Realism(s) #13, or: that majestic sadness

'Let what you do,' says Horace, 'be always simple and a whole.'

--Racine, preface to Bérénice, 1670.

This sudden flight

Leaves me, I must confess, a simple wound.

--Bérénice, act I, scene V.

What, after all, shall I say? I flee your vacant eyes

Which, seeing me always, see me never.

Farewell, I go, my heart too full of your image,

To await, for my part, while loving you, death.

Above all fear not that a distress sightless

Fills the universe with the resound of my misfortune,

Madame: the sole sound of a death that I beg

Will remember you again I was still alive.

--Bérénice, act I, scene IV; also spoken in JLG's Une femme mariée (1964), trans. CK.

De son appartement - Jean-Claude Rousseau, 2007, digital video

Everything was lost in the air and the wind #3

Landscape [detail] - Sesshū Tōyō, c. 1495, ink on paper scroll

Forests #11

artwork from Box of Birch LP - A Broken Consort, 2009, Tompkins Sq., vinyl

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It does make a difference to the sound if you get an instrument and cover it in soil. Or you can use bits of bark as plectra. Because I was using really cheap instruments, I could leave them out in the wood and cover them with leaves. It didn't matter if they got knackered. I was coming to terms with a process of decay.

--Richard Skelton, speaking to Clive Bell in the latest issue of The Wire (326), p.47.

Lumen I

LUMEN I

[Posted this a couple of days ago, but the site quickly ran aground. It's up and running again, smoothly, for good. The issue is now a little smaller, but such is the problem of editing...]

A new journal, a collaboration between Edwin Mak and myself. This has been gestating for a long time, and another issue will follow with very little haste — with infinite patience, as Deleuze wrote of Straub-Huillet. In the meantime, please enjoy and share — we'd appreciate it.

Digressions on the photographic agony #3

I / II

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The future city was ruled by an authority able to make anybody disappear. When people from the past were found, a light was shone at them, and images were projected onto a screen — from the past, until their arrival in the future. Once those images appeared, the ghosts disappeared.

--Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010.

Nabua is only light and memory. There are natural illuminations from the sun and from fire. The lights seep through the doors and windows and burn the rice fields. There are artificial ones like fluorescent tubes and LED lights like dots of recollections. And there are simulated bolts of lightning that destroy the peaceful landscape and unearth the spirits.

--Apichatpong Weerasethakul, The Memory of Nabua (via), 18/02/2009.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - A.W., 2010, super 16mm

Des animaux #5

Viaggio in Italia - Roberto Rossellini, 1953, 35mm

Distance(s) #21, or: really existing capitalism

You and Me - Fritz Lang, 1938, 35mm

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Zorns Lemma - Hollis Frampton, 1970, 16mm

History Lesson(s) #4

Flowers - Andy Warhol, 1982, polaroid photograph