"why do people believe in space & time...cause i'm leavin' all of that behind..."

Last Thursday, Amelia & I had the good fortune of travelling to Columbus, OH to see Werner Herzog's new 3-D movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.


The movie centers around Chauvet Cave which houses the oldest (and incredibly well-preserved) cave paintings in the known world. It is closed to the public for preservation--thus, this may be the only video footage filmed.

The drawings themselves are incredible, and lent extra-realistic portrayal via the 3-D viewing, as many are painted on undulating cave walls that play into the movement and look of the drawings. This was my first 3-D movie (as long as you don't count amusement parks...like the ridiculous cyberpunk psychedelia of indoor rollercoaster CHAOS...Opryland's finest), and it took me a good 30 minutes to reach a point where I felt like my eyes weren't constantly swimming for adjustment.

Herzog's warmth and humanity are evident as ever in many of the interviews, in which he manages to mine character and compassion from a range of scientists, academics, and cave-seekers. Vibrant personality exists everywhere, and Herzog is adept as ever in exposing it; from a pathetic attempt at spear-throwing, to a scientist's circus past, to the bone-flute-stylings of an experimental archaeologist named...Wulf.

The strongest aspect of the whole movie though, is Herzog's use of the cave to rend the space-time fabric that separates us from our distant ancestors, a gulf that often seems infinite in its breadth. Even considering the vastness of time & space with the added bonus of an understandable context (art!) is intimidating. Without context, in my personal experience, thinking about such distant connections is an impossibility.


Wulf and Werner.
The connections to our past are strong, and emotional, throughout the movie. The wall of handprints in red; the sprayed outline of the same hand; with silence and blinding flashlights as a backdrop (add in the stunning score or reverberating heartbeats) these are stunningly heavy revelations. When Herzog mentions the footprint of a child and a wolf side-by-side, not knowing whether they came in together, or thousands of years apart, the point is hammered home. Time as we perceive it is swift; the usual metaphor being a river. But it comes across here as more of a glacier, inching forwards inevitably, leaving chasms that can be crossed mentally, but rarely physically. This cave, this movie, is one of those rare chances. Seize it.

psychedelic things i liked when i was a kid, vol. 2 (or: unattached thought stew)

Friend (& super-great booking dude) Dan C. told me, pre-Tortoise show, "Yeah they're really good for 5 minutes, but after that...it's the same thing. You get the idea." Now, he may have been acting salty due to Ghana going up 1-0 on the U.S. in their quarterfinal Cup match. Or, he may have had match fatigue....er, show fatigue. As a veteran of playing 300+ shows, and attending many more, I can totally understand seeing a band several times and not continuing to be impressed. However, I wonder if this doesn't say something more about our culture in general, and even something about me. A predilection to krautrock, attending Tortoise shows, and reading a 1300-page World War I-era fictional tome doesn't exactly place me in the same time-space-continuum as the rest of the Tweet-feeding, aerosol-pancake-eating, Generation ADD.


yes---this is real. pancakes are so hard to make!

I'm not trying to claim that I have some sort of super-powered attention span (I don't; as evidence, I have 6 tabs open on this Chrome browser); and although I often want to (after working with several thousand kids this year), I'm not claiming that a shorter attention span is inherent in Generation Z. In fact, my only claim is that (and I just read this somewhere on Internet...can't remember) we wear our consumable art like identity badges. This is some sort of filter for most people. "I like this_____this______and_______, what about you?" A creative filtering. Unfortunately, when you aren't into People Magazine and Baconzillas, your filter is coming on pretty strong. What have I been listening to this month? Mostly early Stereolab and CAN records. This sentence automatically flies me to NeverNeverLand. Not that I have beef with that, but what has filtered my art digestion process to the point where I am interested in something that is uninteresting to most...or, how did I end up consuming the mostly inconsumable?


CAN...a little less hip in the late 80s. But who wasn't?

The first time I heard Tago Mago, the first time I heard Trout Mask Replica...these were bizarre experiences. I'm not sure how my brain processed these---was I being influenced by those around me who were partial to such records? Yes, but if that was always the case, I'd love Modest Mouse, or the Pixies...both of which I appreciate but get no emotional grab from. I think maybe repetition is the key...something very mathematic, very primal about krautrock. Even about this Dos Passos book...events pile upon events in such random fashion that the written world becomes a fractal. World War I is merely a piece of pattern in the midst of a thousand others... Perhaps by following my natural Id, my inner circadian rhythm, the tide of my body, compels me to follow art that self-repeats, that tessellates in often-times unnoticeable ways, that digests-and-then-echoes.

Now, to figure out how to seek repetition in art, but not life. Feeling the need to break out of whatever fractal I've woven myself into lately. Immerse myself in other patterns. Other weather systems. Maybe a coast, or two?