Besos Robados – Y en la neblina de una tarde de lluvia… te espero en donde pocas personas te esperarían (2014)

I’ve been thinking a lot about music videos lately…

Partly because I’ve been commissioned to direct a music video for a Boston band. Although to say it like that is a bit disingenuous since the band has a zero budget; they’ve hired me because the singer appeared in three of my five student films and she knows me as a filmmaker who bends over backwards and spits wooden nickels to deliver a product that looks it was produced for roughly ten times what was actually spent on it.

But the other part of why I’ve been fixated on this topic is that music videos played a huge part in paving the path that led me to become a film making kid which led to photography which led to this blog…

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As far as informing my basic, initial visual vocabulary, there’s one name that towers head and shoulders above the rest: Mark Romanek.  It’s pretty much unarguable that he made the best music video ever–the issue is whether one points to Jay-Z’s 99 Problems or the Johnny Cash cover of // | /‘s Hurt. (I can’t choose between them mainly because I’ve seen the now all but impossible to find original cut of 99 Problems and that’s just as good as Hurt; but I have always been especially partial to the production design of // | /’s The Perfect Drug and the sleazy post-coital, 70′s porn grunge of Fiona Apple’s Criminal.)

I was aware of Jonathan Glazer‘s work. I was clued in to his work on UNKLE’s Rabbit in Your Headlights while it was still an underground thing–I initially detested but now consider it one of the best narrative videos ever made. (Shows how wrong snotty 19 year old’s can be…)

But it’s Glazer’s take on Radiohead’s Karma Police that applies to above image.

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Some context on Karma Police: the video is just shy of four and a half minutes long. It features a total of 13 cuts, rendering in average shot length of 20.7 seconds. (Definitely an enormous anomaly in the mid-90s.)

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I don’t know if it’s the extra time we get to dwell on the composition of a camera staring out the front window of a car but this video has–for me at least–become so iconic that I can’t see a shot like the one above without comparing it with Glazer’s image. (As I write this I am in NOLA fresh from seeing the devastating Mark Steinmetz: South exhibit at the Ogden–best photography exhibit I’ve ever seen and there’s an image taken through a car window of a lightning strike in the distance that doesn’t remind me of Glazer and I think that’s because you don’t see the window so much as the out of focus edge of the dash which provides context but is decidedly not a frame within a frame like Glazer.)

The odd thing about Glazer is that while his music videos are far more narrative than Romanek’s and while he continues to explode the boundaries of what is visually possible, his film work–though always beautiful–always flirts with complete incomprehensibility. Whereas, Romanek and David Fincher have proven much better at crafting cinematic narratives.

Source: besozrobadoz

Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.

Bruce Levine, Ph.D. | Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill (via america-wakiewakie)
Source: fullpraxisnow

[←] Rose Bousamra – Faces (2015); [→] François Benveniste – Title Unknown (20XX)

Bousamra’s use of line and color are fucking stellar. (Her work lacks the simple elegance or rigorous consistency of vision that marks Chiara Bautista’s drawings; however, Bousamra, in my opinion, does far more interesting things when juxtaposing positive and negative space.)

As far as Benveniste goes, although I adore this image I cannot get into, condone or excuse his downright fucking offensive surfeit of mediocre images.

The reason I’m posting these two side-by-side is, well… I don’t post about it often but I do have what I self-diagnose as mild-to-medium gender dysphoria. (I’ve posted about it specifically once, I think.)

And, well… if you split the difference between these two images, the result is disarmingly close to my own internal feeling of gender.

At the same time these feelings are as plain as day to me in my mind, I am extremely hesitant to express them. Partly because, AFK, I present as a 6′2″ bearded bear of a guy who is assumed to be straight and cisgendered with slightly more frequency than not.

I’ve gotten used to distancing myself from the straight label. Fuck that noise.

Yet, at the same time I’m hesitant to identify as ‘queer’–even though that feels more and more accurate the more queer folks I meet. Partly, because although the privilege I experience passing does me no favors, I still benefit from it and it feels problematic/disingenuous to “have it both ways”.

