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Q: What would you say is the most important thing you’ve done with your music?
A: The most important thing is just giving it to people. People write me letters talking about their connection with the music or with specific songs, and about times in their lives, what they were doing, what was going on with them, how a certain record came out at that time, how the things they went through and their memories are now connected with that record. They become like little home movies for people; they listen to them, they’ll take them to the grave. This is definitely the most important thing, because it’s also been my experience of music. The first time you hear a record that moves you, that’s a sensation that stays with you forever. It’s the most profound thing.
THOM YORKE, LEAD SINGER OF RADIOHEAD, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL
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It has been known since 1965 that the universe is in a state of expansion, and it has now been discovered that it’s also accelerating, as if a kind of antigravity were at work somewhere far away, repelling all mass rather than attracting it. No one knows the cause, which is why this antigravity has been given the name dark energy. To throw a stone in the air and for it never to come down. An old man who becomes less wrinkled with age. The logic of the message in a bottle sent out by a shipwreck survivor—sending it out, not wanting it to come back. And then there are bodies that grow indefinitely, satellite dishes, roof terraces.
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J soon moved into Sandra’s apartment. Just one suitcase. Around that time, he pointed out certain things that helped a good deal in her research; not facts as such, but tangential ideas that she interpreted in her own language. One Friday, on returning from the Natural History Museum, Sandra found that the arabesques on the bedroom wallpaper had been colored in, and diagrams added, small arrows and other such things. It made Sandra laugh, and she asked him to come to a Deerhoof gig that night at the Garage, but he said, Just this very day, this morning, I went to the Tate to see the Vik Muniz exhibition, the video one I talked to you about. It was really busy, so I sat down on the floor, and then this guy came and sat next to me and began making comments on the images. I found him annoying at first, but then he said some really penetrating things, and that got me started, and so we ended up having this wonderful conversation. He left before the projection finished, but he gave me his address and said I should come by whenever I liked. I thought we could go tonight—I’d really like to. Sandra found J’s impulses irresistible. Leaving in the cupboard the meal that she’d planned to have before the concert, she put on a woolen skirt, low-heeled shoes, and her reading glasses. J wore the same outfit as always: his blue, paint-flecked overalls. The address was very close to the Piccadilly Tube station, on the 6th floor of a magnificent neoclassical building. The elevator went only as far as the 5th floor, and they took a flight of stairs up to a door with 6 over the lintel. Going through, they found a relatively well-lit roof terrace, L-shaped and roughly 20 square meters, and a hut stationed at the far end, inside which a man was sitting with his back to them. 4 or 5 pairs of wet underwear hung from some lines; also pegged to the lines were a large number of sheets of paper, set out in neat rows and typewritten on a single side. Hello! they called. The man turned. Who’s there? It’s me, said J, from this morning at the Tate. Oh! Well, come in. He was an old man, verging on very old, quite fat, and dressed in a thick coat. Scratching his beard, he extended a hand, before pulling out a couple of stools and, in an admonishing way, telling them to sit down. The walls were made of sheet metal and flattened tins, and all but bare. He made coffee. An animated conversation ensued, the trio sitting around a table that was among the few pieces of furniture—there was also a camping stove, a couple of plates, a new-looking sofa, a book with Philips Agricultural Guide: 1971 on the spine, and a radio. He spoke impeccable English, telling them about his life as a writer and how, after leaving Paris in 1984, he had traveled around, finally settling in London. He asked about their work and seemed greatly interested by both of these youngsters. He brought out some food and wine, and they drank a lot and had a good time. He told them that his masterpiece had been a novel called Hopscotch, but that he had also written, in parallel, a Hopscotch B or Theory of Open Balls, which he had always kept to himself. When they left, and once they were down in the street, they looked back up to see him waving at them over the roof railing. When they came around the corner, J and Sandra instinctively looked at one another, and she said that she had been thinking all night that, really, everything, them included, was ants toiling beneath the ground, and that no one knew the true position of the earth’s surface.
