Unhappy Hour
I found (via Trond’s blog) the funny story Unhappy Hour about a group of people getting stuck with a jukebox playing Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. I bought the DVD not too long ago, and it has become one my favourites.
Eno writes in the liner notes: These pieces represent a response to what is presently the most interesting challenge of video: how does one make something that can be seen again and again in the way that a record can be listened to repeatedly? I feel that video makers have generally addressed this issue with very little success: their work has been conceived within the aesthetic frame of cinema and television (an aesthetic that presupposes a very limited number of viewings) but then packaged and presented in a format the clearly intends multiple viewings, the tape or disc.
[…]
So long ad video is regarded only as an extension of film or television, increasing the hysteria and exoticism is its most likely future. […] I am interested in a type of work which does not necessarily suggest this relationship: a more steady-state image-based work which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting [sic.]: it sits still and you move.
Interestingly enough, I think his ideas about video also fit well with the focus on “narrativity” (e.g. large scale form) in music.