[syndicate] real-life vignettes + google should go to hell before i do

[Alan Sondheim]

[please note: nikuko.blogspot.com is unable to be updated. google has taken 
over blogger which went to beta software; i haven't been able to access the 
site since. corresponding with google is useless; four letters only produced 
the response that i had to log in correctly. if anyone knows of better - i.e. 
usable - blog sites/software out there (i don't have and can't afford my own 
server), please let me know back-channel. thanks, alan]

real-life vignettes

I'm tired of these real-life vignettes, somewhat digitally manipulated, as
if there's a gross philosophical point to be made through the sound or
sight of the singer or dancer or walker: what foolery. Nausee, Sartre,
defuge, overwhelm me, and I'm sure if you are following video after video,
text after text, sound after sound, they overwhelm you as well. No amount
of philosophy, no quantity of poetics squeezed from the soul of the imag-
inary, can compensate for one minute of reality rehashed. As if it were
possible to hack the landscape, the mise en scene. In any case, there's
always the appeal to god, as in this instance, or the Pringy church yawps
- spirit makes everything come out well in the end, at least aesthetically
- at least for believers. And I mean: nothing can be farther from the
truth - which may also be modified: nothing can be farther than the truth
- isn't that always the case?

http://www.asondheim.org/chch.mov

All these vignettes involve real people and hard rock, mountains, forests,
villages cities, churches, granges, pastures, meadows, cliffs, glaciers,
bluffs, hills, streams, rivers, trees, goats, choughs, flowers, roads,
paths. And what with the whispering, there is that, the slightest sound
transcribed into pixel after pixel - an entire universe of pixels, of
which this, and this and that, are an infinitesimal part. We climbed down
the north tower of the cathedral in Geneva, rounded a pillar; in a
distance, a choir was singing. Here now the singing loops and transforms;
the image isolates madonna and magdalene, bracketing the right-hand side
of the screen. And that is all, the whole like the paste of spirit
perhaps, or the slight spew of afterbirth.

breakneck speed to infinity http://www.asondheim.org/whoosh.mp4