Wie war das nochmal? Weswegen wird es (auf europäischem Boden) wohl die nächste größere Diktatur geben? Weswegen werden Reglements allenorts verschärft, hin zu mehr Überwachung, zu rigiderer Kontrolle, zu weniger Rechten für den Bürger? Weswegen werden Verhandlungen in solchen Themen von ‘”gleichgesinnten” Staaten’ hinter verschlossenen Türen vorangetrieben und nicht dort, wo sie eigentlich stattfinden sollten - unter den wachen Augen der Öffentlichkeit? Weswegen lassen sich auch die Regierungen der europäischen Staaten nicht zweimal bitten, eindeutig Stellung zu beziehen für eine Position, die die Mehrheit ihrer Bürger, umfassend erklärt, mit Sicherheit nicht teilen würde? Richtig: Wegen der Durchsetzung der Rechte an “geistigem Eigentum” (Einzelner). Irritierend.
Hurra, endlich wieder ‘mal etwas für die Rubrik “Bizarres”: “Macht das Internet doof?” ist die Frage, die dieser Tage den Besucher einschlägiger Zeitungs-Kioske von der Titelseite einer prominenten deutschen Zeitschrift anspringt. Nun ja. “Vernetzt, verquatscht, verloren.” Wird wohl so sein. Macht uns eigentlich auch das private Fernsehen dumm, mit seinen alltäglichen Low-Level-Nachmittags-Talkshows? Oder die tägliche Yellow-Press, die interessanterweise auch zuhauf aus demselben Verlagshaus kommt? Oh well…
Introduced a new category to [pictorial] today: “lost in moments”, mainly being an experiment: Been running around with a camera-equipped cell phone for quite a while now, my hard drives are slowly filling up with wagonloads of snapshots taken then and now, capturing various situations and moods, sometimes trying to really get hold of a “worthy” image, but sometimes just merely been taken for the sake of it, out of a certain mood, and preserved because, well, they seemed to after all capture that mood rather well. As you might expect, cell phone camera quality is highly questionable, and overally this is more of an experiment than anything else, nevertheless I decided to randomly dump some of them to the “lost in moments” category, allowing others (and myself, of course…) to, well, get “lost in moments” once in a while. The pictures come in rather small size and (well, almost…) completely without any postprocessing being done, just “taken off the camera”. So much for authenticity. ;)
Title inspired, by the way, by Ulvers incredible “Lost In Moments” off the “Perdition City” album. Enjoy, or not, whatever. :)
Spending quite some time on it, I eventually finished reading Danielewskis “House Of Leaves”, a book surely to get hold of one as soon as you dive deeper into it. Overally, I have to say that this has been one of the most intense literature trips I’ve been on ever since reading Paul Austers “Book Of Illusions” but nonetheless the House is another kind of beast in many respects. In some way, Danielewski in his first novel successfully challenges our perception of reality in virtually every possible way:
- Mixing fiction and non-fiction writing, a purely made-up novel packed up in a fake-scientific essay on “The Navidson Record”, a reality-horror movie completely fictional yet described in an outstanding accurate and detailed way.
- Merging at the very least three different narrative threads (the story of “The Navidson Record” itself, the writings of Zampano on it, plus the thoughts and stories of Johnny Truant collected in liner notes along the “real”(?) story of the book makes you, finally, end up with a book you will be capable of reading at least three times in a completely different order, depending on whether, how or not to make your way through the different stories. Somehow you virtually can get lost along the way as, except for the conception putting it all together, there’s not that much in common between the three of these stories…
- The core essay surrounding “The Navidson Record”, as well, is armed to the teeth with footnotes referring to a vast load of books, articles and essays, some of them really existing, some of them made up as well as the story itself. Merging realities again, and proving that Danielewski seems to have spent an outstanding amount of time researching virtually everything ranging from physics (what size of room do you need to have an audible echo?), history (implications and ideas of the Minotaur legend and labyrinths in history itself) to the ethical effects of photography and media (considering “Delial” as well as emphasizing the role of “polished” and “raw” video footage and their perception as “real” in days of imaging technology available to virtually everyone) or aspects embracing philosophy, remembering dealing with the uncanny in ‘the House‘ as well as referring to the works of Martin Heidegger. Challenging to the mind, definitely.
