youth media workshops - starting up in brooklyn.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
china magic noodle house
View films at the Golden Mall...
Director/Producer : Tim Sutton
Cinematographer : Chris Dapkins
Editor : Tres Warren
Music : Moondog
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
last night a sandwich saved my life
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Now, where, exactly, they go, I have no idea. So after said tough champions-to-be leave, off on some epic mission to tame the wild chaos into fresh cut grass, the weak of heart, the hurt and the thin-skinned, the choked up and of trembling lip have but one choice. One option. Their only option.
It was right after le deluge at work - the entire department of puppets closing down a disappearing act while the hacking coughs of private equity cigar chomping still audible in echoes from above. The pelting rain seemed to have an endless source. It was freezing rain. A hard rain. I dropped my youngest at Pre K and was in the car, double parked, questioning the entire, endless universe of insecurity that soon would be rushing from my every pore. So I drove. 4th Avenue, Brooklyn. What to do. Think. Come up with something. Come on. Ah, I know, I'll go upstate. I'll get upstate and walk in the woods, figure it out from there, like I've done before. It doesn't matter that it's raining. It's still autumn. A walk in the rain. Poetic. It will be filled with meaning. Filled with - what is with this godDAMN traffic!? The car, jammed within thousands of tons of steel and pavement and glass was going nowhere. I sat there and saw the Fall turn into a bone damp Winter in just a few seconds. It had turned on me. I was about to be lost at sea. The traffic was ruining my life.
Ruining. My. Life.
Yet when I pictured a tired and confused man walking in circles in a barren forest being pounded by sharp sheets of rain with a mere hoodless windbreaker as his only source of protection, it looked even worse. It looked painful and stupid. I looked for parking. It was at this point when my mind stopped working on its own and a sense of the divine drove me forward. To the Q train. No book. No magazine. Staring at my feet, my hands in my lap. Can't meet eyes with others. Get out. Go.
Wait, why did I get out at Canal Street? Why? Walk. just walk, man, walk. There is no rain. There is only movement, forward. Hudson street. Why? Keep going. Where is it? Where am I going? My kids. My wife. My career. Me. My psyche? My psyche is wounded and the wound could be very, very serious. Walk further. Go. Wait. There.
There it is.
There was my destination, concocted within the deepest subterranean room in my soul. I had found my place. My Nazareth. The Corner Bistro.
And it is still the best burger in the city. Hands. Down. To hell with the new. Damn the cliche. It was perfect. Hear me on this one: it is not bad to comfort yourself with food. It is not sad. It is not pathetic. Not at all. On the contrary, to comfort oneself with food is beautiful. And to comfort oneself with a cheeseburger is, truly, a reach into the sublime.
Now, where, exactly, they go, I have no idea. So after said tough champions-to-be leave, off on some epic mission to tame the wild chaos into fresh cut grass, the weak of heart, the hurt and the thin-skinned, the choked up and of trembling lip have but one choice. One option. Their only option.
It was right after le deluge at work - the entire department of puppets closing down a disappearing act while the hacking coughs of private equity cigar chomping still audible in echoes from above. The pelting rain seemed to have an endless source. It was freezing rain. A hard rain. I dropped my youngest at Pre K and was in the car, double parked, questioning the entire, endless universe of insecurity that soon would be rushing from my every pore. So I drove. 4th Avenue, Brooklyn. What to do. Think. Come up with something. Come on. Ah, I know, I'll go upstate. I'll get upstate and walk in the woods, figure it out from there, like I've done before. It doesn't matter that it's raining. It's still autumn. A walk in the rain. Poetic. It will be filled with meaning. Filled with - what is with this godDAMN traffic!? The car, jammed within thousands of tons of steel and pavement and glass was going nowhere. I sat there and saw the Fall turn into a bone damp Winter in just a few seconds. It had turned on me. I was about to be lost at sea. The traffic was ruining my life.
Ruining. My. Life.
Yet when I pictured a tired and confused man walking in circles in a barren forest being pounded by sharp sheets of rain with a mere hoodless windbreaker as his only source of protection, it looked even worse. It looked painful and stupid. I looked for parking. It was at this point when my mind stopped working on its own and a sense of the divine drove me forward. To the Q train. No book. No magazine. Staring at my feet, my hands in my lap. Can't meet eyes with others. Get out. Go.
