Gombrowicz
“Stop being afraid of your own pictures, stop worshiping art, treat it the Polish way, condescendingly, make it obedient, and then your originality will release itself in you, new roads will open in front of you and you will gain what is most valuable, most fertile: your own reality.” Gombrowicz, Diaries, vol. IAfter some years from the last read I’m back to Gombrowicz’s diaries. I translated this for you, below the original.
“Przestańcie się bać własnych obrazów, przestańcie wielbić sztukę, potraktujcie ją po polsku, z góry, poddajcie ją sobie, a wówczas wyzwoli się w was oryginalność, otworzą się przed wami nowe drogi i pozyskacie to co jest najcenniejsze, najpłodniejsze: własną rzeczywistość.”
Dzienniki tom I
OMG, Banksy!
This isn’t really a film about Banksy. You will gather that from this preview (online hype building – you’re doing it right), it’s also about Thierry Guetta, the filmmaker who set out to make a doc about street art and ended up on Banksy’s… erm doorstep.
The filmmaker in a film is my all time favorite motive, when it’s more than putting them in front of the camera but also making them part of the story or even the vehicle that drives it forward.
So stop whatever you’re doing and watch the preview of this “world’s first street art disaster movie”:
Doing a hell of a job
Are you familiar with awkward family photos? I wrote about it some time ago (this is a post from Polish version of abinarylife, but you can have a look at some of my favorites over there), it’s one of these photography blogs designed to make you LOL. Also a good, although fragmented, portion of documentation of social life. So good, that the time has come for live action, because what is more awkward than an awkward family photo? An awkward family video, of course.
Song is called “I’ve Got Friends”, band is called Shark? and the EP is “Fear!’ I found this gem via The Daily What (not to be mistaken for the daily wtf), one of my favorite sources of all things awesome. If you don’t follow them, go there NOW (also if you’re a tumblr junkie you can subscribe over there).
Speaking of favorite sources of awesome things: kitsune noir is another must read and even must listen. Yes, you can’t pronounce the name correctly, but on this one occasion i’m suspending my general dislike for unpronounceable names. It could be called catfoodwrappedinabrownpaperbag.com for all i care. Bobby Solomon is doing a hell of a job showcasing art, design, music and it’s not even pretentious. You should check out his
desktop wallpapers project (pretty self explanatory)
and Mixcast, which is somewhat like a receiving a weekly mixtape (remember these?). I actually wait for these and hunt them down as soon as they’re out.
Recently I saw this video by Dustin Cretton for Joel P West over at Bobby’s. Enjoy.
Rathole Radio Live
They say it’s your birthday
I wanted to start by saying 2 years is the longest I ever continuously wrote something. And then continue to get soppier and soppier from there. But actually my printed column has been going monthly since 2005; first for one title and then for businessman.pl, when the magazines merged. Back when I started it was a novelty in Poland to write about blogging CEOs. Obviously so much has changed since, but sometimes one has to wonder – has it really?
what’s up?
In terms of tech and what it made available to us – surely. But since my interests became less tech-centric and more tech-for-creativity I noticed underneath it all the pace is a lot slower. Most of the big business in creative industries (I’m mostly referring to film and music here) is still in the mindset it was 2 years ago. In other words: something is happening to our revenue streams and we have to tame it as much as we can, occasionally playing along to satisfy particular audience.
The rest of us? Still on the verge of some sort of DIY era, which is uncertain to come and no one quite knows what it will be like. Main trends seem to be: diversification, regionalization (in terms of audiences, not geographically, though that still holds too). So 1000 films which cost 30 000 or 100 which cost 300 000 instead of one for 30 million. But is this going to be a whole era? What starts it, revolution? Evolution? The market crash made it very difficult to find funding for even the 30 000 flicks. We seem to be in the process of figuring out new models to accommodate production of those. Perhaps it has to be a constant flexibility. Can we cope without models, if it comes ot it?
I mentioned Dan, my awesome friend and host of this website (and all around genius web activist). Before we met in person up North England, we “met” while using jaiku – a cute, little microbloging service, which seemed to attract lot of creative web types at that point. 2 years on jaiku – for us – is pretty much no more, since it got swallowed by google. Google buzz is hidden in my gmail labels (though I’m hearing it’s the only service with geo-tagging with any number of users in Poland, where I currently am).
