when a filmmaker's dreams are like poems...

"i am running down a street.

i am wearing a silvered business suit.

it is not i.

the figure is stopped mid-stride, one arm flung out.

the street vanishes.

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the word 'title' is flung at me off five white gloved fingers backed by a vague clown face.

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something of dead leaves... a rustling.

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a waiting - expectancy.
a sea-scape.
large people with smashed faces bending over.

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a paw print - one toe bent in cashew curl... so that it reminds me of a flower petal.

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a quarter-turn clockwise of multicolored basket shapes merry-go-rounding - reds, blues, yellows, and more distant blurs of other shades. dusty-yellowed browns for ground, and a pale blue clouded sky. a very few still silhouettes of people shape."

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some of stan brakhages 1975 dreams as remembered upon waking, from "i....sleeping (being a dream journal and parenthetical explication)", published 1988 by island cinema resources. image: brakhage's anticipation of the night, 1958.

when music looks like ink...

an image from a 1958 hi-fi and music review magazine of "record grooves seen through a microscope". too bad they didn't say what record it was... note the particulary wavy bass tones in the center.

the sound of writing the sound of music...

it's nice when world's collide, particularly on the same object. here's a nice RPPC of a man playing some kind of zither, with some serious visual music on the reverse. no idea if the guy on the front made the marks on the back, but they certainly seem like they were generated by placing pencils between strings in various points on the instrument, and then holding the card against the pencil points as the strings and pencils quiver together.

in one sense, the backside reminds me of william anastasi's subway drawings, and some of tom marioni's drawings, where a physical action generates a scratchy and elegant image. i've done similar drawings with my eyes closed, using sound as a source for determining the movements of my hands; and i think of gerhard ruhm's recordings of the sounds of pencils on paper... as if these marks are speaking.

in another sense, they seem almost mechanical, like the marks of a seismograph or brain wave monitor. they resemble mechanical iterations of sound activity; and perhaps if oscilloscopes could draw, this is what they would make... broken sound waves fallen to the surface of paper like dried leaves...

and since this is the place of writing on a postcard, i see these marks in a third sense... visual, yet related to writing. i think of the calligraphic and scrawl-like nature of the visual works of brion gysin, henri michaux, carlfreidrich claus, ana hatherly, and others who have used their own relationship to the physical process of writing to generate visual images.

and lastly, of course, the marks could simply be a form of writing that we just can't read... perhaps with a depth of focus and concentration, one could discover within these marks a long lost micro story written by the gentle hand of robert walser... a whisper is only a whisper until one places one's ear up against it...