Whimsical #2

I've kinda waxed lyrical in the past about my love for the whimsy, heartbreak and visual rapture of Michel Gondry. So I'm excited to see this first look at his new film 'Mood Indigo'... Plenty more heartache and bliss to come, it seems.

Favourites #3

Most months, some weeks, some days, I acquire a new favourite photographer. There is often something linking the majority of the photographers that I throw myself at like some horny teenager. A left of centre approach to documentary photography is usually the bottom line. An instinct for capturing intimacy, secrecy, moments of shared emotion. This week, my new favourite photographer is Olivia Arthur. Her work, particularly her images taken in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Georgia, are such a rich and strange insight into worlds that are often hidden behind doors. She is also involved in Fishbar, a pretty incredible photographer's space and small scale publisher. This week, she's got my heart.

I'm Trying

“You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.” 

words: Roberto Bolaño

image: Maxime Ballesteros

Oshima

RIP Nagisa Oshima. 

 "the charm of cinema is from the continuity in the discontinuity" 

one.

  

two.

  

three.

Songs That Should Be Films #7

As ever, there are songs that are, for me, more cinematic than most cinema I see; that evoke stories and emotions and characters that I want to live on screen somewhere; places I'd rather spend a couple of hours of my life, sitting in the dark, senses, heart and mind alive, fucked up, yearning, celebrating and desiring. 

"The Healing" - Bloc Party
"Born into a Mess" - International Noise Conspiracy
"Lover I Don't Have To Love" - Bright Eyes
"Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" - Public Enemy
"While You Wait For The Others" - Grizzly Bear
"Coattails" - Low
"Trouble Man" - Marvin Gaye
"Breathless" - Nick Cave as sung by Cat Power
"Save Me" - Tea Party
"Güero Canelo" - Calexico
"Rewind" - Nas
"Anthems for a 17 Year Old Girl" - Broken Social Scene
"Christmas in New York" - The Pogues
"Folsom Prison Blues" (obviously!) - Johnny Cash

and, always, always, forever:

"Sweet Thing" - Van Morrison

Because:

And I shall drive my chariot
Down your streets and cry
Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite
And I don't know why

A Roar In The Heart

"In the immediate world, everything is to be discerned..with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is."

words: James Agee

image: Sebastião Salgado 

Luck

"Many people, even some good photographers, talk of the ‘luck’ of photography as if that were a disparagement. And it is true that luck is constantly at work. It is one of the cardinal creative forces in the universe, one which the photographer has unique equipment for collaborating with. And a photographer often shoots around a subject, expecially one that is highly mobile and in continuous and swift development--which seems to me as much his natural business as it is for a poet who is really in the grip of his poem to alter and realter words in his line. It is true that most artists, though they know their own talent and its gifts as luck, work as well as they can against luck, and that in most good works of art, as in little else in creation, luck is either locked out or locked in and semi-domesticated, or put to wholly constructive work; but it is peculiarly a part of the good photographer’s adventure to know where luck is most likely to lie in the stream, to hook it, and to bring it in without unfair play and without too much subduing it. Most good photographs, especially the quick and lyrical kind, are battles between the artist and luck."

James Agee

Polaroids

Dogs and drains and sun and drizzle. Stunts and kneepads, radios and sparklers. Dawns and sunsets. Beaches and rushes and rivers and tyres. Dams and downtime, driving, drinking and adoring.