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9.27.2007
The brand new "d&a Gallery"
9.21.2007
A Lapilli of Ideas, Part 1
-Go up to someone and inform them that you enjoy taking walks in the park, and that you especially love to go swinging at the park.
-Tell someone that they look brighter than the sun. Point to the sky with one hand while saying this.
-Go outside and take a beautiful leaf and bury it in the ground. Go back a week later and dig it up and see if it is still there. If it is there, cover it back up while humming your favorite tune. If it isn't there, hum a not-so-favorite tune.
-Go outside and praise the sky and all of Mother Nature. Hug a tree and tell it that you love it. Tell the tree that you will never carve someone else's name into it, because you love it more than anything. (Make certain not to say, "...more than just about anything.")
-Carry a stone to a particular location and drop it there. Go back home (or to another location far from the stone) and paint what you remember of this incident. If you don't have paint, draw what you remember.
-Put your feet together. Keep them that way for a few minutes. Think about nothing else except the way your flesh feels as they are joined. How warm. How cold.
-Buy a new diary, or a new notebook. On every page, write the word Boundary. Each time you write this word make it larger or smaller than the previous page. When you have filled every page, send the diary to someone you love.
-Walk around your home one time. The next time you walk around your home, pretend that you are flying and hold your arms out by your side as if to mimic the actions of an airplane.
-The next time you "hear" an airplane/jet fly over-head, call someone you love and explain to them, in fine detail, what you just heard, and where and what you were doing at the time of this event.
-Go into a forest during the Winter and ask the ground if it needs to be warmed by the breath of One-hundred human-beings. Write down the ground's response on a piece of paper when you get home.
-Paint a picture that reminds you of the word, "Idylls."
-Go up to a stranger and tell them how beautiful they are. When you go to sleep that night, recall their reactions (whether positive or negative) and write down the very next dream that you have.
-Take a picture of a picture being planted, and then plant that picture. Pay close attention.
-Write a story about flowers and how they will eventually change the world. Relate the flowers to humans, especially someone in particular (but don't recall their name). Read the story to someone after you find it to be completed.
-Tear a piece of paper into fourths and send each piece to someone you know.
-Open Blinds as fast as you are able, while letting them "drop" back down just as fast, if not faster, and recall, in the best detail possible, what you saw and heard (other than the sound of the Blinds). Write it down. Send it to someone anonymously.
-Recollect a strange childhood experience and write it down. Send it to a loved one.
-Play a piano to the worst of your ability. Record it. Send the recordings out to various people explaining to them, in a small note, the "newest piano music" you "recently discovered." No matter the reactions to the music, explain to them that it is a "Masterpiece."
-Walk outside naked one cold morning for a couple of seconds. Run back inside as fast as possible, slightly yelling.
-After reading a book, send the book, completely altered by you, to a loved one.
-Cut off pieces of your hair. Go outside and walk around the neighborhood (or the areascape) spreading the pieces of the hair throughout. If you don't have hair, then you can skip this. If you would rather not skip this, then for plan B: Cut off the brissels of a broom and spread them throughout the neighborhood (or the areascape).
-Invite someone over for dinner to your home, noting a specific time. When they arrive, ask them (perplexingly) what they are doing at your home. Mention the "God-awful Hour" jokingly.
-Sit on a bed in a room with one light on and imagine yourself floating in the Milky Way (your eyes should stay closed), imagining the light to be the sun.
-Stay Mute for as long as possible (preferrably all day).
-Whisper into a bottle and close it up as quickly as possible before the whisper drifts out. Send the bottle to a loved one with "Bottle of A Whisper" or "Bottle of Whispers" written on it. The location depends upon your own choosing.
-Select something that someone gave you and give it back to them by either (a) Handing it to them or (b) Mailing it to them.
-Play a game of chess with someone. Before starting the game, forfeit one of your pieces. If you do not know how to play chess, then alter a game that you do know how to play by completely changing the rules. Play it with someone. Video-record, if possible. Send the recording to a loved one, or send/give it to the person you played with a few months later.
-Buy a postcard. Spray the postcard with an aroma. Send the postcard to your own address. When it arrives, tear it up and mail the pieces to a loved one.
-Touch a loved one's wrist. Close your eyes and hum the beat of their pulse. The loved one should listen to your stomach, while they hum the sounds that they hear coming from your stomach. Start a band this way.
