| Lamb lies down on Broadway |
[Feb. 3rd, 2010|02:10 pm] |
This little church at the top of Wall Street has always fascinated me, surrounded by skyscrapers in the pure black heart of evil greed, this little Episcopal church seems out of place. Maybe I stuck my head in there once, I cant recall if they have a large crucifix there. Perhaps that's more Catholic .. but I always wanted to make a film slowly going up Wall Street towards the church and then slowly zooming through the doors on to Christ's distorted face. But its difficult to film in NYC, security is massive on Wall Street and you need a permit to film which is just a method the cops use for harassing people.
"The lamb lies down on Broadway" .. its been going through my head. I dont really care for Genesis all that much, Peter Gabriel had a good sense for the dramatic though and the image of the lamb lying down on Broadway, as a kind of Christ returning to the city ala Ensor, the impossibility of stopping the juggernaut of global capital .. it's a resonant symbol. Christianity has been detourned and fractured into a cacaphony of shouting born-again fundamentalists, puritans, desert wanderers and so on. The problem with the morality of the Bible, specifically about usury and being humble, is that it lies counter to the capitalist ethos. I found the comments on this article on Alternet of interest. A few commenters attack Christianity as the poison in the system, that it makes people weak and passive. Christians stand like lambs, We the sheeple.
(Soviet cartoon taken out of context because it looks good here)
I think the issue comes down to being wolves or sheep. We can be in a flock and stand together hoping for a good shepherd to lead us. Or we can roam like wolves, alone in the dark forests. I'd say we live in a world of wolves. Instead of seeing our lives as a question of what we should do with our time here, we are taught to see life in terms of what we can get away with. In a world of wolves, it's very hard to be a sheep. |
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| Paris 1919 |
[Jan. 24th, 2010|03:28 pm] |
great interview with John Cale .. Paris 1919, great album, about when it all went down the toilet
ahh Nico the legend, I love her, but somehow watching this I see that remembering the lyrics was the most demanding part of her day |
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| On Rilke 1875-1925 |
[Jan. 23rd, 2010|11:45 pm] |
I'm still some 80 pages from the end of the Rilke biography I've been reading. What I love about Rilke is his involvement with art and European culture. He traveled far and wide, from Tolstoy's estate to Sweden to Venice, Berlin, Paris, Munich, and his pilgrimage to Toledo for El Greco. These are the jewels of Europe, the glittering puzzle, interlocked, veins of silver. He never wanted for female companions, this rogue of a gentleman, his heart beaten pure. And he wrote reams of letters, requesting loans, maintaining contacts ... I wonder if its possible these days, especially for poets, to live as well as Rilke managed, housed, wined and dined by the fading nobility. The Duino Elegies were especially difficult to finish, with a break of 12 years and the interruptions of war, Rilke wandered waiting for inspiration to strike, For the angels to speak. A simple example, of which there are many: While staying as a guest of Princess Marie Taxis at the mezzanino of the Palazzo Valmarana Rilke became restless and planned to leave Venice. He turned to his network of friends and supporters for suggestions. "Princess Marie offered him a small house on the Lautschin estate, the Valmaranas suggested one near Padua, there was talk of a converted monastery near Taormina .. but none of these could be more than a temporary asylum ...". ahh the life of a poet in 1919 ...
Hanging with Baladine Klossowska
To live this way .. this was the lie we were fed in college, that it was still possible to have such a life, but technology and tourism have swept it all away. I'm a sucker for the fin de siecle, but you know it was a time of special conjunctions. Is the magic still alive in the streets? We live in funny times when we know everything and care about nothing. Rilke searched for the ineffable and embraced it .. he could still find it beyond the pale screen of the world. Today the angels have turned away, because no one is listening. Regardless maybe one day I'll walk the streets of Toledo, maybe one day I'll touch a magic star. |
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| The Fierce and Beautiful World |
[Jan. 16th, 2010|10:36 pm] |
The earthquake in Haiti has reminded me of the photos of Alex Webb
http://www.edelmangallery.com/webb.htm
There is a good interview with Webb here
http://fototapeta.art.pl/2005/axwe.php
And here is his great blog, together with his wife, on photography
(He might be the current president of Magnum, I'm not sure. They live in Park Slope.)
