Notes and notes

I have various blog article ideas gestating at the moment, but as is the way with these things, they keep getting put back.

One of them was/is about Trilogy, Nic Green's theatre/performance art piece for The Arches at St Stephen's as part of the Edinburgh Fringe. Whilst technically brilliant and invigorating, the ideas and more political points came across as muddled and a little out of date. Excluding men from a feminism that responds to "what it's like to be a woman in 2009" seems rather paradoxical to me. I hope I'll be able to write about this in more depth when I get the time, because it chimes with a lot of the stuff I'm starting to read for the MLitt, and what our friend Derek is reading with regards to his PhD on Virginia Woolf, Gilles Deleuze and posthumanism.

The other one, ever-so-slightly related, was a collection of thoughts about this excellent Simon Jenkins comment piece in the Guardian on Friday. Eminently sensible, lucid and right on the money, I'm in whole-hearted agreement with everything he says.

I have been listening on my walks into work to the same three artists over and over again:

Panda Bear.
I love how it all sounds like a party your cool downstairs neighbours are having that wakes you up in the middle of the night and when you wake up in the morning you're not sure if you dreamed it or not.



Asa Chang and Junray
I love this for its choppy/serene dynamics, how it layers up amazing sounds and creates whole new worlds out of them. Whenever I listen to Hana I remember this great video:



Steve Reich
I love how his music lulls you into a rythmn, and then you start to think he's changing the note order but then think it's just you putting different emphases on different notes but then you realise that he has changed it! Just ever-so-slightly. I love how it's perfect walking music.

Revisiting Koyaanisqatsi

I bought Koyaanisqatsi as a reward for getting a part-time job in London when I was a student there. The job only lasted one weekend because it was so horrible, but I still have the DVD.

My mind periodically comes back to it, almost without me realising it. I'd never think to name it as a favourite film, but in a way it is. I was astounded by it, it's stuck with me, and I still enjoy it whenever I watch it again.



I don't know what brought it up this morning, but there we go. Thinking about it now, I imagine the film would almost look like a period piece, or, rather, it captures the final days of an extravagant, more-more-more culture; the culture whose acts we are desperately now trying to undo.

The film was released in 1982, and its sequel Powaqqatsi in 1988. Naqoyqatsi, the third part, was released in 2002. Koyaanisqatsi could be seen as marking the transition between the old culture and a new one, one of the "green agenda" and "eco-consciousness". Certainly the director, Godfrey Reggio, has been at the forefront of progressive politics in America for some time.



It's hard to find actual clips from the films on Youtube, but the two here are. They're wonderful.