Book Thirty

Book Thirty
January 2003 - December 2003
Spiral Workbook
Kept in Grantham's Landing and Vancouver, Canada
8" x 6.5" 128 pages. 


Book 30 is a workbook. It is similar to book 29 both in terms of use and content. It was filled in 2003 and contains something in the last pages you will never find today -  a list of phone numbers.

On the cover, Book 30 features a postcard from the 1965 film, Alphaville (made the year I was born). The image shows secret agent Lemmy Caution standing in front of Natacha Von Braun. As the lights fade up and down she repeatedly obscures his vision with her hand. It is a stylized formal scene set in a surrealist detective movie, yet it is one of the most powerful images in the history of film. Natacha also reads from The Capital of Pain by Paul Éluard. I tried for years to find those poems in translation.

Lemmy Caution is fighting against the abstract and disembodied Alpha 60. A massive computer which controls everything in Alphaville and quotes Jorge Luis Borges "Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along. But I am time. It's a tiger, tearing me apart; but I am the tiger."

Alphaville is a strange film. I am certain that, aside from cinemaphiles, it makes sense to few people. But still, the film is able to combine philosophy, poetry, beauty, love and foolishness and wrap them up in an absurd film noir plot.

Book 30? Book 30 is just a notebook.

Look inside

Here is a list of books.