Tuesday, November 24, 2009

wash of a cold river in a glacial land

i like morning better than afternoon and night better than both.

at least in the morning i can imagine it will, at some point, get light out. the sun is becoming a very evasive fellow as the approaching winter solstice blots everything out. at least snow is bright and reflective. plus there's the golden (literally) time in the afternoon when the sun kind of skips over one mountain on its way behind another one. I think this happens at about 2. Official sunset is like 3:45 or something. I don't know when the official rise is these days, but it's like 11 am now and while i can see sunbeams in the western hills, i most certainly cannot see the sun itself.

perpetual darkness is not without its awesome benefits though, and is in fact highly conducive to:
-stars
-northern lights
-sneakin'
-seances (maybe?)
-long exposure photography (sometimes)
-ghost ships.....say what?!?!?
Okay, well it might not have as much to do with the levels of light as some of the other things on that list but they did just release pictures of a "ghost ship" on the bottom of Lake Laberge.
i very much enjoy that all ships that have sunk are"ghost ships". That is how it should be. Just like all abandoned houses should be called "haunted houses". Anyway this sweet ghost ship was a golrush-era paddlewheeler that sunk in 1901. Dawson's main man Robert Service even rapped about it. There is a video of the boat's mystical underwater secrets here. Perfect for the darkness. They even found boots! And axes! Land of death indeed.
also plus additionally the ship was called the A.J. Goddard, and even though there's an extra D, i feel 94% certain the boat is in fact the ghost of Jean-Luc, the French-new-waving the shit out of that lake.

That's another one for my list of things improved by darkness-- French films from the 60s.
I have been really enjoying re-visiting all the Godard movies lately. Vivre Sa Vie and Week End are my favourites right now, but really i like them all. Even the shitty 80s ones and the confusing Dziga-Vertov ones. When i was 19 i spent an entire summer, almost every night of the week, at the National Film Theatre (now re-named the BFI Southbank...gay).
They had a Jean-Luc godard season that year (2001 maybe?) and they played all his films as well as work by his influences and contemporaries. Anna Karina even introduced one of them. For realz. It was a formative experience for my film-watching and brain. I think it's probably why i like Marxism so much (that and the awesome powers of Saskatchewan, of course). The first one i saw was A boute de souffle cos this strange guy i worked with asked me. Then it spiralled into a borderline obsessive past-time of cinema-going. It just goes to show you that good things can come from having a crush on an Italian, apparently.


in closing, "a thousand miles from nowhere" is a hella-sweet song.
Also, Dwight Yokam is kind of a babe.

double true.