Obviously there is an easy conclusion to draw here. Nothing substantially changes; the big ones eat the small ones with all the usual consequences. Only we have new big ones now. But that is perhaps too easy.
what’s next?
You might have noticed abinarylife has recently become very film-oriented. Being a child of the times I change focus . Or, quite likely, being a child i’m about now figuring where my focus really is. It’s quite likely my next project will involve quite a website and around-website activity (twitters, facebooks, digital content production) of it’s own. Still I hope to keep abinarylife as it has afforded me all the benefits of a democratic new medium: I can blabber freely adding to the general blahblahblah repository of the internet. And to share things not important enough to ever be shared was it not so democratic. I’m very thankful to have you, my dear readers (well, friends, family…) along for the ride.
If it was an actual 2 year old, with birthday in March it would be one of the children of happy summer loving. Right now is a hot birthday parties season. “They say it’s your birthday, It’s my birthday too yeah“. Let’s have a drink and celebrate.
Scott Pilgrim teaser-poster rocks’n'rolls
I’m always waiting for the new stuff from Edgar Wright, who by the way can be followed on twitter. Hopefully it’ll also be something different for Michael Cera, whom I somewhat like, but the akwardly-getting-the-girl business is really doing everybody’s head in by now. Though I have to say, judging form the behind this scenes video, he even eats soup awkwardly…
No trailer a of yet – that I could find.
Open models for digital projects (#oggcamp10 talk)
Less than a talk, I would like to host a sort of a workshop that would be interesting for both hard-core geeks and more artistically inclined digital creators as well as every one who enjoys having a beer early in the day and not being judged. For the talk to have broader appeal I need you to tell me, what sort of knowledge you’d like to exchange more. So here is the rough idea, which hopefully you could help me shape into something more precise.
open production & distribution of content:
what it means (and it doesn’t necessarily mean open source!), what are the possibilities and limitations? differences in film, applications and music. How to open up the production process?
what creators could learn from the open-source community and vice versus:
sharing, community building, approach to audience (user), fiscal responsibility etc – characteristics that make a project successful. Also general internet saavy, licensing issues, online platforms…
how to sustain digital project? various models
can it be done? how? There are few known approaches here, I’d like to talk about. This is, however, open for discussion, perhaps we can generate some ideas together.
let’s talk about our projects:
whomever would like to could say few words about the projects (be it film, music, applications or something else) they are developing and if we figure there is some knowledge to be shared between the creators or potential audience-members we can take it to the bar later.
I’ll illustrate this with few examples from film, since this is my are of… erm.. dare I say it ‘expertise’. I’m sure Dan will have the music bit pretty well covered.
Please let me know what you think, what I should include or not to make the whole thing interesting and informative. You can drop me a line at ana(at)abinarylife(dot)com or find me on identi.ca as binarylife, on twitter as binarylife and there’s always comments form below. Thanks!
People to watch: Lena Dunham
I was too cynical to have any sort of idols when I was a teenager (heck, I was too cynical to like boys… these were the days). I consider my lasting relationship with the works of Witold Gombrowicz closest to that sort of thing, but I’m often fairly critical of them plus I don’t have his photo hanging on the wall, so I don’t think it counts.
Any way, I’m kind of trying to imply here that I gained an idol of sorts and that would be Lena. There is generally few independent filmmakers that I’m immensely impressed with. It’s not that teenage thing, sadly. It’s a feeling akin to watching somebody play the same instrument you play – if they do it well they make it look easy, but you tried and you know how much fecking work went into getting this sound. So based on that sophisticated comparison I will do my John Peel thing and introduce you to my new found idols, starting with Lena, as her film premiers tomorrow at SXSW.
