Trickster chapters 5-11

Page 116, Ifa (destiny) and Eshu (accident)
"seem so much at ods ar the best of friends"

Page 120, ""Eshu is understood to have gotten one of the creator gocs drunk at the begninning of time".
"Eshu .. delights in mishap as well as good hap".

Page 124
Luck is the residue of design. Love sacrifice of food at crossroads, town gates, roadsides, the bush, the mahogany tree, the rubbish heap, beach next to a waterway.

Page 127 "There are designs in this world, but there are aldo chance events, which means design is never finished"

128, "I do not seek, I find" (Picasso)

135, "Hermes of the Marketplace - leave money, cover your ears, walk, uncover and listen, the first thing you hear is your answer"

176, "dirt is always a by-product of creating order".

228, "Douglas knows he's at the edge of a sacred meadow because the alarm goes off, the watchdogs start barking".

229, impudent shamelessness.
Pudere = to feel shame

233 "contradictions's cousins, irony and scorn"

264 "to translate is to betray"

265 Trickster story contains trickster telling the story of his own creation, self reflective inclusion.

267 Levi-Strauss cited

Franz Kafka

While Kafka is not what I am generally calling academic reading, he is a writer who is constantly referenced in film and I have named him numerous times in relation to surrealism. However, I have never actually gone to the text to read him, until now. I recently read "Metamorphosis" as well as few other samples from the book "Metamorphosis and other Stories" newly translated by Michale Hofmann, Penguin Classics, 2007. I think some of the ending portions are different than what I'd gotten from summaries and the graphic novel version. (he goes into his room and dies shortly after his sister declares that they must get rid of him).

The Blood Records, book 2

Second book primarily filled with photos and the voice over text from the video. Also contains a summary of the history of TB, and the schedule of the day that was followed.
Interesting quote: "If we are the body politic, what about the carcass politic; the polis cadaverous?"

The Blood Records, book 1

The Blood Records, written and annotated by Steel and Tomczak: Critical Symptoms, Oakville Galleries, 1998.
This is a set of two small books or exhibition catalogs,

"Eyeing the Sublime: Poetic Politics in the Worked of Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak" by Su DItta. 

Page 12 "... their decision to form a partnership reflects more than a romantic experiment in shaping artistic practice. Their collaboration is lived evidence of the ideological framework that underpins their understanding of the role of the artist in society."

Page 16: importance of aesthetics for social activism and subversion.

Page 17, the sensuous potential of the beautiful ... has an inherently subversive possibility, one which can engage audiences and challenge viewers to change, rather than assimilate, the world in which they live.

"Mourning Pictures" by Mike Hoolboom

Page 35, "The educational films which comprise this first act have been deftly assembled to rehabilitate the mythologies that underlie the unintended camp kitsch of their original material"

"The Blood Records: Idle Identity" by Johanne Lamoureux
 Page 37, "the historical remove" ?
Page 39, sites Susan Sontag on "illness as metaphor".
 

Forbidden Animation

Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America by Karl F. Cohen, McFarland and Co, North Carolina, 1997.

Overall, this book is great when it is discussing issues and events up to 1980s. However, sections discussing current animation and the possible future directions fails to anticipate the affect of the internet as well as the proliferation of adult animation such as South Park (see note for page 194). These sections therefore seem naive.Also, many suppressed works, even those by Disney, have now been restored and released on DVD.

Notes;
Page 10, interested in new dvd from Disney: does "Alice Solves a Puzzle" contain the removed drinking scenes?
Page 12, What are "first night" scenes?
Page 12-13, Everready Hardon history.
Page 23, Famous Studios, zero Academy nominations n 25 years as oposed to Fleischer Studio of four in a shorter time.
Page 26, Willie Wopper, "Spite Flight", St. Peter gives the finger!?
Page 59-69, "Song of the South" discussion.
Page 69, list of Disney shorts pulled from cataloge.
Page 72, Some Van Beuren studio examples of racism.
Page 74, "all the bad guys speak in foreign accents"
Page 91, "Tarzoon" cut neg and turned optical track upside down to comply with course injunction.
Page 94, Jan Svankmajer history.
Page 96, "She [kotlarz] feels that instead of silencing debate, people would try to understand the context in which the images are used. She suggests that those who try to avoid controversy are preventing animators from engaging the problems of society and from sticking their necks out to speak about these problems."
Page 98, Ben Van Meeder zeppelin  - FIND?
Page 132, Juggling chain saws but not knives, machine guns, not regular guns.
Page 149, banned Ren and Stimpy; "Sven Hoek" and "Man's Best Friend".
Page 169-170, list of 10 subtle communist touches in scripts.
Page 174, Tempo Animation Studio?
Page 191, Norman McLaren protected from witch hunt.
Page 194, In regards to Simpsons: "on the subject of scatological humour, it seems that television has probably pushed the envelope as far as possible".

Film Manifestos

Read on line article "Be Realistic: demand the impossible, or, A Secret History of Film Manifestos" by Scott MacKenzie (www.incite-online.net/mackenzie.html)

This is rather short, even briefer than the summer I heard him give in person, but was interested in  "Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, and Keith Sanborn produced works that recycled the detritus images of contemporary culture into found footage films".

Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations

In book Fugitive Images; from photography to video, edited by Patrice Petro, University of Wisconsin, 1995. (from UofR Library).

"Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny" by Tom Gunning (page 42-71).

Notes:
Page 43, Freud, "unheimlich" = uncanny in translation.
Balzac theory that objects are constantly shedding their image like a skin.
Page 45, "the uncanny effect of repetition"
Page 48, William Mumler, commercial spirit photographer, tried for fraud.
Page 52, rationale for mediums being women.
Page 53, "...Claimed all they did was to hold the sensitive, receptive mediums, one spirited, the other photographic, was sufficient to form a latent image".
Page 56, Katie King (medium) ... "retires into a dark chamber (camera obscura) and produces a double of herself which emerges into the light"
Page 58, ectoplasm: term coined by Dr. Richet.
Page 60, Maskelyn, "Spiritualists ... put on a good show, one that was enthralling visually that it could be presented without serving as evidence for supernatural events".
Page 61, Robert-Houdin, exposed spiritualist, Houdini took name from him, he built a studio but when things got tough, he sold it to MELIES.
Page 64: "For Melies, spirit photography results less in communication with the dead than in an exchange of identities between image and model".
Page 65, Paul Coates, author of the early classic work on spirit photography, Photographing the Invisible, indicated that these spirit forces may actually need to consult existing photographs in order to create thee images. .... to refresh their memory".