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?

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.

This Is Margot, by Liza Voloshin

A study in Monochromes

and, perhaps, also

Nostalgia.

Inspiration Board: Power Posing

Lunch when you want to.

Inspiration Board: THE HUNT

Posted retroactively, because these were the faces that inspired me most.

Photos captured by @jrianbones, edits by me.

Mathieu Bleton And The Anatomy Of A Fall

You see now how we've missed the part where we turn around and fall up?

This glorious flight is performed by Mathieu Bleton. For now, that's all I know, but let's hope there's more to find and see.

Adele, Simply

If there is a common thread between many of the videos I have posted on this blog as of late, I think that thread would connect the following: one (count it: one) great idea, executed fully, and some good, clean video footage. And while I am not sure if this level of cleanliness and singular vision is running through my own work yet in quite the way I intend, I will continue to post videos to this digital inspiration board and film as much as my handheld camera can take until I figure it out. 

So then. Our next example.

Other things to note, while making the case for simplicity, is how delicious it is just to have a proper twirl? An idea is in there, somewhere, I feel it. Also that these digital layers might have been hokey, had they tried to be anything other than what they were. Which was layers. 

On Fairies And Other Forms Of Light

I've been thinking about light a lot lately. That bright, shiny stuff. What you can do with it, the different qualities it can have, how it bends. I've been thinking about simple lighting effects and how striking they can be, and how meaningful, like the times we build forts as children and huddle around just one flashlight. The rush that comes from a light shut off, quickly, without warning. The speed in which our eyes adjust to darkness. What it feels like to walk alone, outside, far away from the city, on a very dark night.  Candlelight. Streetlights. Headlights. Nightlights. 

I've also, for various reasons, been thinking about Peter Pan. And about magic. How we can transfer magic to an object, just by saying so. How telling someone, say, not to sit in a particular chair suddenly gives that chair a stoic, ominous quality, and also a pull. Now there is temptation to sit in a chair that you previously never knew existed. You are suddenly very aware of the chair, the room reorients around it. Only because someone said, "avoid that chair!"

In the case of Peter, or rather, Tinkerbell,  someone said, "this twinkling light is a fairy," and so it became a fairy. 

I've gone towards the light now (har har), and in doing so begin to put a pin in visuals where a particular kind of light makes a body appear both magical and strange. Look:

and here:

and then here again, and I don't know if it's a detour or if detours even really exist:

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll also admit that there was one other that I decided not to post, a video of a little girl spinning in a Cinderella dress, in the dark, under a street light. It's so dark everywhere else but where the light shines that it's hard to make out her head, only the dress and arms, and the film quality is poor enough that the images are washed to an almost-black-and-almost-white. And she not saying a word. I did not post it because, to be honest, it creeped me the fuck out. But I guess in a good way, because here I am, still thinking about it. Still, I think it better described than seen, so it can keep its poetry, and stay out of your nightmares. 

Janelle

The way this is shot is the argument for just standing up there and doing the thing. That's all I really have to say about it. I think it's beautiful and I think it's real, and I don't want to know if it's not. Watch it all the way through, even if you've seen it before, because it's not new, but it's still right. This is something with staying power. 

Sila Sveta, Digital/Physical

You'd be hard pressed lately to make it through a week, maybe even a single day, without running into the relevant (but, can I say it, tired? to me at least, it's right up there with talking about the weather) and passionately discussed issue of technology and how it is influencing our every move (often with a negative bent). 

No one's wrong. But what I find more interesting --than the conversation about how technological advances are just one more way in which millennials will ruin our weary, polluted world-- is the intersection of creativity in technology and in the arts. Again, some bad, and some good, but I think change is often the challenge an artist needs. Creativity begets more creativity, said Maya Angelou and a million other people, and it applies. 

Take, for instance, the below video. I like it as a conversation starter. Because it is beautiful, like something out of a dream, and a strange visual illusion, like the stairs that go up and down in a never ending circle. And here is my question. That is a gorgeous, human mover. Are you watching him? Is a harmony, between digital image and (a)live performance, achieved?

Listening to Ira Glass

Inspiration served to you in a snack-sized video that feels real real real and presents a much needed reminder to do the work and do a lot of it. Also isn't it great, the sound of his voice?

Inspiration Board: Femme Formulas

Thinking in shadows and strong silhouettes.

Have a Look (and a Listen!): Wintergatan Marble Machine

Okay okay. So my thoughts on this, during seconds 00:01-00:23 were something like "that's really pretty cool, but also a lot of work when you could just, you know, play the instrument." BUT THEN. The thoughts turned into "holy hell, it's a one man band!"

Either way, its pretty fun to watch, and catchy to boot. See what you think.

Marilyn: On Nightmares

She said, of Francisco Goya, "I know this man very well, we have the same dreams. I've had the same dreams since I was a child."

I've had this dream lately where life-in-the-dream-state appears to be normal, except for I know that something is off. And I'll lift up my shirt, or roll up the leg of my pants, and find that my body is turning into something else, something I don't recognize.  I'll wake up with a jolt, adrenaline racing, confused. I'm not sure if this is a dream or a nightmare, but I hate it regardless. I mention it because I can't seem to forget it, the fuzzy corners of it, and the sense that something perverse is hidden somewhere in the middle of it, which flavors the whole thing with an itchy, gruesome quality.

I mention it also because when I watch the below videos, I'm also not sure if I am watching a dream or a nightmare, and I wonder too about these fuzzy corners, and that long, drawn out ooohhhhhhhhhhhhh----