Category Archives: dream
some nights
Some nights, rabbits dream of being caught by wolves.
kate bush – wuthering heights
Official music video (version 1) for the single “Wuthering Heights” – Kate’s debut single. Released in January 1978, it became a No.1 hit in the UK singles chart and remains Kate’s biggest-selling single. The song appears on Kate’s 1978 debut album, The Kick Inside, and was also re-recorded in 1986 for the greatest-hits album The Whole Story.
…
by Alison Scarpulla
jolie holland – springtime can kill you
broken harbors
Stars of the Lid – “Broken Harbors” (Parts 1, 2 & 3) from The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid (Kranky, 2001)
Tom Jurek, writing for AllMusic, said of this recording:
Having always made records that exist at the margins of descriptive language, this project by Austin, Texas’ most spaced-out duo, Stars of the Lid, is their most ambitious to date, featuring 11 tracks parcelled over two CDs (or three LPs), four of which are multi-part suites. Taking a step further down the road they embarked upon with Avec Laudanum, the duo have expanded the pure space and black hole vistas they offered on Music for Nitrous Oxide and The Ballasted Orchestra to embrace small melodic fragments that seemingly endlessly repeat through minimally varying textures. The effect can either be soothing (“Requiem for Dying Mothers”), hypnotic (“Broken Harbors”), or unsettling (“Austin Texas Mental Hospital”). The trademark analogue guitar/tape cut ups are ever present; what would normally be considered the sound of a guitar is nowhere in aural earshot…
…There is a progression in all the music here, but it is so subtle, so quiet and unintrusive, the listener would have to pay very careful attention to everything that is happening. More realistic, however, is for those who take pleasure in SOTL’s music and inner space explorations — for this truly is a music of the inner terrain — to offer themselves little distraction other than a comfortable chair or resting place in order to let this music enter at will, naturally and expand until it takes you over the edge into something resembling sleep, but far more delicious. Despite its more song-like structures, More Tired Songs is actually for those who are tired of songs, period, and are looking for something less, something unspeakably beautiful and determinedly unmentionable in its vast and luxuriant erasure from any musical category.
wish you were here by catherine anyango
(for scott of the antarctic)
jeffrey lewis – to be objectified
I left a trail of myself every place that I have been through,
And going bald is the most manly thing that I’m ever gonna do.
I tell the earth, “thanks for the hair, thanks for the skin, thanks for the bone”,
Though I now slowly give it back I still appreciate the loan.
Just tell me that you like me in the same sentence as a mountain side.
‘Cause it would be such a relief to be objectified.
‘Cause who says it’s so important to sort through these thoughts of ours.
Maybe that’s why we love to try to see ourselves from the outside
In photographs and videos and diaries and mirrors.
‘Cause it would be such a relief to be objectified.
And the closest that I ever got still seems to leave a lot to go,
But the horizon seems to be a place that nobody can know.
Looking forth and looking back, our vision can’t extend beyond the quaint vanishing points our bodies recommend,
And I’ll help you move some furniture somewhere it’s never been before, but the room’s so small the dresser drawer won’t let us get back out the door.
Just tell me that you like me in the same sentence as the building.
It would be such a relief to see…
I’m just a natural thing.
We’re only boats,
And the boats are only empty
And you can’t blame an empty boat that’s on a river to the sea.
You can’t blame a billion boats without a sail, without a sailor.
And that’s how we look in photographs, and diaries, and mirrors.
And the plants turn into ants, and the ants turn into plants,
And children are clumsy people, and old people are rotting children.
And I still don’t have a cell phone, but this sea shell gets reception,
And the ocean won’t stop calling, and I want a restraining order.
Just tell me that you like me in the same sentence as a building.
It would be such a relief to see I’m just a natural thing.
We’re just a natural thing.
Just like anything.
sofia coppola – from “the virgin suicides” (1999)
Narrator:
So much has been said about the girls over the years. But we have never found an answer. It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls… but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling… still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them from out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time… and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together…
From Cecilia Lisbon’s diary:
Lux lost it over Kevin Haines, the garbage man. She’d wake up at five in the morning
and hang out on the front steps – like it wasn’t completely obvious.
