Mind-Friends

One of my favorite things about “Scott Pilgrim…” is the overload of jokes on-screen at a given time, so that it’s impossible to see/hear them all at once. The Onion News Network does that as well with the information along the bottom scroller. Both inspire/require multiple viewings.

I don’t know if I have a favorite Evil Ex, but I loved all of the fake movie references, posters, and clips from Lucas Lee’s acting career (Also, Chris Evans has quickly become a reason to see just about any movie for me). The idea for them is very similar to what Adam and I were going for in “Trailer: The Movie.” Granted, “Scott Pilgrim” doesn’t share much else in common with our movie, but the particular sensibility with which the filmmakers send-up Hollywood is strikingly similar. Check out a little poster comparison w/ “Action Doctor” and “Tourniquet 3: Cardiac Arrest.” (Pay special attention to the tagline in “Action Doctor.”)

I really love the blue background and grid-work in the Lucas Lee one. And the black section in ours looks sloppy-ish, yes, but! The tone is the same, and that’s something! (You can look at all of Lucas Lee’s acting work here.)

The soundtrack for the movie has been playing pretty much 24/7 since I got it, andhere’s a cool video from the movie version of the song, called “Black Sheep” -

Also, speaking of cool videos and a Scott Pilgrim-like use of special effects, here’s one for the road. Check out this short film, “Pixels,” from Vimeo. It’s creative and interesting and kindof nerdy. Perfect combination. If there’s one thing I do love about the internet it is the level of access to creativity. Be on the lookout for some stuff from me and Adam coming soon.

Let it Go This Too Shall Pass

Sometimes you want an 1100 page novel that bends style and twists narrative and confounds your expectations and engulfs you for 5 months and won’t let you go. But you know, sometimes complexity doesn’t come from questioning and fighting. Sometimes it’s a celebration. I don’t think anyone exemplifies that idea better than OK Go. You saw the treadmill video (if not, click here), but now they’ve got a new single, “This Too Shall Pass” and they have two videos for it I can’t stop watching; two very different ideas, “The Field” and “The Factory” if you will.

THE FIELD:

THE FACTORY:

Don’t those just make you happy? Both single-shot extravaganzas, “The Field” is kindof about the amazing things people can physically do in nature, while “The Factory” is a technical achievement of the mind. I’ve maybe over-thought them just now, but regardless of any of that, they are celebrations of creativity. Along with the song’s lyrics and general mood, both videos aim to soothe and give hope and inspire by showing us something dazzlingly artistic and creative and complex.

“No you can’t keep letting it get you down. No you can’t keep letting it get you down.”

There is a playful spirit in OK Go’s videos that overwhelms me. The song is about moving on and not harboring the past. The videos conquer the past by reaching down and pulling us out of whatever slump we’re in and bringing us into something dynamic and exalting and fun. It’s like being slapped in the face by a bright, loving smile. And it works! These videos make me want to jump up and down like a little kid, I love them so much.

Be Overwhelmed

Sometimes things just get you, you know? They move past the effectiveness of their particular medium and take hold of you personally. They feel like they came from and were made for a certain part of you. That’s been this week for me. With movies and literature and TV and tonight music. Maybe I’m just in that place right now, that’s possible. But whatever the case, they’re finding their way to me and I am happy for it.

Let's Play

Many people read “Where the Wild Things Are” as a kid. I didn’t but sure wish I had. The movie evoked so much in me (I wrote a full review of it here). Scenes of its main character playing alone. Playing in the snow. His rage. His recklessness. His love. All of them smashing into each other. The powerful line KW says to him: “Don’t go. I’ll eat you up, I love you so.” The way the movie embraced danger in the same way I daydreamt about it as a kid; how much fun it would be to be in such a situation. I wanted it desperately. I fantasized about being a superhero who fought crime at night and did amazing things. I created storylines in my mind and replayed them alone on the bus. I was totally pre-occupied with them. This movie made me miss being a kid.

