We lost two good ones this week…
Attorney Edward de Grazia and
cellist Janos Starker.
Both were teachers.
I was lucky to have studied under one.
R.I.P.
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
—
Bertrand Russell
via the always interesting Futility Closet
STOP! Not only is this vid from Andy Baio srsly TLDW, it’s also wrong wrong wrong on how copyright’s “fair use” doctrine effects creativity.
More patient minds than mine have carefully addressed his alarmist despairing in a piece posted at the Center for Social Media. It’s seriously worth the time.
Baio should be more careful. Beyond “Kind of Bloop” and now this mess his prior claim to fame—at 25:02 in the video—may get him into even further legal trouble, this time from the trademark attorneys for a certain chain of discount hair salons. [Kidding on this last, obsly.]
Pynchon they got. But they've left out James M. Cain ... →
This literary map of Los Angeles has just been put online by the L.A. Times.
I haven’t always been a New York attorney. And I haven’t always worked in all the areas of the media I do now.
In 1999 I edited and published what’s surely a source here: Paul Vangelisti’s L.A. Exile.
Wait! Start watching at 3:14 (HD, fullscreen, audio off) up to the credits.
Then watch the whole thing from the beginning.
Clip from Burden of Dreams (1982)
R.I.P. Les Blank.
Serious documentary filmmakers—and I work with a few of them—owe to Blank more than perhaps any other documentarian their freedom to range and meander and intercut and jangle while remaining focused on the subject.
Some notes on Kickstarter for filmmakers. Seriously.
I learned over a working breakfast the other day that a fellow entertainment attorney’s filmmaker client had successfully raised the full production budget for his next picture, a lower six-figure sum, via Kickstarter.
We should understand this is rare. It’s attributable largely to the demographics of the film’s intended audience (middle-class technologically-adroit twenty-somethings) and to the filmmaker’s canny use of social media in corralling these folks’ support by enlisting their network of Friends and Followers.
Late last year I attended a conference where a featured speaker was Ethan Mollick, a Wharton prof who’s been given unprecedented access to Kickstarter’s data. He’s produced an interesting paper on what sorts of projects get successfully funded (and provided some clues as to why). The paper is here. A blogger, Jeanne Pi at appsblogger.com, has semi-pre-digested much of his work here.
Indiewire.com gathered/crunched some data on crowdfunded films presented at this past SXSW. It’s here.
And finally, with crowdfunding as with more traditional film fundraising, it’s important to know the law and regulations that apply. The SEC’s been charged with producing regs to implement 2012’s JOBS Act, Title III of which specifically addresses “crowdfunding intermediaries”. They’re taking their time doing so but in the meantime have posted both a FAQ and a warning on them.
I told you this was serious.
The Great Noise (part 2)
Here’s a video of selections of Michael Haussman’s “Gravity” (NSFW). The title, as I read the video, is a synecdoche for time, inertia, entropy, donuts.
It’s pretty great.
The easter connection here is to the classic pietà—the child cradled in a sorrowful parent’s arms—echoed here:
…itself an echo and repetition of Abraham and Isaac.
Happy easter, folks.
![The Great Noise (part 1)
It’s holy week for the western church and there’ve been two multimedia events of note on the topic, a live performance of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” with video projections curated by the artist Ofri Cnaani at the Met in NYC; and a video installation, “Gravity”, by Michael Haussman at LA’s Young Projects.
They’re both interesting and resonant with the themes of the season and are worth checking out if only to remind oneself that cinema isn’t the only and wasn’t the first multimedia experience.
The Haydn/Cnaani piece is available via streaming video here, req’s flash. The business at hand starts at 00:13:50 and ends at 01:18:00 [update: looks like they’ve edited-out the dead air at the outset]. For an event that seeks to combine media in this foregrounded way it’s odd that the music comes to a not brief standstill between movements. Presumably this would allow more focus on the visuals taken largely from Rembrandt’s 1653 “Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves”.
Pausing so laboriously like this between movements is a mistake in my view. One of the most powerful qualities of “Seven Last Words” is the variation in tone and attack between the segments, something made most evident when they’re actually played back-to-back. That—and the inexorability of the events aurally evoked—to me recommends a less leisurely approach.
(BTW: In 2004 the Emerson Quartet released a great recording of this work which is not to be missed.)
I’ll briefly address the Haussman piece in this post’s part two.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/1e3f0a7d4a5620f015c11cbd40894e14/tumblr_mk8brxNj8d1ravcj5o1_500.jpg "The Great Noise (part 1)
It’s holy week for the western church and there’ve been two multimedia events of note on the topic, a live performance of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” with video projections curated by the artist Ofri Cnaani at the Met in NYC; and a video installation, “Gravity”, by Michael Haussman at LA’s Young Projects.
They’re both interesting and resonant with the themes of the season and are worth checking out if only to remind oneself that cinema isn’t the only and wasn’t the first multimedia experience.
The Haydn/Cnaani piece is available via streaming video here, req’s flash. The business at hand starts at 00:13:50 and ends at 01:18:00 [update: looks like they’ve edited-out the dead air at the outset]. For an event that seeks to combine media in this foregrounded way it’s odd that the music comes to a not brief standstill between movements. Presumably this would allow more focus on the visuals taken largely from Rembrandt’s 1653 “Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves”.
Pausing so laboriously like this between movements is a mistake in my view. One of the most powerful qualities of “Seven Last Words” is the variation in tone and attack between the segments, something made most evident when they’re actually played back-to-back. That—and the inexorability of the events aurally evoked—to me recommends a less leisurely approach.
(BTW: In 2004 the Emerson Quartet released a great recording of this work which is not to be missed.)
I’ll briefly address the Haussman piece in this post’s part two.")
The Great Noise (part 1)
It’s holy week for the western church and there’ve been two multimedia events of note on the topic, a live performance of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” with video projections curated by the artist Ofri Cnaani at the Met in NYC; and a video installation, “Gravity”, by Michael Haussman at LA’s Young Projects.
They’re both interesting and resonant with the themes of the season and are worth checking out if only to remind oneself that cinema isn’t the only and wasn’t the first multimedia experience.
The Haydn/Cnaani piece is available via streaming video here, req’s flash. The business at hand starts at 00:13:50 and ends at 01:18:00 [update: looks like they’ve edited-out the dead air at the outset]. For an event that seeks to combine media in this foregrounded way it’s odd that the music comes to a not brief standstill between movements. Presumably this would allow more focus on the visuals taken largely from Rembrandt’s 1653 “Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves”.
Pausing so laboriously like this between movements is a mistake in my view. One of the most powerful qualities of “Seven Last Words” is the variation in tone and attack between the segments, something made most evident when they’re actually played back-to-back. That—and the inexorability of the events aurally evoked—to me recommends a less leisurely approach.
(BTW: In 2004 the Emerson Quartet released a great recording of this work which is not to be missed.)
I’ll briefly address the Haussman piece in this post’s part two.
It takes a really long time to make something look effortless
—
An article in yesterday’s New York Times illustrates an interesting corollary to Parton’s First Law of Show Business (“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap”), namely that motion pictures—particularly genre films—often spend a massive amount of time in development.
Life is short. Craft is long. Zombies are apparently forever.