I know it’s confusing as fuck and maybe I’m full of shit but I’m usually pretty good at calling bullshit and this bears none of the classic hallmarks.

The reason I mention this at all is because I had one of those two hour long conversations with a new friend. You know the ones where you walk away feeling blissfully stoned, like your head is going to explode because of the infinite possibilities and as tired as a cadaver? Yeah, it was one of those.

But part of what made it so intense is that we each saw a similar absence in each other and immediately understood it. It’s such a rare thing for me to feel seen, much less to be seen as something pretty.

Then again, maybe I just dreamed it…

Rome Grant – Untitled Polaroid (1973)

Anytime I post something vaguely homoerotic, I lose followers. It’s super lame.

Look: if you enjoy watching people fuck, you don’t have to experience sexual arousal in response to every image but your expectations should never be for strict exclusivity. Namely, in the process of seeking out people you want to watch fuck, you should categorical expect to encounter depictions of people who fuck in ways that are not your cup of tea. That’s fine–probably normal-ish (whatever the hell that even entails). But it is hell of problematic when your desire to watch people fuck is only acceptable when limited to watching people fuck if, when and only as long as you never have to see anything other than folks who fuck the way you want to fuck. (That approach is what’s indicated by the term echo chamber.)

If an image of two guys fucking like the one above elicits anything less empathetic than thinking oh, hey, great for them but where’s the lesbians already? then you have some personal growth to which you need to attend.

(If you’re a pervert, embrace that shit. It’ll make your life a lot easier and–I would argue–more fun.)

Back to this Polaroid, though: I won’t go so far as to recommend Grant’s work to you–it’s marred by staid commercial trappings, a lack of thoughtful editing and has all the subtlety of a train wreck in Quiet Town–but this is fucking so exquisite.

Source: romegrantphotography

Tony Patrioli – Title Unknown (19XX)

It’s not the first thing I notice so much as the fourth or fifth, but this photo was almost without a doubt taken in the same area where act one of Antonioni’s beautifully shot L’Avventura unfolds.

I say “not the first thing” because I have all kinds of complicated feels about this and I am not entirely sure how to convey them. (That’s not entirely true… it’s more I can’t seem to work up the courage to put it all into words would could potentially be turned against me.)

Part of these feelings relate to my suspicion this was likely made in the mid-70s when Patrioli was fixated with shooting single, hetero, cis-boys who weren’t opposed to playing along with the photographer’s homoerotic vision.

It’s a sloppy conceit–and I say that as someone convinced that it’s just barely on the grey side of immoral to ask someone to enact something in front of a camera that they wouldn’t also willing ask of you were the roles reversed; but the resulting trilateral tension is fascinating: the homosexual photographer having straight boys play at being gay, the straight boys who aren’t DTF but who don’t mind going along for the ride and the audience who subsequently  can’t take either party quite at their word.

The premo genderfuckery appeals to me. I mean really, really, really, really, really (that’s five really’s) appeals to me. But there’s also the likely unintended side-effect of decoupling physical arousal from sexual ideation. That’s the part I don’t know how to talk about…

I’m mostly opposed to the metaphor wherein sexuality is equated with hunger–that path skirts a little too close to notions of privation and entitlement. But I am willing to go so far as to say that there is at least a correlation insofar as if I say that I’m hungry, I’m asking not because I expect the person with whom I am conferring to feed me or even that their hungry. It’s because I’m fucking hungry and I need to do something about that shit, pronto and I know that I’m not the only one who is capable of experiencing hunger.

Source: jihelle

Alexey Malyshev – *** (2014)

The lighting in this is just fucking fantastic.

Honey hued and evenly suffused–providing something like a four stop range between skin tone highlight (closer to the window) and shadow detail (further from the window). Combined with the somewhat shallow depth of field, the young woman is isolated within the frame.

