In The Believer is a conversation that took place at Brandeis University in the fall of 2007, moderated by Alice Arshalooys Kelikian. And this is the best conversation I have ever read:
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. The intention is to put the audience in some kind of odd reality. [To moderator] Werner certainly shares this. It’s the perverse element in filmmaking. Werner in his “Minnesota Manifesto” starts talking about ecstatic truth. I have no idea what he’s talking about.
But what I do understand in his films is a kind of ecstatic absurdity, things that make you question the nature of reality, of the universe in which we live. We think we understand the world around us. We look at a Herzog film, and we think twice. And I always, always have revered that element. Ecstatic absurdity: it’s the confrontation with meaninglessness.
I was talking with Ron Rosenbaum, a friend of mine, who had just finished a book on Shakespeare. We were talking about the meaning of meaninglessness. Is there such a thing? And I would say: yes. Werner’s work could be considered an extended essay on the meaning of meaninglessness.
WERNER HERZOG: Thank you, yes. It feels good to hear that. [Laughter]
Later:
WH: [. . .] And I said that we were going to do a film there in Plainfield, and that really upset Errol a lot. He thought I was a thief without loot. This was his country, his territory, his Plainfield, and I shot in Plainfield. I shot a film, Stroszek, which I think is forgotten and forgiven by now, and we can maintain friendship over this now.
EM: I told Werner: For you to steal a character or a story isn’t real theft. But to steal a landscape, that is a very, very serious crime.
WH: I understand that. I take it to heart, but there actually is a film out there, and we can’t take it off the map.
EM: It’s a very good film.
WH: It has a beautiful end with a dancing chicken, and I really like it.
BACK in the 1970s, a gutsy blonde named Jill Freedman armed with a battered Leica M4 and an eye for the offbeat trained her lens on the spirited characters and gritty sidewalks of a now-extinct city.
Side note: WTF does nyt think it is doing with the video features? You can’t have your average print journalist produce a video (though they seem to do fine moving to the radio docu style as seen in the “audio slide shows”).
But Hofmann’s life had already been altered. LSD and the other psychoactive drugs “changed my life, insofar as they provided me with a new concept about what reality is,” he said. “Before, I had believed there was only one reality: the reality of everyday life.
“Under LSD, however, I entered into realities which were as real and even more real than the one of everyday.” He also “became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature and of the plant and animal kingdom. I became very sensitive to what will happen to all this and all of us.”
In the last ten years or so the trumpet has been enjoying a renaissance. There are a number of gifted and innovative trumpet players the world over deconstructing, reinventing and rethinking the instrument in myriad ways. In the ’80s when John Zorn was doing mouthpiece-only duck calls and blowing his sax into a bucket of water, the trumpeters were still playing somewhat straight. I suppose it was only a matter of time. What follows is a sample of the breadth of solo trumpet sounds percolating away.
I hate “new jazz”. This is not new jazz, this is some great experimental music. Be sure to check the Mazen Kerbaj as well as Peter Evans.
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV
Basically, it’s the story of Thomas’s doomed attempt to interview Ballard. He takes a taxi to Shepperton, and before he knows it is in a parallel dimension, being driven by a gruff hoodlum with clear contempt for his passenger.
The starting point with this project was a personal study about form & time. I put together more than 150 individual clockworks and made them work together to become one clock. I show the progress of time by letting the numbers be written in words by the clockworks. Reading clockwise, the time being is visible through a word and readable by the completeness of the word, 12 words from “one” to “twelve”.
Check his webpage for an animation of it in action.
