kapaonik, ostrich tracks and winter in mitrovica

reel to reel (mashup)

Without making too much of the immediately apparent technological leap between reel to reel tapes and youtube video uploads (a leap somehow bridged no matter how tenuously by the thin shining metal strings of the çiftelia, the epileptic convulsions of iron particles spun into tape, the brushed metal casing of a camera purchased on holiday in Germany before being hitched to so many cables strung around couch legs and tacked along window frames, strung through tree branches into a gathering of powerlines, down the road past the mosque and underground: none of it possible without and all of it brought to you by spindly fractured wearing down webs of metal spun three times and packed in cardboard from earth it came and to the earth it shall return, but it still takes a metallic resonance to make any of this happen) there remains something particularly charming about these videos: a man holding a lens, or balancing it on the arm of the living room ottoman for four to seven minutes in order to duplicate/preserve/share/force upon us/grasp himself the echoing shadow of a few ghosts, aware of the decay setting in, the warp of heat disfiguring tapes like the bandages falling from mummies revealing only dust inside; these particular breath-holding cellphone-muting extended pauses could (really should) and will only happen for a few years (these few years) in our history as a people, some time after the computers are bought (more for our children than for ourselves) but only until anyone (that child in particular) has stopped caring about those dancing electrons and what they infer and so, in honor of this decade—the decade when Kosovars filmed their reel to reel tape machines, the decade we are more or less living in now and which will be gone soon enough—I give you, in tribute, the mashup:

happy holidays from ko-kosovo

* We strongly recommend you read the instructions for the Santa on the Dree before using.