I love the late writer David Foster Wallace’s way he seems to smile sometimes through his pages as he plays with words. Sometimes it advances something, sometimes it’s just a treat. Other times, he nails turmoil so staggeringly that you hurt for him, even though he might be describing you. Here, in Infinite Jest talking about time and withdrawal:

Poor Tony once had the hubris to fancy he’d had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly shivered until time’s cadences— jagged and cold and smelling oddly of deodorant— entered his body via several openings—cold the way only damp cold is cold—the phrase he’d had the gall to imagine he understood was the phrase chilled to the bone—shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and he could hear his joints’ glassy crunch with every slightest shift of hunched position, time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, coldly; and the pain of his breath against his teeth.

Also, HBO’s “In Treatment” for the way it confounds your expectations and reminded me that you can have effective drama with just two people, sitting in a room, talking. We watch them fail and learn and cry and get angry. More than any other show I can remember, it looks at the way people look while they listen. How communicative the eyes can be. 43 episodes of it and I was riveted.

Finally, The Decemberists. I’ve seen them many times before, I’ll see them again. But tonight was the only time I ever saw them alone. I didn’t like that part of it. It’s harder to share it. But oh how it felt like seeing old friends. I have a relationship with the music now. The animated Visualization of “The Hazards of Love” was stunning, but the music and the band’s own performance made me breathless. I felt lucky. I got to see it twice and now it is done. Never again to be performed live after this tour. How could it be? It’s over. But I saw it. Perhaps it was the animation or I don’t know what, but I kept noticing how emotional this album is. Can a thing be ornate and raw at the same time?

The feeling starts in my chest and rises— slowly at first, but increasingly fast—to my face. I instinctively smile when it gets there, which is partly my way of acknowledging it and partly my way of stalling it for a moment while I accept it. And in each case, the form of the thing, the way it is packaged in its particular artistic medium is part of the joy. Wallace’s words or Spike Jonze’s playful style; the daring simplicity of “In Treatment” and the immensity of The Decemberists’ sound. They’re like little presents, these things, that the artist cannot help but give. They come from a desire to share, to show for us. Even when they are dark, they seem prepared lovingly; with humanity. And they connect us to something outside and above and something paradoxically larger than ourselves but that is also within us, aching for us to see it.

For some reason, the last week I’ve been seeing it. I’ve been feeling it. Art reveals itself to us in the hope of helping reveal parts of ourselves we may not be aware of; that we forgot we had; that maybe we hoped were gone but aren’t; that we can’t believe; that have been waiting for us; that we desperately need even if we don’t think we do or can’t see why. It can help us get out of our own way. It can challenge us, even anger us. Anne Lamott puts it this (much better) way:

This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of—please forgive me—wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break into our small bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

I read those words just before the concert started. Afterwards, I stood outside on the lovely UCLA campus, watching people filing away, down large staircases. I wrote a little about what I saw, how at home I felt on a college campus in the fall. And these things came trickling back to me. It feels good to be overwhelmed like this. Life does feel more spacious. Certainly not everything will make you feel this way, and most things that do aren’t trying to do that in the first place. It just happens sometimes. But it’s good and right and important to me to know that it can and be willing when it does.

95% of Editing is RE-Editing

Adam and I showed our film, “Trailer: The Movie” about a month ago and, after obtaining and settling into our LA apartment, we are back to work on it, re-cutting and improving the film. We’ve cut out 7 minutes of sometimes funny, sometimes superfluous material, making the film a bit crisper in its pacing. We’ve re-done nearly all the graphics for the film, making them both simpler and sleeker. We’ve solved the issue of the HD footage, so now the segments of the faux-entertainment show look…watchable. One of the best changes we’ve made is to the opening of the show, called “Bizz Buzz.” It is part “Entertainment Tonight,” part movie-junket, all trashy. Before we had just one screen with some moving light effects. Not very good. Below is the new and improved opening:

I came up with the initial concept, which only took Adam and I a few minutes to refine and map out (I contributed a stick-figure series of representations for the basis of the scenes). Took Adam a few hours to create the items and animate everything, which he did today while I was at a job interview. Major Kudos to Adam; somehow I feel like the amount of technical artistic creative work he has done has been overlooked. He’s kindof a genius sometimes.

