OEIL

Late Afternoon

Night

Asia

http://abraxas365dokumentarci.blogspot.com/2009/01/one-night-with-joe-coleman-and-asia.html

Eye and Space

http://sophie.wemakelove.org/

This is a pretty fantastic project. It is not about photography, it is clearly about space first–but oh, it is about space within photography. It’s also compositionally careful. It’s personal because the artist herself is in it. It’s charming because it seems strangely peculiar. It could be a big hit, but it is low-key. It is a little too delicate, but it works for me. Because it’s a sort of quantum joke. It is humorous in an intellectual self-deprecating way. And all of those intentions are tethered to the images because of the artist’s presence.

Oh, it is also a form of montage cuz the eye looks for folded space.

Diary: 11 AM

Video has its own specificity. It can be used for its uniqueness, but, in my opinion, rarely is. One of its main interests is that you can work at it at home, if you can afford it or have a production company that allows you to do so. You can therefore work a bit more, perhaps, like a painter or a musician, and realize that the image is not only space but also time.
- J.L. Godard

I talked to Mary this morning. It made me want to check out the light inside the apartment. You can really find cool compositions if you take the time. The tripod I use is worth one dollar but it’s light and portable and steady. I can’t touch it with my pinky finger though without moving it so the only thing is to be extra careful around it once you find your framing.

I walked through the frame back and forth and noticed that movement records like a huge blur. It has to be slow otherwise you can hardly see any details. It didn’t help that I was wearing a black sweater though. I should try it with something lighter. I told D. to bring something lighter when we shoot anyway.

It’s a little exciting. I wish I could pour all of my energy into it and be focused though but we have like 100 things to do for other classes and I have to find a job, etc. I can’t understand for the life of me how I managed to get through living on my own for the past four years. It is totally beyond my capabilities. But that thought is dangerous because it makes me believe there is an actual well-meaning force watching over me and then I attempt to test it through excessive behavior because of faith in it, and of course it does not work and just end up further self-destructing. So yeah, like I said, how do I manage all of this that seems insurmountable at the present time. I do not know.

Here’s hoping all of this doesn’t sound like the ‘hysterical overworryings of a paranoid junkie” as Kerouac said of Burroughs manuscript (which he typed out).

I’m getting back into reading. That’s definitely a step in the right direction to get rid of this depression. This haunting depression always there for me to fall into if I don’t work against it. That’s the logic at the moment, to do these things like reading more, watching more, writing more, working out more, sleeping well more, so that there will be no time for the depression to take over and with added self-evolution thus building more self-confidence, and better sense of self-worth, and generating healthy productivity.

Gosh. This is sounding too much like self-help. I told myself I’d be truthful to the truth and the moment and not censor and I’m discovering this moralizing way I talk to myself. It’s like self-brainwashing. It is self-censorship in fact. But that is okay I guess because I am aware of it right now. So I’m really beyond its understanding. Beyond enough to break it down and look at it objectively so as to control it and shape it and refocus its energy elsewhere.

So yeah. I read an article about James Benning, Landscape Suicide, and found a book on “experimental ethnography” which turns out is exactly the kind of stuff I am currently exploring. Benning, Akerman, Jem Cohen, Deborah Stratman, Godard. I still feel tied to classical storytelling but I don’t know if I am attempting to mix the two or to shed one to reinforce the other.

Ok. I should look at these obsessive formal concerns as something positive instead of a signifier of a larger neurosis. I think I must otherwise I will really believe I have a troubled psychology. I should see it more as a talent, a vision, an ideology, a tie to an imaginative poetic realm, a quest for transcendence.

These are the tools with which I build myself. Here I lay them bare. Is this truthfulness? Delirium?

Ok. To do later: Look for work. Watch Histoires Du Cinema fifth episode, finish reading Lunar Park. Start editing. We all know which one’s most important but I will avoid doing!

Qwel – Practice For Hope

Practice For Hope

it breaks me down to think how we’ve grown
but i still see you as a shorty, i’m the sucker i know
i realize it but don’t believe it and hopefully you’ll get home
my soul to keep we both the suckers not just bustin in poems
receiving letters gotta stack of em scratch on my soul
like prison bars with clenchin fists grippin
it’s practice for hope
i read a kite flown like nine times
and slide out a pen
to recollect upon our youth and truth like nine outta ten
when cinder blocked locked and hollowed
right’s a hard walk to follow
tomorrow’s never promised
honest, but honestly i trust that God knows
our struggles, Harvey to the Jungle
it’s hard to be humble
when all we sees trouble and poverty bubbles
and policies stumbled
some fam man
when i cried all i can
and tried to be the bigger brother
hide my smile in my hands
to swallow piling sands of time slide in
Mike got a daughter
i try to hit you with some hope and sight the mics i done slaughtered
i brought it to ‘em like we said we would i see you sometimes
in the strangest heinous places painted faded sunshine
you’re like a shorty to me still son
ghost is my celly
remembrance of yesters essences
much love your bro qwelly

