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Popol Vuh

Still on music, a pretty damn good price ($33) for 5 disks, a package with very good production values. Apparently it’s out of stock and will hopefully become available again soon and at a similarly good price. If you appreciate the work of Eno and Bowie, you’ll get Popul Voh, arguably the grandees of so-called “Krautrock”.…

Lo and Behold

Not Herzog’s best but certainly, as one would still expect, an insightful and elegant take highlighting some of the most disturbing and techno-ebullient aspects of this technology, a technology that surely marks the cultural tipping point, ushering in the global shit storm that we are now in. The section on AI is fascinating: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? You know we…

Have the monks stopped meditating?

They all seem to be tweeting This observation by Herzog is totemic of what seems to me like a mass self-induced autism, immersed in a vortex of banality, that society has sunk into. When I observe how oblivious people are of reality when out and about with their device, it’s easy to understand why many of us refuse(d) to…

Terrence Malick — philosopher with a camera

Malick, the greatest living American filmmaker, has never made the consistently good fully philosophical film that we know he’s quite capable of. I fear that unless he dumps the star actors, he never will. I suppose that beginning with the Thin Red Line (after a 20 year hiatus) he understandably exploited high-priced luvvies eager to embellish their resume with…

The Glance of Music: Ennio Morricone Documentary

I’m very much looking forward to viewing this documentary (first video) on the genius that is Ennio Morricone. At 87 he’s still going strong and is sharp as a whistle. To my mind, he’s the most Wagnerian of 20th Century composers. Beyond the Morricone-Leone collaboration only one other classic collaboration springs  to mind and that’s the Herzog-Popol Vuh-(Florian Fricke)…

Extended Cognition, Trust and Glue, and Knowledge

Despite my (highly qualified) HEC commitments, I love reading people like Ken Aizawa (and Fred Adams) and others such as Rob Rupert who are really HEC’s best fiends. Yes, I said fiends (a nudge and a wink to Herzog’s superb documentary). These three are meticulous and fair critics, meticulous without ever resorting to point-scoring or being trivial.…

A Guide for the Perplexed

No, not  Maimonides but Werner Herzog. Here’s a review in The Telegraph — Herzog is more a wayfarer than a wonderer.  Herzog is a wanderer – on foot, wherever possible – and the sheer amount of information he has gleaned about different corners of the world takes the breath away. Travellers, soldier-poets, artisans, astronauts –…