Denisa Dvorakova

ph: Andreas Larsson

Indeterminacy 167

Mr. Romanoff is in the mushroom class.
He is a pharmacist
and takes color slides of the fungi
we find. It was he
who picked up a mushroom I brought to
the first meeting of the class at the
New School, smelled it,
and said, “Has
anyone perfumed this mushroom?” Lois
Long said, “I don’t think
so.” With each plant Mr. Romanoff’s
pleasure is, as one might
say, like that of a child.
(However,
now and then children come on the
field trips and they don’t
show particular delight over what is
found. They try
to attract attention to themselves.)
Mr. Romanoff
said the other day,
“Life is the sum total of all the
little things that happen.”
Mr. Nearing smiled.

- John Cage

Caroline Trentini

The Dark Knight (2008)

This time the Caped Crusader is confronted with his arch enemy, The Joker, and the conflict threatens not only his friends and loved ones but the whole Gotham City as well.

Yeah, it took me this long to finally see the movie, thanks to Lovefilm's irrational policies. The DVD copy I got was pretty bad.

I do not think that The Dark Knight is that much better than Batman Begins, both are equally excellent as adaptations of the Batman story. However, Heath Ledger as the Joker has really managed to create this character into a truly disturbing menacing villain. His part alone lifts this movie above anything previous Batman adaptations have achieved.

The Joker (to Batman): "“Don’t talk like one of them, you’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak–like me. They need you right now. When they don’t…they’ll cast you out. Like a leper. See, their morals, their code: it’s a bad joke. They’re dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see, when the chips are down these civilized people will eat each other.”

"You… you just couldn’t let me go could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You are truly incorruptable aren’t you. You won’t kill me because of some misplaced sense of self-rightousness. And I won’t kill you because…you’re just too much fun. I get the feeling that you and I are destined to do this forever."

Who's That Girl?

New stuff

A Scan a Day

Censored

(click to enlarge)

Even non-nudes are sometimes too much for the censors at Photobucket...

Jean Seberg

Indeterminacy 14

We’ve now played the Winter Music
quite a number of times. I
haven’t kept count. When we
first played it, the silences seemed
very long and the sounds seemed really
separated in space, not obstructing
one another. In Stockholm,
however, when we played it at the Opera
as an interlude in the dance program
given by Merce Cunningham and Carolyn
Brown early one October, I noticed
that it had become melodic.
Christian Wolff prophesied this to me
years ago. He said — we
were walking along Seventeenth Street
talking — he said, “No
matter what we do it ends by
being melodic.” As far as I
am concerned this happened to Webern
years ago. Karlheinz
Stockhausen once told me — we were in
Copenhagen — “I demand two
things from a composer:
invention and that he astonish me.”

- John Cage

Sharon Tate

New stuff

Who's That Girl?

A Song a Day

Slowdive - Losing Today

Last show ever at Lee's Palace, Toronto, 21st May 1994

Sometimes I'm sceptical about the term shoegaze. First of all, bands like Sonic Youth were performing 'shoegaze' sytle (standing on one spot and staring at their feet) long before the genre got its moniker. And then I find that My Bloody Valentine, the most influential shoegaze band, was about noise.

However, most shoegaze bands tend to produce quite mellifluous music, and I assume it's Slowdive's influence. Nevertheless, Slowdive's music has a hypnotizing quality to it, and I assume live and loud it was be just as angelic as My Bloody Valentine's stuff.



In a corner
She sits and waits
She's waiting for
Her heart to break

It says it all

Don't lose today

Kate Moss irrégulière

Indeterminacy 73

Xenia told me once

that when she was a
child
in
Alaska,

she and her friends

had a club

and there was only


one

rule:




No

silliness.

- John Cage

Carmen Solomons

New stuff

(amazingly bad cover for a DVD)

Who's That Girl?

Across the Pacific (1942)

A U.S. officer court-martialed in disgrace leaves the country and gets a job offer in central America with a stop off in Panama and is involved in an espionage adventure.

A fun yarn with some of the stars from the Maltese Falcon rejoining in this pic. A bit of pre WWII propaganda, but all done in good mood.

A Scan a Day

Vignettes #21

I have a friend of mine who now is professor for Catholic theology. He has worked on the topic of movies depicting the life of Jesus and therefore is an expert on that topic, but otherwise a very regular moviegoer as well. He was at my cinema quite often.

This friend has the peculiarity that you could never pin him down to express his own opinion on a given subject openly. This might be reasonable in some cases working as a teacher, but in private conversation it can get a bit unnerving.

One evening he joined my friends and myself at the pub. We were discussing the best movies of the previous year. A film magazine had published a top 10 list, and we were talking about what we would have considered our favourite 10.

So we asked this friend which movies he would put in his own personal list. The expression on his face instantly signalized that he felt like we were pressuring him into something he did not want to reveal. He hesitated quite long, so I asked him he surely goes to the movies so often, there must certainly be some titles he particularly liked.

His ultimate reply was, and more he would not disclose: "Well, yes, I saw a lot of little French films that were very good, but I can't remember the titles."

Ever since my friends and I use the term "little French film" to describe an artsy fartsy European movie whose title is not worth to remember.

Missy Rayder