http://webbnorriswebb.wordpress.com/
Webb's work is indebted to Henri Cartier-Bresson, complex painterly compositions, framing devices and strange juxtapositions. Webb speaks of the job of a street photographer, the call to be out in the world. He is drawn to border regions, to the interzones not destroyed by the gentrification of globalist expansion. As he says in the interview, in New York, color is used to sell something, in Mexico and India one gets the feeling that color is in the heart of the culture.
Yet the camera is neutral, it documents, but coldly. The photo bears witness, this is true, but its small flame is quickly extinguished by the torrent of images around us. Photojournalism is a career fraught with contradictions, especially in this age of media saturation and digital ephemera.
Disaster freelancers swarming to Haiti, trying to hitch a ride on the media circus, ride like a flea and extract a little money ... its a living, an adventurous one certainly, but an odd lifestyle. Yet as Webb states, this is the paradox, the beauty of the world that shines through the cracks of the sorrow. He is making art in the zones of despair, while most of the freelancers are just riding the neoliberal gravy train. Webb's photos are lovely, certainly, but the underlying social context remains problematic.
There are interesting conversations about the dilemmas of the profession over on the discussions board of Lightstalkers .. and it is a kind of stalking, a thrillride for some, an ethical position for others, adrenaline junkies. I couldn't do it. I often think of Peter Weir's film "The Year of Living Dangerously" which, although it was filmed in the Philippines and not Indonesia, deals so eloquently with this state of affairs in the continuing grind of the so-called post-colonial world. Haiti, it seems, is set to be rebuilt as a kind of tourist-paradise-cum-garment-worker island. Oh well the more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems ...
What then must we do? .. Tolstoy |
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| screensaver |
[Jan. 14th, 2010|02:31 pm] |
Hey if anybody wants a screensaver based on my Godzilla vs Stalin page .. ;)
I just put one together
you can grab it here
http://volny.cz/wells/godzillavsstalin.scr
put it in your windows/system32 folder, and then choose it as your screensaver on the display panel
as for mac users I'm not sure |
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| Godzilla vs Stalin |
[Jan. 13th, 2010|01:06 pm] |
I've been sifting through my digital archives and came across this old website I made for my short story Godzilla vs Stalin that I wrote in Prague during the hard winter 1993/1994. So I put it back up here. The retro mid90s webstylings works well with the subject matter. The story is a bit juvenile in places, plays a bit too fast and loose with Czech culture, but perhaps some of you will get a laugh out of it.
Meanwhile here in Zizkov we are in the icy grip of January, snowdrifts freezing to icy mush on the hard cobblestones. The windows are frozen shut and I cant look out to see if the large bin has been set out so I can toss the Christmas tree.
I'm looking forward to a thaw. |
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| The Figments |
[Jan. 8th, 2010|11:00 pm] |
My band in college, 1985, Bloomington IN.
I think we only played about 4 times, but we practiced a lot. Great claim to fame: REM came and saw us play ... And Peter Buck came and played with us in the studio for one track, believe it or not.
The members:
James Combs, guitar, vocals
Mark McCormick, guitar, vocals
Lawrence Wells, bass, vocals
Derich Wittliff, drums
This is me singing my original forlorn love song, Pass Me By
I was quite the dreamy-eyed young romantic
"will I always let life pass me by" .. the line haunts me now
and if you like that
grab one of our shows, 15 songs, 45 minutes
http://www.mediafire.com/?34yznztzjtt |
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| winter |
[Jan. 5th, 2010|03:37 pm] |
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