Tarnation: a master piece.

"At the age of eleven, TARNATION director Jonathan Caouette borrowed a neighbor¹s video camera and began documenting his daily life, interrogating his family members and making short films to escape the drama of his everyday existence. Caouette utilized six different cameras over the years, including Super-8, Betamax, VHS, Hi-8 and Mini-DV, with which he shot the bulk of the footage that appears in TARNATION. In addition, he compiled still photographs, archived answering machine messages and audiocassette diaries - all of which documented the details of his tumultuous life. As a self-proclaimed pack rat, Caouette saved what turned out to be 160 hours of personal recorded materials in a wide range of different video and audio formats, spanning over twenty years. When considered as a whole, these materials offer a devastating, yet mesmerizing portrait of a troubled American family. The footage includes unsettling domestic situations, unique dramatic performances (by a pre-teen Caouette and his mother) and unexpected demonstrations of compassion and love that could only be called unconditional." read more.

Tarnation.USA, 2003 Dir.Jonathan Caouette.

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Volan's last will.

This is a picture of the envelope I received. On September the 29th I received a letter sent from London Metropolitan Police’s forensic department. The envelope contains Volan’s death report. I am still recovering from such a terrible moment. As Volan’s closest (and perhaps sole) friend I am in the obligation of publishing these lines on his own blog, as it was his last will. In strange circumstances my dearest friend Volan passed away in the dawn of the 23rd of September in Homerton Hospital in London. His body was carted off from the churchyard of Saint Paul’s Cathedral after a mad night out with Siobhan (Sweeny), -an Irish-Scottish blues singer whose Volan had just met few hours before in the surrounding areas of Anexo Bar, close to Farringdon Station. At the moment that the ambulance arrived at the place Volan showed a critical state and almost without vital signals dying a while after indoors, in the above mentioned hospital. The death certificated shows a very cryptic language ...

I wanna live in America

The White House publicly acknowledged on Wednesday that President Bush has authorized the use of waterboarding, and that he may do so again in the future . The statements amount to an open admission of criminal activity on the part of the US government. The acknowledgement from White House deputy spokesman Tony Fratto came a day after testimony from CIA Director Michael Hayden before the Senate Intelligence Committee. For the first time, Hayden officially stated that the Bush administration had used waterboarding on three prisoners in 2002 and 2003. Waterboarding is a form of torture used since the Spanish Inquisition . It involves pouring water over a prisoner’s head to cause drowning, and has been prosecuted as torture by the United States government in the past. While the Bush administration is now stretching language and credulity to claim that it should not be categorized as torture, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, acknowledged on Wednesday that “taken to i...

norman mclaren

Norman McLaren was one of the most significant abstract filmmakers of the British inter-war period. Born in 1914 in Stirling, Scotland, he entered the Glasgow School of Fine Arts in 1932, where he became interested in film and joined the School's Kine Society. His earliest extant film, Seven Till Five (1933), a "day in the life of an art school", was clearly influenced by Eisenstein and displays a strongly formalist attitude. (more)

Nevermind the bollocks!

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