Re-editing has been much easier than I thought. Watching the film, the things that needed changing were pretty clear. The actual time it took was surprising as well, only about four or five full days worth of work. Some things we watched and thought, how did we ever think that would make the cut? Well, sometimes you keep what you love even when it doesn’t work, so it goes.

Our deadline is Sept 21st. That’s the LATE deadline to the Sundance Film Festival for 2010. Now I know what you’re thinking: do we really think we have a shot at going to Sundance? Presumption aside, the smart money is on “Not a chance in hell.” There are thousands of entries competing for fewer than 100 slots in the short film program, we are submitting to the LATE deadline and doing so at the last possible moment, and our film is less than 10 minutes away from being considered a “feature film” (which for their festival is 50 minutes), which means that our film will eat up more time. So… all things considered, it’s unlikely at best.

But why in the world wouldn’t we at least try?

German Silence Experiment

Pray you... Remember the Porter!

Even as an avid movie-watcher, there are blind spots in my viewing history. Among them, German Expressionism. Most of the big ones are silent films, and this spring I was an extra in a friend’s attempt at recreating the style via Greenscreen. So, it got me thinking, and good friend Tyler had a group of us over the other night for a trilogy of German director F.W. Murnau. The three films on the docket – “Nosferatu,” “The Last Laugh,” and “Sunrise.” We only got through the first two, which was fine because I’d recently seen “Sunrise.”

The films were all made between 1922 and 1927 and what fascinated me was how different they are. There is the horror movie, the character study, and the melodrama, respectively. I was expecting a much more cohesive thematic pathway through the films. Film was in its infancy, and there were simply things you couldn’t do. But what I found as we discussed the films was that Murnau was able to use his distinct visual style in three very different ways.

It’s nice to be surprised by movies. Sometimes movies like these feel like a chore; something you have to watch in order to get a sense of a film as an evolving art form, but that doesn’t really do anything for you emotionally or intellectually. After being left a little cold by “Nosferatu” I thought maybe that’s what this night would be. But then “The Last Laugh” began and it completely blew me away. It has some of the most dynamic camera movement I’ve ever seen in a silent film. I can’t say for sure, but this is one of cinema’s earliest character studies. The movie has such a sense not only of its main character, a Porter at an upscale hotel, but also for the many communities he inhabits. I didn’t know they made movies purely about behavior in 1925. In contrast to “Nosferatu,” which was all static, unmoving shots, this one is often on the move. It tracks along with The Porter as he walks through the courtyard behind his apartment building, interacting with everyone he meets. Murnau often shoots through windows or doors or some sort of obstruction, as if trying to remain unseen and impartial. We see The Porter at work, and the upper-class moving about. We see him with people in the working class, with children, at his daughter’s wedding reception. And along with observing the community, the film is also about how those people view The Porter.

Emil Jannings plays The Porter as a man whose value comes through his job, and the film traces his disintegration (and then his redemption) as he goes from being a confident, well-respected man to a demeaned employee, to a joke to everyone he meets. Jannings is remarkably subtle for the time and even includes a different master gestus for each stage of his character’s journey.

I shouldn’t really be surprised. The movie was made in 1925, which is the same year the great silent comedy “Seven Chances” came out. What is remarkable to me as both a writer and a filmmaker is the way both “Seven Chances” and “The Last Laugh” remain brilliant examples of character-driven storytelling. Both use numerous tracking shots to follow their main character through a sea of people. Both also pull back to a grand scale and show a world of behavior. Most films today don’t even do that. They have no sense of the movement of the world their characters inhabit. Finally, both choose to rely purely on the visual strength of the storytelling, in the way that “Seven Chances” uses dialogue cards (to show what the actors have been saying) very sparingly and “The Last Laugh” doesn’t use them at all. They aren’t needed. Every important piece of information is communicated. The rest is behavior.