Wait, why did I get out at Canal Street? Why? Walk. just walk, man, walk. There is no rain. There is only movement, forward. Hudson street. Why? Keep going. Where is it? Where am I going? My kids. My wife. My career. Me. My psyche? My psyche is wounded and the wound could be very, very serious. Walk further. Go. Wait. There.
There it is.
There was my destination, concocted within the deepest subterranean room in my soul. I had found my place. My Nazareth. The Corner Bistro.
And it is still the best burger in the city. Hands. Down. To hell with the new. Damn the cliche. It was perfect. Hear me on this one: it is not bad to comfort yourself with food. It is not sad. It is not pathetic. Not at all. On the contrary, to comfort oneself with food is beautiful. And to comfort oneself with a cheeseburger is, truly, a reach into the sublime.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Thursday, October 7, 2010
portrait of the artist as a little guy
Zach's artwork featured on brooklyn design lab's site. Notebooks and notebooks being filled up for the past couple of years. Last night we did a 'drawing project' during which I would just call out things (from the bathroom while helping Theo go caca ) and he would just draw them. Mountains, people, animals, a river to a dock, boats, rain...and the piece would have such incredible energy and symmetry. It would jump off the newsprint. It takes my breath away. I wish he could just be home-schooled by 3 artists. I don't want school beating down his spirit.
Friday, September 24, 2010
slanted/enchanted + rattled by the rush = frontwards
A year away, it seemed great. A bit special. Not a life changing event.
It was Theo who bought the tickets. A year in advance, and even though his son shares a name with Theo (Big Theo, Little Theo) and even though the two shared serious times - beginning on a rooftop over manhattan, learning the city together, carving the sculpture of themselves, with these songs as a giant chunk of the soundtrack, he offered "Big Theo" a simple, if borderline-thrilled, yes.
The prediction was not for an intricate emotional breakdown. That part comes later.
They meet up on 69th and 5th. He feels his look is overly preppy in a red plaid shirt - more sailing in coastal Connecticut than stoned in a Portland coffee bar next door to the Kill Rock Stars office, but we have little control over our own narrative. He offers this last bit up to himself as a all-a-part-of-life (read: empty) rationalization. He waves to Theo across 5th Avenue. The wave, he realizes, comes across like arms raised in victory. Energy creeping up, he should eat something. They hug. They're excited, waiting for two other friends of Theo's who were once all in the same crowd with him and periodically cross paths through work. Good guys. Not good friends of his. He drags Theo back to a place off Madison where he spied a roasted vegetable sandwich and, as he gulps it down, he wonders if this is really where it all has come down to: a slightly fey red button down and roasted vegetables. Then Theo plays a joke at the expense of the empty sandwich shop and yells Give me all your money! A quick burst of fear gives leave to a sigh, eyes being rolled. Not at all amusing to the employees who have worked hard all day and just want to get the fuck out of there. Hilarious to the culprits and immediately gives them the feeling of a duo reunited.
The small talk with the other two friends is comfortable, if somewhat irrelevant as they all pop through the gate, stand in the beer line. Summer Stage, Central Park, the first stretch of Fall. He notices that City Winery has a stand there. Wine at a Pavement show. Probably a selection of cheese too. He knows that the world, or maybe simply his world, has gone stale. Middle of the road. Middle age. But he has to admit, goddamnit, that he would love a dry red, with a hint of black pepper and a nose of leather, and what yuppie dad from Park Slope doesn't like a humboldt fog cheese, maybe a Hudson Valley manchego. That's the problem. He loves wine and cheese. He sits at home and drinks wine and listens to music tougher than Pavement. He wonders when he started questioning his likes, his looks (well, always), and his choices with such a sharp red pen. He says outloud, Well, Christ, I like cheese, before realizing his group is discussing one of the member's recent weddings, to which he was not invited, nor wanted to be invited.
They smoke more from pipes and sip more from cans and flasks.
