All you need to know about this blog right here! :) ----> About (this has nothing on it yet).
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Happy new year everybody!!!!!!!
While I was doing various applications and avoiding work I found all of my old music from around 2019-2021 on various USB sticks around my house. I had found an absolutely awful tune called "palestine-israel-conflict.mp3 on there that made me laugh endlessly. It was so bad and I don't even know who I had rapping on the beat (I definitely did not know them, I met this person on a Discord server and was desperate to have someone on the beat); they were doing this awful Future impression. If you want to know what that sounded like, D.M. me and I will send it to you. I don't really want it floating around here. As bad and funny as that was, I wanted to find all of my other music and I'm so glad I did because with hindsight, I kinda love all of it.
So now that I found this music and sent it to some of my friends, I want a place to upload it and I don't particularly want this on a soundcloud or on youtube but I think soundcloud is my best option for now. So this is AFPavel Leak 02/01 (Bait Ones)
I have started getting a bit into a film reviewing mood recently I think it’s time to talk about some of my favourites.
Last year between christmas and new year, I was obsessively watching as many of the Shunji Iwai films as I wanted to at the time. I haven’t seen any new ones as I have been too busy spreading the gospel to my friends to really care about the ones I haven’t seen (and they don’t look that good either).
Imma round up all my opinions of these films in chronological order.
This might be my favourite one (it’s in competition with another film further down the list.) A lot of it’s in the snow and it might become a Love Actually type christmas watch for me.
In this one, Miho Nakayama sends a letter to her dead husband’s childhood address and gets an answer back. She decides to take her new boyfriend with her on a journey to find out what is going on with these letter exchanges.
This one is just bad and edgy. The best thing about it is that it’s short. I liked the bit where they escape from the institution and walk on top of the wall to the river. It’s just a tad bit melodramatic.
Certified hood classic. The futuristic setting and creative script make this one a blast to watch. The cyberpunk future tokyo with cybernetic assassins and a Hong-Kong-in-the-80s-ified Tokyo really sells the vibe to me. There is a feeling from the very start of this thing that it’s going to get really bad for everyone involved. This one and All About Lily-Chou-Chou are probably the most Wong-Kar-Wai like of the bunch if you are into that. It usually ends up on the moodboards with those films. It also features all the people from the Takeshi Miike films if you are into that.
Scratch what I said earlier. This is my favourite one. This is a film about loneliness and being really sad and stuff. Really focusing in on one character going through life in a new city, trying hard but failing to effectively socialise at university. Her final objective in the film is really simple and she succeeds but it’s not much of a success. If it wasn’t for the story and the events of this beautifully thought out movie, everything would be so mundane. It’s a story of small victories and smaller setbacks.
Until we ended up in the era of social media where moodboards and aesthetic threads became common, the most famous Iwai film was Love Letter. After this time, It was All About Lily-Chou-Chou.
I have precious memories talking about this film freezing my ass off at 4-5A.M. on an October evening in 2023 talking about this film and The Third Man on a good friend’s doorstep. At the time I knew who Shunji Iwai was from the 2000 Hideaki Anno film Ritual but I had no idea he made this one. It was my friend’s favourite film of all time and that was high praise; this was a man I could trust.
I have now seen it. It’s not my favourite because it is so horrifically gutwrenching. Every single thing about it is soooooooo saaaaaaaad. The worldbuilding is incredible but that feeling of extreme dread from Swallowtail Butterfly is amplified in this one. So much bad stuff happens. The horror is interspersed with beatiful camera work that has firmly earned its icon status.
Man this film must have sucked before the prequel came out. Thank god that I saw the prequel first in 2023 and then watched this one and got the perfect, single sitting, 4 hour duology experience. The schemes they go on are so good, the digital cinematography is blissful with all of it’s artifacting, washed out colours and pixelation.
These films rely on the quality of the stupidity of the scheme and how many layers of shit they can get into before it implodes. This one’s long too and also quite diabolical. I really like it.
They really were trying to disguise this prequel as a murder mystery for about 20 minutes when the mystery turns out to be complete crap and then it turns into a stupid scheme to torment some dumbass boy again. Off course the scheme implodes and then turns okay in the end by a miracle.
This was the first one I saw and it’s usually the first one I show to people. I should show this one to people less because it’s not very impressive and gives the wrong impression of what I love about Shunji Iwai films, namely the fact that it is rotoscoped. I think they did that because the actresses were like in their late 30s at this point and they weren’t going to cast new voices.
