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Archive - 2008
Tweets from yesterday
Yesterday's Twitter tweets:
- 09:44 so tired of people not understanding that youtube videos are not "usable", you can't "take" them and do anything with them. and even if you could they wouldn't be high-enough quality for pro use. sigh. #
- 14:16 copying old wtr footage from old drives to the new one #
- 20:13 just watched a datura blossom open. beautiful. #
Being and Nothingness (Routledge Classics)
author: Jean-Paul Sartre
name: Steev
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 1990/02/01
date added: 2008/07/14
shelves:
review:
back in college for my continental philosophy class i wrote a paper on Sartre's chapter on psychoanalysis in this book. it was hard work but worth it.
Irony Deficiency
Although we have yet to pick our copy up from the post office, I just read about the cover of the new issue of the New Yorker and the ensuing controversy over it. It's amazing that anybody smart enough to read the New Yorker would not get the joke, and speaks to an old problem that an old friend of mine and I used to joke about and call the "Irony Deficiency" of our nation.
This particular instance of this condition made me realize a possible fundamental cause - the fact that our society is so diverse, so factionalized, and so polarized and full of hate and adversarial relations, that irony is almost impossible on a mass scale - why do I say that? because when you have a population in which some people truly believe what others consider are outlandish jokes, those jokes start to backfire if they spread into the realm of the believers.
Those who would normally laugh at such a joke are on such hair-triggers to defend against the attacks of the believers that they no longer have a sense of humor. The fact is that there are some people who are so naive, hateful, deluded, and/or stupid that they really think that Michelle Obama is a violent radical militant and Barrack is a muslim terrorist. That's just how wide, how separated by chasms of clashing belief and values, the spectrum of "political" dialogue, spectrum of opinion about what is real and true, has become in this country.
And who should be surprised, when there are some people that watch 6 hours of television a night, including FOX News, and others that never watch TV at all and spend those hours reading Noam Chomsky, Harpers, or the New Yorker (and/or the latest Crimethinc publication)? When there are some that listen to Merle Haggard and pump their fists earnestly when he sings "and I'd surely stand up, next to you" or whatever, in that stupid-ass song about the first Gulf War, and yet there are others, like me, who bike around town with songs like this stuck in our heads, a Cop Shoot Cop track from that same era:
It's okay to kill in the name of democracy
And dictators are swell if they like the smell of American money
It's making me sick, I want no part of it
Stop waving that flag
All you idiots bought right into it
And who's left holding the bag?
Surprise, surprise. Surprise, surprise.
The government lies.
Which, by the way, if you didn't get it, contains irony in the first 2 lines...
Yesterday
Yesterday's Twitter tweets:
- 09:14 hating, at least in a way, getting invites to art and music events in cities thousands of miles away. i guess a little disgruntled at tucson #
- 09:15 wondering if i have enough real twitter friends to stop following rex sorgatz.... #
- 17:18 why does everyone shoot widescreen now? and yet all the frames (like on youtube) are still 3:2
Trying to Tell the Story of War Tax Resistance
I'm in perhaps the most exciting yet frustrating stage in my work on the documentary about war tax resistance that I'm making. I'm basically trying to make sense of all the footage and figure out how to present it in a compelling way - the big question is: what is the story? I've been struggling with this for about 4 years, ever since I started thinking about the challenges of making a film about this subject - Put another way, how do I tell the story of war tax resistance in a way that's interesting and exciting?
I decided to go all the way back to Michael Rabiger's excellent, wise, super book, Directing the Documentary, which I originally read in 2003 and which helped me enormously to first learn the art and craft of non-fiction filmmaking - actually, I'm really still learning, of course, but this book was my early training, my film school. I returned to it this week to re-read the chapters on the beginnings of post-production and the first assembly.
The advice I keep coming back to that he gives is: start organizing the material with the action, and then layer on the interviews, because if you start with the interviews, you will have talking heads as the primary spine of the film. Of course most of what I've ever done, and a lot of documentarians have done, has been reluctantly not following this advice - because most of almost any documentary film's central material is in fact people telling their stories. It's very rare that you can capture the actual stuff of life that you're talking about, or at least all of it - I've been acutely aware of this since I was doing the paper edit of my Juarez film 3 years ago.
Yet I tried to find a way out of that conundrum with an experiment in narrative that I had not tried before, which I thought of in very early pre-production and which I tried to follow during shooting: follow real people as THEY learn about the subject and meet people that do war tax resistance.
How sad is it when you have something like 50 hours of footage shot over 5 years and you still don't feel like it's enough "coverage"? [i need more "action" material that is relevant to the topic - demonstrations, press conferences, protests, street theater, tax day rallies, even stuff like relevant signs or banners being held up (or t-shirts being worn, etc) at more general anti-war events. Have you shot anything like this over the years anywhere? Do you know anyone who has? If so, please get in touch.]
However, I might have the seed of a narrative that focuses on action, on movement through space and time, and I want to try to make that into the backbone of the film. Perhaps it will need to be augmented with judicious narration, and animation, but i think it's there, basically... Almost every other film longer than 10 minutes that I've made has instead been organized by subject section - can this finally be a film that is a chronology? Is there hope that the story can really be based on a classic, time-based model of story? I'm going to try.
yesterday's tweets
Yesterday's Twitter tweets:
- 10:01 putting together the august indymedia newsreal. it's like a jigsaw puzzles, with pieces from different puzzles #
- 15:35 trying to switch gears from the sierra club film (which is 99.9% done) to the war tax resistance doc #
- 16:49 logging wtr footage from nyc #
- 18:13 reading about the RED Scarlet camera. hmm. #
Journey of the Heart: Path of Conscious Love, The
author: John Welwood
name: Steev
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2007/01/01
date added: 2008/07/08
shelves: spirit-self
review:
this is a really important book for anyone trying to figure out how to really have a real relationship.
The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
author: Daniel Quinn
name: Steev
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/07/08
shelves:
review:
Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure
author: Daniel Quinn
name: Steev
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2008/07/08
shelves:
review:
Mumbo Jumbo
author: Ishmael Reed
name: Steev
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2008/07/08
shelves:
review:
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