100 Percent Solution
The 100th posting…
Mental Picture 91
There’s a big Tillmans retrospective on at the moment at Tate Britain; we’re going to make a day of it tomorrow and, if the weather’s nice, catch the new Tate river bus up to Tate Modern afterwards. I’m listening to Dub Tractor’s More or Less Mono. Sparkly music for an otherwise glum day.
Mental Pictures
I’ve been thinking a lot about blogs and wikis. HTML seems so ill-suited to dense intertwinglings of thoughts. Ok for simple document layout, but the chunking/scoping seems at the wrong level for anything very fine-grained. I want to be able to pick this site up by a concept, shake it and see how everything else falls into place around it. Some approximation of that would be possible with heavy metadata and hyperbolic trees, but I feel like the map and the document should be the same thing. At the very least I want those visible interconnections within documents that Ted …
Wind
Marcell Iványi’s lovely short film, Wind. Good articles in p.o.v magazine from a few years ago. Can’t find a copy anywhere (I saw it at a festival) [edit: 2013: here’s a copy on YouTube], although there were at one point rumours online that its included on a Hungarian VHS of Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Strange world.
Riley on The Glance
(Quoted in the July 2003 World of Interiors (p.119)): Don’t look at it — just glance! Sometimes in a mere glance one can see more than in the close scrutiny of a thousand details.
Composition with Circles 1
Intense sun today. Dwelling on the rhythms in Bridget Riley’s Composition with Circles 1 (1998) which I was fortunate enough to have been able to buy with some options, back when having options meant anything…
Fleur de Sel
We were in Brittany a few weeks ago, and visited the salt fields of Guérande. There were no paludiers in evidence, only acres of neatly tended salt ponds. Guérande salt comes in two kinds — one grey and very moist, and the other the brittle, pinkish fleur de sel (‘the caviar of salt’), which is ludicrously expensive if you don’t buy it at source. Or you can make it yourself: the following directions, quoted in Salt. A World History, are from Cato’s De Agricultura: Fill a broken-necked amphora with clean water, place in the sun. Suspend in it a strainer …
Digital Test Bed
Attended the launch of the BFI’s Digital Test Bed at the NFT this morning — currently Europe’s only test laboratory for digital cinema. They are justifiably proud that they can now play everything from nitrate to pure digital feed (demonstrating the former with a lovely technicolor excerpt from The Harvey Girls (1946), and the latter with a live connection to ‘The Hall of Edoras’ set for The Return of the King in Wellington, New Zealand, with Jim Rygiel, Weta’s digital effects supervisor). I had to leave before the tour, but from their press pack, it looks as if they have …
Murmurs of Earth
Peters argues that SETI was to the 20th century what the spritualist movement was to the 19th, with serious researchers in both fields resolutely pursuing the inner strangeness of their chosen quests, and yet missing the point that all communication is inherently strange: SETI research reminds one of Thoreau’s quip about those who tried to measure the depths of Walden Pond: “They are paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness.” (p. 257) Curiously, he doesn’t directly reference Carl Sagan’s Murmurs of Earth, effectively the ‘sleeve notes’ for the gold-plated records launched …