She wrote his name in marker on all her underwear. Mom found them and bleached out the Kevins.
Lux was crying on her bed all day.
The trees like lungs filling with air.
My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.
Narrator:
And so we started to learn about their lives, coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced.
We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind dreamy… so you ended up knowing
what colours went together.
We knew the girls were really women in disguise… that they understood love and even death… and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.
We knew that they knew everything about us. And that we couldn’t fathom them at all.
Screenplay based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.
albane simon/dyn – eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Albane Simon/DyN – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
More warped collages HERE.
thoughts on pasolini talking about montage and death
Cinema is identical to life, because each one of us has a virtual and invisible camera which follows us from when we’re born to when we die. In reality, cinema is an infinite film sequence-shot. Each individual film interrupts and rearranges this infinite sequence-shot and thus creates meaning, which is what happens to us when we die. It is only at our moment of death that our life, to that point undecipherable, ambiguous, suspended, acquires a meaning. Montage thus plays the same role in cinema as death does in life.
~ Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Ora tutto è chiaro, voluto, non imposto dal destino”, Cineforum 68 October 1967, p. 609. 
I have been thinking about the similarities between editing and blogging, about how in juxtaposition meaning comes to light, and this comment from Pasolini that I just came across resonated with my thoughts. An online archive of everyday apprehension, a place to pin the things floating amorphous just behind my eyes… It is powerfully transformative to be able to reflect, live, with others, on chains of thoughts, connections, coincidences, concatenations… More powerful for clarity than a diary. Although the public nature of this grappling is uncomfortable for me, it prevents me from dismissing my thoughts as solipsistic delusions, something to which I am prone, especially because sketching them out in a simple A to B trajectory is often impossible, rendering attempts at expression incomprehensible to others in ordinary conversation.
What I like about the montage inherent in blogging, as distinct from other more traditional types of montage, is that the possibilities of hypertext allow me not to foreclose other meanings, not to narrow connections and paths of interpretation down, as is inevitable when making a film, or a music mix, or any object concrete and discrete in itself. The intertextual permeability and wild openness of virtuality is so exciting in this sense… The possibility of creating and reshaping meaning without having to be final or definitive, which necessarily involves the murder of other meanings in the process… This I love, though it makes me dizzy.
kunoichi ninpocho – vajayjay magic #1
From the first volume of the infamous “Female Ninjas Magic Chronicles” series (1991). Oyui shows a band of Iga ninja what’s up her wizard sleeve.
daughter – peter
“Peter” from Daughter (Elena Tonra). Tales From Shop Session, filmed in Bristol by Tom Swindell, 2010.
motel7 – “daydreamers”
Solo Exhibition at 34FineArt, Cape Town
16 October 2012 – 10 November 2012
After her initial solo exhibition,Tears and Castles, at 34 Long Fine Art in 2009, Motel7 left South Africa to work in Europe and America. Having returned to South Africa she has reclaimed her position on the streets and in the Gallery environment.
Having worked in traditional mediums from an early age, Motel7 moved through the ranks of graffiti to street art and like many international artists, such as Banksy, Mr. Brainwash, Miss Van, Blek le Rat, D*Face and Nick Walker, she has secured her position as an acclaimed urban contemporary artist. Since then her work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the Basel Art Fairs, as well as galleries in Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Motel7 continues to hone her skills in urban spaces whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself.
Increasingly street artists occupy both urban and fine art environments. In cities like Cape Town, where street art is still illegal, artworks seldom remain on the walls for long enough to be fully appreciated before being cleaned off or defaced. Ironically, while the value of works in urban spaces is often overlooked, within the gallery environment these same works are approached with a more appreciative eye.
Daydreamers, Motel7’s second solo show, affirms the ease with which she straddles the divide between urban and gallery spaces – where the traditional process of work progressing from gallery environment to museum or public commission, is reversed. The exhibition is presented in her unique visual idiom, built-up over years of working in a challenging environment. The seemingly juxtaposed images of sculls, toys, fruit and sweets are complimented by the vintage quality of the paintings… it’s all about symbolizing daydreaming and nostalgia and the past.
