purge/glut

the reason that i have re-posted yesterday's entry is because somehow i deleted today's one, which was quite long, i was rambling on about stuff, film and photography mostly. i don't know how i did it- it is completely my fault and confirms to me that I AM A TECHNOLOGICAL DORK there is no doubt about this. hopefully will get the hang of this soon and have no more embarrassing accidents.

what i was writing about was time slice film and how it freezes a moment, which is not what film usually does, but spatialises it in the sense the camera can move through the space, but the moment remains fixed. i don't know if it was the first, but i think it was the most well known piece with this technique before the matrix was a film of the exact moment of a horse's death in a abbatoir. it put me in mind of an early piece of film by edison involving the execution of an elephant.http://www.roadsideamerica.com/pet/topsy.html i was thinking about how there seems to be a connection between death and photography. eg. why pick the exact moment of a horse's death to demonstrate a new photographic/film technique? what is it that is being recorded?

i'm writing this down again because i want to remember it myself - it's one of my preoccupations and i'll probably be going on in this vein more. i am pissed off! don't know how i did it - pressed wrong button or something - what makes it worse i suppose is that i did it in some sort of public(ish) arena.

anyway, was musing on the fact that alexander graham bell thought he could use the telephone for talking to the dead, edison thought that he might be able to somehow record people's souls at the moment of death through his phonogram. http://www.hauntedink.com/ghost/ch1.html this link is for a fascinating dissertation on the uncanniness of nineteenth and early twentieth century technology, in this case sound recording. much reccomended. there was not so much division in those days between science and what we would now call superstition. this worked with photography too; the practice of taking what were called medium photographs- manifestations of people appearing on sensitised plates, via a medium, but apparently without a camera. so this led me back to asking what the time slice of the horse was intended to represent.

there was more i think...i will say it again I AM A TECHNOLOGICAL DORK and i'm kicking myself...i'm going to eat the keyboard now.....

Saturday, December 20, 2003

right- i've started- new to this, so have to see how it goes..... ah- just discovered that you can change the font....... and (not so keen on this - courier?) you can put things in bold too! i like

is this private, or not? what voice do i use? is this internal monologue overheard by chance, or am i addressing an audience? stupid question- of course its not private, or i'd be writing in my little black notebook with a pen, closing it, and putting it in my pocket....but i'm wondering what's the appropriate tone a bit - i haven't done my research.....

at present i'm sitting in my paren'ts spare bedroom - what now my dad's sort of office, and used to be my brother's room. i'm back for christmas. it's a small house, built by wimpey or bovis in the late '60s on the outskirts of heathrow airport, on the (moderately bleak, certainly boring) western fringes of london. there are 3 cats, which i'm here to feed. i like the sounds of the house, the heating turning itself on and off, the slight noises the cats make. it sounds a lot like a machine that's working. and it's warm, which is always a bonus. there's double glazing which deadens the sounds of the trains that go past at the end of the street -to and from london 4 times an hour- and the planes that go over i don't know how often. in a holding pattern, i think that's what it's called stacked up to i don't know how high above me.

i grew up here, in what felt to me like the fringes of nowhere at the time - and still does. it isn't really, because obviously people live their lives here, have children and die. but it will never feel any different to that to me. the world must be littered with places like this (that is the rich world - that tiny part of the world that can afford the space or resources) that don't seem to be anything except their proximity to the quickest routes somewhere else.

the sky is huge here, like that was the area's most marketable commodity. on the way from the station this evening i was looking at the width of the street as compared to the height of the houses, with everything being so low rise, and the street being so wide, it was as if the sky came right down to the pavement. obviously it does, anyway, but it's always given me this feeling of a huge vacancy. i suspect that it's flat enough here to see the curvature of the earth, if there was something tall enough to stand on.

well, all that is to say that i much prefer london proper to the suburbs, i suppose. i have a fantasy that the streets where i live now, which are in the east end are a gigantic intestine, and absorb and process the different communities that have lived there, and the languages that were spoken, and after a certain while, excrete them out into the suburbs. it's like a giant engine of amnesia.