Filmmaker Oscar Lhermitte made this beautiful experiment in camera work as part of a workshop at RCA in 2010. He attaches a camera that shoots 15 frames/second to a drill that spins more than 20 rotations/second. The result is a display of the field of color that the camera captures, and the shapes created by the light fields. Watch it through until the end, when he counters the camera on a drill with an image on a second drill...magnificent.
Just got over the flu. Misery. My own symptoms, as usual, sparked interest, and I've been reading up on the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 3% or more of the world's population at the time. Made worse by the close quarters in which masses of soldiers found themselves during WWI, the Spanish flu was particularly bad because it preyed on healthy young adults. By causing a severe over reaction of the immune system, those whose systems were the most robust were most at risk, as the bodily system designed to protect us actually did the destroying. I find viruses fascinating: they are not even really considered living creatures, and yet they are sophisticated and powerful enough to trick the human body into attacking itself; they have subsisted on this planet longer than any living species; and they often manage, as in the case of the Spanish flu, to reach every part of the globe, including the arctic and remote islands. Pretty scary. Pretty fascinating.
And the machine turns - the politicians drive it with fear, the media bloody steers it. The filth pig cops clear it a path and the bastard self-serving magistrates and public prosecution own the fuckin gas stations, and don’t those little demi-god fuckin twats know it! And the general mass watch it and even cheer its passing. We watch places in Africa, Asia, and the Middle-East with street riots, molotov tossing dodging rubber bullets, and we shake our heads labeling them insane. When we are the fucking mad ones - we sit back, throw the odd armchair whinge at the 6 o’clock news, and think ourselves informed. We are the unconscious, the limited, the uneducated, the confined, restrained, and regulated. We are the insane; after all, we live with it. Where are the unsettled, the informed - forming lynch mobs in public parks? Hunting down and having them answer their fear mongering, self-inflating, bullshit-spinning campaigns. I have wished for God more than I can remember in the last 6 months and I see him in few places- perhaps he is tired of our people - given up and moved on. Perhaps he has shaken his head, rolled his watered eyes and quietly walked away. My hope remains that he has not. Rather that he sits and watches, knuckles white with frustration at the bloodied injustice, the uneven. I hold hope that some divine remains sternly, steadily, knitting a feathered blanket. I hope, if for nothing else, demiurge remains to punish the filthy likes of elephants and donkeys to have them live as they now inflict. Shame.
I find it enticingly insane that we live in a world where these four companies would be associated with one another in any way, let alone as business partners in the same venture (in this case, an online invitation and greeting card service). For those unfamiliar: Chuck E. Cheese's is chain of party spaces for children in the form of an in-door jungle gym/arcade/pizzeria; Susan G. Komen is a politically controversial breast cancer research fundraising company; UFC Fight Night, I'll assume, needs no introduction; and Yo Gabba Gabba, of course, is a magically educational children's television program uniting puppets with celebrities. Yep, I think we've got all the bases of contemporary existence covered.