‘Allegedly, the story goes like this.
Billy Wilder runs into Louis Malle. This was in the late 60s, early 70s.
And Louis Malle had just made his most expensive film, which had cost two million dollars.
And Billy Wilder asks him what the film is about.
And Louis Malle says, “It’s sort of a dream within a dream.”
And Billy Wilder says, “You just lost two million dollars.”’
- Steven Soderbergh, in Waking Life
Today Solidarity Federation, Bloomsbury Fightback and a number of other groups have called for a solidarity protest over the continued harrassment of two of their workers involved in union activity, Andrej and Rodrigo. These two workers established the Pret A Manger Staff Union and for…
She’s in Kuala Lumpur, they told me. She was “flyin’ or drivin’ or playin’ every day,” so a phone call was out, Skype was out. Face-to-face was definitely out. So I emailed my questions to Maria Minerva, the Estonian singer-producer making dreamy, hazy lo-fi chillwave for Not Not Fun and 100% Silk; former Wire magazine intern and Goldsmiths Aural and Visual Cultures graduate, now working with blissed out disco diva LA Vampires.
That was in August. Two months went by and no response. My editor is sending panicked follow-up emails. Hello? Is anyone there? Ms. Minerva is missing, presumed lost in a transatlantic wormhole, last heard of heading for soundcheck at a venue somewhere in the eye of the Bermuda Triangle. These things happen.
Eventually, our response comes – as if out of the blue, out of the ether; or, as it happens, out of a laundrette in Williamsburg. But then what’s two and a half months to someone who seems to live in a perpetual twilight world, on the cusp of the past and the future, channelling sounds from every TV in the background of every science fiction film, filtered through the bleary-eyed reverb-smear of endless jetlag?
It was less than eighteen months ago that Maria Minerva burst onto the scene with a series of tapes and 12"s which quickly attracted attention from the likes of Simon Reynolds, The Guardian, Pitchfork and Vogue. Before long she was on the road, touring everywhere from, well, Kuala Lumpur to Williamsburg …
It seems appropriate somehow to picture you in this very faraway country that I’ve never been to and can scarcely imagine. Your music always strikes me as being strangely far-away and dislocated, out of place somehow. Does travelling inspire you, musically?
Talk about airports… I have found myself at an airport eating overpriced food at 7 am in the morning SO MANY TIMES in the last one and a half years. Time I will never get back. Time I would have preferred to spend with my two year-old sister who barely knows who I am because I left home when she was born. Travelling does not inspire me, it frustrates me. I have just arrived in New York City from London via Australia-New Zealand-rest of USA (was touring the country) and I have not had a desk for 3 months now. I cannot work. I travel alone, it gets lonely. I have found out a lot about my bodily rhythms and myself though, because being caught between time zones and eating regimes teaches you – something. I have learned how to cope with all this but recently I noticed how I freak out when I hear the loud hand-dryer sound. It just reminds me of airports. It reminds me of arriving somewhere by myself, body sore and tired from being stuck on a plane, looking like shit. I go to the restroom, apply make up, brush my teeth, stare at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I am not feeling so good… then the annoying, loud and reverbed-out hand-dryer sound that just emphasises this miserable state. When you have been flying almost every day for two and a half weeks, it is SO LOUD it hurts.
Read the full interview at The Line of Best Fit
In the long history of love songs the attention of a beautiful woman has been compared to many things – but perhaps only in Pakistan’s tribal belt would it be likened to the deadly missile strike of a remotely controlled US drone.
In a sign of how the routine hunting down and killing of militants by unmanned CIA planes has leached into the popular imagination, drones have been given a starring role in a new romantic song.
In most respects the track, which is proving popular in the largely Pashtun city of Peshawar, is faithful to standard themes of the genre. The lyrics mention rosebuds and wine. o blaring music it celebrates the allures of a temptress with “sweet lips” and a “smile fresh as early dew” which “ensnares lovers with amorous pangs”.
Then the repeated chorus: “My gaze is as fatal as a drone attack”.
Pakistan drone attack love song racks up YouTube hits - The Guardian
za kaom pa stargo stargo drone hamla - Da Khkulo Badshahi Da Film Song - Dua Qureshi (by tungtakordotcom)
(Source: youtube.com)
Caché | Michael Haneke | 2005
(Source: theartofmoviestills, via cinemaissatanschurch)
TweetTweetThe epigraph to Alfred Schmidt’s ‘The Concept of Nature in Marx’ #marx #nature
Orson Welles, unlike Eisenstein and Dreyer, has never considered film as a plastic object but rather as a duration, something which unwinds like a ribbon; he has defined film, in fact, as “a ribbon of dreams.” - François Truffaut
(via godot-et-merault-deactivated201)
TweetTweetErik Satie et Picabia dans une courte scène du film Entr’acte réalisé par René Clair en 1924