http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhiZEPVTn_0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOFHWyIMKmo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noFfn5xaePY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG-9h_rvJyk

A fantastic video by Mona Qaddoumi for the track "Wood Between the Worlds" off of the album Seven Circles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohysta8bnwo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVWCXfoZj9w

Excerpt, Brokenkites: "Flight School"
http://brokenkites.com

"So how long are you leaving for?" he asked, not looking up from his display.  At least he had stopped typing.

"I don't know.  A month, maybe.  Maybe two.  It's a short mission this time."

"Two months is a long time," he replied, pushing the display to the side and finally making eye contact with me.  "Your whole life is going into the service.  It's going to kill you, one way or another.  It's a stupid war."

The invitation for an argument, presented.  But he was young, that's what kids do.  He didn't understand why I signed up in the first place, he wouldn't understand what I fought for.  He didn't want to understand, and his opinions kept him from listening.  I avoided the subject.

"I see your scores are high enough this semester to earn you scholarship credits.  Have you started looking at universities yet?  I was kind of hoping you'd send an application in to Flight School."  I hated myself for sounding like our parents would have sounded, if they'd been around.  It wasn't so long ago that I was his age, when last thing that I wanted to do was think about academia.  Summer was right around the corner.  I pushed for answers to questions that he wanted to avoid as well, though.  I was spiteful.  I knew how to play the game.

"School's easy, no worries.  As for Flight School," he paused, considering something, then thought better of saying it.  "I'm going out tonight, so I probably won't see you before you fly."  He paused, waiting for me to disapprove, I guess, but I didn't.  "Don't get killed," he added.

I sighed.  "Haven't yet," I said, wondering if this would be the time that something went wrong.  Some pilots were like that, all luck, all victory, never taking a hit, and then one day, out of nowhere, the Big Black, where a systems malfunction would send them astray, lost in the abyss.  I knew a few of them.  We had a name for them - we called them the Lost Kids.  Quite a few stories regularly circulated about their fates, about what became of them once the Big Black got them, but I didn't buy any of it.  Nobody could confirm them, though, because the Lost Kids never came back.  Ghost stories, the lot.  If you aren't scared of your enemies, you gotta be scared of yourselves.  It makes sense to me.

Not that the bad guys weren't frightening; they were.  They just always seemed to bail out of a skirmish, even if they had the upper hand.  We didn't know enough about them to understand.  Still don't, do we?  I mean, how does a group that has all the battlefield advantages make a unilateral decision to just... vanish?  Everyone heard about the battle of the Argus, though, it was old news, even then.   The same situation, though, it happened all the time, except on a much smaller scale. 

So we kept ourselves in check with stories of the Lost Kids and the Big Black.  And most everybody but me took the stories seriously.  A little part of me wanted to know what happened to the Lost Kids.

"Where you going out to?" I asked him, genuinely curious.

"Friend's having a party, hopefully," he told me.  "If her rents get out on time, anyways."

"Girl friend? With a space... or without?" I teased.

"Currently with a space," he smiled.  I was relieved to see it.  We could still talk a little bit, as long as we avoided the war.

But how much longer could we avoid talking about the war?  How much secret life would happen between us before we had to talk about it?  I believed that he was telling the truth about the party, but I also knew that he wasn't letting me in on his secret meetings; meetings that were becoming more and more frequent.

His comm alerted him to something.

"Time to go," he said, grabbing his bag and keying the code that locked his console.  I didn't stand up.

He left without saying goodbye.

It's up! Jason and I finished our Chernobyl/Pripyat video footage! (Actually, Jason did all of the hard stuff putting the video together, and he did a great job as always!)
Check it out:



http://youtube.com/watch?v=JYkVatvFLsg

We're working on a higher resolution version on a different site, which we'll link to from the information section on the youtube page. We shot the original video in high definition, but a lot of that is lost due to youtube's compression. Nonetheless, it's a great look at Chernobyl and the abandoned city of Pripyat, which hopefully has some stuff you've never seen before in it. Our friend Laura did the narrative for us, and we used the Brokenkites track "Arc's Angel" as the background music for the film. Leave a comment or email me back and let me know what you think. (Or if you want to set up a trip to go there, which I'd totally be down for doing again, haha)

- ja

Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Brokenkites – Resonator

The truth is never far behind the past, it's all here in the midst of a concerted effort to remember. I sometimes have the freedom to consider the sounds made by a klystron resonating in orbit around us, to desire the ability to ride alongside and feel the throbs of its inner burnings. Brokenkites, in this hour of intense meditation, has brought to the surface some of these depths. The joy is the fact that there is no longer a pain related to the things left forgotten. No regrets have disintegrated in measures of belief and understandings of this belief. All these moments are both present past future and beyond in a single chord repeated and explored in conjunction with doublestringed chords and thoughts. Shoutouts for Epiphora & Escape Velocity. Special shoutout for the neoprototype Prelude.


http://eartaste.blogspot.com/2008/01/brokenkites-resonator.html

EarTaste

Pics from Pripyat & Chernobyl:

http://brokenkites.com/pripyat/

pics