Three Landscapes

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The Hudson River Valley is my home. In the summertime I’m always amazed at how beautiful the landscape is. The dry green meadows, where the hay bales cast long shadows at that magical hour of the day. The clouds rolling above the Catskill mountains—huge thunderheads—are stunning, evoking dreams. I remember reading an account of Henry Hudson’s voyage up the Hudson River, and how fragrant the land was to the sailors on board his ship; they could smell the abundant fruit trees. From the dispiriting climates of Western Europe, they thought they had arrived in paradise.

--Peter Hutton, in conversation with Luke Fowler, Mousse #37, 2013. Hutton's newly completed film, Three Landscapes, will premiere next month at TIFF. 

History Lesson(s) #18

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My son, we have received your letter from Chalkida, and we read in the paper that they have sentenced you to death, my child. Your letter makes the stones cry out. How will the heart of your mother and sister not break? Today we sent out the funeral procession from our house. Oh, how unjust it is, my son! Do you remember how they received you in the Summer of ’43, the whole of Lidoriki, all the good words that were said for you? Why now, my son? Oh, my child! I will die, my son, before they bring me the dark message that they have murdered you, and brought you into the black earth. All of us in the house are as if insane. We weep, my son, for the terrible things that have happened to us. We have lost both father and son and our house is falling down. Everything, my child, is missing in our house. As if that weren’t enough, my child, they have also shot our Eleni, and now we are left with nothing but death. Everyone, my son, asks about you. Do not therefore leave us without a letter. Many relatives and friends send their greetings. Your sister kisses you, my child, and we all wish for you to return to our house swiftly. Your dearest mother sends you her blessings and wishes that nothing bad ever happen to you.

Your dearest mother, Konstantina Petru.

--Letter written in Lidoriki by the mother of Georgius Petru, a DSE fighter, on 19th January, 1948. Spoken by Peter Nestler in Von Griechenland / From Greece (1965). Georgius Petru was executed during the Greek Civil War, alongside many hundreds of ELAS and DSE fighters who joined the struggle for a democratic Greece.

History Lesson(s) #17

Untitled (Italo-German air raid over Madrid) - Robert Capa, Winter 1936-1937

An aside, or: links

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Noticed, of late: Patrick Keiller's forthcoming essay collection from Verso, The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes; at Vdrome (for another week or so), Eric Baudelaire's The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011); Ryland's second short film, Inside Voices, to be shot this summer; seanema, a homemade archive of annotated images, links and texts being built by May Adadol Ingawanij and Richard Lowell MacDonald (inc. recent texts on Bangkok-based artist Taiki Sakpisit and a note on Tropical Malady); Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings; Erika Balsom's Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art [pdf]; a new article by Jonathan Beller, Advertisarial relations and aesthetics of survival: Advertising –> advertisign; a tribute to Raúl Ruiz by Adrian Martin; Boris Nelepo on Norte, the End of History; and two starting sketches for a new film by Gina Telaroli. 

In London: T.J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner's Lowry exhibition has opened at the Tate, and is notable for its embrace of a still strikingly reactionary figure – "a rent-collector by day and an artist by night, a lifelong Tory voter and teetotaller," as a celebratory article in the Telegraph a few weeks ago reminded us. The FT marked the opening of the exhibition by commissioning a series of comparative photographs by John Davies. Elsewhere: Death in the Making: Photographs of War by Robert Capa at ATLAS gallery, and, at the BFI, a Jean Grémillon retrospective, and rare screenings of films by Santiago Álvarez and Peter Nestler during August's Art of the Essay Film season.

Also: parts I and II of a rediscovered 1971 interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson – "you have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt, which is not an easy thing, because you steal something"; an informative, telling piece on the transformation of London's Olympic park, w/ photographs by Jason Orton (related); Chris Watson's Sheffield Sound Map (and a beautiful new LP recorded on the tidal island of Lindisfarne [320]); David Runciman on Thatcher(ism); It makes us sick: notes on affective labour, sanity, and post-Fordism; two new publications by Red Notes: The Little Red Blue Book: Fighting the Layoffs at Fords and Revolution Retrieved; a typically fine interview with Lars Iyer – "friendship is difficult – it involves a struggle against what is now a widespread opportunism and cynicism. I think there really is such a thing as an art of friendship. I think it’s worth breaking off friendships when this art is being dishonoured – and doing so in the name of friendship"; recent mixes by Mark Fell & Old Apparatus; Four Tet on Hessle Audio; After Dark II; and two older pieces I didn't link to earlier, Amazon Unpacked, and Simon Reynolds' excellent 2011 article for The Wire, EXCESS ALL AREAS, or: The Catastrophe... And What Comes After.

Realism(s) #29, or: some little bare numb spot of ground

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I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say, All right, I'll take it, I'll buy it. That's what it is. Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn't that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that's why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can't measure it, because the pain comes after and lasts longer. So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

--James Salter's beautiful, laconic reading of Break it Down by Lydia Davis. Text from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2011), p.24. Also, recently on Salter: James Meek in the LRB, and Sarah Nicole Prickett on A Sport and a Pastime. 

Des animaux #8

Before Sunset - Richard Linklater, 2004, 35mm

Forests #12

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Amy Cutler has uploaded a full catalogue of the recent exhibition at St. John on Bethnal Green, Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig. The exhibition includes a specially extended 25-minute version of Noon Hill Wood by Richard Skelton (part of his second ARCHIVAL release, accompanying the publication of Bark, Xylem), as well as work by Camilla Nelson, Sung Hee Jin, Carol Watts and David Chatton Barker (whose own site is worth a look too). Related: Dan Handel's extended essay for Cabinet's current special issue on trees, Into the Woods.

Illuminations #16

The New Yorkers - Robert Herman, 1978-2005