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I'm the left hand ticking on the timeless clock
Otherwise mostly what goes on around here is capitalism, errands, and interacting with doctors: the usual. Wishing I could vaporize people with the power of my brain.
I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.
I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.
The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.
I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.
I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.
The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.
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Will come back later for the songs...
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It is almost too apt an image, but that's time for you.
(The peeling, bubbled emulsion of that ghost reminded me of Henryk Ross' buried archive.)
*hugs*
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"Eventually, they painted a backdrop featuring classical pillars and hung it in front of the farm equipment." You can fit so much ironic hindsight into this bad boy!
...And then there was the final image they chose to run with the piece. Ow.
Edit: I wonder to which epicenter we are standing the closest. It may be individual; I think mine might be "these first-run primary-source books on the Holocaust inherited from my spiritual parent are going to stay in these bankers' boxes until long after I'm gone, because somehow the fascism got turned to eleven and I don't need the books."
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I actually read that line out to
"Eventually, they painted a backdrop featuring classical pillars and hung it in front of the farm equipment." You can fit so much ironic hindsight into this bad boy!
That whole war was ironic hindsight!
...And then there was the final image they chose to run with the piece. Ow.
*hugs*
Given the braiding of the article, it would make sense if the discovery of that photo had sparked its writing, but it sounds as though it waited to turn up after the fact, proper haunting-style.
Edit: I wonder to which epicenter we are standing the closest. It may be individual; I think mine might be "these first-run primary-source books on the Holocaust inherited from my spiritual parent are going to stay in these bankers' boxes until long after I'm gone, because somehow the fascism got turned to eleven and I don't need the books."
It feels a bit like an earthquake swarm, frankly.
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*reviews earthquake protocols*
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BET YOU ANYTHING IT WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE SLEEPING MORE.
*passes the crocus*
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You're welcome. I had never heard of the collection.
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This is why I’ve come to dislike the criticisms I’ve seen of actors and (more usually) actresses in historical dramas who “have a face that knows what a cell phone is.” If the makeup and hairstyles are inaccurate, that’s one thing, and usually not the fault of anyone in the cast. But not everybody looks like the icons of their time.
The man seated on the left of that photo has pierced ears.
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Yes! There are fashions in faces, but they mostly manifest where faces are supposed to matter: actors, models, society beauties etc. I would trust just about everyone in that photo to know what a cellphone was, if not to feel like answering it.
The man seated on the left of that photo has pierced ears.
I wondered if it was an earring, too, or just a detail of his mate's uniform behind him (with his hand on his shoulder), but if it was, by definition it was in period.
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So relatable! *hugs*
And this as well! *more hugs*
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*more hugs back*
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(It also feels like the basis for an unscreened Sapphire and Steel episode, but that might just be me)
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You're welcome. It is like a contagious haunting.
(It also feels like the basis for an unscreened Sapphire and Steel episode, but that might just be me)
(It definitely has that feel, but you should still write it.)
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You're welcome.