A Short Post For A Short Track

Track 9: Foam is now up! The album cover is by Isam Prado, who appears in the most recent Popgun.

Contempt

Two photos inspired by Le Mépris.

Molly Ringwald in King Lear via Godard

The Spaces Between Things

In my last Radar-related post, I mentioned that a few little surprises would come up in the next couple of months. The Spaces Between Things is one of them -- the first short story to appear on the site since last year. It is a story similar in mood to some of the shorts I wrote from 2004 to 2006, only more ambient and not as cryptic. It's about as cryptic as the reader wants it to be, anyway.

It's no coincidence that the protagonist's first name comes from my middle (yes, my middle name is Will, not William). His thought processes and views on imagination mirror my own at that age.

What are the spaces between things? The spaces between things are just that -- spaces. What's inside an empty space is whatever you put in it, and what you put in it will be different from anyone else.

The art for this short is a wedding gift from the blonde queen cod, Bettina M. George, an absurdist artist whose subjects are always highly fashionable, whether in a snow pea costume or a well-designed shirt. When I think of the artists I want to work with over and over (and over) again, Bettina is always dancing with some remarkable company at the top of the list. Her mixture of elegance and absurdism is tremendously inspiring. Some of her art can be found at ptlaulau.com.

The Tourist, Part 2 (of 2)

Further scenes from a honeymoon in Paris.

List Returns

1. Whisper of the Heart - Yoshifumi Kondo (1995)
2. Seven Samurai - Akira Kurosawa (1954)
3. Pierrot le fou - Jean-Luc Godard (1965)
4. Solaris - Andrei Tarkovsky (1972)
5. Band of Outsiders - Jean-Luc Godard (1964)
6. Chungking Express - Wong Kar-wai (1994)
7. Café Lumière - Hou Hsiao-Hsien (2003)
8. The Spirit of the Beehive - Víctor Erice (1973)
9. Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea - Hayao Miyazaki (2008)
10. Sans Soleil - Chris Marker (1983)
11. There Will Be Blood - P.T. Anderson (2007)
12. Linda Linda Linda - Nobuhiro Yamashita (2005)
13. Dodes’ka-den - Akira Kurosawa (1970)
14. Hélas pour moi - Jean-Luc Godard (1993)
15. Masculin féminin - Jean-Luc Godard (1966)
16. JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre - Jean-Luc Godard (1994)
17. Magnolia - P.T. Anderson (1999)
18. Days of Heaven - Terrence Malick (1978)

The Tourist

Scenes from a honeymoon in Paris.

The Nerd Wave Paris of Spring 2009

I am a Jean-Luc Godard fanboy, so as any good Jean-Luc Godard fanboy would do, I made a little list of things referencing the great director while I was in Paris.

1. In Paris, you can walk along the Seine and find open-air bookstands selling books on Godard, along with postcards depicting scenes and posters from his films. Some of them carry a few Godard dvds as well.


2. In Paris, dvd stores tend to have entire sections devoted to Godard. All of his films have many different editions on dvd, and most of them carry beautiful designs, often utilising the original poster art.


3. In Virgin Megastores, the G sections are broken up by a Godard section slammed right into the middle. dvds are typically ordered by director, as they should be -- after all, if bookstores arrange books by author, why don't our stores arrange dvds by the authors of the films?

4. In Paris, you can flip through tv channels to find a Spanish station broadcasting random clips from Godard films, with little commentary, for about an hour.

5. In Paris, you can go to the Louvre and quickly find the hallway which the Band of Outsiders ran down. You can't run down this hallway, but you can take a picture of yourself pretending to run down it.

6. The Champs-Élysées is about the same as it was in Breathless. Walking down it with your wife, you have to resist the urge to shout those immortal words: 'New York Herald Tribune!'


7. In Paris, you can watch the French Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, and one of the answers to a question will be Jean-Luc Godard.


8. In Paris, you can step into the Shakespeare & Company and almost immediately come across books on display on the French New Wave. The covers to these books depict scenes from Godard films.


9. At the Charles de Gaulle exhibit in the Hôtel des Invalides, there is a room devoted to the 1960s which is comprised of glowing screens. One of these glowing screens is a photograph of Jean-Luc Godard.


10. At the Cimetière du Montparnasse you can visit the grave of Jean Seberg.


11. The Cinémathèque Française has a 1968 poster of an Une Femme est une femme / Vivre sa vie double bill, along with a looping projection of an early scene from Breathless.

12. The Trafic portion of the Jacques Tati exhibit at the Cinémathèque Française has a screen showing the traffic jam sequence from Godard's Weekend.

Now In Married Form

I'm back, I'm alive and I brought some Radar with me. The site will be updated on a weekly basis until Radar has completed its serialisation, at which point the physical book will be the next major project. But there will be many little suprises throughout -- and soon after -- all of this.