One of my favorites of the films made by Werner Herzog is "Wild Blue Yonder", a sci-fi movie collaged together mainly of NASA video footage and which posits an interesting temporal schemata- itself collaged together, I imagine, from various sources filtered through Herzog's conscious and unconscious parts.
I'm drawn as well to the director's ideas about "the poetic truth" vs "the accountant's truth", as extolled here, on pg 252 and 253 of "Herzog On Herzog":
"I wanted to get shots of pilgrims crawling around on the ice trying to catch a glimpse of the lost city, but as there were no pilgrims around I hired two drunks from the next town and put them on the ice. One of them has his face right on the ice and looks like he is in very deep meditation. The accountant's truth: he was completely drunk and fell asleep, and we had to wake him at the end of the take....
"It might seem like cheating but it is not. 'Bells from the Deep' is one of the most pronounced examples of what I mean when I say that only through invention and fabrication and staging can you reach a more intense level of truth that cannot otherwise be found....
"We have known for a long time the poet is able to articulate a deep, inherent, mysterious truth better than anyone else. But for some reason filmmakers- particularly those who deal in the accountant's truth- are unaware of this as they continue trading their out-of-date wares."
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At the age of perhaps fourteen or fifteen years I encountered the ideas of the Dadas while lurking around in the public library in downtown Belleville Illinois. Coincidentally, the music of the Boredoms reached my ears at approximately that same short aeon, and I was thrilled indeed to feel instinctually that there is an abiding correlation between the two. My first zines, created around that same time, were an attempt to do visually what I felt the Boredoms were doing sonically.
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excerpts from RED NOTEBOOK, p 12-19:
24/25
In my dream last night I fought a demonic entity, which I either killed with two swords or which transformed into four swords clattering to the ground after which I picked up two of the swords. In a circle of ash (or thoroughly burnt-up wood or paper) lay or fell a cigarette butt. It's burnt tobacco end came to resemble a mouth like a bird or reptile beak which spoke in a deep, slow, booming voice. It was angry I had defeated the demon and mockingly summoned another [demon?] which it called "The Dragon" or "My Dragon". A humanoid from- maybe both or neither male/female- rose slowly out of the floor. It's head was reptilian maybe and with tentacles or horns or a writhing combination of both. Its movements intimated a terrifying speed. With the two swords in hand I dashed up a flight of concrete stairs to a door, whereupon The Dragon caught up with me? Something transpired... either I stabbed the Dragon with one or both swords or I said something to it, perhaps puzzling it long enough for me to escape through the door?
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- Should a veiled portraiture of "Ex. A" participants be installed as part of "Ex. B"?
-(TT)P occurs when the artworks of "Ex. A" and the artworks of "Ex. B" are broken down to their base symbolic components and combined or passed through one another. The "past" and "future"- or more appropriately "Present Tense A" and "Present Tense B" overlap (?) at the moment of... TRANSMISSION?
TRANSUBSTANTIATION?
THE CHRONO-MAGNETIC PROBABILITY FULCRUM?
-If there is any substance to these ideas, then I have already created the work for both shows. Both shows have occurred, are occurring, and will occur. I am creating work for both shows. I will create work for both shows.
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Two texts loosely memorized- over time the slippage of the brain and memory cause them to meld into various combinations through subsequent recital and improv.
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I don't like the question of whether or not I mean all of this, or if it is a joke, a put on, and/or fictional construction. In fact the success of the endeavor may depend on obliterating such divisions of thought. The reality and legitimacy of an idea must be recognized to be as firmly and weightily rooted in concrete SUBSTANCE as that of the brick- or the ostrich. Let us not hide our heads in the sand of materialist hierarchy.
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Progress feels to be confirming itself, if "machine" can sometimes be defined in an extremely broad sense: as maybe a specific grouping of people each with a different function in the whole; or something partially constructed but partially enacted- objects and actions existing in a physical or corporeal manner combined with objects and actions existing in psychological or spiritual realms of being.
Traveling in and out of Time may be a correlation of travelling between, or bridging, or recognizing as One* the various modes of existence:
-physical
-mental / emotional
-spiritual
-etc?
*what does this mean?
* * * * *
"We cannot reach the meaning or higher significance of anything by any unaided logical process, but only by an illumination of the whole personality which lifts it to new basic conceptions... We cannot deal with the world as it is in itself, but only with the world as it is for us... The point which stands out clearly is that the meaning of a thing depends, not on the thing itself, but also on the extent to which one's personality can respond to it... In our view the boundary which restricts our knowledge of the real is ourselves. It is a subjective boundary."
-GNM Tyrrel, Grades of Significance, 1947
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As the works of Ex. A enter the as-yet-unnamed realm between A and B, their less-than-prime aspects fall away. Only the basic symbolic components remain to be transferred to their reincarnations in Exhibit B.