I think about it sometimes i think about how we’ve grown
I think about you still a shorty, who’s the sucker i know
i realize it but don’t believe it and hopefully you’ll get home
my soul to keep we both the suckers not just bustin in poems

i think about it when i’m eatin this burger
how you aint free to eat burgers
just stuck for lust sleepin with murderers
it turns this burger into sand in my stomach who knew
that we’d be livin our lives decisions
skewed hued through a skewed view
a cruel youth produces bruised fruit
philosophies land fill
systems inducin cats that curiosity just cant kill
its lock and key and stand still, no sleep for our brethren
treatin kings just like they slaves, COs readin our letters
depletin our centers and leavin weepin mothers in winter
it drives our fathers to insanity when families splintered
because a letters never a hug and now my windows just pain (pane)
sittin like a shitty whisper in the rain painted frame
this pain painted brain strain for prayin burstin insane
cursed to burdens here were chained to this earth spin
it turns us into monsters fightin beasts from its belly
i still be prayin for your freedom every second dog love and peace qwelly

it breaks me down to think how we’ve grown
but i still see you as a shorty, i’m the sucker i know
we realize it but don’t believe it and hopefully you’ll get home
my soul to keep we both the suckers not just bustin in poems

Video Essays

This is pretty smart stuff. Via House Next Door.

video here

Whoa. This is just as smart too. A storyteller/essayist in the making. Via Shooting Down Pictures. Check out the other essays too.

Diary

Wow. This is pathetic. But I am doing it because my shrink suggested it. Don’t worry, I won’t write about my real life. It will all be fabrication. That’s the only way I can get away with saying the truth about me anyway. I think it was Paul Mooney who said that most comics are self-loathing introverts. It’s the reason why they make so good impressions because they don’t like themselves. Ok.

Volunteered at the film co-op today. They had me run down to NDG on an errand to pick up a Bolex zoom lens (an RX-5). I tried to swift my way to it by taking the school’s free shuttle that drops you off in front of the NDG campus. I found the only man in Quebec that knows the mechanical ins and outs of Bolexes enough to modify them in ways that they can take all kinds of lenses. Anyhow. He looks like George from Seinfeld.

All these women on the bus. It is scary. To imagine the prettiness of their little girlie mannerisms, and also the softness of their skin, and their imperfect teeth and curled lips and the way pretty fights those back. I think it induces trauma in me. To imagine their smell when they flick their fingers dusting thin air. I can’t remember when I last…Oh I can actually. It ain’t nothing special.

So I managed to pick up Maddin’s Writings From The Atelier Tovar. I read his diaries and that was pretty inspiring. It reminds me that I should flesh out more stories, constructed ones, expertly engineered, and deeply personal. I’m sort of moving away from all that now that I fell in love with my little camera. I don’t even know how I’m going to put all of it together to make a coherent film. But I think the incoherence is the point. The structure is in the making of the image. Sort of like “Look. I have filmed these things in the past two months. This is what this camera can do between the months of December and February. Maybe if you buy one it might do the same for you. Anyway, I put it all together and added some sounds and some titles. Just watch it.” What I mean though, is that the way I have captured these little darling images is what I’m trying to get across. The documentary-nature of the image is the fire burning inside the image. But I am very aware that often it only sparks but a thin fire. That is why the voice-over, the sounds, and the overall narrative are there to coal up the engine. To seduce you into investing deeper meaning into the image. In fact that’s how I see cinema now. How to make an image carry memorable weight. I think I get this from watching Jem Cohen’s Chain. And it’s actually scaring me a little because now I feel inadequate if I shoot anything that is considered ‘b-roll’. I could never be a b-roll camera operator or a news cameramen or anything like that. Every image I produce should be as sacred as a painting. I think the audience can feel it when a shot was labored over. But whatever, I think in the end is just one language amongst the many I will be learning. I will probably tell myself the complete opposite 2 months from now.

I think I am really making my first movie again. I feel like my position is somewhere between the Lumiere’s after they invented the camera and wanted to just record things for the sake of recording them, and a classicist who sees the camera as a privileged object that should not be put into the hands of any old amateur. Like a pen. Cinema is not old enough to be looked at with the same rigueur as literature. I remember when I told my friends I was dropping out of school to become a writer they looked at me like I didn’t have the right to do that. That I wasn’t Hugo. or Rimbaud. or Marlowe. That only great men were allowed to write. I felt ashamed.

Nobody in film school feels ashamed. I do. I don’t want to be working under the shadow of Gance or Griffith. Or Kubrick, or Malick. But nobody really cares. But I think if I want to make a living I should not care either.

This is totally embarassing. Anyhow, it’s not true.

Things to do:

-Look for work
-Workout (this flab is not fab)
-Schedule dates with actress
-Start editing
-Read more
-Stop complaining about how people are stupid so much
-Stop drinking
-Write diary

The people at the film co-op are really cool. They wanted me to volunteer more but it’s just absurd to do so. Specially right now, jobless. Anyway. They have this amazing view of the mountain. It is pretty impressive. But the windows are so dirty you can’t really admire it. The way the sunlight goes in is superb. Right over the Steenbeck. It gave me some ideas for how to reflect light on the little gears when I shoot mine. It’s pretty simple in fact. I should use a piece of metal and reflect a white light and then move the metal bar around to get the perfect lash.

Raul Ruiz – Ville Des Pirates

This guy is Welles meets Coltrane. When Godard talks about ‘unseeable sights’ or the ‘blind man’s gaze’, it probably looks like Ruiz.