a whole pile of these cedar chips -- you know the kind, the kind from the bottom of hamster cages -- and she's gluing them into the frames of the pictures. She glues them together, and frames the pictures and then hangs them over the fireplace. That's more or less her method. And suddenly I realize that this is just her way of explaining to me that I should become a structuralist filmmaker. Which I had, you know, planned to do anyway."
That's right, these fourteen hours are going to make you a structuralist filmmaker. Or whatever, you know, you had been planning to do anyway.Speaking of Laurie Anderson, though, if you're seasonally sad you might want to avoid France Culture's two part Laurie Anderson sound diary, Nothing in my pockets. Although it's interesting to be a fly on the wall as Laurie goes with Lou Reed to Sri Lanka to try ayurvedic massage, it's somewhat depressing if, like me, you love her early, funny pieces.
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are hamsters ever NOT pets?
are there free range hamsters
running free somewhere?
whole herds of them...skittering across the landscape?
liberated?
one can only hope.
Im missing the point.
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(Anonymous) 2006-11-15 01:26 am (UTC)(link)no subject
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(Anonymous) 2006-11-15 04:45 am (UTC)(link)Yeah, because it's SO MUCH BETTER when YOU like her.
Hypocrite.
Again (yeah yeah yeah... you contain the blah blah blah... you're still the lame fuck on BBC).
ooooo... I'm anon! oooooo... I'm in the U.S. (so I MUST be wrong, right? HA HA HA)
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I was looking for these videos last week, but a server-crash had taken them away. Great to see they are back up again, I was having a Terry Riley frenzy.
Speaking of new food, is Berlin really this great?
http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/travel/12surfacing.html?8dpc
(only 45 hours left to go downloading)
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The first 8 seconds of the Riley interview TOTALLY remind me of "Munchausen" by No Bra :)
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I've always wanted to be part of one of those all night performances of "In C", just to get up play and sit down when tired. We tried to do something like that inspired by Riley last year where we just got a bunch of people to bring laptops and modular equipment and stay for 6 hours just making funny noises whenever we wanted to. It was fun, but it seems like "In C" has just the right amount of structure and chaos, what we did was almost entierly chaos.
Also, isn't ubu web great? Everytime I go I'm amazed by what they have there.
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Good God. Why??