With the expression “Audio-Philosophical Dwellings” you refer to every symbolic support of Sonic Belligerency, whatever its nature and importance. For example: a turntable with modified pitch, a record covered with bits of sellotape to indicate concrete sounds to be scratched, a particularly creative gunk and, more generally, every site in which Extraordinary Sonic Happenings (E.S.H.) favor the suspension of dominant behaviour codes. You can distinguish “permanent” audio-philosophical dwellings in which the E.S.H. is endless, and “temporary” audio-philosophical dwellings in which the E.S.H. strikes and runs away.
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The writings of Ulrike Meinhof

edited by Karin Bauer, afterward by Bettina Röhl. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008. $19.95/£9.99

This book is the first translation in English of a collection of Ulrike Meinhof’s column articles that she wrote for the West German Left magazine konkret between 1959-1969. Compiled are 24 texts by Meinhof that read well in English, although the accuracy of the translation hasn’t been confirmed yet.
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François Genoud was born in 1915 in Lausanne, in the french-speaking part of Switzerland. In his teens he became an admirer of Adolf Hitler, met the future “Führer” in person in 1932, and remained a staunch National-Socialist until his death in 1996.
In 1936 this was amended with another life long committment: to Arab nationalism, when he and a friend traveled to the middle east and met many leaders of the Palestinian national movement then exiled in Iraq, and in Jerusalem most importantly the Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, himself not only the historic leader of Palestinian nationalism, but also a close ally of Nazi-Germany.
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‘If you ask for my life, I will stab you in the heart’

1.

Four black and white camera angles show a subway station; no sound. A train arrives, people get on and off. The lights of the next train shine from the tunnel. An agitated man descends onto the tracks. His final moments are recorded in monochrome, 15 frames per second, 13, 14, 15.

In 2006’s “The Description of Bankruptcy”, director Lee Kang Hyun carries forward the haunting violence of this moment, the despair in the jumper’s anonymous fate and the events which would compel it in order to provoke reflection on the financial crisis of 1997 and its aftermath. Images of Seoul are overlapped with radio channel chatter, news reports stream lifestyle advice atop cityscapes. We are taken from one scene to another. Everyday life goes on in industrial spaces; a printing press rapidly stamps paper. Traffic passes through Seoul: ‘People who don’t smile a lot have wrinkles in their face’, a stone-faced man stacks papers in a printing machine, his gloves stained red. ‘…smile out loud as much as you can. One who smiles a lot also has less chance for mental illnesses such as hypochondria.’ Other workers steam-press clothing in a factory with the radio confidently declaring: ‘The time has come when all power comes from the people, as stated in the Constitution article 1.’ We are not given any cues to celebrate. Steam rises from the cloth.
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(BFI DVD 2007, RRP £19.99)

“Peter Whitehead and The Sixties” is the first official DVD issue of “Wholly Communion” (1965) and “Benefit of the Doubt” (1967), two documentaries ‘directed’ by an obscure and yet notorious figure. Peter Whitehead was, and is, a chameleon who excels at endlessly reinventing himself. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University he studied natural sciences but soon abandoned these to pursue fine art at The Slade in London. If one believes other versions of Whitehead’s life, then at Cambridge he may have been recruited by British Intelligence who propelled him into the bohemian art world. Regardless, in the mid-sixties Whitehead briefly but successfully refashioned himself as a film-maker (albeit not a particularly competent one). For many years Whitehead was close to Howard Marks, and veterans of the sixties counterculture tend to view his role as an important prosecution witness against this pot celebrity in a major drug smuggling trial as somewhat shameful. With the release of this BFI retrospective DVD, it would seem Whitehead is once more a film-maker….
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