The more I watch silent films, the more I desperately want to make one. There is a simultaneous challenge and freedom to the notion. To have to tell a story visually and sustain it. For most young writers, an interest in film begins with an interest in dialogue. That’s how it was for me. I’ve been able to write dialogue for a long time, and it can become a crutch. It is the easiest way to overwrite something. Some writers never progress past that point (like this guy). Other writers decide to challenge themselves (like this cat). It’s a lesson I’m constantly learning. The last thing I wrote recently was 22 pages of non-stop dialogue. It’s only okay. I’m very happy with the dialogue, but the thing is a little one-sided. It’s not writing that is going to make me a better filmmaker, if that makes any sense.

Compare that to something like “Delicious Breakfast Cereal,” which, while not great by any standards, contains less dialogue and was a very useful experiment for how to tell a story specifically with a camera. The trick is, of course, to combine the two. To know when it’s time for dialogue and when to let character action take over, and how to make them swim along side each other for a while and not fight.

Apatow Enters Adulthood

Oh to be a fly on that wall

I saw “Funny People” last night, and I just can’t stop thinking about it. It’s the new movie from writer/director Judd Apatow, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll probably have to wait for DVD, because unfortunately it’s kindof come and gone in theaters. Maybe it wasn’t the movie people expected when they heard Apatow, Seth Rogen, and Adam Sandler were making a movie together. Maybe they saw the trailer and were turned off (most of that material isn’t even in the movie, either. Bad marketing team…bad).

Apatow’s 3^rd film is his longest, at about 2 ½ hours. It’s also the darkest, meanest, most grown-up, and least crude. I don’t know if it is his best film, I like them all, but something has definitely changed. His other movies were simpler and more direct. I’m sure there was some improv, but I never got the sense that the movie was being put on hold to watch friends joke around. If it had, this thing would be 4 hours long.

Apatow has a penchant for writing male friendships, but until now those friends have been aimless man-children and the movies have formed the path to adulthood. Here, he grows them up, and instead of six or seven, there are three ambitious friends, who are all trying to start careers in LA as actors or comedians. Kindof my place in life… RIGHT NOW.

To me, the movie is all about notions of success. Different kinds. Different ways to get it. How are you supposed to feel when your friend is the lead on a sitcom? Do you hate him for the success, are you proud of him, do you try to get a guest spot on there? How do those feelings change if the show isn’t any good? Jason Schwartzman’s character is the sitcom star (see sweet fake clip from it below), he leaves his paycheck stubs around, he blabs about wanting a role in the new Tobey Maguire movie, he’s just realized he may be just successful enough for women to throw themselves at him. In many ways, Schwartzman’s is an early version of the Adam Sandler character, who’s done countless awful looking comedies because they pay, and has become as egomaniacal as he is lonely. There are a couple of moments where both characters show someone their work, and no one is laughing. Sandler has stopped caring, he knows it’s just a paycheck, but Schwartzman tries to play it off and makes excuses for it.

Then, there’s Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, trying to make it as stand-up comics. They do gigs for free, they just want to be recognized, they want some small inkling of success to get them by. Rogen seizes the opportunity to write jokes for the Sandler character, Jonah Hill jumps at the chance to be on his friends’ lame sitcom.

At dinner before we went to see the movie, my roommate Adam and I were talking about the downfall of Charlie Sheen, and the sad reality that more people watch “Two and a Half Men” (which is like a real version of “Yo Teach!”) than “The Office” or “30 Rock” and I asked, “What would we do if someone wanted to hire us to write for “Two and a Half Men” ? Because we’re nobody and we just want to get our foot in the door, wouldn’t we take it? Isn’t that what you do? You write or direct or act in or get on-set of anything you can stomach, hoping to get far enough to do the things you really want to do. 2008’s Apatow-produced, “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” where Jason Segal was doing music for a CSI type show, and the titular character talked about doing movies that were the “right move” for her career. Even the Tina Fey character on “30 Rock” has a past where she was one of the ladies of the night, advertising for a phone-sex hotline.

