Graphic novelist Jeff Lemire returns to the Republic with a weekly newsletter, Tales From The Farm.
Craig Mod’s excellent RIDGELINE hits 12 issues, all nicely archived for you.
(My intent here is to actually try and remember to note down the newsletters I like, building a map of my personal region of the Republic. I also like that “The Republic of Newsletters” seems to have stuck with some people, the way Nabil Maynard’s “Isle of Blogging” stuck with me)
The hashtags mark it as “ritual” and “Indian,” but “ukujula” is a Zulu word for “depth.” It may be somewhere between Muslimgauze and the “Ethnological Forgery Series,” I don’t know. But it’s very much trance music, and very much a nice way to close out the day. It’s three American dollars on Bandcamp. And a good way to test the shortcode function on this WordPress install.
PICTURES OF THE OLD WORLD is brutal.
Honestly, I could have filled this post with nothing but screenshots from this amazing, beautiful, tender and staggeringly bleak film.
Shot in 1972 by Dusan Hanak and banned by the Czech government for its unrelenting documenting of grim rural poverty, this luminous restoration by Second Run DVD is a revelation. Often heartbreaking, sometimes charming – the toothless old man obsessed with the 1969 moon landing, who stuffs his jacket with related clippings, carefully taking them out and reading them with a magnifying glass, telling the camera all the Apollo trivia he knows like a lonely child eager to finally find an audience.
Parts of this film could have been shot in the late Middle Ages. This is what back-to-the-land waiting-for-death uncivilisation looks like. Pain, damage, unmitigated age, a man who’s literally lived on his knees for twenty-five years like an extra from HARD TO BE A GOD, and, over and over again, I repeat, waiting for death.
PICTURES OF THE OLD WORLD (UK) (US) (or directly from Second Run DVD, not sure how international shipping works with them but you may prefer to try)
I’m fried today, so was glad to find something gentle (yet sonically complex in its textures) to start the day. Here we go again.
On French speculative writing in the 1920s:
In a 2009 book called Future Tense, the Canadian historian Roxanne Panchasi describes a curious feeling pervading writing on the future in France from around this time. She calls it “premourning.”
…there persisted, she claims, “a nostalgic longing for French values and cultural phenomena that had not yet disappeared.”
From The Music of the Future by Robert Barry (UK) (US)
From that same book, more evidence for my thesis that James Bridle is a human superposition:
I had come to see a performance by the Tennessee-born artist Holly Herndon. She was billed as part of a digital arts festival called Némo. I had been intrigued by Herndon ever since her name came up in a Skype conversation I had with the artist and writer James Bridle earlier that same year.
One of those SoundCloud regulars I enjoy so much. Nice to find a piece by the Monk at the end of my day.
I just found the following in a folder. In a docx file entitled “IMPORTANT.” It seems I wrote it in 2014. I have no idea what it is or why I thought it was “IMPORTANT.”
* * *
“It’s not right, you know. A man should be free to fly in the world without having to worry about burning death clouds.”
“Do what?” said a voice from under the table.
“The volcano in Iceland. Funny word. Began with a B.” He hunched a little and looked down, seeking the word. He gave the impression of peering down into the algae-smeared pool of his own memory, hunting something on the dark shallow bottom, among the rusted coins and fish shit. Finding the word, he pulled it out with a creak of his back and strangled it in the air, not leaving a single scale of Icelandic inflection in its production. “Bardabunga. That was the bugger.”
He sat at the table, in a mindful way, treating his spine like it was a string of unexploded bombs.
“Why are we even here?” said the voice from under the table.
* * *
Answers on a postcard to my doctor probably
