Postscript to the previous post.

I see there was an incident in Sainsbury's where a cashier refused to serve a customer at the check-out who was on their mobile phone. Quite right. The number of times I have stood behind someone with their phone crooked into their shoulder making a fist of putting their shopping into bags or fumbling for a wallet. It's as if the check-out person, other people in the queue, the entire world come to that do not exist. I phone therefore I am - and no one else is.

Coincidentally, in the Murnau film (1924) this very issue is explored: how people are erased in unequal social exchanges. The door man, relegated to a toilet attendant, proffers a towel to the hotel guest who ignores him completely (much as, earlier, the hotel manager sat at his desk smoking with his back to his employee).

Returning to 2013 and the lesson has passed unheeded. Sainsbury's have compensated the customer (&, no doubt, the cashier will be sacked or otherwise disciplined).

Big society. Big deal. Loser wins all.

Books may be renewed

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I sometimes dredge for/ immortality, among the second-hand book shops, and elsewhere.

('A Web', A Windmill Near Calvary, Keith Waldrop)

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Up to Chapter Five 'The Perception-Image' in Cinema I and it's more or less (sometimes a little more, sometimes far less) making sense. Which, of course, is the point as I'm ever more aware of when reading Deleuze. There are paragraphs over which the eye roams and you have an impression of understanding and then sudden crystallizations - a sentence, an image - when what has come before acquires an utterly different set of possibilities. Impossible - at least for me - to read Deleuze as a passive absorption, a string of ideas served up in order. Instead, an active engagement (fight?) which also involves simultaneous other reading: Difference and Repetition, the Deleuze Dictionary, other essays, parts of interviews. But it's worth it. There's something exhilarating about reading his prose - the sheer intelligence, the range and depth of reference - and intimidating, too. Crossing to Teletheory and Ulmer seems plodding in comparison.

And, inevitably, Deleuze has revived my interest in films themselves. Sunday's viewing of Breathless followed on Monday by some early Lumiere Brothers shorts on the BFI Primitives and Pioneers DVD (workers leaving the factory, knocking down a wall, snowball fight, etc.). Then, yesterday evening, I watched Murnau's The Last Man with the extraordinary performance of Emil Jannings and that revolving door*.  And, again, it's the luxury of the holidays to allow time to distend, to be able to move from book to screen and back, a rhythm disallowed during the working months.

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"Each face, even if just seen yesterday, is different today, because today isn't yesterday. Each day is the day it is, and there was never another one like it in the world. Only our soul makes the identification - a genuinely felt but erroneous identification - by which everything becomes similar and simplified. The world is a set of distinct things with varied edges, but if we're near-sighted, it's a continual and indecipherable fog." (Paragraph 167, The Book of Disquietude, Pessoa)

A new first thing in the morning routine to read a page of Pessoa & it's perhaps inevitable that the eye lights on passages that chime with other reading. Here, what seems to be a beautiful encapsulation of Deleuze's rethinking of perception - how "an atom perceives infinitely more than we do" and that the first gesture of subjectivity is "subtractive". 

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Listening to ...

Evidence, Steve Lacy with Don Cherry

The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961, Bill Evans

Kveikur, Sigur Ros

Screenplay, John Parish

Various compositions by Olivier Greif 

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* The revolving door ... it's interesting how Deleuze homes in on the opening sequence of the camera-bicycle descending the lift and then moving towards the door. It's the door that fascinates me: the impassivity of the door boy who just stands to the side, staring impassively before him, typifying the form of alienated labour and dehumanisation the film explores in several ways. The hand is separated from intention, simply an automated movement, a wave that acknowledges no one (think Chaplin's more exaggerated wrench work at the conveyor belt in Modern Times). The contrast, too, with the smooth turning of the door (accentuated by silent cinematography) and the hustle and bustle of the affluent guests in and out as well as the constant to and fro of people and traffic in the rain outside. Yet, at the same time, there is something hieratic about the boy's pose - a guardian of the Threshold (seen, too, in the posture and regalia of Jannings as the door man). The way the revolving door starts to work in the film: mythic as wheel of Fate (the sudden demotion and the equally sudden 'stroke of luck' of the inheritance at the end) and socio-political as arbiter of employment/leisure/redundancy, old/young, movement/immobility, moneyed/poor, high and dry/ a rainy day. And, cinematically, the way the revolving door enacts Deleuze's Bergsonian fascination with the break up of continuity as images of the passersby are multiplied and dislocated as the move right to left and left to right. And, surely, a cinematic 'memory' of its zoetrope 'ancestor' - even here a kind of embodiment of the films central theme of the casualties of progress? 

To think ... a week ago & I wasn't even aware of this film. I'm now thinking I could build an entire course around it. 

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Wet. Then sun. 

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/)