Journal

David Bowie Passed Away

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

Two days ago David Bowie passed away after an 18 month battle against, which he, miraculously, managed to keep completely hidden from the public. He did this while simultaneously releasing two albums, the last of which was released two days before he passed away. The last album, which I haven’t attentively listened to yet, is supposedly full of clues about his illness and mortality.

As I’ve told many of you before, my mother was a big fan. My earliest memory is of my mother holding me in her arms while she danced through our living room while listening to songs off the Station to Station album.

Before my mother passed away, she chose a few songs to be played at her cremation. I’ve written about this before, and she chose two Bowie songs that have become incredibly important to me since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbpMpRq6DV4

My personal favourite is the Danny Lohner (a.k.a. Renholder) mix of Bring Me the Disco King, for reasons I can’t quite put into words.

Bowie has been part of my entire life and it’s fairly hard to imagine him no longer accompanying me. While you grow older, you don’t expect people — who have become like an aspects than a person — to grow older as well, and eventually pass away.

Hurry! Buy More Stuff!

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

Buy More Stuff

Buy More Stuff is a really interesting piece of performance art/social activism. Like most people, I can’t quite make anything of it, which is kind of the point. “Confuse everyone!” It really fits well with Black Friday, which happens to be today. They are in their eleventh year, and I hope they keep this up.

Ghost in the Shell: Identity in Space

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

This video helped me understand a few things that I’ve come to notice over time.

I recollect very clearly how Eva and I once went to see the Takeshi Kitano vehicle Brother in the cinema once. There was a scene in the film that was a shot of two men in the back of a limousine, one looking out the window at the city passing him by, the other stoically staring at nothing in front of him, only stirring to brush a noticed bit of fluff from his leg. A group of people behind us just didn’t get the pacing, the stillness, the pointlessness of the scene, while I loved it.

One of my favourite scenes in Ghost in the Shell, is a scene that adds nothing to the story, except to add some mood to the film by showing some disconnected shots of the city. I love everything about that sequence, but I was never able to put my finger on why it was so special and why it was so different.

Now I do. It’s aspect-to-aspect, rather than action-to-action.

Action-to-action is the transition from one shot to another that drives the story forward, from one goal-driven action to another goal-driven action. This is something that’s most often used in Western visual storytelling media, like cinema and comic books, while Eastern (specifically Japanese) storytelling often uses aspect-to-aspect transitions, where the story isn’t driven forward, just the perception, which helps to explore the space the scene plays out in.