Versus, Dir. Brett Morgen
Edited: Kia/Threadless “Jeffrey Kalmikoff: Portrait of an Entrepreneur”
January 10th, 2010 § 0
Dir. Greg Brunkalla
Edited: JFK 50th Anniversary
January 7th, 2010 § 0
Created with Ogilvy for the JFK Library Foundation. For more on the library, museum and the 50th Anniversary of John Kennedy’s presidency, see jfklibrary.org.
Edited: Kodak, “It’s Time to Smile”
December 9th, 2009 § 0
“Magic Yellow Box”, “Come Together”, “Memory Machine” Ogilvy
On Film and Phosphorescence
October 17th, 2009 § 0
It’s hard to agree with all of Robert Bresson’s dogma, but in his notebook Notes on the Cinematographer, he has some cool insight into live performance and the way it informs the live-ness of an edit. I think it is prettily written and true.
“Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images. Everything blossoms afresh.” p.80
“Your images will release their phosphorus only in aggregating. (An actor wants to be phosphorescent right away.)” p.82
“Cutting. Phosphorus that wells up suddenly from your models, floats around them and binds them to the objects (blue of Cézanne, grey of El Greco).” p.77
Christmas in Bob Dylan’s Heart
October 11th, 2009 § 0
on Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart (2009) by Paul Snyder
Countless blurbs have been published in recent weeks about Bob Dylan and the October 13th release of his 34th studio album, 47th official album–and first Christmas album–Christmas in the Heart. The instant meme was that the record, comprised of traditional songs in a traditional setting, was a bridge too far, that Dylan had lost his mind, or worse, succumbed to the same pitiful commercialism that Christmas had. Plus, Robert Zimmerman, raised Jewish.
The sixties are dead and buried, and Bob has appeared in Cadillac and Victoria Secret ads, but he has always rejected the mantle of antiestablishmentarianism. And those of us in Dylan’s audience–which remains sizable, including many who consider his present output amongst the most interesting of his career–may actually find this record in tack with the direction of his recent work. Writing off his Christmas record in premise speaks as much to the withering state of holiday music, as the media’s fickle treatment of its own “legend.”
Role-playing has always been a part of the Dylan mystique. He’s written countless first-person story songs. Half a dozen actors played him in 2007’s I’m Not There. He invented an alternate voice for himself, to sing his 1969 country record Nashville Skyline, which is considered a classic today. His recent writing has even more fidelity to character and song form. Although he’s lived in Malibu for years, the state of Texas and its musical tradition figure into several songs on his last album, Together Through Life. Christmas in the Heart just suggests Bob believes in the Christmas tradition likewise. It might not be as serious as his recent records, but that doesn’t make it fundamentally different. There’s no shortage of humor, even in his most serious work.
Christmas songs are some of the best-loved, most enduring songs in popular music. But in spite of the ‘Christmas creep’ of November airtime, few people are still writing Christmas songs. Today, releasing a Christmas album is often at record company behest, an attempt to cash-in on holiday airtime, or as a gift idea for the child whose parent had been a genuine fan of, say, The Moody Blues, in their heyday. (I did buy my mother their album, December, but it was seemingly their last act as a band.) On the upside, if your Christmas album is deemed a modern classic, it gets played endlessly (ala Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas).
Even if it were exclusively a commercial venture, Bob Dylan’s Christmas album would still be cashing in on the part of hungry Americans. During a recession winter when U.S. unemployment is hovering near 10%, US royalties from Christmas in the Heart are going to the charity organization Feeding America. International royalties are going to charities in the UK and the developing world. Prior to the album release it has already guaranteed more than four million meals to people in need. Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” it ain’t, but it’s not as over-the-top either, so it might actually be better.
Consider that Johnny Cash hosted annual Christmas specials on CBS throughout the seventies. The Beatles made seven Christmas singles for their fan club, with original songs and sketches thanking them for their support. To imagine Bob Dylan is out of touch with the symbolic value of making a Christmas album–as hilarious a sign as it is–is just underestimating him.
Dylan’s approach is decidedly Christmas–not “holiday”–oriented; about half are hymns about angels and drummers, and half are about Santa or sleigh bells. No original songs here, and the arrangements are impeccably, absolutely traditional. Horns and strings aplenty. The backup vocals are angelic, like they weren’t recorded on the same planet as Bob’s lead. True, without his singing, some of this could be anybody’s Christmas record. The album is so unironic, fans are already fighting over whether it’s meant ironically. At times you will laugh.
Believability. That’s what Sam Cooke cited as the reason people endured Bob Dylan’s singing voice, which today is more world-worn than ever. If this were an elaborate prank, the way he sings this album, there’s no telling. As with Nashville Skyline, the difference between Dylan prank and a serious choice isn’t a meaningful difference in credibility. Besides “The Christmas Blues,” which is truly contemporaneous with his recent work, “Must Be Santa” is probably his first polka, and with “Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fideles),” I believe we have the first instance of Dylan singing in Latin.
