- 27/4/2024 fucking hell. and i thought videodrome was clairvoyant media. Serial Experiments Lain, like predecessor Evangelion, balances metaphysics and genre with the dissection of neurosis and the place of an individual within society, but turns its eye to the prospect of disconnection and fragmentation of identity over social media and the web/globalisation project as a whole, a similar focus to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse, another frightening Japanese science fiction tale. but where Pulse limits itself to a basic and now-outdated view of the digital world, overtaken by the breath of understanding and nuance in Serial Experiments Lain's own Gibsonian cyberspace, The Wired. watching this without subtitles, my understanding of the plot is fragmented at best, but that allows so much more to be *felt* thematically: Lain's disconnect, self-loathing, construction of herself as a series of beings, a social being, a digital being, a quaint doormouse-like persona, all resounds greatly with me as a native of the digital age. this is an absolutely fascinating show, and also a great display of digital aesthetics: the click-and-drag Navi layout of the late 90s, the crisp digital processing of the show's foley and images, hues of yellow and blue. truly a cry for help, and a brilliantly articulated one at that. Current Listening: The Unseen - Quasimoto (a perennial classic)

- 24/4/2024 watching serial experiments lain, i'm very impressed by the sound design. there are the obvious parts, like the droning ambience that simulates (in combination with the visual style) Lain's disassociation, which are cool, but what really sells the digital theme of the show is the constant processed, even synthesised tint to the foley. stuff like Lain brushing her hair back, knocking on a door, footsteps: all those foley effects, rather than being hi-fi with reverb, as is typical of animation, sound entirely canned, and often digitally produced, with beautiful, crispy bitcrushed texture. that, and so much of the soundtrack being made up of 808 beats: perfect for me. Current Listening: In Search Of The Lost City Of The Monkey God - The Sorcerers

- 12/4/2024 Hiroshige's 100 Famous Views of Edo must be some kind of all-time pinnacle for Ukiyo-e, and art as a whole. While his use of colour and composition is brilliant already in Tōkaidō and Kisokaidō, but this is on a whole other level of mastery. The composition and framing especially, the kind of democratic view that the Chōnin art adopts similar to the social and aesthetic democracy of post-modernism and late modernism (especially with photography), this kind of suspension of hierachial value exploded to the minutiae of the image, in combination with the absolute lack of physical depth to the woodprints (something I find incredibly beautiful) leads him to frame the whole image through the window (frame within a frame) of a commoner home, or focusing most of the foreground (a term inappropriate for depthless Ukiyo images, but one forced out of neccecity, as I hardly have the artistic vocabulary) on something like a cat licking itself, or (and this one is my favourite) a view of what I recall as a graveyard, though I'm unsure, taken through a gnarled, knotted branch, in a cycilical curl itself forming the approximate shape of the spiral seen in the golden ratio. Wonderful things like this, and an intense interest in the subject matter as a Shinnichi makes this just about my favourite artwork of all time. I'm less wild about the point at which Hiroshige II takes over, I think he's closer to a Hokusai to a Hiroshige style, and definitely feels more like a Kabuki Ukiyo style than a landscape style, with all these grotesque, rough, mutating lines, whereas what I really love is Hiroshige's prescision, his cartoonish neatness, and combination of elements proximate to the perspective (again, perspective is certainly a foreign term to some degree for Ukiyo-e, but what can I do?) with those further away. If you take a glance at the Art section, I've lagged out the [next] button from the amount of Hiroshige pictures I've added from this collection. I'll need to focus on diversifying it, because there must be about half or a third of the 118-page series there. Current Listening: Black on Both Sides - Mos Def

"The Moscow art theatre is my deadly enemy. It is the exact antithesis of what I am trying to do. They string their emotions together as to give a continuous illusion of reality. I take photos of reality and then cut them up so as to produce emotions… I am not a realist, I am a materialist. I believe that material things, that matter gives us the basis of all our sensations. I get away from realism by going to reality." -sergei eisenstein

i'm lewin, and this is my website! it's still incomplete, and i don't know html lol but this is a place where i'll make bi-or-tri-weekly reviews on film mostly, but i also just love philosophical writing, and writing about the arts as a whole, and this is MY neocity so i can take it wherever! most pages are either not yet up or not yet done.

year 10 diehard roger corman stan with a crippling oolong tea dependancy and an unshakable addiction to mahjong. other than that, my interests are postmodern aesthetic philosophy, idm/edm music, occultism, krautrock, classic daikaiju movies and 8-bit emulator gaming. ever since i saw alien at 11 or so years of age, my sole aspiration has been becoming a filmmaker. i'm also a big-time sinophile/shinnichi, and am at an intermediate stage of learning japanese. i'm new to html, so fucking around on this site has been really fun so far! i listen to MF DOOM, Pixies, Funkadelic, Kraftwerk, CAN, Goblin, Autechre, Quasimoto, Tyler the Creator, Aphex Twin, Barry Adamson, and Neu! i love art and philosophy, and the junction between the two, writing. fuck letterboxd (respectfully), i find my films on tmdb, rip em on yts.mx, read up on them on wikipedia, and review them here.