movies, music, Uncategorized

0776 – Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

timespace coordinates: 2688 >1988 San Dimas, CaliforniaAustria in 1805 > 1879  the Old West > 410 BC ancient Greece > 14th century medieval England > 1901 Vienna Austria > Kassel, Germany, 1810 > Orleans, France, 1429 > Outer Mongolia 1209 >The White House, 1863

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Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a 1989 American science fiction comedy film directed by Stephen Herek and written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. It stars Alex WinterKeanu Reeves, and George Carlin. The plot follows slackers Bill (Winter) and Ted (Reeves), who travel through time to assemble historical figures for their high school history presentation.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure received generally positive reviews and was commercially successful. It is now considered a cult classic.

DC Comics produced a tie-in comic following the plot of the first movie timed to coincide with that film’s release on home video. The sequel was adapted by DC’s competitor Marvel Comics, published to coincide with the second film’s release in theaters. Its popularity led to the ongoing Marvel series Bill & Ted’s Excellent Comic Book by Evan Dorkin, which lasted for 12 issues.

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There were also Game BoyNES and Atari Lynx games released, which were very loosely based on the film’s plot. A PC title and nearly identical Amiga and Commodore 64 port were made in 1991 by Off the Wall Productions and IntraCorp, Inc. under contract by Capstone Software and followed the original film very closely. (wiki)

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documentary, Uncategorized

775 – Hunt For The Skinwalker (2018 documentary)

timespace coordinates: 1990’s > 2010’s west Uintah County bordering the Ute Indian Reservation

MV5BNzkwY2ZmNjQtYzkyZS00ZDI4LWFjMTItNTNjOGI1OTM1ODI0XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMzI3MDUxMjA@._V1_Branded “the Area 51 of the paranormal”, the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah is thoroughly investigated both by the Pentagon and CIA. Strange lights and animal mutilations, among other various unexplained phenomena, are known to take place at the mysterious ranch.

imdb   /    the skin-walker of Navajo

documentary, movies, quotes

773 – American Animals (2018)

timespace coordinates: Lexington, Kentucky, 2004

American Animals is a 2018 crime drama film written and directed by Bart Layton. It stars Evan PetersBarry KeoghanBlake JennerJared Abrahamson, and Ann Dowd. The film is based on the true story of a library heist that happened at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky in 2004.

“we must suppose that American animals… slowly migrated by successive generations from the outer world into the deeper and deeper recesses of the Kentucky caves.” Charles Darwin

imdb   /   The Birds of America

movies, quotes

772 – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

timespace coordinates: 1900. girls’ private school, near the town of Woodend, VictoriaAustralia

“What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1975 Australian mystery drama film which was produced by Hal and Jim McElroy, directed by Peter Weir, and starred Vivean GrayDominic GuardAnne-Louise LambertHelen Morse, and Rachel Roberts. It was adapted by Cliff Green from the 1967 novel of the same name by Joan Lindsay, who was deliberately ambiguous about whether the events really took place, although the story is in fact entirely fictitious.

The plot involves the disappearance of several schoolgirls and their teacher during a picnic at Hanging RockVictoria on Valentine’s Day in 1900, and the subsequent effect on the local community.

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read: 770


Marion stares down at the Picnic Ground and says, “Whatever can those people be doing down there, like a lot of ants? A surprising number of human beings are without purpose though it is probable they are performing some function unknown to themselves.”

documentary, quotes

771 – Robinson in Ruins (2010)

Robinson in Ruins is a 2010 British documentary film by Patrick Keiller and narrated by Vanessa Redgrave. It is a sequel to Keiller’s previous films, London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997). It documents the journey of the fictional title character around the south of England. (wiki)

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books, quotes, Uncategorized

770

The Weird and the EerieMark Fisher (2016)weird-and-the-eerie-9781910924389_hr


Making Sense of “The Weird and the Eerie” By Roger Luckhurst

(…) “You have probably heard of “the weird” by now, but you may not quite know what it is, or why so many genre critics, cultural theorists, and philosophers are keen to engage with it. It might once have been quarantined as a subgenre associated with sullen Goths and all those arrested-adolescent readers of H. P. Lovecraft, but it has long slithered free of those confines, and now leaves a trail not just straight across the internet, but on the page and in mainstream TV shows and movie screens.

