Posted in March 2010 …

Mar 30 2010
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Non-linear states, Random Intoxicants

NON-LINEAR STATE No. 14: BARE FAITH AND OTHER HUNGRY FRAGMENTS

“I see things that are impossible to believe and experience people and situations that permanently misplace my previous knowledge constructs. And losing my conceptual frameworks and assumptions is not unlike losing the backpacks upon immigrating to Israel. I possess nothing more than a temporary understanding. And I’m unexpectedly grateful.

If I tried to control reality by making sense of it, by needing certainties and truths, I would miss all that is invisible and obscure and overlook the fluid places where magic lies. I gather my knowledge in fragments, and when they begin to form into a solid, singular piece, I break them apart by the introduction of another fragment. When the fragments crash, it sounds like heavy metal played by forest creatures in leather dunce caps and frayed silk wings. It’s haunting.

I call on us to experience the joy of relinquishing the judgments we’ve made. Let’s fight when we want to surrender and surrender when we want to fight. Let’s live as a deranged creature, hungry for the unknown, repeatedly ripping up plans and blueprints to see what emerges from nothingness, from bare faith. ”

–Anita Doron, Filmmaker–

From her great TED Fellow talk, murmured from stage in a way that was deliciously transfixing, and did derange.

(Gracias Anita)

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Mar 29 2010
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Random Intoxicants

MANERAS DE CAERME

Work by Alberto Borea. From the series Maneras de Caerme. (Forms of falling.)

More here

Via I heart Photograph

***

“Tomo mi paracaídas, y del borde de mi estrella en marcha me lanzo a
la atmósfera del último suspiro. Ruedo interminablemente sobre las
rocas de los sueños, ruedo entre las nubes de la muerte…”

-Vicente Huidobro-

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Mar 26 2010
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Random Intoxicants

OH HERZOG, A PLASTIC BAG

“This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.”

(Click here to see.)

(Gracias Benji Z.)

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Mar 25 2010
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Random Intoxicants

TEEN AND TRANSGENDER COMPARATIVE STUDIES

Work by Charlie White.  See more here.

Via I heart photography

(Gracias Mary C.)

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Mar 24 2010
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Random Intoxicants

ALBERT MAYSLES, INTERVIEWED BY VBS

http://www.furious.com/Perfect/graphics/maysles.jpg

Flying off to Oaxaca today, to work once again in collaboration with the whirlwind globe-trotting people of VBS; this time round, specifically, with Erik Lavoie, one of the original founders. And so while we trek the cobble-stone streets, visit studios, shoot interviews, and, of course, eat mole amarillo at the local market, I leave in my wake a VBS interview with Albert Maysles–one of the great documentary filmmakers of our times– produced and shot by Bernardo Loyola who is, alas, hanging out with our dear Christopher Doyle et al in China and will not accompany us this time round. (Condenado.)

Click image, or click here to see.

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Mar 24 2010
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Tóxico People, Working in Mexico

MARTHA: HOY! EN CINEMA GLOBAL

Martha, una película dirigida por el maravilloso Marcelino Islas Hernandez, por fin se estrena en México: tanto en el Festival de Cine de Guadalajara como en Cinema Global.

“Martha es una mujer de 75 años que vive sola en una casa de interés social en la periferia de la ciudad de México. La monotonía que marca su vida rutinaria cambia cuando un día, después de 30 años, es despedida debido a que su trabajo será desempeñado por una computadora. Impulsada por las circunstancias y con el apoyo de Eva –la joven encargada de vaciar los archivos en la computadora- Martha decide que acabará con su vida una vez terminada su última semana de trabajo.”

Una buena parte de las personas de esta película–Marcelino (director), Rodrigo Sandoval (fotografía), Daniel Castillo (sonido), Rodrigo Teie (edición) e Ivan Lowenberg–han colaborado con Tóxico en diferentes proyectos. Además, ya arrazaron con varios premios nacionales e internacionales, y eso que apenas empiezan: Martha fue su tesis para la carrera de cine.

