The Awl listed this as its top online video of 2011. Made me wonder if video game screen caps constitute found footage. It’s a good watch.
I’m pretty late to ASAP Rocky, but I finally copped the LiveLoveA$ap mixtape. I love how weird mainstream hip hop is getting.
I think you’re supposed to go to Hour of the Pearl to read Andy Mills’s comics. And don’t get me wrong, I read the shit out of the comics. But really, my favorite part of his tumblr are the essays he posts along with the comics:
It is January 1, New Years Day, so we all are laying around, hungover, being introspective, catching ourselves being ourselves, hating what we’re doing, promising to stop doing it this year and promising that this is the last day we’ll do it or that Monday will be the day or next week sometime, and we continue to be ourselves through this year and the next and the next and forever until we die, still essentially ourselves, ten pounds heavier than our ideal weight and riddled with lung cancer, alone.
One time, some guy from either L Magazine or The New Yorker (I forget) told Andy that he needed to change something about his comics, maybe to put in less text? I disagree. They’re pretty much perfect as far as I’m concerned.
I wanted to take a minute and reflect on everything I’ve learned over the past year about documentary. A couple of years ago I picked up a camera and began making shorts as a way of teaching myself the craft of documentary filmmaking. I know this sounds ridiculous, but it had never occurred to me to stop and read something about the practice before I attempted it. Either naivete or hubris dictated that I just pick up a camera and attempt to do it. My time at UnionDocs taught me that I had a lot to find out about. Since then I’ve taken a small break from making work to read and listen and learn. I’ve read or reread a number of texts since then, starting with Eric Barnow’s history text Documentary. Other books followed–Bill Nichol’s Introduction to Documentary, the collected writings of Dziga Vertov, Sheila Curran Bernard’s Documentary Storytelling. I also spent a lot of time watching movies, both online and at the weekly Stranger Than Fiction series, where I’ve also gotten the opportunity to listen to a number of incredible filmmakers speak about their craft.
So what have I learned? Documentary film is in the midst of a sea change. A rapid and massive decline in the cost of the equipment needed to make a film with decent production values has allowed pretty much anyone to call themselves a filmmaker, while at the same time pools of funding available to artists have continued to contract. Funding also seems easier to come by if you have narrative scaffolding to help funders visualize your story. That makes it more difficult for people interested in a more time-consuming, immersive verite style of filmmaking to come by money, unless their last name happens to be Maysles.
The notion of what documentary is and can be is growing and evolving. I tend to think of documentary as less of a genre and more of a wide category. I think most people hear the word documentary and conjure up a vision of a pedantic social issue film, much like when people hear the phrase “comic book” and think of superheroes. But fictional genres can also be represented in great docs (both The Cove and Man on Wire are two examples of thrilling heist flicks). At the Camden International Film Festival I had a brief, but interesting, conversation with Caitlin Boyle, the founder of Filmsprout, about the film Catfish. I had only recently watched the film, and was completely enraptured by the skill with which filmmakes Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost told their story. The idea of how “real” it was was largely inconsequential to me, although I knew it had drawn criticism from some at festivals for an ethically dubious approach and for possibly manipulating its subjects. I was indifferent to the critiques, and Caitlin seemed to think they were a result of a generation gap between older filmmakers who thought of what they did as journalism, and younger filmmakers who thought of what they created as art. Documentary often seems expected to function as the conscience of the film world, but that expectation is incredibly limiting, and I think makes for poorer films.
I know now is the time of year when we are awash in “Year’s Best” lists, but I would have no idea how to rank the number of documentary films I’ve seen this year. I was impressed with both Better This World and If A Tree Falls for the pains the filmmakers took to explore the notion of radical activism, and present a fuller picture of activists charged with crimes of terrorism. But I was probably most taken with Alma Har’el’s Bombay Beach, an impressionistic essay that touched on a number of universal themes of humanity–poverty, race and class, to name just a few–without ever steering close to becoming preachy. I also had the good fortune to hear some of the great heroes of the direct cinema movement speak: D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Robert Drew, Hope Ryden. These are people who literally invented a new means of cinematic storytelling, and it’s heady to just be in the same room as them. Watching Crisis at DOC NYC and then listening to Pennebaker talk about the method they used to convince segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace to participate in the project was truly amazing.