Writers of the New Weird in Britain, like M. John Harrison and China Miéville, briefly rallied to this banner in 2003 before morphing into something else (although the critics still lumber around with the term). Philosophers such as Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker have proposed a “weird realism” — a rival term to “object-oriented ontology” — that replaces Husserl or Heidegger with Horror. One of the early signs of this shift was Mark Fisher’s own symposium on Lovecraft and Theory at Goldsmiths College in London in 2007. In film, David Lynch was always “wild at heart and weird on top,” from his early animated short films up to Inland Empire. On TV, True Detective was pretty weird, with its echoes of Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow and dark nihilistic mutterings lifted from Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of this Planet: The Horror of Philosophy Volume 1. Stranger Things was quite weird, although a little too soft-focused and retro to be fully paid up, but The OA was definitely out-and-out weird. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy of books (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, all of which appeared in 2014), so far the major achievement of the American translation of the New Weird, will hit mainstream cinemas with Alex Garland’s film adaptation in 2017. Best get weirded up.

Fisher’s guide to this terrain is an excellent place to start your orientation. The book displays his signature knack for reading popular culture (principally music, fiction, and film) in an expressive, demotic way that is still vigorously political and philosophical. Somehow, Fisher magically renders post-Lacanian, post-Žižekian Marxism and the radical anti-subjectivist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze entirely accessible. Only Fisher can enthuse about old Quatermass TV shows in terms of their “cosmic Spinozism” and still (mostly) make sense. With typical disdain for cultural boundaries, Fisher moves crab-wise from Lovecraft and H. G. Wells to the impenetrable mumblings of punk band The Fall; obscure Rainer Werner Fassbinder TV shows from Germany; Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, and Andrei Tarkovsky films; Nigel Kneale TV series from the 1970s; the music of Joy DivisionThe Shining; the unclassifiable fiction of Alan Garner and Christopher Priest; Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary avant-garde SF film Under the Skin; and surprising appearances of Margaret Atwood’s early fiction Surfacing and Christopher Nolan’s portentous quantum SF blockbuster Interstellar (which receives a great defense).” (read more here)


https://k-punk.org/

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/


The eeriness of the English countryside

(…) “In music, literature, art, film and photography, as well as in new and hybrid forms and media, the English eerie is on the rise. A loose but substantial body of work is emerging that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of “dwelling” and “belonging”, and of the packagings of the past as “heritage”, and that locates itself within a spectred rather than a sceptred isle.

Such concerns are not new, but there is a distinctive intensity and variety to their contemporary address. This eerie counter-culture – this occulture – is drawing in experimental film-makers, folk singers, folklorists, academics, avant-garde antiquaries, landscape historians, utopians, collectives, mainstreamers and Arch-Droods alike, in a magnificent mash-up of hauntology, geological sentience and political activism. The hedgerows, fields, ruins, hills and saltings of England have been set seething.”

“What are those pressing concerns, though, and what are the sources of this unsettlement? Clearly, the recent rise of the eerie coincides with a phase of severe environmental damage. In England, this has not taken the form of sudden catastrophe, but rather a slow grinding away of species and of subtlety. The result, as James Riley notes, is “a landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present”. This awareness of absence is expressing itself both in terms of a vengeful nature (a return of the repressed) and as delicate catalogues of losses.”

“Digging down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth is another trope of the eerie: what is discovered is almost always a version of capital. Keiller’s Robinson tracks the buried cables and gas-pipes of Oxfordshire, following them as postmodern leylines, and tracing them outwards to hidden global structures of financial ownership. Wheatley’s deserters rapaciously extract “treasure” from the soil, by means of enslavement and male violence. In his cult novel Cyclonopedia (2008), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani figured oil as a sentient entity, developing Marx’s implication that capital possesses emergent and self-willed properties, that it is somehow wild.” /  see: 771-robinson-in-ruins-2010

(read more here)

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A suitable place for violence? Orford Ness, Suffolk. photograph by Emma Johnson