notes on becoming fearless

DANGER

 

William Burroughs Dead City Radio. Via Ubuweb.

POETRY

 

 

operating manual for SPACESHIP EARTH

 
I've talked about my fondness of the geodesic dome before both as buildings in the amazing hippie commune that was Drop City and as applied to clothing so I was excited to find that much of the work of Buckminster Fuller, the original architect of the geodesic dome, is available for free online. Fuller was a philosopher as much as an architect devoting his life to solving problems of all kinds.

 I'll be reading Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth his essay on our intellectual evolution and our capabilities of surviving in the vastness of space.

 

 

                           

 

 

RESOURCE

  
I discovered UbuWeb after Jennie tweeted about them a while ago and I thought I should share it here as it's an amazing free avant-garde art and literature resource with all kinds of books, videos and recordings available to download. They are breaching copyrights but are happy to remove any items if artists or copyright owners request they do so - they aim to provide acess to materials that otherwise may not be available to the general public. Read more about UbuWeb and what they do here.

I'm going to be watching Ways of Seeing the television series based on John Berger's book.

 

 Burroughs The Movie about poet, writer, artist and visionary William Burroughs.

 

Merce Cunningham's Points in Space (1986) with music by John Cage. There is more Merce Cunningham here and I have posted my personal favourite, Beach Birds, before. If you like dance and you've never seen it then you should definetly have a look!

 

And I'm so happy to find Conical Intersect by Gordon Matta-Clark who is probably one of my favourite artists as well. I've posted about him before here.

 

An interview with filmmaker/artist/ethnomusicologist/alchemist Harry Smith. 

 
Oh and just had to add this - a documentary about occult mystic Aleister Crowley.

 

 

newspaper

I'd really like to buy a copy of Newspaper by Janette Beckman but the cost of postage to the UK is about 5 times the price of the paper. Available here.

 

 
 

hollywood BABYLON

Jennie gave me both of the Kenneth Anger Hollywood Babylon books for my birthday - I've been wanting to get them for ages but hadn't got round to it. They are definitely compulsive reading - sometimes shocking, supremely trashy but still gossipy and funny all at the same time. Thanks Jen! x

I was planning on scanning a few of the stories to post here but it turned out to be a logistical nightmare I just didn't have the patience for. You should just buy the books! 

ATOMIC

I really want this book, How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb by Peter Kuran... it is a little expensive though so I will have to content myself with these photos in the meantime. Seems to be available in the US for a much chepaer price here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More information here.

 

dear JOHN

Am wondering why I have never read any of your writing before?

This matter will be rectified, starting with this and then this.

Kind regards

 

 

  

a few hints for the young MIXER

From the Savoy Cocktail Book...

 

 

 

 

For really good cocktails in London go to 69 Colebrooke Row in Islington.

collecting the WORLD

I am enjoying reading Susan Sontag's On Photography it has lots of interesting ideas that are still relevant today.  I like the idea of photographs as a souvenir of daily life, and I am most definitely guilty of in ways inventing my own past with the photos I choose to take and keep and display.   Sontag says that 'photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.'  A lot of what she has to say raises questions and illuminates our very image driven current world and is interesting viewed in terms of the internet and blogging.

But in the end I just enjoy collecting the world, recording my insignificant life, mostly for my own pleasure, and of of course I enjoy looking at the ways other people invent and record their own lives and experiences.

Where Sontag calls immersion in image 'the most irresistible form of mental pollution' I would like to think of it differently, sometimes I think the small frame of photography helps me to appreciate the beauty of the everyday more than I might otherwise do, even if it does knowingly exclude perhaps it provides something of a focus. I probably am guilty of an overconsumption of images and in many ways a preoccupation with image but hopefully this is something which makes my life better rather than worse.