Today ... grappling with the first ten pages or so of Deleuze on cinema (Cinema I).

This, in an attempt to reformulate some ideas in Gregory Ulmer's Teletheory (a post-Derridaean pedagogics exploring extensions of 'writing' into video).

While ...

... watching Godard yesterday afternoon (Breathless) has sent me back to the (now) rather ancient-looking Secker & Warburg volume Godard on Godard. In which I find - page 19 - his statement of the early 60s:

"At the cinema we do not think, we are thought." 

In this one sentence he manages to encapsulate Deleuze's opening pages on Bergson's Three Theses.

Just watched Breathless again (one of the summer resolutions is to work my way through the 2 volume Godard DVD sets that have been gathering dust on the shelf).

Seeing it, you begin to wonder if there's ever been a better film - or more quintessentially cinematic. The sheer élan with which it is filmed ... How much depends upon walking & driving. Literally the movies. Breathtaking, indeed.

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Pages from Paul Valery's Cahiers

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http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6000172h/f1.item will take you to the source for these images. Fascinating stuff.

Day One of the summer hols. Despite the predictable Teacher's Curse (you go down with a cold the moment school finishes) and the unseasonal damp grey weather, there's a general feeling of optimism: books to read, books to make. A provisional reading list to be posted soon.

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greetings card for an 'alternative' wedding/ baby celebration

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“Then I realised I was celebrating the death of a human being, no matter how vile she was. And there was nothing symbolic about her death, beause her baleful influence on British politics remains undiminished. Squeeze practically any Tory, any Blairite, and any Lib Dem of the Orange Book persuasion, and it’s the same poisonous Thatcherite pus that comes oozing out of all of them.”

"Pus" - le mot juste.

... This from a last interview with Iain Banks in today's Guardian, reminding me of that other last interview with Dennis Potter when he talked about the cherry blossom outside his window and what he would do to Rupert Murdoch.

Another necessary voice snuffed out.

This arrived today - and what a pleasing thing. I knew the music already - it's been playing in the car to and from work most mornings the past two weeks. Dark, brooding, disconcerting stuff. The book, though, is an added joy. A cover that provokes more than titillates (sense of an interior psychological space, the woman's hair hanging forward reminiscent of the mother lifting her head from the water in Tarkovsky's Mirror). Inside, pages of typewritten song sheets with corrections and deletions - reminds me of those interspersed sheets in Lisa Jarnot's Some Other Kind of Mission - plus photos of Cave & Bad Seeds presumably snapped during recording sessions.

So much blather these days about the decline of the CD & music being bought & downloaded online, blah-blah-blah. Well, if more bands issued work in these kinds of format who'd settle for simply a mp3 file? Full marks to Nick Cave.

Great title, too.

I'm heading back for a second look tomorrow first thing ... maybe see you there?

(http://www.tour-taxis.com/en/)