when chairs appear in different cities...

yesterday at the flea market, i picked up these two cabinet cards, because of the chair. as you can see it appears in both photographs. even though it's kind of an interesting chair, it wouldn't have been necessary to procure the photographs until i noticed that one image was taken in chicago, and the other in st. louis.

as difficult as travel must've been around 1870, i would imagine it being even tougher for a chair. i'm not sure if there's more to the story, other than the fact that face of the boy in the solo image, and the girl on the left in the other image have incredibly similar facial features.

like the photograph of the woman and the victrola i posted last week, the chair here does begin to feel like a surrogate for a missing person; and perhaps, because no one is actually sitting on it in either picture, there is a family spirit taking up the chair-sitting-space invisibly.

perhaps this invisible presence was felt by the others in the photographs; and that the subjects, along with the photographer, attempted to photographically capture this ghost, by travelling to different cities, and posing with different family members. it would seem that every time they, and the chair, had their photograph taken, they would be filled with hope that the phantom would somehow appear, sitting on the chair comfortably, within the photographic image that eventually appeared upon the paper...

if that was the case, then what we see here, is simply a failed attempt to make the invisible, visible.

five recent tintype finds...

before the house deceased (with help from the sunrise)

this morning i was looking through some records for a piece of music to post, and found a track on a 7" of field recordings from bali of a funeral march - the title translated from french via google being "before the house deceased". the track follows part of a five kilometer procession ending with a cremation.

when i recorded the track into my computer, i used, as always, a protools session that i have set up only for transferring vinyl into my mac. a strange thing started to happen as i was listening to my re-recording... in the quieter spots of the cremation procession i could hear some electronic sounding drones, and once in a while notes that sounded as if they were played on a lap steel guitar. i listened to the track several times, thinking i might have brought some ghosts into my room, before i then realized i had left some bits of my sunrise recording in the session on a track i never use, and thus didn't see on the screen.

i decided, rather than retrace my vinyl to digital steps, i would post it as is, apparent vinyl apparitions intact. it's not often one gets to duet from their bedroom in pasadena with a procession of musicians from bali...

if you listen softly, you hear only the procession, if you listen with headphones or loudly, well you'll hear a bit of the ghosts of a sunrise tagging along, perhaps helping the dead feel a bit lighter and a little happier in their journey...

click here to listen

a room full of ghosts...

for halloween, an albumen print, circa 1890, of a room of girlish ghosts...

this is not a dream...

"this scenario is not the story of a dream and does not profess to be such; and i shall not try to justify its incoherence by the simple device of labelling it a dream." (antonin artaud, preface to the shell and the clergyman, 1930)

one of the strangest RPPCs i own. it looks a bit like two hillbillies in an early surrealist film still. the strange white lines seem like visible liquid electricity. the white glows, connected to early spirit photographs. the scenario, some pagan ritual in a dumpy urban apartment - film noir meets michaux and artaud's darkness. it certainly has the hallucinatory feel of a dream state. i have no idea what the hell is going on here...