Melancholic black midi, mind-bending Koans from cartoon monks, Greenlanders evoked in grainy archive. Cleanse your doors of perception

Welcome to our occasional paraglide into the sublime of the creative classes - all quite unnecessary, all completely vital. Cleanse, wipe, onwards…

Above, from Creative Review (a choice from their “Top Ten Music Videos of 2021”, very much worth sampling):

Darlings of the Brixton Windmill and beyond, black midi have experienced a meteoric rise to stardom over the past year or so, and with videos this brilliant it’s not hard to see why.

Animated and directed by Stockholm-based Gustaf Holtenäs, the video opens with an anthropomorphised Wall-like hammer, and goes on to take in all sorts of reference points veering from Transformers to vapourwave to Fox News (here dubbed ‘Faux News’, arf arf) to binary code and all sorts of gamer gore. The whole thing rounds off with live action scenes that veer into the territory of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.

From Aeon:

Is seeking an explanation for life’s deepest mysteries a worthy pursuit? Many scientists and theologians would say yes. Zen Buddhists practising in China from the 9th to 13th centuries CE, however, believed that it was important to embrace uncertainty instead of always seeking answers. For these monks, achieving enlightenment meant resisting the urge to know the seemingly unknowable. To foster this way of thinking, they meditated on paradoxical riddles called kōans to raise doubts about the very meaning of knowing and, through this, find deeper truths about existence. This playful animation from TED-Ed provides a brief history of kōans, and offers two rich examples from the roughly 1,700 kōans written to illustrate the key role of ambiguity on the path to enlightenment.

From Vimeo Staff Picks:

Meet a young photographer, Inuuteq Storch, who works with found images telling Greenland history from the Greenlandic perspective. “A lot of the documents and photos we are used to seeing are by people who came to Greenland, not by Greenlanders themselves,” he says.

Inuuteq Storch encountered a series of films with a friend while working in a dumpster; he then figured out that ‘found images’ could be a project for him. For Inuuteq Storch found images and archive projects have developed into a project where he wants to tell Greenland history from the Greenlandic perspective, “because many of the documents and photos we have are by people who came to Greenland.” “It is like physics; the practical and the theoretical results are usually different.” 

“A lot of my work is about me trying to understand how the traditional life in Greenland was.” His series, called ‘Porcelain Souls,’ is made of photos by Storch’s parents when they were young. “They are often portraying fragile and vulnerable people at the same time when the Greenland history and way of living was also disappearing,” Storch says, adding: “I had the idea that everything would fall apart and disappear. “