This is the kind of light anyone who knows fuck all about operating a camera lusts after–great when you can find it but not always easy to find.

That’s why as much as the light is what makes this image work, the same light would’ve made just about anything work. (Good light is fucking magic like that.)

What interests me increasingly is work which transforms disadvantageous, even ugly lighting situations into something that motivates the image just as much as if the light had been exquisite.

Now I’m not especially fond of Paul Barbara but credit where it’s due: his work is more aware of light than most.

This frame from Barbara’s Love Lost project demonstrates an even more astute use of light than Malyshev–because it manages to employ a stark, bright white backlighting with a compelling composition, that manages enough shadow detail to balance against presenting the young woman in silhouette.

In other words, objectively displeasing light is suddenly rendered not only an interesting factor in an image but a big part of why the image works.

After all if we sit around and wait for the perfect light, we’ll spend more time waiting than we ever spending creating.

Source: harlings

Harry Callahan – Eleanor and Barbara (1954)

onlyoldphotography:

Muses throughout his career, Callahan’s wife and daughter played, posed, and aged before his lens. With their attention to the physicality of light, however, Callahan’s photographs transcend mere family portraiture by calling attention to the simple beauty of life’s fleeting moments. “He just liked to take the pictures of me,” Eleanor recalled in her nineties. “In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”
Eleanor Callahan died in February 2012 at the age of ninety-five.

Source: onlyoldphotography

Michael Grieve – Porn shoot, Cuffey, UK from No Love Lost series (2006)

This reminds me of a dream I had a little over two months ago.

Really? You remember a two-month old dream?

Well, I’m fairly sure I dream most nights but it is a truly rare thing that I remember my dreams upon waking. On the rare occasion when I do–it’s like water to a man dying of thirst in a desert. As such a make a point of jotting them down in my dream journal.

In this dream, Carin* was in my room. It wasn’t really my room but an amalgam of my current room, the second apartment I had after graduating from college and the room I lived in from 1998-2000.

I can’t remember why she was there but it had that sort of seamless dream logic to it. There was a reason she was there and I had at one point known what that was and as such it had ceased to matter.

[A little contextual background on non-dream Carin: she worked for me for like seven months. She was hand’s down the worst employee I’ve ever had–not because she was incapable of doing the things asked of her (if anything she was overqualified); she just had a piss poor attitude and constantly complained about everything. In hindsight, I realize that her performance reflects worse on my ability to motivate her than her ability to be motivated. Now that she doesn’t work for me, we get on famously.]

Also, I have no idea what color her natural hair color is. In the dream it was blue with bleached streaks.

She was in the middle of the floor seated in a frog like position (Diagram 1) with her pleated skirt in a perfect circle around her. For some reason, this didn’t strike me as the least bit odd even though Carin wouldn’t ever be caught dead in such an outfit.

She was doing her usual simpering bravado routine–which is charming when you aren’t her supervisor. She informed me she’d hidden something somewhere in my room and I needed to find it.

I looked around half-heartedly at first and then began tearing my room apart.

The BB gun I used to have but have long since disposed of (I have an outsize problems with guns) was buried in my closet wrapped up in a towel. I asked her if that was the thing she’d hidden. It wasn’t. She thought it was dumb and even dumber that I had it but that she gave me credit because at least it wasn’t tacky looking.

I realized that she’d clearly gone through my stuff. I thought about all the things I was mortified she’d certainly seen. Only I wasn’t mortified. I asked her if she thought I was a pervert. She said she’d always expected as much but now had the goods and wasn’t disappointed.

I turned around and saw that she was holding her skirt up with one hand and was applying lube to the head and shaft of a truly dauntingly sized white marble strap-on. Taking a step closer, I noticed she was wearing powder blue boyshorts and that she’d wedged a small purple vibrator between herself and the floorboards.

There was an expectant pause accompanied to the buzz of the vibrator resonating against the wood.

This is okay, right?

Before I could whisper yes, I woke up.

*Close to but not identical to her real name

Source: milk-sockets