Street art and graffiti are closely associated, but are often regarded as vandalism – evidence of urban decay – in stark contrast to gallery art, which is seen as the epitome of artistic achievement. Daydreamers demonstrates that it is not these works themselves which are different, but rather the contexts within which they are viewed.
Don’t miss the opening reception on 16 October. Find out more HERE.
cherry bomb – gouttes mécaniques (mechanical teardrops) – 2008
egghead (2004)
I sleep with one eye open, so I can see them coming.
I can’t get away, but at least I can see them coming and steel myself.
Ideas like bunnies fuck me in my bed.
Sometimes they bounce in uninvited, coquettish, and it’s almost fun. They keep me up till morning. I writhe, giggle hysterically, chase them pillow to post. Fluff tickles, a humid sneeze, and I’m knocked up, swelling anaphylactically. On colder nights I’m gang-raped, tied down and stabbed, bloating with high-pressure jets of rabid spores.
However it happens, the thoughts germinate in swarms, another and another and another sprouting.
I’m weepy again. Exhausted.
I don’t want the mutants that grow from these unions. I wish there was a contraceptive. A chastity belt. Anything to stop this brood, to render my imagination infertile. The pills are useless.
I can feel my chemistry changing inexorably as the cells divide. Thalidomide embryos kick with vestigial limbs, opposable pink stubs. Leprous digits dropping off and repropagating like mitotic cacti. Opaque eyes, squamous ear buds, mouths filmed over with milky membrane. Foreheads bulging with gestating thoughts trapped in undifferentiated tissue, crying out restlessly in underwater bubbles before they can even breathe. They’re so ugly!
Fruitless and multiplying.
I have to abort them all.
Distended oxygen thieves.
They mustn’t breathe.
They mustn’t breed.
Halt the assembly line!
I wish I could give these little niggling creations a chance, the benefit of my doubt. Wish I were able to carry them to term, to quietly, patiently allow them to ripen inside me till they could live by themselves. If only human nature could be allowed to take its organicky course… I cry for their inchoateness as I spew them out. It seems such a pity that I’m allergic to them.
Yes, they’re poisoning me.
Yes, I make myself sick.
Yellow serum oozes the truth of what I’m doing. I’m bleeding inside, putrescing slowly.
Maybe I’ve succeeded this time in gouging free? I wonder every time if what I’ve done will make me barren.
But no, the root won’t be cauterised. I still malfunction just fine afterwards. Each time I pick at the raw scab over the umbilical entrance, each time I lance the pus, another swelling surfaces elsewhere, ballooning mercilessly with the filth that I’m never able to excise completely, swimming with stillborn nonsense.
I’m leaking rotten discharge out of every opening. I don’t even try to hide the bulimic blurts any more. Everyone knows. I can’t stay home ALL the time. I’ve become inured to their “Shut up!” “Shut up!”… I like to believe they’d be more sympathetic if only they understood the advanced state of septicaemia I’m living with. Then again, no one likes someone else’s bloody vomit on their shoes I s’pose… They recoil, grimaces masked with grins.
I smile beatifically.
Plop!
Another black clot of afterthought.
Malformed.
Malignant.
It smells disgusting.
And oh, the cramp!
The nausea rises, throbbing.
Heave. Swallow. Metallic post-nasal drip.
Rises again…
I can’t down another millilitre of this bloody mucus, eat one more word.
BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA
Sorry.
I’ll go home now.
Lock the door.
Lie down. Palms up.
Oh it’s quiet.
Teeth chattering.
SHUT UP!
Baby talk.
Stupidness.
Stupor.
Smooth and cool… So serene. So sterile for a few moments.
But the sweet stench is creeping back. I turn on my side, hug my legs up to my chest. And my cheek is wet with the dark patch spreading on my sheets. Squirming with infection, with congealing dread. I scrub and scrub, but the stain is under my nails.
So? I’ll paint them vamp red then.