The list could go on forever, because among TV and movies that deal with this idea, there are always horror stories of how people got their foot in the door. It’s a string of unfulfilling prospects until you find your break. IF you get a break. It’s not guaranteed. And the question is, how are you supposed to be proud of yourself doing this, particularly when this may be all you ever do? One side says you have a job and at least attempt to bring something to it. Therefore, you should be happy with yourself. The other side says that it can be a fool’s errand, buying exclusively into the business side of what you used to do because it made you happy and wanted to do because you felt you should.

I go back and forth with these competing notions, and maybe the reality is somewhere in between, but the fact is I’m not even in a position right now where I can figure it out. “Funny People” is sortof about all of these things and different stages of success, embodied by different people. Sandler’s character has lost something, and the movie traces his attempts to get it back, from his health, to his career, to the woman he loves.

In the credits for the film, Paul Thomas Anderson is thanked. I learned that during the editing process, Apatow brought in a few directors to get their input, among them Anderson (who directed Sandler in “Punch Drunk Love” and James L. Brooks (who directed him in “Spanglish”). It shows. Perhaps Brooks helped him balance the personal drama of the final act with the film’s comedic sensibility? And though it is pure conjecture, it’s not ridiculous to assume that P.T. Anderson helped him with one of the most surprising aspects of the film: its meanness. Many of Andersons’s characters have an edge to them that is painful, hurtful, and hilarious all at once. Think of how much verbal abuse Seth Rogen’s character takes from Sandler. This isn’t the light-hearted ribbing from “Knocked Up,” there is a real darkness and cynicism to this character that was fascinating to see, particularly because of how nice Sandler is in real life. For me, this was like a warning. The character isn’t mean because of his fame. He’s mean because he was a mean person to begin with. Becoming rich and famous just gave him a lifelong excuse not to change. This is one of Sandler’s best performances, and it isn’t all negative. He modulates his anger with actually caring for one or two people, and he does respond when something is genuinely funny. And in maybe Apatow’s most brilliant and surprising move, the film begins with old home videos of Sandler doing funny voices and prank-calling people. Reminds you why you have to like Adam Sandler, even if it’s in spite of yourself, even when he makes bad movies. Luckily, this is one of the good ones.

New Place News

Been in new apartment about a week – many cool things. 

1. Found a great running route that doesn’t cross too many busy streets, also found a huge lake/park a few blocks away with tons of running trails and no stop-lights for cars to kill me at. 

2. Apartment building has Courtyard with pool and hot tub, both of which are actually – wait for it – CLEAN!!! Overheard some neighbors talking about being actors in LA – maybe I’ll chat with them another time. Nothing better after running for an hour than a dip in the pool. Also, Courtyard has 3 entrances and circular halls – this seems ripe for one of my beloved long takes in a short film that I may have to start writing. Camera moving in and out of building, across pool, pausing here, there for some conversations. It’s a little Boogie Nights, but it’ll be a good exercise if nothing else. Party-sized cast + extensive camera movement = awesome

3. Looking for a car. Went with Tyler and Jen last week, need to go again this week. Talked to the salesmen at the used car place, and since I have good credit, I should be able to get a car without a current source of income. Looking for good gas mileage above all.

4. Am blogging for Tyler’s new podcast More Than One Lesson, which is very good and interesting (Check out my most recent blog). I may be appearing (in voice) on this show very soon.

5. Meeting some good people, including new friend Josh who also writes for the website and is the only person I know who’s actually finished David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. And as he doesn’t know anyone else who’s finished it, I feel compelled to move it up my list and begin it as soon as I finish Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which shouldn’t take too long. For all her shortcomings as a writer, that damn J.K. Rowling tells compelling stories that are easy and fun to read. You could do worse. 

6. Met some AFI students over the weekend, two of whom are Production Designers. This could come in handy, especially with aforementioned possible new short film rattling around in brain. One of many.