And, then, the time is now. The stage darkens and the roar of decades sounds out like a steamship approaching through a dense curtain of memory. This band. This band. First, the downside, and he knew this was coming as he is overly and acutely neurotic: this band comes out on the stage, and the cliche is real: they are older. We are old. He is old. Spiral Stairs, covering his recent baldness with a newsboy cap and dressed and shaped like a 50-something guitarist for a bar blues band, standing insecurely stage right (is this true? Is this simply his own insecurity taking center stage). Steven Malkamus, once the overly bored intellect, songwriting Jesus, the true sufferer of no fools, now openly bathing in the spotlight of his long heralded, globally influential (on an indie level), masterminded expedition of taste and sound, singing the lyrics unchanged from decades ago. He's talking to the crowd. He's trying (too?) hard. So unlike him. Only The Screamer looks perfectly in place, unchanged, unhinged still.
He has seen Pavement, in their prime, twice, but his formative experiences with them are stereo-based, years of slanted living rooms with open windows and private air guitar visions. Apart from sly, sonic, shimmering and shivering beauty, Pavement was, to him, a raw antidote to all the things he wished to become but simply might not make it there. He decides to close his eyes.
And then, all at once, he is torn to shreds by the bear of memory.
It wasn't until the second song came through the haze, a deep, serious float made of an army of bumble bees that he realizes that he is unprepared for the chaos of emotion that has planned, all along, to take complete control of his mind. His heart. He is transported. He first knows - he knows this - that Theo deserves a better friend than him. Out of nowhere, he turns back and embraces Theo. It is borderline pathetic. But Theo, as he always has, understands. It makes him feel wonderful. And undeserving. But there they are, the wind is picking up and the wind is glorious. He realizes that the wind is not wind at all but, instead, his 20s. Not the recent 'before we had kids' daydreams that come out in conversation here and there. It is a real, serious reverie. A reach back to something he can barely even imagine. He knows every song. Every word of every song, except the few lyrics that are simply unknowable. He is then transported back to the arms of an old girlfriend. It's not even a song they listened together. It was a song he listened to while he was just thinking about her. And all of that energy and lack of confidence and longing and the unknown future and the feeling that everything is temporary and the simplicity of their failed relationship comes and entirely, completely, incredibly blows him away. His mind is blown. And he is in love with the feeling. To try and hold it and reason with it isn't possible, nor is it the point. he knows this. He doesn't want to own it. But he feels it deeply, awesomely. He believes himself to be insanely happy. The happiness grows into euphoria. Song by song, the feeling is thrown at him like cocaine fireballs that are warm to the touch. His stance is wide and his head is buried in the velvet-fisted beat of dueling guitar, shriek and whisper voice, and the uniquely scattered drum - always just perfectly behind the beat. He sees years form into solids and friends and times and, Jesus, he's getting emotional again. He's having a mid life crisis. He is spiraling, rattled. He rocks to an encore so intensely that he falters and stumbles. A favorite song - they are all favorite songs - comes to him out of the air like a bomb being dropped from his younger self. Psychodelic Explosion. It is incredible. He could fall on his face. It is chaos. The real thing. Of the soul.
------
And yet he is home by 11:30. He gently kisses his wife before collapsing into bed beside her warmth. The next morning he has a decently slight hangover. Nothing too bad. He plays songs from a seminal album on the family ipod for his two sons who gleefully jump on the couch to the same tune that, hours before, had brought him to his knees in existential fervor.
He thinks about the show, and the visions from the show, and the sounds from the show, for days, unable to move on. The cliche, again, is real: he is filled with emotion.
He needs to write it. And then turn 40. And here he is.
Frontwards.
It was Theo who bought the tickets. A year in advance, and even though his son shares a name with Theo (Big Theo, Little Theo) and even though the two shared serious times - beginning on a rooftop over manhattan, learning the city together, carving the sculpture of themselves, with these songs as a giant chunk of the soundtrack, he offered "Big Theo" a simple, if borderline-thrilled, yes.
The prediction was not for an intricate emotional breakdown. That part comes later.
