lemon ice cream

i got about 80% of the way through a blog post last week about Jorgen Leth's cycling films, but figured i would leave that sleeping dog lying rather than try to revise it a week after the fact. he had it though. so ill say something different, but related to that theoretical post. (this is all about a sunday in hell, fwiw). bike racing seems to make the most sense to me when i view it through charles sanders peirce's (brought to my attention by jean-jacques nattiez) concept of the infinitely multiple interpretant; (defined crudely, apologies) bike racing (the concept) is an (virtual) object, which exists through the infinite multiplicities of interpretants, which all allude to the object (and to each other). while the tangible "getting to the velodrome the fastest" is a notable, important part of "the bike race", "the bike race" is made up all of the other things leth chooses to show us, as well. what's neater is that all of these other things ...

hello friends, reds (1981) had very little staying power in my head beyond diane keaton looking so swagged out the whole film. lots of yelling! loren, helli and i dnf'd it at the theater so i watched the rest at home today. i honestly enjoyed the first half but it was a great film to pull the cord on; watching the post-intermission half today was not rewarding. i feel like my history with michael snow dates back like 15 years despite my never having seen any of his work. he is kind of a quintessential "guy you find out about when you're randomly searching for ~weird~ artists" guy (like schoenberg, cage, roden, you get the idea). the impetus for new york eye + ear control (1964) is maybe the most i've ever identified with a filmmaker; snow had seen the albert ayler quartet and thought they went so crazy that he pursued + used a "film employing jazz" grant from ten centuries concerts so he could "buy a half hour of music" from ayler + co. i liste...

    tried to eat my vegetables on some older freeskiing tonight. i feel like i have a pretty good understanding of what makes an edit appealing to me; as i watch more and more film i feel like i'm developing a good vocabulary to put into words what makes a good ski  film  as a opposed to a  ski  film (or a film with good skiing in it). Both Poor Boyz productions, Tracing Skylines and Propaganda are really mired in the conventions of the time(s) in which they were made. This is not purely negative - i found there to be a lot of charm to what Propaganda specifically celebrates - but it can make them feel like just budget skate-videos-on-skis, when the medium has room to be its own (similar, but distinct) art form. We can get the ugly out of the way first - Tracing Skylines. This will focus on the Detroit section of the edit, as it is what is readily available for free on youtube. the Nike SB-esque stink is all over this fucker. drone shots, self serious narra...