7. Have been looking at filmmaker’s website Without a Box – awesome. You can get information about thousands (yes, thousands) of film festivals – including the major ones – for submission deadlines and costs. You can create a profile and add projects so the site can more easily point you toward those festivals that fit your film. You can create press kits with all sorts of promotional materials. Lucky for us, we have most of that stuff already, so it should be even easier.

So, all in all, things going well so far. In the midst of writing this, I was even called back for a job I applied for today. Ain’t that something!

Worst-Ever Case of the Mondays

This weekend, we began shooting “Trailer: The Movie” and we couldn’t be happier. Regardless of our cinematographer bailing on us (10 hours before we started filming: not professional). Regardless of the cops showing up (After speaking to him, Officer Stone told me: Well, you’re not bothering me any. Carry on.) Regardless the rain on Saturday. Regardless the issues with Adobe Premiere. We spent 23 of the 48 hours on set, I got less than 10 hours total sleep, and I can’t remember being happier. There was a moment, just before we started, when all the extras and crew were gathered around Adam and I (we’re co-directing), all eyes on us, everyone waiting to be told where to go, what to do. Surreal doesn’t begin to describe it. We filmed an m-f’ing RIOT on Saturday. We blocked off a city street. We staged 2 different car-chases. We used real guns and fake blood. We shot a fight scene using a defibrilator. The actors were brilliant, the crew was on top of every detail, the footage looks great. And from what I can tell, everyone had a great time. This was our Action Weekend, so most of the scenes were purely physical: lots of running, fighting, driving, shooting. Lots of guns. Lots of fake blood (maple syrup + chocolate syrup + red food coloring = badass). The extras did a really fine job, and they gave a great texture to everything. It didn’t look polished, it looked messy and accidental and perfect. It’s hard to describe the vibe on the set. It wasn’t strictly serious, but no one really goofed off or screwed around. It had a nice balance of everything. there were times when we’d be really serious and no one really talked between takes. Then, other times, usually involving the fake blood, we could barely keep going we were laughing so hard. We stuck to our schedule very well, even got a few shots done from next weekend, but one of the things I’m most proud of is that we weren’t too rigid. We took our time, got the footage we wanted and then moved on. Most of all, with so many action scenes, you want variation. So the second part of Saturday and much of Sunday was shooting action scenes on the fly. See a location, block a fight or a gun shot, move on. We had the freedom to be inspired by the location and as a result, we got unique and awesome shots.

 

 

The Official Logo for 1 of 3 films within our film

There’s only one bad part to the whole thing: coming back. Adam and I went to a late dinner Sunday night. Our favorite location and the place much of the script was shaped and discussed: IHOP – where dreams come true. We were talking to our waitress and we ran down how many hours we’d spent shooting. “That sounds awful,” she said. But it wasn’t. Maybe it took explaining to her for us to realize it, but I would so much rather spend 23 hours making a film than 10 hours working anywhere else. It was painful to go back to work today. It itched all over and we both called each other complaining. How do you come back from that? It was impossible to feel motivated. I worked my hours, did my job well, but what a waste it felt. All I could think about was shooting. It’s much different than coming back to work after vacation. You wind down from vacation. It still sucks, but the very idea of vacation has a built-in return to something else. This was different. This was more powerful than vacation. This was purpose, that loaded and overused word. And today wasn’t a let-down, it was a fall from grace. It was a crash.

 

For now, I’ll have to get through a week of my job in order to go to work (let’s use Definition #7 that the dictionary provides: everything needed, desired, or expected). All I want to do is set up a shot, block a scene, direct actors, discuss the lighting and set design. Readers, I’m in love.