If I showed this one to you first, then I'm sorry, lol. I should have made you watch Love Letter or April Story instead, wayyy better films.
Again it is time for me to focus on deadlines and so I’ve decided to write for this blog again. Sorry it’s been so long since you heard about me! I’ve kept myself busy for a while doing all sorts of silliness while trying to piece my heart back together.
First of all, I successfully built two microphones. One with a very simple circuit and two small-ish capsules and another with one large capsule and a complicated internal working that made it really difficult to finish.
The first of these microphones is not really a clone of anything and more of a design idea that I had where I wanted the warmth and body of a vintage ribbon microphone with the detail of modern condenser microphones. The result is really good.
The second of these microphones involved a capsule similar to that of the AKG C-12 (The Beatles mic). It has the same Schoeps inspired preamp circuit of the other microphone with a second board just to provide the 80 volts that the capsule requires (I did get shocked by it once). It sounds so damn clean. Everything I put through there sounds like it did when I had it next to me. It might be the most honest microphone.
There’s also a preamp in the works but it’s still in parts in a box under my workbench (the schematic was a lie).
Generally just glad it’s Christmas break. Autumn made me want to die but winter has me feeling good again despite the lack of light. (This might be due to the pressure relief I am feeling after working for so long without a break.)
I’ve gone through many small fascinations in the time that I have disappeared from the blogosphere such as: the illustrations of Charles Keeping in Beowulf and The Wedding Ghost; everything to do with Edvard Munch; nearly getting addicted to cigarettes again; microphones – specifically recording acoustic guitar; guitar pedal design and building.
Although I haven’t had much time indoors at home for months, there isn’t really much notable happening outside for me to bother you with.
This is an incredible life-changing film. Wim Wenders’ films take a little bit of getting used to because they are quite slow and they have a lot of superfluous dialogue. This is true for all of them to a lesser or greater extent. I am not sure if I like this or not because sometimes it can become boring. The drive of Paris, Texas had me hooked from the start.
It stuck with me so heavily because it is a film which tackles really heavy feelings. Feelings of guilt and entrapment. The main character: Travis is a perfect vehicle for this. At the start of the film he is in an almost primal state: constantly wandering through the desert, completely mute, not feeding himself, neither is he sleeping; he’s just walking. When he eventually collapses, he is reunited with his brother by a shady doctor. We find out that he has not spoken to anyone in four years, after leaving his son with his brother’s family. He stays mute for the first half hour of the film, he is then shown to be an amnesiac. He can barely remember his brother, he cannot remember anything about what happened four years ago, or who he is.
When he finds out what happened four years ago, he goes into a guilt spiral. He takes his son with him on a road trip through Texas to make right all his wrongs. The trouble is that he quickly figures out that this is impossible. He realizes why he escaped from everything. We find out the situation which got him into this mess. His final decision is perhaps not the worst decision, but it’s a bad one.
My feelings about this one are still up to be decided. I don’t know what lesson to take, but it feels like one could be learned.
The cinematography is beautiful though. Look at Robby Mueller’s work damn.
It's been a long time hasn't it. I am very sorry about that but I have been very busy with new found employment and the emotional rollercoaster of life itself. I was planning to post more often on this blog but I became very busy and ambitious so I decided to do some more freebie type posts to this blog. Small observations rather than big essays.
This week the little freebie comes from a Soviet Era translation of Ivan Turgenev's "On The Eve" which is strange in the fact that it makes absolutely no effort to introduce Turgenev to the audience. I enjoyed reading this book but it's not the content that I like to discuss but rather the back matter. Usually the back of a novel would contain a short plot synopsis to advertise itself to a potential reader; Raduga Publishing Moscow had a different idea. Instead they would provide us with some insight into the character of Turgenev (who must be so famous as to have his reputation precede himself in even the most nascent infant). So they have a comparison between his answers to a questionnaire presented to him in 1869 and again in 1880.
