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“Cuando se usa la primera persona, hay una delgada lÃnea entre la seducción y lo insufrible. Desde hace tiempo sueño con traspasar un poco esa lÃnea, escabullirme de pronto hacia el otro lado y estirar el lÃmite de lo que se supone es una conducta aceptable en la primera persona, acentuando, como si se tratara de un tinte, el carácter abyecto de mi narrador, sólo por el placer de vivir peligrosamente.â€
-Phillip Lopate
(Via Editorial Tumbona)
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“Erotic creativity is the making of a world”
-T. Moore-
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Stills from Orson Welles’ Quixote
(See post bellow)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt-8btq7kt8&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Orson welles spent almost 30 years of his life trying to complete a film: his own version of the Quixote. He died trying, becoming somewhat a Quixote himself in the process. Click here to see what has been called ‘the 6 most beautiful minutes in the history of cinema’ — filmed in a movie theater in Mexico City, back in the days. (It plays right after an interesting conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum, stay patient.)
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“Oh to be a red Indian, instantly prepared, and astride one´s galloping mount, leaning into wind, to skim with each fleeting quivering touch over the quivering ground, till one shed the spurs for there where no spurs, till one flung off the reins, for there where no reins and could barely see the land unfurl as a smooth-shorn heath before one, now that the horse´s neck and the horse´s head were gone.”
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(I am the guest blogger at i heart photograph Nov 22 – 28. Do come visit)
(And thanks to Laurel Ptak for the invitation)
This new book is out today, with an essay on arts, culture and creativity by yours truly.
Ya veremos qué tal.
Public art project by Candy Chang.
“New Orleans is full of vacant storefronts and people who need things. My neighborhood is still without a full-service grocery store. So I made these fill-in-the-blank stickers to give us an easy tool to voice what we want where we want it. Fill them out and put them on abandoned buildings and beyond. It’s a low-barrier tool for citizens to provide civic input on-site. These stickers are free and can be found in corner stores, cafes, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other places around New Orleans. And the stickers are custom vinyl and can be easily removed without damaging property.
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Candy Chang–a fellow TED Fellow–likes to make cities more comfortable. This project launched with exhibit Ethnographic Terminalia at DuMois Gallery. See more on her website.
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“Perhaps the history of errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their own discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her interesting extravagancies and absurdities.
-Benjamin Franklin, 1784-
Project by Aram Bathroll:
“I am pleased to preview ‘Dead Drops’ a new project which I started off as part of my ongoing EYEBEAM residency in NYC the last couple weeks. ‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop contains a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is still in progress, to be continued here and in more cities.”
(Via I heart Photograph)
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(Tóxico will be the Guest Blogger at I heart Photograph from the 22-28 of November; one of the most widely read blogs on photography. Stay tuned!)
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“I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.”
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Inexplicably, I had never seen Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados before last week’s screening at the Auditorio Nacional. Over 4,500 of us pressed in to have our hearts broken, and I keep stumbling across others who were there and were equally in raptures. Working in film preservation has doomed me to be highly conscious of the materiality of film as a physical artifact, the dust, the scratches, the splices. The restored print was incandescent, faintly imperfect, and I ran home from the screening to find out exactly which elements had been used for the preservation.
A bit of sleuthing revealed that the Filmoteca de la UNAM worked from the original nitrate negative, held in its collection. Nitrate, a highly flammable film stock, was industry standard until the early 1950s, but screenings are rare and fraught with legal restrictions; I saw a nitrate print only once, in a theatre of archivists covertly looking back at the projection booth in anticipatory terror. Despite causing regular fires in theatres and film vaults, one of which, debatably, destroyed the Cineteca Nacional in 1982, it has a dense, luminous quality to the light, wholly absent from the safer stocks that replaced it.
Although great care is usually taken to guard the original camera negative, when new prints of Los Olvidados were needed for exhibition, they went back to that negative again and again and again (until it disappeared for 20 years, although that is another story), leaving it worn and battered and patiently waiting…
-Audrey Young, Mexico City
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(Audrey Young–who has a Masters in Moving Image and Archiving Preservation– is part of Tóxico’s International Internship program)
Nuestra muy querida y muy admirada Paula Astorga–directora de la Cineteca Nacional de México–nos dió su lista de las 5 pelÃculas de la muestra que no se pueden perder:
La leyenda del Tio Boonmee, de Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Materia Blanca, de Claire Denis
Un hombre que llora, de Mahamat-Saleh Hauron
De dioses y de hombres, de Xavier Beauvois
Verano de Goliat, de Nico Pereda
Y el resto de la cartelera aquÃ, además de las sinópsis de todas las pelÃculas.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKmhsaoxbqI&feature=related[/youtube]
Segundo de chomón – Les Kiriki – Acrobates Japonais (1907)
(So beautiful)
(Gracias Tornillo)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ack-iA7NECM&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
Ingmar Bergman commercial from the 50s.
(Gracias Bonita Films)
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“I’ll summarise this. It’s very simple: I think, and I hope that you’ll agree with me, that Mizoguchi, Ozu, Griffith and Chaplin are the greatest documentary directors, and thus the greatest directors of life, of reality. They are the directors who hide things, who close the doors, and you can open them, sometimes. Yet, to open the doors of such films is difficult, dangerous – it’s work. Sometimes when we think that we’re going to show everything, that we make a documentary to show everything, in fact we don’t show anything, we don’t see anything, we’re just scattered…
So, the real directors don’t distinguish between documentary and fiction. Never in my life have I thought: am I making a documentary, am I making a fiction, and what are the ways to make one or the other? They don’t exist. We film life, and the more I close the doors, the more I hinder the spectator from taking pleasure in seeing himself on the screen – because I don’t want that – the more I close the doors, the more I’m going to have the spectator against me, perhaps against the film, but at least he will be, I hope, uncomfortable and at war. That is, he will be in the uneasy situation of the world.”
-Pedro Costa-
(Gracias BenjamÃn Z.)
Images by Enrique MetÃnides.
I first met Enrique MetÃnides when I interviewed him for Colors Magazine, a few years back. When I rang his doorbell I was greeted by a small, thin, impeccably-dressed man in his 60s, who kindly showed me his Venice masks and porcelain frogs collection: the perfect host, that in one gentle breath offered you your choice of Blue Pepsi or Coke in their small, original glass bottles; plus your selection of fire, crash or murder pictures.
He has an uncanny nose for tragedy and accidents, always managing to be at the “right” place at the “right” time. And this started early on: he took his first death-picture (of a beheaded man) when he was only 11 years old. Soon after that he would skip school, and started riding with the police, clicking away; and of course he quickly became a yellow press photographer, widely respected for that strange almost aesthetic quality he was able to constantly capture.
You can  listen to a VBS interview with MetÃnides here–produced by the talented globe-trotting Santiago Stelley, also an ex-Colors Magazine editor.