People are trying to figure out how to tell non-fiction stories in a non-linear fashion. The notion of interactive documentary, something I associate closely with the idea of a “documentary game,” is gaining prominence in some quarters, but is not likely to break through to the mainstream anytime soon. The web continues to disrupt traditional distribution models, while providing new channels for many whose work would likely languish in obscurity otherwise.
My class at the Maysles Institute on documentary production, taught by the incredibly capable Vee Bravo, taught me a lot about the nuts and bolts of making a film. How to write a synopsis, how to write a treatment, how to make a budget, how to apply for funding. But most importantly it taught me the importance of selling both yourself as a capable person, and your film as an idea that needed sharing, a story that needed telling.
To be a filmmaker you need to make films. That seems obvious, but it’s too easy to wait for the perfect moment to start a project. It’s kind of like having kids–there’s never going to be a perfect time. I’ve met a lot of great people over the past year, a number of whom continue to inspire me to keep creating, to keep striving to make work, to understand that it’s okay to fuck up, to fail, as long as there is something to be learned in the process. Here’s to 2012, to hoverboards and Mayan calendars.
As you work, don’t fear the God of Authenticity, for he is a weak god, a fraud, a fake, and–for all his posturing–completely irrelevant. Do your job, and your goddess will protect you and bless you. She is your mashooq, this One who is always absent. You know who she is, this One you follow always, the One who is untidy, elegant, blowsy, impossibly glamorous. She is the goddess Beauty, who has been frozen in liquid oxygen by the party bosses on Mount Restoration of the Righties, who has been declared dead in the Lost Valley of the Lefties. But you know your mashooq, and you can feel her power and her grace, how alive she is. She will always elude you, but you must risk everything for her. At the end of each day of work, the only question she will ask you is, did you write well today? And if you can honestly say, yes, I wrote well today, she will come a little closer to you, and you will sense her presence, and as you caress your mashooq, as she ravishes you with pleasure, you will know how absolutely real she is, this shape-shifting phantom. Then she will flee again. This absence is the only true grace you will ever know, or need. Believe in your mashooq, lose yourself in the dream of Her, and you will be Indian, a good artist or an adequate one, local and global, soft as a rose petal, and as hard as thunder, not this, not that, and everything you need to be. You will be free.
-Vikram Chandra, taken from this essay.
by Swami Tejomayananda
Ratri means “night” and Nava means “nine”. At Navaratri (“nine nights”), the Lord in the form of the Mother Goddess is worshipped in Her various forms as Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati. Though the Goddess is one, She is represented and worshipped in three different aspects. On the first three nights of the festival, Durga is worshipped. On the following three, Lakshmi and then Saraswati Devi on the last three nights. The following tenth day is called Vijayadasami. Vijaya means “victory”, the victory over our own minds that can come only when we have worshipped these three: Durga, Lakshmi, and Saraswati.
Durga
To gain noble virtues, all evil tendencies in the mind must be destroyed. This destruction is represented by the Goddess Durga. Durga is durgati harini: “She who removes our evil tendencies.” This is why she is called Mahishasura Mardini, the destroyer of Mahishaasura (demon), mahisha meaning “buffalo.” Isn’t there a buffalo in our minds as well?
The buffalo stands for tamoguna, the quality of laziness, darkness, ignorance and inertia. We have these qualities too. We love to sleep. Although we may have a lot of energy and potential inside us, we prefer to do nothing – just like the buffalo that likes to lie in pools of water. In the Puraanic story, Durga Devi’s killing of the Mahisha demon is, symbolically, the destruction of the tamoguna within us that is very difficult to destroy. In the Durga Devi Havana (sacrifice), we invoke that Divine Power within us to destroy our animalistic tendencies.
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