-Smell a loved one's hair and ask them if they have ever searched for a needle in a haystack. Respond with only "yes" or "no" if they ask you questions following your question.
-Randomly show up at a loved one's home. Tell them that you have come over to merely touch the walls inside of their home. Once inside (if they let you in), follow thru with these actions, not answering any questions that they (or anyone else) asks you until you have rubbed your hand across many, if not all, of the walls in their home. Afterwards, ask them if they would be interested in a cup of coffee "later."
-Write "Idea" on a piece of paper. Fold it up and leave it somewhere in public where the possibility of someone finding it is high. Continue this trend for several times that same day.
-Buy paintings and other arty items from thrift stores. Alter them. Cut and paste them all together. Send the finished product to a loved one.
-Open a dictionary with your eyes closed. Pin-point, with your finger, a place on the page. Open your eyes. Recall the word that your finger is either "on" or "pointing to." Write down the word on a small piece of paper. Hang the piece of paper from your ceiling. Do this several times, hanging them all from the ceiling so that you have quite a few. Spread them apart from one another so that they aren't jumbled together in one location. Invite people over to see them. Or, wait until someone asks about them. If they begin reading the hanging words on their own, and if they ask questions about them, only "smile" as your answer.
-Tell someone that they look brighter than the sun. Point to the sky with one hand while saying this.
-Go outside and take a beautiful leaf and bury it in the ground. Go back a week later and dig it up and see if it is still there. If it is there, cover it back up while humming your favorite tune. If it isn't there, hum a not-so-favorite tune.
-Go outside and praise the sky and all of Mother Nature. Hug a tree and tell it that you love it. Tell the tree that you will never carve someone else's name into it, because you love it more than anything. (Make certain not to say, "...more than just about anything.")
-Carry a stone to a particular location and drop it there. Go back home (or to another location far from the stone) and paint what you remember of this incident. If you don't have paint, draw what you remember.
-Put your feet together. Keep them that way for a few minutes. Think about nothing else except the way your flesh feels as they are joined. How warm. How cold.
-Buy a new diary, or a new notebook. On every page, write the word Boundary. Each time you write this word make it larger or smaller than the previous page. When you have filled every page, send the diary to someone you love.
-Walk around your home one time. The next time you walk around your home, pretend that you are flying and hold your arms out by your side as if to mimic the actions of an airplane.
-The next time you "hear" an airplane/jet fly over-head, call someone you love and explain to them, in fine detail, what you just heard, and where and what you were doing at the time of this event.
-Go into a forest during the Winter and ask the ground if it needs to be warmed by the breath of One-hundred human-beings. Write down the ground's response on a piece of paper when you get home.
-Paint a picture that reminds you of the word, "Idylls."
-Go up to a stranger and tell them how beautiful they are. When you go to sleep that night, recall their reactions (whether positive or negative) and write down the very next dream that you have.
-Take a picture of a picture being planted, and then plant that picture. Pay close attention.
-Write a story about flowers and how they will eventually change the world. Relate the flowers to humans, especially someone in particular (but don't recall their name). Read the story to someone after you find it to be completed.
-Tear a piece of paper into fourths and send each piece to someone you know.
-Open Blinds as fast as you are able, while letting them "drop" back down just as fast, if not faster, and recall, in the best detail possible, what you saw and heard (other than the sound of the Blinds). Write it down. Send it to someone anonymously.
-Recollect a strange childhood experience and write it down. Send it to a loved one.
-Play a piano to the worst of your ability. Record it. Send the recordings out to various people explaining to them, in a small note, the "newest piano music" you "recently discovered." No matter the reactions to the music, explain to them that it is a "Masterpiece."
-Walk outside naked one cold morning for a couple of seconds. Run back inside as fast as possible, slightly yelling.
-After reading a book, send the book, completely altered by you, to a loved one.
-Cut off pieces of your hair. Go outside and walk around the neighborhood (or the areascape) spreading the pieces of the hair throughout. If you don't have hair, then you can skip this. If you would rather not skip this, then for plan B: Cut off the brissels of a broom and spread them throughout the neighborhood (or the areascape).
-Invite someone over for dinner to your home, noting a specific time. When they arrive, ask them (perplexingly) what they are doing at your home. Mention the "God-awful Hour" jokingly.
-Sit on a bed in a room with one light on and imagine yourself floating in the Milky Way (your eyes should stay closed), imagining the light to be the sun.
-Stay Mute for as long as possible (preferrably all day).
