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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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On Saturday night, a big bunch of Toronto cyclists watched The Triplets of Belleville under the moon and stars in Trinity Bellwoods Park (a Bike Week screening by CBN). Because of the bikes-and-film connection, it was good to see Cinecycle's Martin Heath and bike courier/filmmaker extraordinaire John Porter in the audience. It was chilly, but most of us had blankets and beer. People sitting nearby made popcorn on a parafin stove.
My favourite image in the film is this strange machine, a sort of pedal operated mini-cinema projecting film of the road, with three cyclists staring into it, pedalling furiously and thereby powering the image that captivates them. At the climax of the film the whole contraption takes off and a car chase ensues, but the cyclists remain oblivious to anything but the film in front of their noses. This weird hybrid sailboat/bed/platform trundles along the city streets, glowing in the night. It's a very unusual yet oddly familiar image. There are certainly a lot of resonant connections between bicycles and film. I often think about this odd passage by Marshall MacLuhan from Understanding Media, the chapter titled, "Wheel, Bicycle and Airplane":
"...the movie camera rollsup the real world on a spool, to be unrolled and translated later onto the screen. [...] ...the airplane rolls up the highway into itself. The road disappears into the plane at take-off and the plane becomes a missile, a self-contained transportation system. At this point the wheel is reabsorbed into the form of a bird or fish that the plane becomes as it takes into the air. [...] Unlike wing or fin, the wheel is lineal and requires the road for its completion. [...] The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane."
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Levittown (again)
Tom Moody has just written an excellent post on art, war, and USA. It's here.
Hey very way cool...my plants are on samplesize!
I keep running accross references to Plato's Cave these days. (A quick refresher: the world is a cave with a bunch of people constrained to stay in it, all facing one way. Shadows flicker on the wall from the doorway and the constrained cave dwellers mistake those shadows for the real [ideal] forms that generate them, because the shadows are all they know, and all they are capable of seeing.)
Some people are both frustrated and motivated by the philosophical (some would say physiological) impossibility of seeing the world as it is. I love very much this passage below from Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1977. pp.70. I see it as an elegant attempt at the impossible task of finding words to describe something that cannot even be properly perceived.
He squinted hard, sorry that he hadn't had time for an hour's nap before his important business. And then it hit him. [...] It was as though he were in a different world. A million odors cascaded in on him at once—sharp, sweet, metallic, gentle, dangerous ones, as crude as cobblestones, as delicate and complex as watch mechanisms, as huge as a house and as tiny as a dust particle. The air became hard, it developed edges, surfaces, and corners, like space was filled with huge stiff balloons, slippery pyramids, gigantic prickly crystals, and he had to push his way through it all, making his way in a dream through a junk store stuffed with ancient, ugly furniture...It lasted a second. He opened his eyes and everything was gone. It hadn't been a different world—it was this world turning a new, unknown side to him. This side was revealed to him for a second and then disappeared, before he had time to figure it out.
Back in March, I posted the text and images from one of my old three-fold flyers, a piece of art ephemera from 1996. Here is another one (with very minor edits), written just pre-Buffy, but well post-Pet Cemetery.
WARNING: Something Will Go Wrong
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An important thing to remember about bringing people or animals back from the dead is that something is bound to go wrong. It will probably seem like a great deal at first, you just perform some ritual with garlic and fingernails, or sneak around at night in the sacred burial grounds, whatever, it’s not a lot to ask to get your loved one back. Right? Right, until...well, until you actually do it and they do come back, and they’re all rotting, or they’re possessed by the devil, or they’re just plain zombies or mummies and they try to kill you or suck your blood or whatever, something will definitely go wrong. It’s as if there’s some kind of punishment for trying to do what anyone would do, and bring a loved person or animal back to life. It’s as if, when you try to do it, you become evil, or something, and from then on you deserve everything you get. |
It’s not like I really expect someone not to do it, if they've got the chance. All I’m saying is that something is pretty well definitely going to go wrong.
