Been away from online writing for a long while, as I've moved across a continent and have been finishing a number of large projects that will be surfacing in the next couple of weeks, including: in collaboration with Steve Wright, translations of, and a critical introduction to, Romano Alquati, a crucial Italian Marxist who's never been available in English - this will be coming out with Viewpoint and will, with any luck, go some way toward changing how readers of English make sense of operaismo; a long essay on over-accumulation and cinema for World Picture; an essay for a new Criterion Collection release; a dissertation; a new work on Joseph Losey, helicopters, cameras, war, and architectural fly-throughs of shitty lux yuppie condos for La Furia Umana; and, above all, work on a new, long, and ongoing project that develops a circulation-centered history of cinema.
1916 cartoon.
The last has been taking the form of talks: one, as a joint presentation with Victoria Brooks where we focus on recycled cinema and periodization, at MaMa in Zagreb, and the other at a remarkable colloquium with other artists, directors, theorists, and curators that took place last week at EMPAC in Troy (aka the ex-second richest city in America, now home to a lot of pitbulls and warehouses free for the taking).
Below is the first, the one from MaMa. My talk starts at 15'45", and I can promise that my absurdly twitchy frenzy of dropping computers and rubbing my face like I'm being stung by small glass bees - a combination of sweat, allergy, coffee, and discombobulation - doesn't continue through the whole talk, just one long minute. (To spoil the ending, I do regain something like a mask of human control on the way to talking about how to lose that en masse through the cinema and its short century of scratched reels.)