Whether or not it’s a genuine album in Dylan’s discography–and Bob has admitted to making deliberately unserious albums–it’s at least a genuine Christmas album, a fun and funny listen, which was probably fun to make. And it exonerates The Moody Blues, and other credible artists who might like Christmas music. Even if Dylan’s just tipping his hat here, Christmas in the Heart is an acknowledgment of an underappreciated musical tradition from one of the most important innovators and interpreters of American popular song.
Full Article and Comments on the Huffington Post
Update: Proud to have been featured in the Official News Release for this album.
Public Enemies and the Invention of Video
September 28th, 2009 § 0
on Public Enemies (2009) by Paul Snyder
It’s 1934. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale are very serious about committing and stopping crime, respectively, flanked by every other handsome, gruff-faced man in Hollywood, plus a wealth of Tommy guns and Marion Cotillard. Sounds good; sounds like a lot of movies made between then and now. Recounting the last few months in the life of bank robber John Dillinger, as Public Enemies does, has been done at least four times before. Michael Mann’s version isn’t historically definitive, nor narratively the most cohesive, but it looks and feels different than any predecessor — or any of this summer’s other blockbusters. Its raw aesthetic evokes a violence not of John Dillinger’s time, but of ours: the movie looks, arguably, cheap.
There are many economic and production-related reasons that filmmakers choose to shoot digital, but its flat, uncorrected look, muddy, half-visible blacks in low-light and clipped overexposures in the sun, are considered its flaws and carefully avoided. These days the technology can so closely approximate the look of film, telling the difference has become a matter of trivia (did you know that Benjamin Button and Superbad were shot digitally?). Public Enemies, shot with a mixture of non-film cameras from to the cinema-resolution Sony F23 to the $6K prosumer EX1, brings digital production’s unique — some would say, ugly — qualities to the fore. The elaborate nightclub is nearly invisible. Cotillard’s bathtub is eaten up by glare. Aside from the cast, you’d be forgiven for thinking it didn’t cost $80 million. Production value be damned, this is the Great Depression — er, Recession.
But there are advantages to shooting this way, too, and these are the audience’s surprises. With multiple simultaneous cameras, the editors often find unflattering, unusual and sublime angles. In a car chase the cameras nearly scrape the dirt road, as likely to fall out of the car as the gangsters. Distant pursuers appear in a deep focus impossible with a film camera. Pretty Boy Floyd is gunned down at such a static angle, it looks like Purvis set up the tripod himself. That’s the conceit: a renegade production for a renegade’s biopic. Hushed dialogue strains the ear, and sudden, unsweetened gunshots blare. These might be flaws, but it’s hard to argue that the volume, in the life of a gangster on the lam, ought to be normalized, or that gunfights ought to be prettier.
The raw video aesthetic would be less jarring were Public Enemies not set in 1934. The documentary style makes the action seem more real; the impossibility of video cameras during the Depression makes it all the more unreal. At its best, the movie uses this tension to great effect: paparazzi invade crime scenes, conflating Dillinger’s celebrity and Depp’s. When a police interrogator abuses Cotillard, the anachronism emphasizes his barbarity, while the verisimilitude makes it painfully familiar.
Anachronism enters Dillinger’s life within the film, too. The outlaw was famously gunned down on his way out of the film Manhattan Melodrama, and the final aria in Public Enemies is a montage of Dillinger reflecting on his jailed lover in the smiles of Myrna Loy. One has to imagine that as dated as it seems in the middle of a 21st Century crime picture, for a man who’d lived so hard for so long as Dillinger had, the fighting between Gable and Powell was impossibly cute.
For all its aesthetic sophistication, the film’s spontaneity runs roughshod over a lot of true history. There’s the false premise that John Dillinger was made a priority after Purvis killed Floyd; in reality Floyd and Baby Face Nelson were shot after Dillinger. It’s glossed over, but the women were prostitutes whom he took to the movies that night, and Dillinger never sauntered into the Dillinger squad, pining for his lost love. Michael Mann sides with Dillinger on the standing question, at the heart of the film’s title — whether he was a friend or an “enemy” of the public good — and transforms him into a sentimental hero whose death was sort of a careless martyrdom. Guess there’s nary an American who wouldn’t like to rob a bank, these days.
Public Enemies doesn’t confront Dillinger with questions or historical nuance; it doesn’t make his heists nor his love life seem very sexy. It tells the story, true or not, of a man who tries and fails to escape a construct he’d made of himself. The history and melodrama are a lot of pretense — independently unsatisfying — but the spirit of the film, taking aesthetic risks and chasing what elsewhere would be considered flaws, manages to produce something nearer the spectacle — or that construct, however unspectacular — of John Dillinger.
Edited: Temperley Zoetrope
September 25th, 2009 § 0
Temperley London Circus Zoetrope from LEGS on Vimeo.
Zoetrope touring Fashion Weeks in NY, London for Spring 2010. Dirs. Legs
Edited: Shipley & Halmos Installation
September 16th, 2009 § 0
For designers Shipley and Halmos, Fashion week 9/2009, these frames were projected on four walls in the Milk Gallery, each around 12′ tall; the panorama 40′ wide.
Dirs. Legs