Turning the tables

Francesco Carancini, Italy, circa 1890s?

As psychic powers or ways of communicating with spirits go, being able to lift living room furniture a few feet off the ground in the dark has to be one of the more useless and absurd. And yet it was a thing that persisted in the repertoire of mediums for several decades. I’ve mainly been enjoying these pictures as  exercises in domestic surrealism rather than as documentation of unknown powers. They’re from a (long out of print, 1981) book called Photographs of the Unknown, which seems to be associated– although not by name– with Fortean Times. In the photo above I like the fact that couple on the right are gripping each other’s hand  apprehensively while the fellow on the left is still nonchalantly puffing away on his cigarette. The position of his left hand suggests slight annoyance that his ashtray has just been whisked away telekinetically.

Spending all my time… forever… and ever… and EVER

Another experiment in re-soundtracking J-pop videos with highbrow Modernist composers: see also The Rite of Spring (Onions). By the way, I’m officially staking my claim as the originator of the J-pop video/Modernist orchestral soundtrack mashup genre, OK? Not that I imagine many other people would want to lay claim to it.

Anyway, this time it’s Perfume’s Spending All My Time (directed by Tanaka Yuusuke), in which the scarily wholesome autotuned J-pop robo-idoru appear to have been locked in a room where they amuse themselves with OCD hand rituals and by complacently shattering ornaments with telekinesis, like chirpy Harajuku versions of Sadako from the Ringu series, versus György Ligeti’s Lontano, best known from the immensely effective and creepy soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s film of The Shining.

Instructions:

1. Mute the audio of Spending All My Time.

2. Press play on Lontano. I suggest starting about two minutes in.

3. Press play on Spending All My Time.

4. In seven days you will die.

5. Not really. You may have screaming nightmares about the young ladies from Perfume exploding your head like an egg in a microwave, though.

PS: On Youtube there are re-enactments of this video by three overweight Mexicans and by a man with three copies of himself. Because, you know, of course.