Gideon Coe - BBC6 - 2021-05-19

• Courtney Pine - Some amazing jazz.  Sacreal something? - must look up
• Ted Taylor Four - Cat's Eyes - amazing surf

Emily Herring on Henri Bergson; laughter is what keeps us elastic and free

https://aeon.co/essays/for-henri-bergson-laughter-is-what-keeps-us-elastic-and-free

Amazing essay on Henri Bergson and his philosophical ideas about laughter

Laughter, wrote Bergson, had 'a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation'.

E.B. White and Katherine S White: "Humour can be dissected, as a frgog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind"

Bergson: the comic does not exist outside of the strictly human. [...] It is possible to laugh at animals or vegetables but only on the condition that we are able to detect the human in them.

Bergson: laughter has no greater foe than emotion.  When the emotional stakes are too high they don't allow for the momentary anaestesia of the heart that laughter demands. 

Bergson: laughter appears to stand in need of an echo.  Social bonding.   Laughter plays an important part in our various social groups.

Bergson describes life as an ever-changing, creative (ie, producing entirely new and inpredictable forms) and spontaneous movement.  In this sense, life exhibits the opposite of the mechanical tendencies of inert matter characterised by rigidity, predictability and repetitiveness.  [...]. Society therefore needs its members to display 'the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability', and needs to guard itself against 'a certain rigidity of body, mind and character'.

A man walking down the street, he slips and falls. Hilarity ensues.  According to Bergson, it is the involuntary nature of the action that makes us laugh. Stumbles, gaffes, slipups, bloopers and general clumsiness indicate both a lack of versatility and of awareness; "where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being", we find instead "a certain mechanical inelasticity".

Consider a scene from the classic film Modern Times (1936) in which Charlie Chaplin plays a factory worker subjected to the relentless cadence of an assembly line. Even outside the factory, he continues to erratically tighten imaginary bolts, stuck in the repetitive movement he has been executing all day. In Bergsonian terms, this is funny because we are seeing someone act out deeply engrained habits even though the circumstances demand otherwise. Both in the case of accidental blunders and in carefully choreographed slapstick comedy, we are laughing at figures who lack ‘elasticity’, who are mechanically following a predetermined trajectory and therefore fail to adapt to their surroundings.

Attack on the Block

Amusing enough scifi about aliens invading a British estate housing.  Nothing spectacular but well executed.

The Third Day

Strange psychological miniseries with Jude Law.   Visually and sound wise sometimes reminiscent of Utopia.

Gods of Snooker

Small three ep series on the snooker heroes of yore, mostly Alex Higgins, bits of Steve Davis, White,  et.

Heat

Finaly watched this 1995 classic.  Amazing work, acting, storyline... everything.

Possessor

 Brandon Cronenberg - son of - does a nice body horror job here.  One thing I struggled with was to understand *why* she starts to struggle from these mix of senses... it felt like we were thrown into the story late, before setting up the scene.

Might be just me.  Enjoyed it.

the Flight Attendant

fun series about a hard drinking girl waking up next to her dead one night stand (Michiel Huisman)

podcasts

* Team Deakins - amazing insight in the films they helped make

* Tom Read Wilson has words with - enjoyable enough

* Huberman Lab - why we need to sleep

* Darknet Diaries - a bit superficial and over the top, but fun stories about e.g. North Korean cybertronic bank heists

* I'm not a Monster - gripping mini series about an American girl moving to Syria to join ISIS with her radicalized husband. Her son was ten years old and famous for threatening the American president via a video message.

* In machines we trust

* I was There Too - chats with "second characters" of films, e.g. bus passengers of Speed, the girl in the pit from Silence of the Lambs.

Sisters with Transistors

Delia Derbyshire was instrumental in setting up the BBC Radiophonic workshop after ww II. Wrote the Dr Who theme!!

Daphne Oram set up her own sound studio.

Jo Hutton - musicologist.

Elaine Radigue worked closely with Pierre Henry.

 

Music of Bebe Barron (together with husband Louis) was described by Anaïs Nin: "a molecule had stubbed its toe". They did the sound for "Forbidden Planet"! Bebe Barron: "The monster was the most difficult thing. The dying of Morbius was the actual dying of the circuits". Some bigshots of the movie/msuic industry did not allow the soundtrack - first completely electronic soundtrack ever - to be called music, afraid for their jobs.  Thus they are credited as "electronic tonalities by Louis and Bebe Barron"

Pauline Oliveros used an accordeon?! "I used a bathbtub for reverberation".  She was a woman, gay and played avant garde music.  Every single one of those things would be difficult in the 1960's.  She had all three. 
Wrote a piece 'Don't call me a "Lady" composer'... which is a strange echo from the past reverberating my frustration with gay or female writers being asked "what being gay or female" meant to them.... while no man is ever asked what being male means to him or influenced his art! As it shouldn't! Don't ask them, as you don't ask him! They are writers, composers, artists. Like "him".  We should switch it around. Ask males "how/why" them being male influenced their work. ffs. Doesn't this species ever learn?
Pauline Oliveros - "Listening is the basis of creativity in culture"

Laurie Spiegel wrote "Music mouse" ... in the 80s?  Should really look into her.

Wendy Carlos; her of "A Clockwork Orange" fame.

Playwriters were writing very surreal plays after the war.  They needed surreal sounds.

Arab Strap - "Fable of the Urban Fox"

Amazing parlando track.

Can - "Vitamin C"

 Somehow haunting song with that repeated "hey you! You're losing.. you're losing... you're losing your mind!"

Drum 'n base version: Adam Beyer & Bart Skils - Your Mind [Drumcode]

Mr Scruff - "Fish"

Also famous from the electro-swing alike "Get a move on"

Tim Birkhead - "The most perfect thing"

The final book about bird eggs!

Ingmar Heytze - "De veertig van Heytze"

Nogmaals aan het overlezen, nog altijd even goed.

Meander

Fun "cube" like film with ok plot

Seobok

Nice South Korean film about a clone who needs to be protected.  Has a wonderful balance between philosophy and action.

Vicious Fun

Does what it promises. Horror magazine journalists finds himself in an "AA meeting for serial killers"

Fried Barry

Crazy South African film about a drug user getting possessed by an alien, going on a strange surreal trip through the night. Includes having sex with a sex worker who gives birth immediately after. Crazy stuff.

In the Shadows

Great Turkish film of a dystopian future where men just live to serve the machine, but don't know why or what.