There are many things I find amusing about this. The layout makes you read his answers in sequence and the fading from naivety to cynicism is quite wild. I do prefer many of his later answers to his earlier answers (besides the questions where he obviously laments the loss of his youth). I too don't like going hunting but I am not sure how much I would prefer taking snuff. I think the most interesting answers are to the questions "favourite historical figures", "Present state of mind", "thing you most detest", "favourite motto" and the questions concerning his "idea of happiness" and "unhappiness"(in that order)
Postscript: I just remembered I have a flatbed scanner and I will be using it way more often now
When I found a Go board in Robert’s Rummage (everything 2/6d) I did not know that I had found my favourite game. It was hidden behind a mountain of novelty teaspoons and Princess Diana plates and it stood out to me instantaneously. My excitement in finding this game set was so obvious that it shocked the titular Robert of Robert’s Rummage and the other perusers in the establishment.
I had been looking for one of these for a while, ever since I had the game explained in a video by “Shut up and sit down” on YouTube. Before seeing this video, I had imagined that it was a very complicated and Chinese game (like what Mahjong is), and I did not think that I would enjoy it one bit. Part of the expectation of this is that I thought it would be really statistical and calculated like chess. Turns out that this is not the case at all; it is an extremely simple game with a wide range of playing styles.
Chess is a game which can be played very well by people who look down on creativity and social skills. It’s usually a game of probabilities and ascertaining which set of moves will lead to victory in a completely mathematical or logical sense. There is a limited set of moves that can be made at any time, and so computers have been able to beat grand masters at chess since the 1980s. Computers have only been able to beat masters of Go for quite a short time, and in order to do this, artificial intelligence has to be employed. The idea of the complex nature of Go is passed around like an orientalist joint which prevents people from playing it. I found a Go board in shabitat (another excellent junk shop) once but was very disappointed to find out that it only had a 5x5 and a 9x9 board instead of the customary 19x19 board. Playing a proper game of Go is hard because it's hard to have fun when you're not playing the real game.
A comparison between Go and chess; even Draughts or Othello is misguided because none of those games come near to expressing the feelings that Go does. The closest, and most inferior, neighbor is tic-tac-toe, which is less of a game and more of a “personality test” to quote Tim Rogers. However it doesn’t ascertain anything besides whether or not you’ve been paying attention, neither does it take long to complete. Go is a better personality test, whose results are entirely subjective. The whole way the board is seen depends on the person. There isn’t really anything indicating as to what you are doing. It’s like the ink blots on a Rorschach test; “why does it look like my parents arguing?” etc.
I’ve had a lot of fun playing this game against people. It takes maybe a minute or two to explain the rules and people are already devising highly personal and fascinating strategies in order to whoop my ass and consume the board. If you know me IRL, hit me up to play Go, I will probably oblige (if I have my board with me that is.)
This feature in my room is probably one of the few created structures in my life which I am fully content with. It’s just a big ass red stack of shelves with a bunch of stuff I like stacked on it. I do not know how I got it, but one day when I was living in germany, this case appeared in my room basically stacked with things I already had, and I did not question its sudden appearance. I like a lot of things about it. It’s relatively sturdy, was painted a shade of wine red by the previous owner and it’s made of a dense pine that has a certain cosiness about it.
The reason I consider this to be good feature of my space is the fact that I have organised it as the central location in my room for frequently accessed media. The top shelf is all film cameras; the shelf below it contains all my VHS tapes and various trinkets; the shelf below that contains a smattering of books and DVDs that I like; The shelf below that contains my playstation 2 games, the CRT television and the playstation 2 itself; The bottom shelf holds the playstation one and a currently dysfunctional VCR.
If I put a bunch of pillows and blankets on the floor, this becomes the perfect setup for playing video games and watching DVDs. I refuse to do this alone, because CRTs just emit gamma rays like crazy and the high pitched hum always gets irritating after a few hours. So the whole console setup is for when friends come round. Even when not in use, the features give off a really functional atmosphere and always makes my room feel a lot more hospitable.
The most notable trinkets are the little figurines I have running around. Mostly the Ayanami Rei figure and box for an EVA gunpla kit. I might write another time why I think Rei is one of my favourite fictional characters full stop another time. Right now I’ll just mention that within like a week of me finishing Evangelion, 15 year old me saw this figure at the place I played Warhammer and bought it, in box, for a very small sum of money. Since then It’s been a feature in my room. At some point I also got a really crappy set of tintin figurines to keep Rei company across the shelf. I think it feels more like a living scene.
Postscript: All in all, this makes up a first post. Nothing too deep here, I just wanted to share this thingy. If you have any questions just ask me and I will update the post :)