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Walter H. Halloran, one of the Jesuit priests who took part in the exorcism of a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, which formed the basis for the book The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty and for the subsequent William Friedkin film, died on March 1 at the age of 83 in Wisconsin. In January 1949, Halloran was a 28-year-old seminarian when Father William Bowdern called him, along with 4 other priests, to the Saint Francis Catholic Church in St. Louis to assist in the exorcism of an 11-year-old boy named Robbie. The boy had been exhibiting extremely violent tendencies and behavioral issues and his parents had taken him to doctors and psychiatrists, but to no effect. Believing their son in the possession of a demon, they sought the advice of the Archbishop of Maryland, who sent them to Father Bowdern. The exorcism sessions took place over a period of 3 months. Robbie recovered and went on to live a normal life, carrying no memories of the experience and never showing any signs of psychic imbalance thereafter. The Catholic Church never recognized it as a bona fide exorcism and doctors and other experts discussed the case, concluding that he had been suffering from a mental illness. Halloran kept silent on the matter until a few years ago, by which time he was working as a curate at Saint Martin of Tours Church, San Diego. He had vivid memories of the case, and confirmed that a number of inexplicable things had taken place during the ritual, that the boy had reacted very badly to the holy water, to Communion, and whenever he heard the names of Jesus, God, or the Virgin Mary. The exorcism of Robbie Brady had strengthened his faith, he said. He said that he and Father Bowdern had gone to see the film together, but that they had not liked it. It struck them as the usual Hollywood fare, he said, a horror movie intended to make people scream, nothing more.
EL PAÍS OBITUARIES, MARCH 14, 2005
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From inside all you can hear is the wind outside as it buffets the wire fences. The books line the shelves, programs are loaded on the computers, the plates in the kitchens are clean and neatly stacked, the meat in the walk-in refrigerators remains intact, the board games are in the display cabinets, the counters and the dice shakers encode hypothetical games. Somewhere a radio … “and in international news, a line millions of people long has formed to see the remains of John Paul II. Meanwhile, in Berlin, the renowned British band the No Syndicate are touring their fifth Anglo-Hispanic collective record, Heidi Street [“El Regreso”]; as has become traditional in their shows, the members, all of whom are anonymous, read various fragments and answer questions from a group wearing black balaclavas. This is Radio Nacional de España, Radio Five, stay tuned…”
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Henry Darger’s body was found in 1972 in his Chicago home—which during his life he had rarely left except to go to Mass, sometimes as often as 5 times a day—in a state as undistinguished as it would seem the artist’s existence had been. The landlord, upon noticing that, for the first time in 47 years, Darger’s rent was late, went to his home on Webster Avenue, and was concerned when Henry did not come to the door. Never having needed his key in those 47 years, he had lost it, and the police had to come and kick down the heavy oak door. It would be years before the scene they discovered could be properly accounted for: Henry was sitting in a barber’s chair facing the television, which was on, he had a book open in his hands, and there was an open liter bottle of Coca-Cola, no longer fizzy, next to his glasses on the floor. In his studio, which took up part
of the living room and kitchen, they found one of the most obsessive, voluminous, and complete works in the history not only of literature but that of painting, music, and of comics, too. This included: a typewritten manuscript, single-spaced and exceeding 15,000 pages; more than 300 watercolor paintings in pastel shades and of enormous dimension; images of saints; newspaper cuttings; and an impossible ledger providing an account of the weather in Chicago every day for 10 years, and which he had taken the trouble to name The Book of Weather Reports—with the attendant suggestion that, for Darger, everything that happened in his life was in itself art. It seemed that the 300 watercolors were meant as the illustrations for the novel The Story of Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. An epic tale set on an imaginary planet in which 7 child princesses from the kingdom of Abbiennia—the Vivian Girls—take on an army of adult Glandelians responsible for enslaving and torturing children. The watercolors include scenes of extreme violence, of girls being impaled, disemboweled, and tortured, and others of naked girls frolicking in fields of flowers, complete with gigantic, pastel-shade, gold-edged butterfly wings. Interestingly, these girls, naked except for leather shoes and embroidered socks, also have small penises. One theory is that Darger had never been in an intimate relationship with a woman, due to an obsessive fear that they might turn out to be the sister he had never met. Others think he took inspiration from depictions of the baby Jesus. Obsessed with description, he went into great detail on all the battles, giving names to each of the hundreds of soldiers, describing and drawing each of their uniforms, the flags, horses, and butterflies, to the point of making up anthems for each of the different countries and drill songs for all the troops. When he was found, sitting in a barber’s chair, a liter bottle of no-longer-fizzy Coca-Cola on the floor by his glasses, the book he was holding was Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai. On the television a very young Michael Jackson was telling an interviewer that what he liked, far more than singing songs, was having friends.