I click on the hundred-watt bulb, swinging futile against the darkness, awaiting the cuddly incubi’s return. I can hear them breathing behind the curtains.
First published at http://www.africans.co.za, april 22, 2004
moon and flying snow
Beautiful fight scene between Moon (Zhang Ziyi) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) in the yellow forest from the extended version of the movie “Hero”
Hero was first released in China on October 24, 2002. At that time, it was the most expensive project and the highest-grossing motion picture in Chinese film history.
drawings by chaos magician austin osman spare
“London has harboured many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956). A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said, “Spare’s medicine is too strong for the average man”.
But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality.”
I particularly adore his automatic drawings and his drawings of robust, strong women. He was certainly a figure drawing master.
His writings about magic was groundbreaking. Read his Book of Pleasure here.
His writing on automatic drawing here.
the awakening of adonis
1900, by JW Waterhouse
le journal de personne – not even in your dreams!
I am a woman – quite real – to myself
and all that is most virtual to others
accessible to myself
inaccessible to all the others
what is it that separates me from the others?
the veil of Maya, say some
the unbearable lightness of being, say others
illusions and allusions
there you have it, what protects us, the one and the others
what separates us, the ones from the others
to a friend who insisted on seeing me, I said, “not even in your dreams”
she took it badly and eclipsed herself from my mind
i was mistaken, badly mistaken, I should have told her
in dreams, why not, but not in real life
some hidden meaning… some secret meaning… some sacred meaning…
there you have it, what comprises Mystery
my life and I, we will always be out of reach
intimate intimity
Chimène* or Chimera
since ancient times the emphasis was always on the duplicity of all living things
am I a person or a personality?
real or virtual?
existence or excellence?
that I am Nobody makes my character more enigmatic but at the same time more consistent
it is paradoxical, but all who are tempted by infinity will know what I am saying
will push themselves to question Orpheus anew. He descended into hell to save Eurydice. Imagine the pain he put himself through. No, you can’t imagine, because it is unimaginable. And at the moment of returning to the surface, when he was in front and she behind him, the gods forbade him to turn around until they were both together at the other side of the barrier, on the human side, but Orpheus couldn’t restrain himself; he turned around, and lost Eurydice forever
* literary character signifying obsessive passion
(Thanks to Martin Jacklin for help with this translation. Original text HERE.)
sleep soundly; dream loudly
Graffiti under the flyover, Roeland Street, Cape Town
March 2012. Photo: Rosemary Lombard
amália rodrigues – barco negro
Amália Rodrigues sings the fado “Barco Negro” in a scene from Henri Verneuil’s 1955 film LES AMANTS DU TAGE.
Translation of the French conversation in the scene (which paraphrases the Portuguese lyrics of the song being performed by Amália behind it):
Child — Do you like it?
Woman — Very much. I’m sorry I don’t understand Portuguese. It must be beautiful.
Child — It’s the wife of a fisherman who died at sea. She goes down to the beach every night and talks to him as if he were alive. She tells him… She tells him… love things.
Man — [paraphrasing the singer] “I woke up this morning trembling next to you, afraid that I was less beautiful than yesterday. But your eyes told me, ‘No.’
“When you opened the door, the sun was gliding along the sea and your black boat was dancing in the light. Standing on the rocks, I saw you hoist sail and turn towards the open sea, while waving happily.
“The women praying at night along the shore say that you never returned. Madwomen, my love, madwomen! You never left. You’re everywhere around me, as always… In the wind, throwing sand against the windowpanes; in the water, singing on the fire; in the empty chair, staring at me; in the dark of the hearth; in the warmth of the bed; in the crook of my shoulder… You are there always. Always there. Always.”
the cure – catch
william butler yeats – a crazed girl
That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling, she knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved, hungry sea.’
elizabeth barrett browning – a musical instrument
What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
High on the shore sat the great god Pan
While turbidly flowed the river;
And hacked and hewed as a great god can,
With his hard bleak steel at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of the leaf indeed
To prove it fresh from the river.
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
‘This is the way,’ laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
‘The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.’
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, —
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
fleurmach 