(Click en los links de arriba para ver horarios.)

(Ahí nos vemos.)

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Mar 23 2010
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Random Intoxicants

D.H. LAWRENCE DIXIT

*

There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.

*

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Mar 22 2010
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Random Intoxicants

UNTIL THE WORLD NO LONGER EXISTS

Images by Antoine D’Agata

“It’s not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It’s their intimate relationship with it. I photograph to face the world. I engage the same inexhaustible protocol, traversing and being traversed by experiences whose common denominator is excess. Confrontingthe inherent contradictions to the use of documentary photography, I document what I live and live the situations I document. I structure a physical and psychic path overshadowed by risk, hazard, desire and unconsciousnessin a frantic search for the feeling of being alive,being part of life, belonging to life. To givea transcription of my position in the social and physical order, to escape organic and political passivity, I invent a scenario that I condemned myself to live out, to the letter and in the flesh.”

Video interview here, en español.

And another text by D’Agata here.

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Mar 21 2010
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Random Intoxicants

MANY MANY JELLYFISH FLOATING IN THE SKY, SOME OF WHICH FELL TO THE GROUND AND BECAME MUSHROOMS

Images by Zhou Fan, artist and illustrator from China

“A series of my paintings is based on dreams that I had as a child of many many jellyfish floating in the sky, some of which fell to the ground on parachutes and became mushrooms. These dreams had a strong impact on me, and I remember them vividly. Somehow I feel that it is easier to focus on dreams than reality.”

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Mar 19 2010
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Project Research

TÓXICO PROJECT RESEARCH No. 27: THE HOUSE IS BLACK

The House is Black (1962, 22 Minutes), is the only film from Forough Farrokhzad, possibly Iran’s most noted and controversial female poet. A look inside a leper colony, the documentary short has been called “the greatest of all Iranian films” by Jonathan Rosenbaum, and is (now) frequently referred to as one of the lynchpins of the Iranian New Wave.  And between the clinical dialogue (in every sense of the definition) are snips of poetry by Farrokhzad, read by the author herself, that elevates the colony’s plight to the level of that Old Testament paragon of unanswered and cruel kismet.

Via the wonderful UBU Website.

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Mar 19 2010
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Random Intoxicants

BIRDS AND INKY FINGERS

    *

    I plant my hands in the small garden:

    I will grow green

    I know, I know, I know

    And the birds
    will lay eggs
    in the grooves
    of my inky fingers.

– Forough Farokhzad –

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Mar 18 2010
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Random Intoxicants

CARNIVAL STRIPPERS, AND OTHER STORIES

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Says American Suburb X:

Susan Meiselas has represented difficult issues with innovative approaches throughout her thirty-year career as a documentary media artist. Meiselas does not limit her work to the effects of conflict on people but extends her visual investigations into her own role as an imagemaker. Her first book, Carnival Strippers (1976), resulted from a three-year immersion in the culture of striptease acts at New England country fairs.

Read an interview with Susan right here.

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Mar 18 2010
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Random Intoxicants

AND THE WORDLESS BLUE MOAN

“And, of course, that is what all of this is – all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs – that song, endlessly reincarnated – born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket ’88′, that Buick 6 – same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness.”

- Nick Tosches-

Mar 17 2010
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Random Intoxicants

RECOMENDACIONES: CINEMA GLOBAL

Paula Astorga, gran directora de Cinema Global, nos pasó los títulos de sus tres películas favoritas de éste ciclo de cine:

-El vuelco del cangrejo, de Oscar Ruíz Nava (Colombia)

-La fuga de a mujer gorila, de Felipe Bragança e Marina Meliande (Brazil)

-D’generacion, historias subterráneas de la no-ficción española (varios autores)

***

Cinema Global empieza este martes 16 de marzo.

