I’m not going to apologize for pimping my own photo site. Okay, yes I am… I’m sorry. Dammit.
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
Funny guy and finder of all things sports and Michael Mann, Hirp, sent me this first of a five-part video essay series on the latter. Watching it, it dawned on me that the only way to really describe Mann is through video, his contributions to film haven’t been so much in the intellectual but in the visual, you need the clips, and the accompanying score, to tell the story. What this essay does well is contextualize his work and describe exactly what his contribution is in the same kind of fine detail that Mann himself employs. The thoughts could be described faster, and in far less than 5 parts, but then how would you truly enjoy every. gory. detail?
Have fun. And when you’re ready for part two, here’s that.
Thanks Hirp!
This is just a fun thing to do while you’re thinking of other stuff:
I’m sure as you get older you learn to romanticize the imagery of your youth. Certainly, that is the subject of many a song, novel, script, poem, probably even architecture, dance and other things, like how you parent. Down home this past week, I travelled through my own ghostly playgrounds and flashes of images past seeped through in flickery, Proustian, Christopher Walken in “Dead Zone” kind of way. No coincidence, then, that I’d wander upon this video today, looking like memories I didn’t know I had and, who knows, maybe they are mine, it’s hard to tell the difference anymore. The band is new (Bibio), the look is old, but the effect is nothing less than stunning and has me lost in a daze of childhood school days of overhead projectors, endless educational videos and banal things seen for the first time. It defies description, I am only glad that certain artists are able capture small pieces of it so I don’t feel crazy when the flood comes.
The site is called Curatorialist, but although I kind of know what that means, I’ve never really bothered to explain it, in full. Maybe because it’s more of a process than a thing. I have a particular way of finding things. It involves, usually, reading something, but sometimes seeing something, or hearing something. But that is not usually the thing that ends up making it here. I am looking for something, I just don’t know exactly what it is until I find it. It echoes the way I write, draw and photograph. The beginning is never the end and, usually, the beginning is even erased. The first sentence, the first lines, the first shot — by in large, nobody ever sees those. I am, in fact, mostly embarrassed by them. When I write, the first thing I write is mostly something trite or said before a hundred times. I self-loathe over those first lines, written or drawn, all the time. I know others do, too. Working past those initial knee-jerk thoughts is where the work comes in – and the struggle.
Curatorialist is the process of finding something through that darkness. Stumbling onto it through a form of study that I invented when I was a kid, in school. I found it hard to stay on track with books and my mind wandered. However, study time was study time, so I fished around in my room until some kind of connection was formed. I might have a book report to get done, but it was rarely that book that helped me write the report. My inspiration happened when I wasn’t looking at it, but listening to the radio, thumbing through encyclopedias, Time Life books or just day dreaming. The ability to make the two things connect was out of necessity – time was running out. It was either that, or fail.
I was reminded of all this because I felt the same patterns tonight as I was reading a LA Times article about the Asia America Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven’s Ninth this week. Before I could even get through the short article, I went to see about purchasing a ticket for myself online. I was already scrambling about. Hit play…
I came across this Leonard Bernstein-conducted version of it and listened in awe (it was performed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an amazing side story in and of itself – another hour gone), particularly to the vocal amazingness of Shirley Verrett. That lead to me more videos of her and then wondering what the hell they are singing in Ode To Joy (something I’m embarrassed to say I’d never looked up – the filling in of embarrassing gaps in knowledge is a major energizing force in my process). That lead to reading about Beethoven’s life. That lead to Schiller’s life, the poet who wrote Ode To Joy (actually just called “To Joy”). Somewhere in that reading, I discovered that another of Schiller’s poems was also put to music. Beethoven chose Schiller’s poem because it was great. That was a harder path for him because, in the process of adapting it for music, the challenge would be harder (how do you improve upon greatness?). His darkness.