Today, I had lunch with the Quay Brothers, which was just about the funnest thing I've done since I've been here (in Switzerland). These guys are hilarious. One Quay will make a joke, then the other Quay will riff on it, and then the other Quay will riff on that, and on and on. And the joke just keeps getting funnier.
They had made plans to inspect some very old Swiss chalets after lunch and invited me along. Normally, I wouldn't find that kind of thing all that interesting, but their curiosity was infectious.
Afterwards, they showed a short film that the BBC had commissioned them to make. The idea was to come up with images to accompany an original Karlheinz Stockhausen composition. The film they ended up making was inspired by the letters of an insane woman (in an insane asylum) to her husband. She would write pages of words on a single page, writing over the words she had written before until the page would become almost entirely illegible.
The film was astonishingly brilliant. It's almost unimaginable that anyone could make a film this good. And yet, there it is, for all the world to behold. The film's not available in the States but a new DVD of their work will be coming out in October and will include this mind-boggling gem.
posted by Caveh Zahedi at
1:07 PM