-Whisper into a bottle and close it up as quickly as possible before the whisper drifts out. Send the bottle to a loved one with "Bottle of A Whisper" or "Bottle of Whispers" written on it. The location depends upon your own choosing.
-Select something that someone gave you and give it back to them by either (a) Handing it to them or (b) Mailing it to them.
-Play a game of chess with someone. Before starting the game, forfeit one of your pieces. If you do not know how to play chess, then alter a game that you do know how to play by completely changing the rules. Play it with someone. Video-record, if possible. Send the recording to a loved one, or send/give it to the person you played with a few months later.
-Buy a postcard. Spray the postcard with an aroma. Send the postcard to your own address. When it arrives, tear it up and mail the pieces to a loved one.
-Touch a loved one's wrist. Close your eyes and hum the beat of their pulse. The loved one should listen to your stomach, while they hum the sounds that they hear coming from your stomach. Start a band this way.
-Smell a loved one's hair and ask them if they have ever searched for a needle in a haystack. Respond with only "yes" or "no" if they ask you questions following your question.
-Randomly show up at a loved one's home. Tell them that you have come over to merely touch the walls inside of their home. Once inside (if they let you in), follow thru with these actions, not answering any questions that they (or anyone else) asks you until you have rubbed your hand across many, if not all, of the walls in their home. Afterwards, ask them if they would be interested in a cup of coffee "later."
-Write "Idea" on a piece of paper. Fold it up and leave it somewhere in public where the possibility of someone finding it is high. Continue this trend for several times that same day.
-Buy paintings and other arty items from thrift stores. Alter them. Cut and paste them all together. Send the finished product to a loved one.
-Open a dictionary with your eyes closed. Pin-point, with your finger, a place on the page. Open your eyes. Recall the word that your finger is either "on" or "pointing to." Write down the word on a small piece of paper. Hang the piece of paper from your ceiling. Do this several times, hanging them all from the ceiling so that you have quite a few. Spread them apart from one another so that they aren't jumbled together in one location. Invite people over to see them. Or, wait until someone asks about them. If they begin reading the hanging words on their own, and if they ask questions about them, only "smile" as your answer.
9.04.2007
Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (with Pink Floyd, of course)
The Dramatic conclusion to "Zabriskie Point", and one of the greatest final scenes in film-history.
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Michelangelo Antonioni's "greatest triumph", Zabriskie Point
Text from Here: Zabriskie Point was to be Michelangelo Antonioni's greatest triumph, a crowning achievement in an already seminal body of work and a bold affirmation of his commercial ascendance in America. (...) The real star of Zabriskie Point, however, is the desolate, parched-white landscape of Death Valley, in particular the vista from Zabriskie Point, the desert lookout that gives the movie its name and where Frechette and Halprin consummate their brief relationship in a hallucinatory sex scene. It is an eerie, skeletal expanse of stony ridges and dry stream beds, stunning in its ancient, unearthly emptiness. And the climactic explosion of the opulent desert retreat belonging to the real estate tycoon played by Rod Taylor -- a fit of imaginary vengeance envisioned by Halprin over and over in her mind's eye after she hears of Frechette's death at the hands of the L.A. police -- is spectacular in its composition and compelling, repetitive effect.
But nothing symbolizes the grand designs Antonioni had for Zabriskie Point more -- and the lengths to which he would go to achieve his ends -- than the movie's musical soundtrack, a remarkable mélange of abstract sound sculpture, expansive solo-guitar reveries, full-blown psychedelic rock, old-time country ballads, and 1950s jukebox corn. Even Easy Rider, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper's 1969 smash about two bikers on an ill-fated cross-country odyssey, featured a relatively orthodox rock soundtrack comprised of music (by Jimi Hendrix, The Band, and Steppenwolf, among others) that Fonda pulled from his personal record collection. In Zabriskie Point -- a film about the collision of youthful innocence, hardboiled commerce, and social mutiny -- bizarre bedfellows such as Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, the Eisenhower-era siren Patti Page, the brilliant guitarist John Fahey, the ethnic-folk-rock fusion band Kaleidoscope, and the hillbilly country singer Roscoe Holcomb could all be heard in strange but effective juxtaposition.
