i managed to find the "flambeau," which is very beautiful but doesn't feature the same lighting mechanism as Margot's fab, slim, sleek, silver, minimalist-designed-single-action lighter (the flambeau's "lid" must first be raised . . . oh the torture!). i am simply obsessed with finding this lighter. anyone who can help will be rewarded (i don't know how, but i'll think of something).
Friday, August 31, 2007
obsession
i managed to find the "flambeau," which is very beautiful but doesn't feature the same lighting mechanism as Margot's fab, slim, sleek, silver, minimalist-designed-single-action lighter (the flambeau's "lid" must first be raised . . . oh the torture!). i am simply obsessed with finding this lighter. anyone who can help will be rewarded (i don't know how, but i'll think of something).
Monday, August 27, 2007
Warhol's best
Saturday, August 25, 2007
help interpret these dreams? . . .
so, your challenge is to answer the following question : what is the universe trying to tell me (about this or any of the other dream-bits i've shared)????
be as creative and nonsensical as you like, but the one requirement is that you respond freely and don't edit yourself; say -- with abadon -- what comes first to mind.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
from my book . . .
Sunday, August 19, 2007
manifesto
raise your hand if you're tired of seeing this image at my webspace. i. am. not.
i recall the moment of my discovery in the bathroom at the MoMA and the intense affective registers vibrating pleasurably on the skin of this robot (little shoutout to Beck).
so, i’ll be submitting my most recent film - remove to dispense - which was inspired by this cardboard scrap, to Kairos for publication as my “manifesto.” i guess i’m some kind of New Media scholar now? it’s weird to take the label. a friend called me “the queen of New Media,” which is beyond absurd (although i blushed to hear it). what i don’t know about New Media is legion (like, why do we capitalize it? it feels somehow wrong to me), but i do *work* as a digital filmmaker, and i work in Composition, in Rhetoric, and that’s where we find ”New Media.” so i’ll go w/ it, my new label. it’s fine, although in the spirit of my film/manifesto, it’s probably best to continue to evade it, if possible. i am a “digital filmmaker” - that is easy and clear and doesn’t exert as much pressure as does “New Media Scholar,” especially as i’m really more a “practitioner,” but then we have, again, some nasty theory/practice issues, and i do have some theory . . . and it functions within my practice . . . and now i’m rambling. maybe labels identity should be easier. maybe i should simply accept it.
Friday, August 17, 2007
inland empire
people, seriously. got the dvd yesterday. started watching late last night, knowing i would not be able to watch it all because i needed to get up early this morning for adjunct orientation. agony to hit pause.
but seriously. i. am. in. love.
i'll watch the rest tonight. in the meantime, please share your Inland Empire experience.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
self-deprecation as iteration
Monday, August 13, 2007
new media
so my question about the book. i keep coming back to this: "New Media" is so often capitalized. i'm having trouble with the label, with the capitalization, and with how i should or should not be attending to convention when i use the term.
maybe i've missed some key piece of writing that complexifies or even clarifies (gasp!) the matter. if so, maybe someone could point me to it? or, more simply, give feedback on my near solid decision to write New Media in caps once and create an endnote to explain that i will do so only once and in every other instance simply write "new media," (w/out the quotation marks) which i'll be defining through several sources but mostly using to talk about digital filmmaking potential for Composition classrooms.
please post your thoughts! please (but be nice; if i'm an idiot for missing or forgetting some obvious resource, please be gentle).
also, maybe you'd like to post thoughts on the book blog idea. is this something one (I) should do? i'm not sure it's for me, but i like the idea of frequent feedback from the cool people who read and post in the circles i am wandering in to . . . but at the same time, it's a little frightening.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
inspiration
it may seem spacy to admit that i see this as some kind of confirmation, but i do. clearly, my mind agreed; last night, i had a dream in which David Lynch appeared to validate my ideas about inspiration (i had recently been reading his book on meditation, which speaks of inspiration and how we can get in touch with it). i woke feeling happy.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
now i'm just being lazy . . .
and now, from the HBO show, all geared up and still p-r-i-t-t-y cool, man:
blank
Friday, August 3, 2007
flow
yesterday was my first day off the 2 week antibiotic regimen that had me sleeping something like 16 hours/day. i had thought it would take a while for the sleepiness to wear off, but no, yesterday morning, i wrote for 2-3 hours straight (adding and revising for my Comp Studies revision of the "1963" paper i gave at C's). i wrote with that Bhabha-esque disregard for clarity (so watch out), but i love what happened, how it validated what i write and, maybe more importantly, how i write (and this how also helps me to understand why i like, why i prefer, filmwriting).
so i realize that i am presumuptuously-to-the-point-of-narcissism identifying w/ Homi Bhabha, but, to be honest, i have done so since i read the piece, "Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt" in the Grossberg collection for a Cultural Studies class i took in grad school. "nonsententious." i just hung on that word, that concept, and i've been vibing out on it ever since. it doesn't make publishing easy for me, but, well, here's Bhabha talking about a "lack" of clarity in an interview w/ W.J.T. Mitchell :
I take the question of accessibility very seriously. That a book should be impaired by a lack of clarity, so that people cannot respond to it and meditate on it and use it, must be a major indictment of anybody who wants to do serious work. But I also feel that the more difficult bits of my work are in many cases the places where I am trying to think hardest, and in a futuristic kind of way -- not always, I'm afraid, there may be many examples of simple stylistic failure, but generally I find that the passages pointed out to me as difficult are places where I am trying to fight a battle with myself. That moment of obscurity contains, in some enigmatic way, the limit of what I have thought, the horizon that has not as yet been reached, yet it brings with it an emergent move in the development of a concept that must be marked, even if it can't be elegantly or adequately realized.
so the projects i want to take on are about this investigatory form of meditation that moves in "a futuristic sort of way," with a gesture toward some future hope or ideal. In his Senses of Cinema entry, Craig Keller identifies Jean-Luc Godard in this intellectual camp:
refreshing . . .
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
in honor of filmmakers booed at Cannes or otherwise rejected
made after my submission was rejected,
this is actual copy from the letter.
i wear it today.
filmmakers pass on . . .
i have seen only a few of the masterful films of these two filmmakers. i did not, as The New York Times stories suggest has been the case with many viewers, always see their films as coherent or abundantly clear, but then i tend to enjoy ambiguity in film; in many ways it's what allows us to discuss -- sometimes over coffee and cigarettes (please forgive the cliche) -- just what is going on in, sayWild Strawberries or L'Avventura, both of which i found confounding but also brilliant in many ways. L'Avventura was initially booed and hissed at Cannes, but as Gary Morris explains in an Images article, "[f]ortunately, a small band of critics recognized the film’s ravishing pictorialism in the service of a vision of modern life as a quiet hell of ennui." "a quiet hell of ennui"(QHOE, which i'm going to normalize within my discourse). that 's good. and it's applicable, as i recall the film. and it's true that i a shared a vision of these characters (on the island) as "shallow," i admit that i sensed, at times, greatness, especially in its bleak pictorialism, which so clearly reflected that QHOE.
i imagine lots of Berman and Antonioni will be appearing on TNN, IFC, Sundance Channel, and so on. i plan to wallow in the various takes on homage.
-
image source In 1973, our family's fishing boat broke. The bow broke off after crashing down in the trough of a wave. We were return...
-
If you thought things were retrogressing in Russia, you. Have. No. Idea. See Durakovo: Les Village des Fous (Village of Fools) , Nino Kir...