These guys are the best kind of people. Really. I met them at The Victoria Inn in 2002. Since then I’ve made sure to go and be with them at least once a year. It’s a poor year when that doesn’t happen. The title of this film, made about their recent shows since the release of their incredible fourth album ’sfortuna’, translates to ’self-congratulation’. Literally, I guess that would be a kind of bad thing…but these guys haven’t got a self-indulgent bone in their collective body. It’s more like the celebration of The Self. If you meet these guys you’ll have a good time, and probably end up laughing until you throw up, even though you can’t understand a word they say. Go and download ’sfortuna’ from them for free here, then order the 12″ (it sounds immenso), then go and see them and say “Hi”.

Toby brought me this back from SXSW this year. Proper glad I am too because, apart from it being a limited edition (and I do like limited editions), and hand numbered, and A NEWSPAPER (something that still excites me a lot about Newspaper Club (who made it)), and full of great writing and images, it’s also got a lot to say about time and stuff…

“What Charles Darwin did for all life through time, Vernadsky did for all life through space. Just as we are all connected in time through evolution to common ancestors, so we are all – through the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and these days even the ionosphere – connected in space. We are tied through Vernadskian space to Darwinian time.”

- Foreword to Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s The Biosphere. via Matt Jones‘ article on the sun, Solar Storm Watch, Chizhevsky’s ‘Heliobiology’, and the numinous experience.

“…what newspapers are really good at: understandable, highly portable, physical objects that make digesting certain kinds of information easier. Like magazines, they can get you to read things you would never usually be interested in, simply through clever design decisions.”

- Bobbie Johnson on newspapers, and how they are constantly evolving, always in beta, and how they’re not dying – they’re just changing.

Where people congregated in Texas at different times of the day.

Time-sinks. Beautifully arranged, as always, by David McCandless at Information is Beautiful (who did one of my favourite things here).

“The most invaluable resource any writer has is time.”
- Warren Ellis, in the midst of thinking about print, publishing, notebooks with rulers on them, and it not hurting to value the physical…

“Capitalist newspaper names, then, are either temporal or political – and what is politics, but an attempt to freeze morality in time?”
- James Bridle, on the naming of newspapers.

The only picture of Jim Henson I’ve ever seen is in an incredibly beautiful animated short made in his honor called Overtime, so I didn’t recognise the protagonist in this rhythmical time bent piece until the credits rolled. Check it:

This is the film we showed at the Time Travel Opportunists night at QUAD earlier this week, where we filled an evening with TIME STUFF to compliment the Tuesday evening showing of Time Traveller’s Wife. A big thankyou to Ted Chung, who kindly gave us permission to show it. A hearty pat on the back for him n’all for making such a gorgeous film in only 24 hours:

I love that. Deceptively simple yet with layers of complexity from a story, screenplay, and photographic point of view. Pick a point of view and watch it a few times over, and you’ll learn something…if not about the film itself, then maybe time, or even something more personal…

While I’m here talking TIME and FILM in the same post, I might as well say that I thought The Time Traveler’s Wife was very very good. I expected to be disspointed or at least underwhelmed…but I wasn’t. In fact, I’d say I came out pretty satisfied. Not blown away, but satisfied. The flick handled Henry’s chrono-impairment really quite subtly…never overdoing it in a “Whoah check Henry out he’s TRAVELING IN FUCKING TIME” or anything. Wasn’t too sure about the doom-laden ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ though. A heavy handed choice of song in films at the best of times, Broken Social Scene’s version just didn’t sit right…

Anyway, whether it be a short or a full blockbuster feature, generally film + time and/or travelling through it is a winner. Yes, even in Timecop.

Update: If you watch On Time with the sound down while listening to ‘Mutual Slump’ by DJ Shadow, the film becomes another thing entirely…like something Jonathan Glazer would make…all desaturated greens and oddly placed subtitles.

Scrolling through Vimeo last night and found this little beauty. Stunning photography, and the music reminds me of a cross between the Forrest Gump feather sequence, and Peter Broderick’s ‘Piano & Toy Piano’ from Ten Duets – two of my favourite things. These chaps need to triple their views to get points for their course so watch it a few times, show it to your girlfriend/boyfriend/mum/dad/brother/sister/friend/dog/friend’s dog a few times, embed it into your site and tell more people to do the same. Wonderful.