As he did in Blow-Up (which boasted a Blue Note-style jazz score by the pianist Herbie Hancock and a fiery cameo by The Yardbirds), Antonioni used music sparingly in Zabriskie Point, with meticulous attention to placement. A spacious instrumental fragment of The Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" -- just over two minutes taken from a 23-minute concert performance on the 1970 album Live/Dead -- can be heard as Frechette pilots his stolen plane over L.A. A short taste of "Sugar Babe" by The Youngbloods, from the band's 1967 LP Earth Music, plays on a car radio as the lithe and beautiful Halprin first meets Frechette out in the desert. And Halprin hears a disc jockey announce Fahey's "Dance Of Death," a 1964 recording from his Takoma album The Dance Of Death & Other Plantation Favorites, following a radio news report of Frechette's demise.
That radio voiceover was done by Don Hall, a real-life DJ who was holding down the prime-time evening shift at the L.A. underground station KPPC-FM in 1969 when he was approached by Antonioni, through a mutual acquaintance, to work on Zabriskie Point as music coordinator. It was Hall, to a large degree, who brought the catholic vitality of late '60s free-form FM radio to bear on the Zabriskie Point score. "There was no idea, when we were doing the film, that a rock soundtrack meant everything had to be hard, intense, electric music," says Hall, who was officially hired by M-G-M as an A&R executive and company liaison with Antonioni. "I was trying to do a soundtrack using the many different types of music that were being played on FM radio at the time." Many of the previously recorded pieces heard in Zabriskie Point -- "Dark Star," "Sugar Babe," Roscoe Holcomb's jaunty, Appalachian-back-porch rendition of "I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again" -- came from Hall's playlist of personal favorites. One of his earliest suggestions to Antonioni was to use in the desert-jukebox scene Patti Page's sweetly old-fashioned "Tennessee Waltz," written by country songmen Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart in 1948 and recorded by Page two years later for Mercury.
In its original, 11-track vinyl release on the M-G-M label, the Zabriskie Point soundtrack was a testament to Antonioni's deep research of and appreciation for pop music, not to mention his excellent taste. Pink Floyd's "Heart Beat, Pig Meat," heard during the film's opening credits as a radical-student meeting is in process, effectively sets the scene's tone of menace and cross talk with a naked, foreboding pulse-beat and a disruptive sequence of television and radio sound bites. "Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up" is a cryptically titled remake of the Floyd's volcanic 1968 B-side "Careful With That Axe, Eugene." But its bonfire sound -- all roaring guitars, crashing drums, and death-throe screaming -- is the perfect complement to the movie's cataclysmic finish. The extended piece by The Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, a solo-guitar improvisation accompanying the love scene, is not just a highlight of the film -- Garcia's fluid melodicism and elegant, crystalline picking make "Love Scene" one of the finest studio performances of his career.
This lavishly expanded reissue edition of the Zabriskie Point soundtrack -- boasting previously unissued tracks by Pink Floyd and four exquisite outtakes of Garcia's "Love Scene" (the final version is a composite of edits from the full-length improvisations) -- documents in even greater depth the vision and labor that went into the movie's music. In discussing the cinematography of Zabriskie Point, specifically the use of colors, Antonioni once said, "You cannot argue that a film is bad but that the color is good or vice versa. The image is a fact, the colors are the story."
The music created and compiled for Zabriskie Point is an essential part of the film's story -- and one of its saving graces. To listen to it now is to wonder again: How did everything else about the movie go so wrong? Chester Crill, the singer, violinist, and keyboard player for Kaleidoscope, remembers all too well the preview screening at which he saw Zabriskie Point. "When it was over," he says, "there wasn't a person who left that was looking anyone else in the eye. It was the most embarrassing thing that I'd ever been to. Everybody just slunk away."
9.02.2007
If
If I could marry words, I would. Letters falling down the back of my neck: Full-body Language tuxedo. Shiny shoes, marble heiroglyphics. The alter, filled with alphabetics and language, of all genres and types. Standing there, eyes adjusting to the letters of words and all of the letters' family and words' family who would join us, all of us there, at the ceremony. Dictionaries would be alive with grace and glee. I'd smile, my teeth made of words: proverbs, hypertextuality, cut-up and diced texts, expressive-unexpressions of unknown language yet to be discovered. Paragraphs and adjectives as flower-girls. Words, sentences and paragraphs in foreign languages wrapped into one complete ring, for each of us. The minister, a large question mark, pronouncing us the prouncement of what textuality exists of; Humanity to Language, Language to Humanity. A cathedral of Conversings. The love of words and I; sentences and I; paragraphs and I; chapters and I; Language and I: together, adjoined, fully and thoroughly. If I could marry words, I would.
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