I love his work. All of his figures seem to have been thrown into the fire, and finally saved from the fire. Pfostl’s work has the textural quality of relics.

Hearts, devils and towers are ashes.

Go see Pfostl show in Brooklyn at Observatory.

More info here.

Visit the Paper Graveyard.

7 p., cuis., s. de b. … a saisir

Agnès Varda directed this short in 1984. Sept pieces, cuisine, salle de bains …a saisir (Seven Rooms, Kitchen, Bathroom …a Bargain) is a film about a house. It’s an essay, in the erratic sense of the word, about time and space. The camera moves in the rooms like a visitor. Walls speak. Objects tell stories. And old woman is shown in all the dignity and beauty of her naked body (it rarely happens).

There should be more movies about houses.

Buy (here) or download (here) this incredible little film.

Agnès Varda’s films live here.

There are ghosts of everything, of houses, clothes, animals, people.

I can’t stop listening to this: Okkulte Stimmen – Mediale Musik: Recordings Of Unseen Intelligences 1905-2007. It’s a three-CD collection of audio documents of paranormal phenomena including trance speech, direct voices, clairvoyance, xenoglossy, glossolalia, paranormal music, “rappings” and other poltergeist manifestations.

It doesn’t matter if these recordings are true or fabricated. It matters that their evocative potential is incredible. Music is for the eyes. It makes us want to see something in the moment that it takes it away from our sight. The voices of the possessed children are the sign of their presence and their disembodiment. There was never anything to see. Even if we were in the room with the medium Leslie Flint, we would not have seen Oscar Wilde or Charlotte Brontë or Winston Churchill. They were only voices.

I can play them back as many times as I want. They are in my stereo right now.

Listen to the possessed children here.

Buy Okkulte Stimmen here.

OTHER/ALTRO is what I am not, what is different from me, what I move toward and never reach.

America, the idea of America, for me, grown up in Italy, has always been OTHER/ALTRO.

Even now that I live in America, I am interested in an America where I am not, that is far from me.

Growing up, America for me was a book translated into Italian by Cesare Pavese, Moby Dick. America was Edgar Allan Poe translated, reinvented by Giorgio Manganelli. America was The Discovery of America by Saul Steinberg, a book so beautiful that I kept it under my bed. America was Robert Crumb Draws the Blues, Charlie Patton tattoed on my arm.

America is this book that I read a month ago, and love: Because I Was Flesh, The Autobiography of Edward Dahlberg. I have never seen Dahlberg’s America. Nobody ever did. It’s Kansas City colliding with Ancient Greece.

I have spent the last twenty minutes trying to find a paragraph to quote, to give an idea of how unique this book is, and I couldn’t pick any, because every paragraph, sentence, word in this book is a surprise.

Because I Was Flesh is one of the best autobiographies I have ever read. It pushes the limits of genre, language, style, taste, and at the same time manages to keep the rhythm of the page flowing. What really strikes me is the imagery, often delirious: “Let the bard from Smyrna catalogue Harma, the ledges and caves of Ithaca, the milk-fed damsels of Achaia, pigeon-flocked Thisbe or the woods of Onchestus, I sing of Oak, Walnut, Chestnut, Maple and Elm Streets. Phthia was a bin of corn, Kansas City a buxom grange of wheat. Could the strumpets from the stews of Corinth, Ephesus or Tarsus fetch a groan or sigh more quickly than the dimpled thighs of lasses from St. Joseph or Topeka?”