Best of 2008

If you are like me, you make lists. Lists of lists even. If I want to know who are my favorite film directors of all time, I know I’ve made a list of them, which I can forever amend and edit. If I want to compile my top 20 books of all time, I am in luck that I have kept track of every book I’ve read since 2001, and have a star rating attached to each of them. I use a 4 star system, which does not function as a translatable percentage, though it would seem easy to apply. 3 stars does not mean 75%. Art is not judged like a pop quiz. I have been looking over my list of books read and CDs heard and DVDs watched, and I am thinking of them in terms of when they came throughout the year. I bought The Raconteurs’ sophomore album “Consolers of the Lonely,” because I liked their first CD okay, and hoped they’d grown (they had). That CD is listed first on my list of purchases for the year, but it wasn’t released until the end of March. And for me, it feels most like summer for all I listened to it. The three Tom Waits albums I bought have no frame of reference, though, because they feel like forever (same goes with The Decemberists. Once I listen to them enough, it’s like they’ve always been there. They are absorbed). I don’t recall if I had them when I saw him in concert, because I have so much of his stuff, the albums blend in to each other. This fall I got on a Jay-Z kick, so they feel like running and falling leaves and sweat and motion. But I’ve just been talking music. And I haven’t gotten to my awards yet.

 

The Collective Experience

For the finale of my podcast, my co-host and I have chosen to discuss not simply our favorite this-or-that’s of 2008. That would be too simple. Our podcast has been rigorously, ridiculously overly expansive, and in that name, we have decided to discuss our Top 10 Artistic Experiences… of ALL TIME. That is to say, if there were only 10 artistic moments you could have, if all else were to be locked away and discarded – no, forsaken -  what would you choose? What moments did you witness or have that really stick out? 

 

 

The Solitary Experience

It is an impossible game to play at. How do you compare, say, a live concert with the reading of a book? Or going to a Broadway play that you thought was just okay to watching your favorite movie of all time alone in your room one night with your girlfriend? Can the two be reconciled? Yes, of course, the answers will be carefully selected, but I don’t yet know what big:small moment ratio I’ll have. How much does the subjective experience of a thing compare with its objective importance to you? When I saw “Tropic Thunder” the first time, I laughed more than at any other movie this year. I was with good friends, we were all in hysterics. Second viewing? Different city, early evening, second movie that day, and a lame-ass crowd. Most of the movie fell flat. The jokes took forever to get from the screen to me, they seemed completely un-spontaneous, and  instead the movie’s glaring pacing issues and Ben Stiller’s badness came shining through. But I still remember the first viewing fondly. I take the few things from the movie I really did like, and let the rest be fun had with friends. 

 

So…2008. Let’s give out some awards.

Best DVD Discovery – “The Public Enemy” from 1931, with one of my all-time favorite performances by James Cagney that makes you beam with angry pride. He is the origin and Godfather of all portrayals of gangsters, criminals, and low-lives. Below is my favorite scene, which is also the most iconic. Think of film noir. Think of “The Matrix.” Think of Daniel Day Lewis in “Gangs of New York” and think of Heath Ledger’s Joker.

Best Album Bought – The Mountain Goats’ 2002 album “Tallahassee” because it is simple and dreadful and lovely and tells me the story of my life. 

Best Literary Find – Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte. My senior year of college, I took a class on Jane Austen. This book is what I had hoped to find. It is deeper, wiser, more emotional, more stirring, more painful, and more gloriously written than anything Ms. Austen ever did or could hope to do (God rest her soul). Austen is the Salieri to Ms. Bronte’s Mozart.

Best Back-to-Back Experience – In the span of 10 days, I saw Colin Meloy’s solo concert – he of my beloved Decemberists – and my heart’s most recent favorite, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in concert – they of the breakout 2007 film, “Once” (Runner-up: I saw “Into the Wild” and “There Will Be Blood” in theaters on the same day, with loads of friends. Good day.)

Best Artistic Personal Milestone – This is not the milestone itself, but the means to that milestone. I purchased a Panasonic Digital Film camera (see it here), and have been writing and making movies since the summer. It was the catalyst to make me break out and get to work. So far – 6 minute film that I am going to reshoot, 33 minute film that I moderately like, and 3 more projects to get to in the next few months. We will see.