Y tampoco se pierdan Martha, de Marcelino Islas Hernandez (también querido señor productor de un proyecto de Tóxico) y Un día menos de Dariela Ludlow (quien tomó el Tóxico Master-Class de Christopher Doyle)

***

(“Cinema Global propone una mirada a los directores más arriesgados del nuevo cine Iberoamericano. Este ciclo producido por Circo 2.12 en colaboración con el Festival de México intenta encontrar vínculos y diálogos entre los protagonistas iberoamericanos que actualmente están mostrando sus películas y/o videos en los festivales, muestras y museos más vanguardistas del mundo. Compuesto por 30 títulos aproximadamente.”)

Mas info y horarios aquí.

Mar 17 2010
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Random Intoxicants

CORRIENTES ALTERNAS

REVIEW | Running Scared: Claire Denis’s “White Material”

Más cine para esta semana, en este caso para los que están en Guadalajara.

Max Cruz y Michel Lipkes (de los mejores programadores que tenemos en México) nos pasaron sus recomendaciones para Corrientes Alternas, un ciclo de películas que se pasará en el marco del FICG, curada por ellos.

Max dice:

Polist, Adjetive, de Corneliu Porumboiu

El Vuelco del cangrejo,  de Oscar Ruiz

Between two worlds, de Vimukthi Jayasundara.

Michel dice:

Trash humpers, de Harmony Corine

Independencia, de Raya Martin

White material, de Claire Denis

(Gracias a los dos)

(Click en el enlace de arriba para ver horarios)

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Mar 16 2010
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Random Intoxicants

THE OLDEST BOOK FROM THE AMERICAS

1932 reproduction of Mayan codex

11th century Mayan codex reproduction

Says Bibliodyssey:

The Dresden Codex  is a fig bark paper manuscript in concertina style, produced around the beginning of the 13th century (a contentious point). The seventy-four pages are sewn together producing an eleven foot long document which was originally folded up between protective wooden covers bearing engraved jaguars. As the most complete of the few remaining Maya manuscripts, it is a comprehensive source for Maya calendar and astronomy systems and an aid to glyph interpretation in the wider iconography of the Maya culture. The Dresden Codex was written by eight different scribes using both sides. They all had their own particular writing style, glyphs and subject matter. [..] Its images were painted with extraordinary clarity using very fine brushes. The basic colors used from vegetable dyes for the codex were red, black and the so-called Mayan blue

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Mar 04 2010
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Random Intoxicants

FINDING A FEVER

Images by Anders Petersen, renowned Swedish photographer.

“To me, it’s encounters that matter, pictures are much less important.”

Yet darkly beautiful pictures he does make.

More here. And read Aperture interview here.

(Gracias Nadia B.)

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Mar 01 2010
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Random Intoxicants

TRACES STILL THERE. OR, THE PHYSICAL MEMORY OF BLOOD






Says Exposure Project:

Angela Strassheim’s project Evidence hybridizes aspects of criminology and photography into an eerie, often visually savage body of work. In the press release for her recent exhibition at Marvelli Gallery, it states:

“Long after the struggles ended in these spaces, despite the cleaning, repainting and subsequent re-habitation of the rooms, the “Blue Star” solution is capable of activating the physical memory of blood through its contact with remaining proteins on the walls. Long exposures- from ten minutes to one hour- with minimal ambient night light pouring in from the crevices of windows and doors, capture the physical presence of blood as a lurid glow: a constellation of stars embedded in the walls.

Through a long and painstaking research process, Angela mapped out the exact locations where violent, often horrific crimes were perpetrated. She convinced new owners and tenants, some unaware of the violent history of their residences, to revisit the unnoticed, unseen past. Angela captures the tracing of a final struggle through the hard evidence of a violent moment, thereby revealing the silent yet omniscient memory of everyday living spaces. The physical result of her work is a series of luscious, large black and white prints, which attract the viewer like stills from a film noir with their eerie seduction and mysterious quality. Ultimately, these images are honest and true to the original space; they make visible, once again, the traces of violence and death that took place in those spaces in a forgotten past.”

More here and here.

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