HIC SVNT DRACONES

Björk interviews Arvo Pärt

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:54:36 -0500

Björk interviews Arvo Pärt

Harry Escott’s score to Steve McQueen’s Shame is a...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 09:03:00 -0500

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,..."

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 21:29:34 -0500

“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.”

- Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Essential Kubrick animated .gifs

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:33:37 -0500

Essential Kubrick animated .gifs

The scholar W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, has...

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:14:00 -0500

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...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 09:15:48 -0500

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...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:53:05 -0500

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...

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 11:27:08 -0500

L: Sabrina C., R: Michael R.

L: Nora G

R: Katie P.

L: Chris K., R: David S.

A few works from the Fall semester Senior Survey at Pratt Institute.

Ah, end of the semester amusement. Yesterday’s MFA Survey...

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:28:51 -0500

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...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:38:00 -0500

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

From Dylan Trigg’s essay, This Place is a Tomb: Infinite...

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:37:00 -0500

From Dylan Trigg’s essay, This Place is a Tomb: Infinite Terror in Darkspace:

In distinction to the bulk of black metal bands peddling themes of religious evil on the one hand, and eco-friendly paganism on the other hand, Darkspace eschew the human realm in favour a speculative thinking about the nonhuman universe, as the band report on a Pascalian note in a recent interview:

We propose an experiment: Choose a dark and clear night. Lie down on your back. Look out for the stars. You will feel like looking “up” into the sky, but in Space there are no such things as “up” or “down”. You are adhered to the planet by gravitational force only. Visualize that situation and look “down” into the stars. You might feel the fascinating fear to lose planetary contact and soar into the void.

Recently J. Fischer queried me for my top albums of 2011. Having...

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:05:00 -0500

Recently J. Fischer queried me for my top albums of 2011. Having cleared out, but not deleted, my iTunes library a number of times this year I had to do a little digging. I turned to Metacritic’s High Scores of 2011 to jog my memory. And as it stands:

Is This Hyperreal? Atari Teenage Riot
Celestial Lineage Wolves in the Throne Room
Night of Hunters Tori Amos
Norwegian Wood Jonny Greenwood
Let England Shake PJ Harvey

It’s worth noting that 3/5 point to more than a twinge of 90’s nostalgia, or perhaps career longevity. After looking through a few lists, I’ve clearly missed out on a couple releases (which I have since remedied):

Street Halo Burial
Nostalgia, Ultra. Frank Ocean
An Album By Korallreven Korallreven
Ninth Peter Murphy

From Michael Lewis’s It’s the Economy,...

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:41:00 -0500

From Michael Lewis’s It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!:

Published in 1984 by a distinguished anthropologist named Alan Dundes, Life Is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder set out to describe the German character through the stories that ordinary Germans liked to tell one another. Dundes specialized in folklore, and in German folklore, as he put it, “one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”

Dundes goes on, “The combination of clean and dirty: clean exterior-dirty interior, or clean form and dirty content—is very much a part of the German national character.” So, by that measure how German is Freud? Well, he seems to have his own fecal fixation. In Dreams in Folklore (1911), Freud writes: “How old this connection between excrement and Gold is can be seen from an observation by Jeremias: gold, according to ancient oriental mythology, is the excrement of hell”

While it may currently be prudent to Beware of Greeks Bearing...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:14:00 -0500

While it may currently be prudent to Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds there is still much splendor to the ancient culture of yore. A few weeks back I assigned my Studio on Technology class Albert J. Bergesen’s reading of Greek sculpture and European painting applied to the form language of 20th century—sneakers.

Hot on the heels Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, I devoured Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. Ambling through the stacks at Pratt, I picked up Heidegger’s Early Greek Thinking; ordered The Logos of Heraclitus; started Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Admittedly, Schiller’s object is not explicitly Greek, it is implicitly so. And so it’s only appropriate that the writhing Laocoön and His Sons, adorn the post above.

Uncharted 3. Richly entertaining, albeit shorter than...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:03:00 -0500

Uncharted 3. Richly entertaining, albeit shorter than predecessors?

"But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my..."

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:01:00 -0500

“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.”

- Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time