Electromechanical Installations and Its Uses as an Artistic Canvas; OR, Microcontrol Me

Once in a great while, you see something so new, so interesting, so far beyond the lengths and widths that your mind had stretched. Last Friday, in Kansas City’s downtown Art Walk, I had this experience. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. No long build-up today.

What I saw was an exhibit called “Reel to Reel” by visual artist Jeff Share and musical artist Jon Fisher. Childhood friends from Texas, they went their separate ways during college but have found themselves collaborating on a monumentally impressive, expansive artistic experience.

Think of a sculpture. A 3-D item made of some material or materials. Now add a mechanism, so that your sculpture moves. Now add electricity, so that the mechanism can be both more advanced and more refined. And now revert back to step 1 – a sculpture; a visually stimulating THING. It is aesthetically interesting, the mind pours over it, inspecting its tiny details. 

This is not even the interesting part yet.

Within this sculpture is something else – a set. A model set of, say, a kitchen or bathroom or a hallway. A scale model. And either mounted onto the set or built in with it is a camera, which generates live video from inside, which is projected onto a monitor which itself is a part of the larger, exterior “electromechanical installation” or sculpture. So you have the sculpture, the set inside the sculpture and the film of the set, which is also a part of the original thing – the sculpture. But is the sculpture the first thing? Or have I assigned it “first thing” status? 

And now let’s go further. The set is being moved or rotated by some mechanical means. Within the set are lights, such that as it moves, the shadows move and change. Or there are tiny granules of sand, which flow freely and move and fall into crevices of the motorized set. Now let’s combine this entire experience with music. And what if the music wasn’t merely preset and chosen by the artist as a means of underscoring, but was generated by the movement of those sand granules? Or by the movement of the sculpture as a whole? And what if that movement was not precisely choreographed, but allowed to occur at random? Jon Fisher explains: 

“In each sculpture there is a microcontroller acting as an electronic “brain” for that piece. The microcontroller has the ability to turn on and off the various motors and lights within the sculpture. It also has the ability to communicate with a central computer running the whole show… generating in real time the soundtrack that is accompanying the video output of that piece… At the level of detail, chance is an integral part of the work. The algorithms generating the music heavily rely on computer-generated random numbers, though these are used in very tightly controlled windows of randomness.”

And the exhibit as a whole also functions like each individual piece, in that all of the pieces are linked and play off of each other, at times are projected onto a large movie-screen, which cuts between multiple pieces, which are all moving. So then as you watch, you see people go back and try to figure out which piece is being projected onto the larger screen at a given moment. There is a buzz, people calling out to strangers across the gallery, “Is it that one?” Shore and Fisher have created an exhibit that contains interactivity between art and viewer and between those viewers, as the art is occurring. 

Just the scope of the idea is impressive, a big beautiful collaboration among different arts, sciences and concepts. Big things within small things within other things, within something else, all interacting at random with each other and the connoisseur. It is one of the few pieces of art of any kind I’ve experienced that so perfectly links the abstract and the tactile, the sort of thing the mind puzzles over, going round and round and thinking you’ve gotten to the end and you’re back to the beginning, or thinking you’re at the beginning and finding out you’re in the middle, or thinking you’re in the middle and finding out you’re in the middle, but the middle is something other than what you thought it was.

And even outside of the thing itself, what an inspiring thing it is to be able to be blown over by something, to so fully not see something coming. It’s invigorating. I’ve said before that I hate artists, which is true but incomplete. I hate most people in most groups. But I also love artists, and this is why, this is what restores my faith in us. That pieces like this can be created. That movies like the just released “Synechdoche, New York” can come along and boggle our minds for a solid week, until we run out and see it again. I have hopes to revisit both experiences. This is something my very great friend BJ would have really liked if he still lived in KC. I very much wish he could see it. Explanations are bound to be incomplete, something like this begs to be seen and felt and experienced. Then talked about. It is one of the greatest, most intriguing things I’ve ever witnessed.