- Overally, “uncanny” indeed is what describes a lot of aspects of this book rather well, describing vast extends of dark, absolutely empty space, extending to boundaries unreachable even to the protagonists of “The Navidson Record”, eventually almost destroying them while trying to get to the core of the labyrinth starting at the living room wall of the house on Ash Tree Lane. Not sure though whether it is uncanny because of its very size and darkness or because of it being completely absurd and beyond any rational comprehension.
- Completely letting aside the story as such, the typography used throughout the book challenges everything you might have seen so far in a printed book… Not that it makes reading really easier, at least it definitely does emphasize the mood of the book in many respects…
So, after ending the “main” part of the book, just having the appendixes (mainly the Truant letters) left to read, I am listening to the perfect soundtrack to this (“Hallways To Always” by Ulver, which at the very least in its title references the “House Of Leaves”…), pondering the implications of space and how “The Navidson Record” deals with it - vast, empty spaces, scary and frightening, “unheimlich” because of feeling not just “empty” like an empty room but “empty” like space not showing any signs of ever being claimed, being inhabited, being filled with life by anyone. Perhaps a good ending point - overcoming the uncomfortable feeling emanated by large, empty, unknown spaces by simply “filling them with life”, with laughter and art and inspiration and anything that make them comfortable, tangible, … human? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do after reading “House” for a second time… or a third… or … you know. By the way: No I don’t think the world would need “The Navidson Record” as a “real” movie, there’s hardly a way getting next to the “inner-eye movie” created by reading this book, anyway… ;)
Just as of recently, I have been playing around with Java Mail, a library I overally enjoy working with, except for one thing perhaps: Somehow I miss a consistent data structure backing it to allow for traversing an e-mail structure in a clean way…
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Some progress, at last. Quite some of my (spare?) time the last couple of weeks I spent pondering a smart way of getting an existing Spring/webapp environment consisting of several modules migrated to make more use of the Java EE 5 features, namely provided by the glassfish application server which has been in productive use in our environment for quite a while now. But while migrating webapps from tomcat to glassfish has proven to be pretty straightforward in our case (asides a few minor caveats it was just as difficult as deploying the .war file using asadmin and seeing the application start up on the new system… ;) ), the idea to make our “backend” application (so far Spring-Remoting packed into a web application context) a well-behaving EJB3 module turned out to be a little more complex than just that. But doable, to say now, after all…
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Oh well… being so busy writing about this and that (and, most of the time it seems, nothing) these days, I almost forgot something maybe really worth mentioning: A while ago, Australian death metal band Locura has chosen one of my older works still hosted on Flickr to be used as inner-sleeve artwork on their debut album “Draconian Measures” (which I am just partly posting here, for the “full” print feel free to get the album… ;) ):
Feels good to see ones name printed to the back cover of a CD sold “on the other side of the planet”; even though I haven’t yet heard the whole album and/or read some of the lyrics, the music to be found on their myspace.com site at the very least sounds promising. Thanks folks, ‘ts been a pleasure working with you. :P
Well, haven’t been writing about music in ages; not that the last weeks were lacking good releases, but… oh well, maybe I was just lazy. ;) However a while ago some kind soul on last.fm told me to have an eye / ear on the “On The Parallel Front” album, an online sampler obviously created by x-line net label, collecting tracks solely created by Russian electronics / industrial / ebm acts. And, overally, I have to say this was quite a good recommendation, as most of the tracks are exceptionally strong. Personal favorites of mine, on there: ‘Survivalism’ by Church Of Machinery, a strong, straightforward electro/ebm track reminding me of Tamtrum somehow (asides the fact that I really enjoy the name of this project…), The Pulsar’s ‘Point Of No Return’ and ‘Trinity’ by D.J. GOLUBb. If you’re into darker electronic noises, be sure to check it out, get the tracks (and possibly some others of the x-line releases, and give’em a shot, it’s surely worth the time. Only bad thing, so far: Next to nothing is known about most of the projects and bands involved in this records, no websites, no mail addresses, no nothing. If anyone knows more, feel free to drop me a line…