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Q: What effect did it have on your music that you grew up in a small village?
A: Living in quite a remote place encouraged me to use my imagination from a young age. There weren’t very many outside stimuli apart from the countryside, so I had to make up my own game world, my own environment, and it all had to happen inside my head.
PJ HARVEY, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL
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For breakfast the old man Arkadi has a bowl of sugared milk and vodka thickened with pieces of bread and lard. He picks up the bowl with both hands, his face disappearing between them as he drinks. He would like to have a ring on one of his fingers, he thinks, for the way it would go clink against things: a way of limiting or giving form to the world. Except for the sound of him slurping the milk, the kitchen is quiet. Not long until the pigs will start demanding to be fed. On the wall to the left of the stove, next to an image of Christ and some photographs of his parents, hangs the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He has put it inside a frame Vartan gave him, golden and decorated with a number of angelfish gazing around in all directions. They are the watchers, Vartan said when he presented the gift. Arkadi usually spends this last 15 minutes of sunrise scrutinizing the bunched-together faces on the sleeve. He has crossed out that of Karl Marx, the only one he recognized, but after that he stuck a photograph of his deceased wife’s face on top. He looks at her. They had never been able to afford the wedding ring.
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There was no horizon until a person came and stood between it and the next horizon along; the vertical human silhouette on the horizontal plane constituted the first intersection, the elemental crossing of paths still pursued by the chef when dropping croquettes in oil to fry, by 2 businessmen shaking hands to close a deal, by the mathematician testing out an equals sign between two equations. Until this moment the horizon had existed, simple and neutral, outside of time, which is why airplanes, which have no horizons, give an impression of weightlessness when they are in the air, moving directly from one nothing to another, in a time continuum that has no corresponding image in space, and this is why, too, the bubbles in fizzy water, with their vertical ascent, institute their own horizon until such time as the water freezes and the bubbles become fossils, trapped.
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The way Steve and Polly met always seemed very peculiar to them. She had been driving along the road between New York and Long Island when she ran into traffic—a quite spectacular accident, it seemed. The cars were moving forward in a continual on-off of accelerations and brakings, and at one point Polly looked to her right and saw a scrapyard, and a man dressed in an astrakhan shawl jumping up and down on the hood of a car, surrounded by a small, attentive crowd. The next day Polly read a small article in The New York Times about a chef named Steve Road doing a book launch in a scrapyard: The Cooking with Your Car Compendium, as suggested by the title, was described as a series of recipes to cook on a car engine, useful if at the end of a car journey someone wants a decent hot meal, but doesn’t want to go in search of fast-food restaurants. You wrapped ingredients in foil and placed them on certain parts of the engine, based on the marks on the components. Cooking times were calculated according to the distances driven, and there were as many as 53 recipes for basic, easy-to-use ingredients like potatoes, carrots, chicken, beef, eggs [don’t crack them], various fish such as tuna and swordfish, and all with the added bonus that oil is never needed, and neither are added sauces; a healthy way of eating, therefore. There was a note at the end about the “theoretical cuisine” restaurant run by the artist, Steve of Steve’s Restaurant, on Orange Street in Brooklyn. Polly called the following day to make a reservation.