It’s called Tiny Furniture and I posted the trailer some time ago. It’s her second feature, first one being Creative Nonfiction, a film about a college student who eventually writes a script for a film based on her recent experiences. There you go, if you followed this blog you can see where I’m going with this. Self-shot film about creative utilization of life for making a film…
Back then Lena made the Filmmaker Magazine’s list of 25 new talents of indie film to watch. Now, Tiny Furniture is a whole new quality, by the looks of the trailer. From what I figure it was done on canon 7D, too. It really looks pretty and don’t tell me this is not as important as the story. This is film, we’re talking about. You can watch the progress of Lena’s works over at her vimeo page. TF is shot by Jody Lee Lipes, who also did Afterschool (much cannes-hyped flick from 2009 if I’m not mistaken)
TF’s main character, Aura, played by the director, comes home from College to find herself suffering from a familiar case of post-degree blues (god, I don’t know a single person who didn’t get hit by that). If you’re in your 20s or 30s you can probably indentify with it or memory of it. If you’re above 40 you might want to watch it to understand your kid’s confusion and despair. You’ll figure out, because “Aura would like you to know that she is having a very, very hard time.”
Descendants
[via the daily what - not to be mistaken with the daily wtf]
voices: Whoopie Goldberg and Christy Scott Cashman
3D Core Team:
Heiko van der Scherm . . . Writer, Director, Design, Modeling
Bernhard Haux . . . . . . . . .Character TD Flower main actors
Goro Fujita . . . . . . . . . . . Supervising Animator
Felix Graf . . . . . . . . . . . . Animator
Holger Schönberger . . . . .Pipeline, Shading, Lighting, Compositing
Time Frame:
Production time (First script to final short) . . . 3 Years
Work time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Full time, 6 days a week
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .0.75 – 1.5 Years per core person
how not to be a jerk about films
I personally don’t buy into the teory that it’s particularily because they recruit mostly from failed, frustrated filmmakers. It takes work to be acclaimed, so most of these folks probably didn’t even have the time to really try and fail. it takes no work what so ever to self-proclaim, which indicates people who are in for an easy ride. They probably didn’t have the ambition to try in the first place.
Why, then? Because it’s so easy to slip into.
I base that theory on rigorous self-observation. Two items in my film RSS feed made me slightly chuckle today. And I was going to write about them in the ‘look at what these idiots are doing’ manner on this blog to share my instant disgus. Fortunately, just in time, i kicked myself on the arse with a good ‘ole ‘who the fuck do you think you are, lady’.
Evidence item no. 1: The Suicide Girls: Guide to living trailer.
Why it made me chuckle? Because somewhere in the trailer they make the proclamation that suicide girls present an alternative for every chick tired of not fitting into society’s standards of female beauty. This is ridiculous, they are all skinny, and yes they don’t wear a tone of make up, but they have a tone of tattoos and breasts to die for. if you don’t fit into norms, you won’t fit in with them, because they are pretty rigugorous with their own standards.I don’t like Suicide Girls phenomenon also because of the idiotic use of the word suicide (hence no photos of naked tits here, would be hypocritical to bust my readership this way) . BUT – this has nothing to do with the film. I haven’t seen the film. I saw the trailer, which yes, is rather bad, but is this something worth writing about?
Evidence item no. 2: Book of Genesis in 3D, the new enterprise of Paramount entitled In The Beginning.
Instant thought – Jesus, what the hell? (pun not intended) Of course, after the success of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, every one will be looking left and right, to create a miraculous 3D world and gross over 100 mln on the opening weekend. But the Bible? Seriously? It all has to be garden-themed now? Can’t you come up with anything more creative..? I’m right to feel tiny bit jaded, I think. But, again, is this something worth writing about?
I don’t read community-based film review websites, because most of all I’m jaded with the ‘Kevin Smith is fat and his wife has big ears’ reviews. And I’ll be damned if I contribute to the amount of rubbish floating around internet – disputable, I know, but at least this type of rubbish. There are 3 film blogs I trust and I rarely read even their reviews, because they scarcely review documentaries – and docs are what i watch most.
How to avoid falling into this trap? answer these questions:
1. have you seen the film?
2. do you have any criticism/praise for the film? (and not the subject matter, the filmmaker’s private life or other works etc)
3. is it really worth writing about?
If the answer to any of the above is ‘no’ – restrain yourself. Don’t be a jerk.
OK. I finished writing and then I saw this. It’s about film critics in the slightly different register to what I write about. At least I hope the question number one doesn’t even apply. If you read, read some of the comments too.
The Hot Blog is, by the way, in my top 3 film blogs.