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Film recommendation of the month: Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973). Still haven't seen his El Topo (unless multiple viewings of Greaser's Palace counts) but it just moved up my list. Mountain is the ultimate artist's movie--a staggering amount of work went into sets, costumes and props that are seen briefly and never again. Contentwise it fits the Alfred Jarry transgressive mold--much nudity, violence and swipes at church pieties. But it also parodies new age seekers of wisdom--the characters who announce their occupations and planets ("My planet is Uranus" etc) in a series of brilliant mini-biographies that are the heart of the movie. Their goal is to ascend the Holy Mountain with their mysterious guide The Alchemist (played by Jodorowsky) and displace the Nine Immortals--cowled figures sitting at a table like figures from Dali's Last Supper. The first 20 minutes or so of the movie presents a completely plotless succession of absurdist activities and tableaux, such as the "Toad and Chameleon theatre" featuring those critters dressed as soldiers and clerics, flipping around a tabletop in a chaotic "holy war." The rest veers between Bunuel (and occasionally Monty Python) surrealism and a kind of "60s swingers" vibe of polymorphous sexual antics, constantly changing course and subverting itself. Completely refreshing, and very likely something that could only have been made in the early '70s, before religious scolds of every denomination achieved a stranglehold on our discourse.
Slipstream fiction - bibliography; Bruce Sterling's original essay coining the term (and list of representative novels).
These are books which [science fiction] readers recommend to friends: "This isn't SF, but it sure ain't mainstream and I think you might like it, okay?" It's every man his own marketer, when it comes to slipstream.John Clute prefers the term "Fabulist," which sounds more like the known "Magic Realism," whereas I believe Sterling was really thinking his way around an unidentified genre.
My photos of JODI's installation Composite Club at vertexList. The exhibit closes today--go if you can! Efrain Calderon Jr explains the art here; in a nutshell, it repurposes a game-related video camera (coupled with motion recognition software) called an "Eyetoy," designed to turn a child into a human joystick or data glove. As the kid moves head, arms, and torso, the camera reads the motion and a videogame makes countermoves, keeping the child physically active and away from the Doritos bag. Instead of kids, JODI has aimed the Eyetoy on films ranging from cyberpunk classics to Sophia Loren/Marcello Mastroianni romances. The movements of those films trigger video game actions, which are simultaneously layered over the films. Yes, this means you can watch Darth Vader play an anime ping pong player, but such one-to-one matchups happen only intermittently. (The bottom photo, a moving projection on the gallery wall, shows the various formal attributes the camera reads while the movie plays--screen position, light/dark values, etc. The top two are screenshots of "games" in progress.)
JODI (Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk) are the most painter-like artists working with computers and video today. Imagine Robert Rauschenberg using such tools at the time he did his "combines"--his work was called Neo-Dada and bridged Abstract Expressionism and Pop and that's essentially what JODI does now, with their densely layered amalgam of Japanese videogame weirdness and cult film cinematography, dissolving and mutating before your eyes. The conceit of the "the movie playing the game" isn't always comprehensible in these clips but for me this is a feature, not a bug. Art isn't about rubbing one ordered system up against another to get a third, but rather achieving an energized chaos that reveals something about the initial ordered systems, a la a Burroughs cut up. This revelatory randomness launches Composite Club beyond the pat realm of XYZ new media art. The artists use software like an auto-destructing Jean Tinguely painting machine and let chance processes do the work. They then discerningly edit motion captures of game play to make "best of" DVDs. The results are stunning--as good as anything you'll see in the galleries these days.
An earlier discussion, on why JODI isn't showing with one of the Manhattan cyber-galleries, is here.
"sketchy" version of something posted earlier
"Junebug" [mp3 removed]
...have been having a congenial back and forth with a friend about whether the songs I post are music--he prefers "sound objects" because the structure is so clear. They are that, a little--I like transparency and think grid-based music software should sound like what it is and not some quantized, artificially natural thing. But I think they're music in the sense that techno music is music and have gotten more interested in structure since I first started posting. (Changing motifs makes the original motif sound better when you come back to it--what a concept.)
Blogosphere snapshot--obsessive/compulsive generosity:
Since a big issue was made here with massmirror and rapidshare let me myself explain why i prefer rapidshare:This sounds like a Billmon in the making--a blogger who completely overdid it, then harangued his readers about how hard it was, then loudly exited the Web (twice). I love mutantsounds but take a chill pill, y'all.
1.Rapidshare is still the most reliable host.I've tried Sharebee and proved to be total crap.Massmirror seems to be ok...for NOW.I don't know how it will be in a week or two.Those continously growing waiting times make me very suspicious.So i want some more time till i make a decision...massmirror has to prove it's stability and reliability.
2.Since our time is limited(and mine possibly motre than Eric's) and uploading one by one files takes much time.Rapidshare with rapidupload offers the option of massive uploads....using massmirror will make me spent more time on blog and "steal" this time from my family or time of rest( i already sleep about 4-5 hours per day due to blog...imagine what happens if i have to make uploads one by one).Someone could say lower the daily posts....that's totally out of question...i love music and i think both Eric and me have many many stuff to offer.A blog with one post per day or per week etc is a dead blog.Music is one of the things i could kill for or give my life for and i want to spread good music (IMHO) as much as possible....Besides the posts are from too many genres that no one is obliged to d/l all our daily posts.I hope you understand why i'm still on rapidshare...BUT once Massmirror proves it's stability and reliability i will turn to this .
Thanks for your support and love.
Jim Mutantsounds
Baramin...good grief, I'd never heard that term
From the Boston Globe:
Conservapedia is just like Wikipedia, except that its 11,000 entries read like they were personally vetted by Pat Robertson and the 700 Club. Fed up with Wikipedia's purported liberal bias, Conservapedia's founder, Andrew Schlafly, son of conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, has created "an encyclopedia you can trust."This would be funny if these people weren't so sad, and such fascists. Baramin--sounds like "varmints" but it's supposedly based on Hebrew.
And you can trust them, to give you some pretty loopy definitions. Their entry on kangaroos, for instance, says that, "like all modern animals . . . kangaroos are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood."
You may not recognize the word "baramin." It's a 20th-century creationist neologism that refers to the species God placed on earth during Creation Week. Special for kids: I wouldn't use that word on the biology final. Although maybe your parents could sue the local school board for failing to teach the Book of Genesis in science class.
More on Conserva-kangaroos: "After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart, or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters."
Who knew?
Some excellent clone-hunting going on at VVork: stacks of audio loudspeakers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and stacks of books (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) by artists. A while back it was "neon week."
"I feel that my stack of loudspeakers is more profound than yours because..."