They meet up on 69th and 5th. He feels his look is overly preppy in a red plaid shirt - more sailing in coastal Connecticut than stoned in a Portland coffee bar next door to the Kill Rock Stars office, but we have little control over our own narrative. He offers this last bit up to himself as a all-a-part-of-life (read: empty) rationalization. He waves to Theo across 5th Avenue. The wave, he realizes, comes across like arms raised in victory. Energy creeping up, he should eat something. They hug. They're excited, waiting for two other friends of Theo's who were once all in the same crowd with him and periodically cross paths through work. Good guys. Not good friends of his. He drags Theo back to a place off Madison where he spied a roasted vegetable sandwich and, as he gulps it down, he wonders if this is really where it all has come down to: a slightly fey red button down and roasted vegetables. Then Theo plays a joke at the expense of the empty sandwich shop and yells Give me all your money! A quick burst of fear gives leave to a sigh, eyes being rolled. Not at all amusing to the employees who have worked hard all day and just want to get the fuck out of there. Hilarious to the culprits and immediately gives them the feeling of a duo reunited.
The small talk with the other two friends is comfortable, if somewhat irrelevant as they all pop through the gate, stand in the beer line. Summer Stage, Central Park, the first stretch of Fall. He notices that City Winery has a stand there. Wine at a Pavement show. Probably a selection of cheese too. He knows that the world, or maybe simply his world, has gone stale. Middle of the road. Middle age. But he has to admit, goddamnit, that he would love a dry red, with a hint of black pepper and a nose of leather, and what yuppie dad from Park Slope doesn't like a humboldt fog cheese, maybe a Hudson Valley manchego. That's the problem. He loves wine and cheese. He sits at home and drinks wine and listens to music tougher than Pavement. He wonders when he started questioning his likes, his looks (well, always), and his choices with such a sharp red pen. He says outloud, Well, Christ, I like cheese, before realizing his group is discussing one of the member's recent weddings, to which he was not invited, nor wanted to be invited.
They smoke more from pipes and sip more from cans and flasks.
And, then, the time is now. The stage darkens and the roar of decades sounds out like a steamship approaching through a dense curtain of memory. This band. This band. First, the downside, and he knew this was coming as he is overly and acutely neurotic: this band comes out on the stage, and the cliche is real: they are older. We are old. He is old. Spiral Stairs, covering his recent baldness with a newsboy cap and dressed and shaped like a 50-something guitarist for a bar blues band, standing insecurely stage right (is this true? Is this simply his own insecurity taking center stage). Steven Malkamus, once the overly bored intellect, songwriting Jesus, the true sufferer of no fools, now openly bathing in the spotlight of his long heralded, globally influential (on an indie level), masterminded expedition of taste and sound, singing the lyrics unchanged from decades ago. He's talking to the crowd. He's trying (too?) hard. So unlike him. Only The Screamer looks perfectly in place, unchanged, unhinged still.
He has seen Pavement, in their prime, twice, but his formative experiences with them are stereo-based, years of slanted living rooms with open windows and private air guitar visions. Apart from sly, sonic, shimmering and shivering beauty, Pavement was, to him, a raw antidote to all the things he wished to become but simply might not make it there. He decides to close his eyes.
And then, all at once, he is torn to shreds by the bear of memory.
It wasn't until the second song came through the haze, a deep, serious float made of an army of bumble bees that he realizes that he is unprepared for the chaos of emotion that has planned, all along, to take complete control of his mind. His heart. He is transported. He first knows - he knows this - that Theo deserves a better friend than him. Out of nowhere, he turns back and embraces Theo. It is borderline pathetic. But Theo, as he always has, understands. It makes him feel wonderful. And undeserving. But there they are, the wind is picking up and the wind is glorious. He realizes that the wind is not wind at all but, instead, his 20s. Not the recent 'before we had kids' daydreams that come out in conversation here and there. It is a real, serious reverie. A reach back to something he can barely even imagine. He knows every song. Every word of every song, except the few lyrics that are simply unknowable. He is then transported back to the arms of an old girlfriend. It's not even a song they listened together. It was a song he listened to while he was just thinking about her. And all of that energy and lack of confidence and longing and the unknown future and the feeling that everything is temporary and the simplicity of their failed relationship comes and entirely, completely, incredibly blows him away. His mind is blown. And he is in love with the feeling. To try and hold it and reason with it isn't possible, nor is it the point. he knows this. He doesn't want to own it. But he feels it deeply, awesomely. He believes himself to be insanely happy. The happiness grows into euphoria. Song by song, the feeling is thrown at him like cocaine fireballs that are warm to the touch. His stance is wide and his head is buried in the velvet-fisted beat of dueling guitar, shriek and whisper voice, and the uniquely scattered drum - always just perfectly behind the beat. He sees years form into solids and friends and times and, Jesus, he's getting emotional again. He's having a mid life crisis. He is spiraling, rattled. He rocks to an encore so intensely that he falters and stumbles. A favorite song - they are all favorite songs - comes to him out of the air like a bomb being dropped from his younger self. Psychodelic Explosion. It is incredible. He could fall on his face. It is chaos. The real thing. Of the soul.
