From the video for I See, So I See So by Broadcast.
• RIP Trish Keenan of Broadcast. Tributes here and here. The Broadcast/Focus Group collaboration …investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age was The Wire‘s album of the year for 2009. Joseph Stannard interviewed Trish Keenan and James Cargill in October of that year.
• Who Knows What Tomorrow Might Bring, a new pay-what-you-please Arthur mixtape. Also at Arthur, Sunday Lectures by Freeman House here, here, here and here.
• Cormac McCarthy’s description of American pioneers in Suttree (1979) kept coming to mind during the past week:
Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease.
• Born This Way: “A photo/essay project for gay viewers (male and female) to submit pictures from their childhood (roughly ages 4 to 14), with snapshots that capture them, innocently, showing the beginnings of their innate LGBT selves. It’s nature, not nurture!”
• Mischievous street art characters. Chris Marker wouldn’t want us to forget Monsieur Chat. Speaking of Chris Marker, there’s Plato’s Cave as Kino: Owl’s Legacy Excerpt & Becoming Imperceptible.
With the point of a knife Dr. LeBaron took from the little round box a small quantity of a dark, greenish-colored gum, which, as it was passed from one to another for inspection, gave off an agreeable, aromatic odor. Then, as he was engaged in filling two capsules from the box, he explained:
“As le docteur read from ze book of Monsieur Richet, ze favoreet méthode in ze Orient ees to take ze Haschisch by ze smoke in ze Persian pipe—ze hookah, ze nargileh. But zey also take eet in ze great varieté. Ze principal kind zat come to ze market of Europe, ees zat I show you—ze Haschisch, an’ ve take eet like ze dose of quinine,” said he, as he handed a well-filled capsule to both Smith and Arnold.
Throwing back his head, Smith bolted his dose without ceremony, and Arnold immediately followed his example.
Haschisch: A Novel (1886) by Thorold King. Related: Haschisch Hallucinations (1905) by HE Gowers.
• Dan Hill’s personal report from the drowned world of Brisbane. Related: Hayley Campbell recalls swimming in the city’s hazardous floodwaters when she was a wild child. Also: Canoeing in McDonald’s.
• Cabinet Card Backmarks, florid advertisements from Victorian cabinet photos. Callum James made a post on the subject in 2008 and has a Flickr set showing his discoveries.
• The Brothers Quay made a public information film about AIDS in 1996. (Now deleted from YouTube…boo!)
• The secret stories of book inscriptions. Related: The Book Inscriptions Project.
• Ani, Turkey: City of 1001 Churches, all of them abandoned and ruined.
• Vulgar Army: Octopus in Propaganda and Political Cartoons.
• Designer John Gall makes collages in his spare time.
• Witch Cults and I See, So I See So, both by Broadcast & The Focus Group.
The city of Ani looks as though it were ripped straight from the imaginations of either Willink or de Chirico.
Were both Turkish and Soviet laws not so strict in their day, it would’ve been interesting to see Tarkovsky or Paradjanov make use of these transfixingly dismal ruins for set pieces.
Werner Herzog would be keen as well. There’s a shot in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser which his brother filmed in Burma of a plain covered in hundreds of temples. You can see it at the end of this clip. And there’s also the thousands of windmills in Crete from one of his earlier films, Signs of Life.
Another good Trish tribute: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/01/farewell_broadc.php
So surprising and sad that she’s gone. I saw Broadcast live several years ago, she had a delightful presence. Sigh…