Which is the extra?
https://www.storyanddrama.com/the-36-dramatic-situations-of-georges-polti/
Stage/Camera/Girl/Joy
Can we have both?
The Sense That You Need To Hang Onto Something For Later?
I just got that feeling while watching this clip, so I’m going to pin this here so I don’t forget it.
“To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life, but it does not create life, nor cause life. Furthermore, to attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds with the scientifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis in a posthypnotic state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures.”
-Stanley Kubrick
One Man, Many Sounds
A snapshot of a voice-as-instrument. The deepest internal gaze I’ve ever seen.
And, honestly, real brilliance on display.
Dinner and a Show
Is sitting in a theater, watching a performance, a state of hypnosis? I’m watching Dimitris Papaioannou from the moon.
Nightlights
Is there a human being out there who hasn’t seen this video? If so, here is a present for you.
I think about it all the time. I saw it three years ago, which probably still made me late to the party as it had dropped the year before, but this gdang thing has been showing up in my dreams ever since. It’s about to inspire The MicroFiction Series Chapter Two (JUST WAIT) in such a blatant way that I’m claiming it now— yes I know. But you know what I used to live by a park with a parking lot and it occurred to me while I was there that I’d like to shoot video one night on that parking lot, and so maybe a form of this idea slapped a whole lot of us in the face in 2014 the way ideas do, but it was only brilliantly realized by Chet Faker that year. How’s that for a run on sentence? In any case, when I finally shoot my own nighttime piece, there will (sadly) be no rollerskates and we’ll be working with an altogether different narrative.
On another note, I slept with a nightlight well into my teens, how about you?
Famous/Last
I got on that bus too.
Run Out Of Answers?
Alicia needs more Cards. And upon more thought I actually don’t know that I like the premise (is it tired? is it too on the nose but not so on the nose to avoid the trap of being obvious?) EXCEPT for that this premise reminds me of a Magic 8 ball and what a device that is. But! Things I love include: that machine and the look of a pile of used cards, and I’m also VERY curious about the knife and the voice on the phone AND ACTUALLY NOW THAT I MENTION IT I quite enjoy the idea of Anna Wintour bringing anyone a bag of eggs in the same way I would enjoy watching a man in a suit ride a unicycle down Broadway. It’s wonderfully weird and a good punch line.
So. Fancy a peek?
Slow Motion
MY GOD I think this is terrific. I do I really do and the great irony that a cheeky-and-fake-behind-the-scenes video is so relatable is like a big BOOM left there at the end that makes me think, Yes! Right, yes yes, you’re right. I know this beauty is engineered but the fact that it feels like an accident is maybe precisely what is so satisfying about Slow Motion— that it can seem real and also simultaneously like a dream. Tricky, lovely, tricky.
I’m not here.
Slow Motion, Cate Blanchett, Matthew Frost, 2013
Negative Space
Watch this on silent like a screensaver or maybe with church bells in the background because a Ladder of Babel that goes nowhere except forever is such an interesting thing to see————
Billie Eilish, Bore, 2017
Backwards Kate
Try at home. Watch on mute. Cut mystery boyfriend. Cut mystery apology. Reclaim hysteria. Choose a different hat. Add more snow. Wear an even larger sweater. Don't be so literal. Keep the angles. Add upside downs. Keep doors. Keep mighty stomps. Get angrier. Sing.
Betsey Johnson's Dollhouse
I had a Dollhouse once. A bungalow apartment, all nooks and slants, that I painted many colors without asking. And the philosophy of filling a home with the things you love is one I can wholeheartedly get behind. I imagine being a little girl, let loose in Betsey Johnson's tiny wonderland. I imagine being free to roam it now. I imagine glee. I want to live my life that way, vibrating high and seeking joy. So I'm going to leave these images here (photographed by Maggie Shannon) for myself as proof/digital sticky notes/low-day reminders of the no-rule-but-love-rule. Also COLORS, WOW.
Poem for Or
My first thought posting this now is that a year ago, at the time when this video was first released into the ether, I was falling in love. I was falling ungracefully, full of doubt, questioning it the whole way down, very unlike what I imagined the whole thing might feel like. But I was falling and here I am now, in the love jar, and it's great in here and I think I'll stay.
I find it a bit ironic that this video takes me back to that whole experience because this piece of art feels like heartbreak. It also feels like separation, like distance. People are quick to tell you that distance either kills love or strengthens it. I'm not close with either person in the video, though I've been a longtime admirer of one of them, but in this case, it seems to have done both.
I want to say more but I feel like I shouldn't, so here, watch the magic thing, and feel what you want in the space between the two.
Marion
Another throwback this week, this slice of heaven is an afternoon in the sun, a beautiful pair of shoes, a cold martini, and a serene pool of water. It's glamorous, the makers are banking on that I'm sure, and that catches my eye immediately. Marion Cotillard is a stunner. But what keeps me watching is the strangeness here, the awkward beauty, the moments where the rules are broken. I've said it before, but I love beauty when it's strange.
I'm also obsessed with underwater shoots, and one day I've gotta do it. Thank God they make you wait for it here, so it's quite literally a cool splash of water.
Movie Trailers: Andrea Tarkovskiy's "Stalker"
Can I just start by confessing that I have never seen Tarkovskiy's 1979 film Stalker? But I found this trailer while searching for some visual examples for a project I'm working on and I have to say: these shapes are beautiful.
[If you're caught up in the title, it should be pointed out that this is a science fiction drama in which the term "Stalker" is used to describe a "guide" who escorts individuals to and across the border of the "Zone," a restricted and dangerous area, where access is forbidden and therefore illegal.]
The first time I watched it, I watched it with the sound off. To be honest, I don't love the track, but the whispering gives me the tingles. My big thought is this: It's witchy and wonderful and reminds me a bit of what we were going for with the trailer for The Hunt. The fact that I'm seeing it a year later is only adding fuel to my fire that it's time to revisit my coven...
Click play below for a 2:40 experience.
David Byrne: On True Surround Sound
This is a bit of a throwback, as this exhibition opened in 2009 while I was bopping around a college campus, reading books and living off dumplings, a good four years before I started to think about what it might mean to be "fully" immersed in a piece of art. David Byrne, meanwhile, was attaching an old pump organ to the literal bones of the Roundhouse for the UK premiere of "Playing the Building," an experience which expands, literally, what it means to "play."
I've always thought that buildings had distinct personalities. David Byrne taught this one how to sing.
On The Many Versions Of The Same Face
I have been chewing on the thought lately that we're all just variations on a nose, eyes, and a mouth. That our faces are actually not so different from other faces. That we're actually each part of a chain of faces-- and then how many chains can there be, really?
Maybe it's connected to that daily sensation of being one in the great mass. A small fish, still searching for my rainbow scales.
On Drowning
I was gone for a little while. Hustle has a way of swallowing you. I survived, and now I'm back, unsure if I'm wounded or if this is just what life looks like.
Either way I'm fairly certain that the woods and a thunderstorm can cure almost anything.
This Is Margot, by Liza Voloshin
A study in Monochromes
and, perhaps, also
Nostalgia.
Inspiration Board: Power Posing
Lunch when you want to.
