Saturday, June 20, 2009
Omnivoracious: Neither a Contract Nor a Promise: Five Movements To Watch Out For (Guest Blogger China Mieville)
Though this might look like apocalypse fiction, it will in fact be not about any implied catastrophe, but about scobbing together of culture from the refuse (and implying that all culture is and always has been so scobbed). An art of making-do, tool-use and ingenuity. A fiction infused with a militant amnesiac uninterest about cultural memes' origins and 'pure' 'original' 'purposes' - which chimeras its adherents will derisively and polysemically render 'pUr(e)poses' - this will be literature that celebrates reclamation, and/but forgets that prefix 're-': so, clamation fiction, ignoring the fact that ruins are ruined, were ever anything else.
If Benjamin warns that history is a buffeted angel staring at a giant pile of debris, Salvagepunk ignores the angel and roots around in the debris looking for a car to hotwire.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
RIP Hugh Hopper , of Soft Machine, one of the Hughs who inspired my poem "The Book of Hugh", Soft Machine member & writer of "Dedicated to You (Hugh) But You Weren't Listening" & "Out-Bloody-Rageous", has died. The most melodic electric bassist I can think of, even more so than Steve Swallow, whose place in the Carla Bley band Hopper took on more than occasion...
To Be a Baby
Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults...
Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both. The picture we used to have of children was that they spent all of this time doing pretend play because they had these very limited minds, but in fact what we’ve now discovered is that children have more powerful learning abilities than we do as adults...
Friday, June 05, 2009
Thursday, June 04, 2009
this is very well done--On the Creepy Alluring Art of the Follow Shot
"Following" is a montage of clips illustrating one of my favorite types of shots: one where the camera physically follows a character through his or her environment. I love this shot because it's neither first-person nor third; it makes you aware of a character's presence within the movie's physical world while also forcing identification
with the character. I also love the sensation of momentum that following shots invariably summon. Because the camera is so close to the character(s) being followed, we feel that we're physically attached to those characters, as if by an invisible guide wire, being towed through their world, sometimes keeping pace, other times losing them as they weave through hallways, down staircases or through smoke or fog...
"Following" is a montage of clips illustrating one of my favorite types of shots: one where the camera physically follows a character through his or her environment. I love this shot because it's neither first-person nor third; it makes you aware of a character's presence within the movie's physical world while also forcing identification
with the character. I also love the sensation of momentum that following shots invariably summon. Because the camera is so close to the character(s) being followed, we feel that we're physically attached to those characters, as if by an invisible guide wire, being towed through their world, sometimes keeping pace, other times losing them as they weave through hallways, down staircases or through smoke or fog...
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Monday, June 01, 2009
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