guilty pleasure

this freezer-place is giving me ninety degree hot dog chai tea dreams

guilty pleasure

Cinema celebrates its birthday. A century which wants to be known as modern and be understood as neither linear nor circular, but accepted with jumps, tears, holes and cavities. The perception that film and its apparatus have offered aid in the formulation of this understanding. Camera lenses are turned on the world and bear witness to its existence, but it is quite another nature which "speaks to the camera as that which speaks to the eye" (Benjamin).

In thousandyearsofcinema Kurt Kren turns his perspective around with a quiet and unsettling irony. The images appear. One eye tightly shut and the other pressed against the viewfinder. This is the standard position which Kren captures in single frames. Uncountable photographers, with their acutely-angled cameras directed at St. Stephan´s Cathedral whizz by. Picture after picture is about to be exposed in a form of collective unanimity. In the decades of his engagement with film, Kren has never conceived hermetically, and never permitted film, history and life situation to be set against each other. To allow the material, technical apparatus or conceptual purity to deflect him from the desire for filmic vision is foreign to his nature. He remains true to precise work and experiment, curious about communication with the world outside.

thousandyearsofcinema is not only bound up with this standpoint, but also shows a new direction. The soundtrack is becoming important, not as a scratched on noise, but as voice, as text. The passages, taken from Peter Lorre´s film The Lost, open up another realm where the element picture grates against that of voice. "I have seen these eyes before." A rapid sequence of images show the allegedly objective lenses of the cameras. On the soundtrack is someone who subjectively believes in the truth that he recognizes his opposite number, only to be curtly repudiated. A space containing Peter Lorre´s eyes is created by implication. A man driven, a lonely man, both before and after Hitler´s thousand-year empire. A man who cannot forget.
thousandyearsofcinema by Kurt Kren is a small utopia, a witness for the explosive power of the film medium set against the framework of 100 or 1000 years of (hi)stories. (Elisabeth Büttner)

things to watch before going to bed

an ode to a daughter by a mother

things to watch before going to bed

my kind of men

Amy Taubin wrote a lovely article in last November's Artforum about Michel Auder. I like his attitude, the so-distinctly-French balance of "fuckitall" nihilism and hyper-awareness of what is precious and beautiful. That psyche is the core of the little bits of his video work I have seen. Taubin delicately corralled him in with Jonas Mekas and Warren Sonbert, what she calls "avant-garde film diarists". They also happen to be my two secret heroes.



There is so much of Mekas to be found freely, which I'd bet is thanks in large part to his own ambition to be seen, his loud charisma. I recently attempted a research paper dedicated to Warren Sonbert, an experience in itself through which I came to see him as a kind of internet specter. If you ever find yourself with the opportunity to see "Friendly Witness", count yourself lucky (hint: call me). I see traces of his aesthetic influence everywhere, while trying to track down some of his own work is like trying to catch your own shadow (yes, the peter pan reference is deliberate). What a shame, when his abilities to capture and curate are closer to than anything I've ever encountered to perfection. So it seems fitting that this eleven-second snippet is one of the only free talismans left to us.

Warren Sonbert from jeff scher on Vimeo.

bros

I know very little of the nature of Chicagoans, who are for whatever reason something of a mystery. That's the city that produced The Buckinghams, the vintage powerpop man band that has recently stolen my heart. My lifecoach Greg (of that generation) thought my admiration of the quintet was somehow comedic. Whateverrrr...I found this compilation after hearing "Hey Baby (They're Playing Our Song)" on a latenight 1550 AM drive, quite serendipitously. At just under 50 minutes, it plays like a Hollywood popcorn romance, one that you love sans the guilt. It's the kind of album that makes you slow down way before the red light, window down, cigarette in hand with a nodding "Yeahhh...", cowboy-style. Or, it did for me. It feels timeless and goes down like sugar. "Kind of a Drag", "I'll Go Crazy", "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" and "It's a Beautiful Day" are some of the most perfectly bittersweet love songs I've ever heard.

HERE

future husband