l∅ckedinab∅x: all quiet on the western front

23 August 2004

all quiet on the western front

sorry for the lack of posting. I gotta admit, the bug in the template, or in the blogger publishing server software, is really pissing me off. Heard an early mix of 'everyone's an asshole' yesterday, but chris still needs to boost the vocals some more, so it won't be posted on here for a couple more days.

It's really cool being in a creative partnership where you do the least amount of work. Sure, I'd love to dirty my hands writing some music but that's a long way off from happening and besides, I like being front-person and word writer, and being able to say things like "You know chris, some distored guitars would go really well with your dance hall/dub reggae sound."

A few ideas floating around my head. A story and some images for a film I started thinking about before I even started on my course kinda unfolded in my head after I'd gotten up, which was nice. Now the progtagonist has a fuck buddy/girlfriend and keeps finding mysterious messages in his notepad that are enigmatic clues or directions to meet somewhere, and there's going to be an esteemed pyschologist/narrator type, you know, just for kicks, and different levels of reality...

I think one of the tumours in my brain (not a real tumour you understand, but a metaphorical one - if I had a real tumour I wouldn't waste my time moping, I'd be ingesting every substance I could get my hands on and writing an awful lot, probably to be posted post-humourously as a blog, but anyway...) is down to the gap between thinking up stuff and doing it. I really am a terrible procrastinator. I have two short films to write, another one to tighten up and shoot, and two features to flesh out over the next couple of years, and I really need to get down to it. Think I might start setting myself excercises and seeing how long I can keep it going. I predict a couple of days maximum, but you have to try, right?

Been pondering standup comedy recently. You might not know it, but I'm a pretty funny guy, in a strange kind of way. I might throw together some material and make an arse of myself in front of everybody in the uni bar. At the very least I'll get a couple of drinks out of it. Maybe post extracts of stuff on here. Maybe.

oh gawd, I have to gain some kind of employment too.

Yes, most definately time to grab myself by the bootstraps and throw myself down the road. Time to get productive. Time to write, time to flesh, time to perform, time to start leaving the house a little more often. Time to bury all my neuroses and social paranoia under a big fucking rock and enter the arena of the productive artist.

Yeah!

[ this motivational speech was brought to you by the "fucked up creative types need shiny things too!" foundation, in association with Manufactured Consent Inc. ]

[qu∅tes]

"one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight." Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

[on cinematography] "After you have done a picture you forget everything you have ever known, so that you become a child again, or an infant or a void into which the new picture creates a whole new evolvement... So that you do not have to keep doing the same thing all over again. In other words you take what yourself back to ground zero. Of course you cannot unlearn what your brain knowns. But I mean it emotionally. I mean you just become scared again, as if you do not know anything... I never felt on top of it. I neverfelt that I knew so much that I could sit back with a cup of coffee and it would all turn out wonderful." - Conrad Hall

[on cinematography] "When the budget is minimal you are forced to look at light as you find it, and to make it look good." - Haskell Wexler

"Rock 'n' roll is like an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Like anything can be rock 'n' roll." - Lester Bangs

"The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long-term consequences." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head

"In shamanic cultures, synchronicities are recognised as signs that you are on the right path." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head (excerpt), Book of Lies

"...reality is up for grabs, so learn the codes through which the narrative is crafted and participate in its unfolding." - Douglas Rushkoff

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. The American leaders were acting with almost inconceivable treachery by denying that they had received requests for peace…The bombs were exploded on congested cities filled with civilians. There was not even the slightest military justification, because the military outcome of the war had been decided months earlier." - Dave Dellinger

"We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on." - Tilda Swinton

"Pursue the small utopias: nature, music, friendship, intimate love." -The Fugs

"We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna: a thousand voices producing a daily parody of democracy, in which everyone's opinion is afforded equal weight regardless of substance or merit." - Ted Koppel

"There are alot of things you have to sacrfice. It all depends on how deep you want to get into whatever your gig is. Whatever you're there for. So like the deeper you get into it the more sacrifices you have to do, maybe even on your personality or your outward this and that. I just dedicate my life to this whole art. You have to forget about what people say. If it's art or anything else, whatever you really, really dig doing, you have to forget about what people say about you sometimes. Forget about this or that-when you're supposed to die or when you're supposed to be living. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven. Once you reach that point of where you don't give a damn about what everybody else is saying you're going towards heaven. The more you get into it, they're goin' to say "Damn, that cat's really flipped out. Oh, he's gone now". But if you're producin' and creatin', you know, you're getting closer to your own heaven. That's what man's tryin' to get to, anyway." - James Marshall Hendrix

"With its totalizing claim, the system created the conditions for this horrible retaliation. The immanent mania of globalization generates madness, just as an unstable society produces delinquents and psychopaths. In truth, these are only symptoms of the sickness." - Jean Baudrillard

"If poetry is what you can't translate, as Robert Frost once suggested, then art is what you cannot define. Nevertheless, it's fun to try." - james monaco, 'how to read a film'

"This spectacle of banality is todays true pornography..." - Jean Baudrillard

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms." - Philip K. Dick

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose ideas, shining in his head, frighted people and for whom delirium is the only solution to the strangulation that life has prepared for him." - Antonin Artaud

"The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out from the heart." - Charles Bukowski

"Tea heads are a sociable lot. Too sociable for my liking." - William S. Burroughs

l∅ckedinab∅x

23 August 2004

all quiet on the western front

[ mespace ]

[input]

[n∅∅zb∅x]

[musicb∅x]

[∅utput]

[archive]

[qu∅tes]

[you mean there"s more?]