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Pictures Of The Old World

Published March 26, 2019 by Warren Ellis

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)

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26mar19

Published March 26, 2019 by Warren Ellis

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SCAV: Morphing Clouds V

Published March 26, 2019 by Warren Ellis

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.

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22mar19

Published March 22, 2019 by Warren Ellis

Gonna be a day. Have a weatherchicken.

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QUOTES: Premourning

Published March 21, 2019 by Warren Ellis

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.

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NIGHT MUSIC: The Monk By The Sea

Published March 19, 2019 by Warren Ellis

https://soundcloud.com/themonkbythesea/shadows

One of those SoundCloud regulars I enjoy so much. Nice to find a piece by the Monk at the end of my day.

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When You’re Fairly Sure You Don’t Have Blackouts, But

Published March 18, 2019 by Warren Ellis

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

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Published March 12, 2019 by Warren Ellis

could the last person in Brexit Britain with access to electricity please turn out the lights, just as, you know, a symbolic thing, while the rest of us huddle under The Hanging Tree trying to chew open a can of chickpeas that expired in 1983

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Comics Are The Ghost Train

Published March 10, 2019 by Warren Ellis

I like trains. I like sitting by the window, the big windowframe of British trains, the glass panel that frames the outside world. Sometimes the train is still and another train clatters past, and my panel becomes a panel from “Master Race,” the short comic written by Al Feldstein and legendary for its illustration by Bernard Krigstein. One of the many effects in that eight-page comic that had never been seen before included a view of a slowing train, the motion communicated by slicing and repeating the view of people behind the train’s window glass, a convincing evocation of the experience in a static medium. A panel about a panel containing strobing strips of another panel.

Which is the sort of thing that, if you think about it for too long, makes a comics writer want to start drinking. But I seem to be on the train from Southend Victoria to Liverpool Street in London, and there’s no refreshments service.

The lights flicker. Bloody British Rail. As the lights brown out, there’s a strobing, transparent figure at the window, waving his arms. A black fringe of a beard, glasses with large black frames. Bernard Krigstein, circa 1955. I recognise him from photos with Harvey Kurtzman. He seems very concerned with the frame of the window, here in the flicker and strobe. This is what he says:

“Each panel must exist by itself. And the thing that makes a comic page different from every other day in the year is that each of these individual works of art, at the same time as they have a totally individual life of their own, also exist as a total group, as a unit. This was my inspiring motivation in doing comics. If you can pull out your panel and frame it, exhibit it as a panel, and then have the reader unconscious of that as he’s reading the totality, then you’ve done something, in my estimation. You’ve raised comic book art to the level of Goya, if you can achieve that.” *

(A fragment of a thought that I found in my files today. Probably ten years old.)

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