Björk interviews Arvo Pärt
Harry Escott’s score to Steve McQueen’s Shame is a work of painful intensity—of the lingering kind. The ‘coo inducing crescendo’ pathos of Unravelling, when paired with the exquisitely taunt and drawn out sequences featuring Michael Fassbender’s Brandon preying in the subway and later running in desperation, is a work of cinematic brilliance.
The comments in the YouTube clip will lead you to the work of Hans Zimmer, for an apparent homophonic analogue in his score for The Thin Red Line.
Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism.
The scholar W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, has taken as his subject the intersection of literature and visual arts, which leads him to visual culture and media studies. The above interview, following his lecture Cloning Terror, is a good introduction to a recent history of the subject.
A practitioner, taking cues from Mitchell and particularly his call for a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil, is @williambanzai7. William Banzai, of Zero Hedge notoriety, strives for a contemporary polemical image activism in his critique of money, power and institutions. Watch his year end YULE-POCALYPSE NOW!
In the mid-90’s I was introduced to the work of Noam Chomsky through his seminal Manufacturing Consent. This interview, from 1988, with Bill Moyers is one of the best I have seen.
On this Winter Solstice, A White Rainbow by Coil:
A white rainbow under an unquiet skull
(A roaring aura)
(A tremulous column of air, hanging there)
Moon’s milk spills from my unquiet skull
And forms a white rainbow
(A psychosis, a roaring aura)
(Aurora borealis)
A white rainbow
A lunar ascension, a solar declension
A tremulous column of air hanging there
A bleached beach, a psychosis
(Laughing like skeletons clattering at midday)
Feel the moon’s pull
Feel the moon’s pull
Moon’s milk spills from my unquiet skull
A white rainbow
Inverted vertigo, a psychosis
(Moon’s milk spills)
And overhead, overhead
(Feel the moon’s pull)
A tremulous column of air, hanging there
(A white rainbow)
(Laughing like skeletons clattering at midday)
And overhead, a white rainbow
Under an unquiet skull, under an unquiet skull
Feel the moon’s pull
A white rainbow
A few works from the Fall semester Senior Survey at Pratt Institute.
Ah, end of the semester amusement.
Yesterday’s MFA Survey was long, 8 hours of talking and walking, though Friday’s BFA Senior Survey should prove less grueling.
A few favorite films from 2011:
- A Dangerous Method d. David Cronenberg
- Cave of Forgotten Dreams d. Werner Herzog
- Of Gods and Men d. Xavier Beauvois
- The Tree of Life d. Terrence Malick
- Midnight in Paris d. Woody Allen
- Drive d. Nicolas Winding Refn
- Bellflower d. Evan Glodell
And A few that slipped through:
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
- The Artist
- Melancholia
- Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
- Martha Marcy May Marlene
- Young Goethe in Love