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Harold had ascended through Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, and carried on through Kansas, Colorado, the Dakotas, and Montana, so that now he finds himself traversing Canada: 108,007 kilometers and counting. He is a news item now. Any prospective interviewer has to run with him, because when he stops at night to rest he refuses all questions, insists on being left alone. Speculation abounds as to when he will stop, and various associations squabble over him: sportswriters claim him as the most important ultra-marathon runner in the history of the sport; artists say his practice has nothing to do with sport but is rather the most brilliant renewal of the possibilities of Land Art; ecologists say both are wrong, since he neither aims to break any records nor makes any graphical record of his run—they call it a hymn to zero-emissions transport; Al Qaeda’s ecological arm, for its part, claims to be Harold’s legitimate global representative and is trying to buy his image rights, pointing to the way he has opted out of Western technophilia, how he travels only with what he has on, and that, above all, his frenetic running is clearly borne out of a desire to get away from the great Evil that is the USA. Now, after 3 years of running 40 kilometers a day, he has arrived in Alaska, and soon he will have no choice but to turn around and head south again. From the window of a following TV car he is asked by a local reporter to explain his run, to which he says, I went to pieces after getting divorced, left my job as a doctor, moved to Miami. A few days after I got myself set up, I went to the supermarket and bought a box of cornflakes, the classic kind, and when I got home I saw that the sell-by date was my ex-wife’s birthday. I went back to the supermarket and asked them to bring me all the boxes of cornflakes they had with this sell-by date. They came to the house the next day with half a truckload. I stacked them up in my garage, deciding I was going to have to eat my way through the whole lot before I could dispel my wife’s ghost. If I ate all the boxes that expired on the day of her birth—it was as though only by finishing them could I consider the relationship over—that was the only way I was going to dispel both the melancholy and my attachment to her. Every time I munched those little toasted flakes of corn I was obliterating a caress, a gesture, a fight, everything; acts that in another time would have strengthened the bonds between us. And
at the same time I started playing a tennis videogame nonstop, while eating bowls of the cornflakes, until one day, after 3 and a half years, I had finished all the boxes. That was the day I knew I was free.
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2 boys are walking through a land they do not know. It’s been 2 days since they have seen anyone or eaten any food. They ascend a foggy mountain road, very tortuous from what they can make out. Soaked through, they begin to feel snow underfoot. At midday, hardly any light. They try to find a shepherd’s hut or some cave for shelter. Then, behind them, the roar of an engine, followed a few seconds later by the headlights of a car. It pulls up alongside them: a white Mercedes taxi, not old, precisely, but antiquated. 2 men inside: the driver and another man in the seat behind him. The driver wants to carry on, but the other man, addressed by the driver as Mr. A, motions for him to stop. Mr. A gets out, saying, What are you doing here, children? Where are you going? We don’t know; we were on an outing and we got lost. The man, short, thickset, and with a broad, Anglo-Saxon-looking face, tells them to get in. In the meantime the driver has opened his door and, legs stretched out on the road, begun taking swigs of vodka from a bottle. The taxi starts, sliding a little on the covering of snow. The boys ask where they are going. The man introduces himself as a film director, telling them he is Greek but has lived in America for many years. He is back in Europe now searching for a blank stare, an empty gaze, in the form of 3 very old videotapes made by the Manakis brothers, also Greeks. They are, he says, possibly the oldest-known European film recordings. I was in Sarajevo not long ago, he tells them, but I realized I had to come east, toward Ukraine, like Ulysses on his journey—do you boys know who Ulysses was? The boys say nothing. Neither does the taxi driver. He takes some sweets from his pocket and offers them back, but the boys, though they are very hungry, decline. Our stomachs are hurting, says one, my brother’s especially. The driver turns on the radio. The important thing with a movie camera is that the filming eye must not be reflected in the lens separating the 2 worlds—the filming and the filmed. Like when you look at a shop window and you see yourself reflected in the glass—that is to be avoided. The skin of an adult is approximately the same thickness as a 16mm film, and that of a child a Super 8. The driver, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the gear stick, bottle clasped between his thighs, says, Right or left, Mr. A? Mr. A does not answer. The boys were found a number of days later in a truck going west, inside the drums of some industrial washing machines that were destined for, among other places, an island in the Mediterranean. They later said that they were so accustomed to oil pipes that the washing machines seemed to them the perfect mode of transport.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 19