------
And yet he is home by 11:30. He gently kisses his wife before collapsing into bed beside her warmth. The next morning he has a decently slight hangover. Nothing too bad. He plays songs from a seminal album on the family ipod for his two sons who gleefully jump on the couch to the same tune that, hours before, had brought him to his knees in existential fervor.
He thinks about the show, and the visions from the show, and the sounds from the show, for days, unable to move on. The cliche, again, is real: he is filled with emotion.
He needs to write it. And then turn 40. And here he is.
Frontwards.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
tramp
A short video on Justin Townes Earle - his new album Harlem River Blues is pretty damn serious.
Commissioned by my good friend Sid Evans for Garden & Gun Magazine.
Director : Tim Sutton
Producer : Sid Evans
Camera : Todd Warnock
Sound : Josh Neal
Editor : Tres Warren
Titles : Jesse Fairbairn
Color : Igor Grinblat
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
new york I love you
He bought the CD, in a blur within a blur, exiting the venue late last night. This was before the encore, but well within a heady stream of song in which the ceiling was blown icelandic with a thick river of pulse, shattering ecstatic the spirit bodies of David Bowie, New Order, Blondie, Morrissey, and, when skinny, even the Cars. This music, though, was remade into a power and clarity of sound that was so big it was necessary to consider the impact. It was something to witness. This music had animal blood coursing through it in tidal form. It was something to behold. His face had been melted. And he recognized this.
Now, seriously, get me the fuck out of here.
He says this to himself, a few times, while unable to breathe, wrapped too tightly within the thousands of bodies that locked together in the room, pulsating endlessly. And the light show, it was magic. On fire. But getting out of the middle to the side of the venue by the bar took a week, possibly longer. The path a narrow stretch of hot arms and faces and torsos. People massage his shoulders as he passes (there were a lot of happy, comfortable people in the room, if you can imagine) which makes him simultaneously uncomfortable to the core and also so thankful.
He stays. He rocks out. He is far in a corner now with a tiny bit of breathing space. He continues to wonder why, really, he is there. He wonders how everyone on the balcony above knows every word to every song when he does not. Its not that he was the oldest person in the room - old, yes, but not out of place. The intensity matched with the quickness matched with techno-heaviness matched with the tirelessness within the tightness of space became a depth charge. Recognizable, yes, as music both beautiful and anthemic, but these songs and words weren't directed toward him.
Out of nowhere, he starts questioning the fact that he doesn't even have an iphone. His mother-in-law has an iphone. Is he pathetic? It makes him wonder, and leads him further down that route. He begins thinking about the fact that he and his wife hadn't been to a show - Sleater Kinney, Interpol? - in a long, long time. Over 5 years. More? Since the kids. He begins to change all this in his head. He begins to mend this hole. He imagines dates for them to go see bands that they loved, together. But just thinking about it exhausts him. He begins thinking about his kid's upcoming birthday weekend and, well, that's it.
The encore(s) were surely, truly meaningful to everyone in the room, but he has drifted away long before he passes the merch table.
He was in, almost literally, a spin as the concept washes over him in a grand moment of pointed gesture - he wants to support this artist from the artist's source - not through itunes or amazon or a friend or a random site but from his organization's personal stash. He hasn't bought something at a show, beside the wilco t-shirt for his kid, Christ, since he was in his twenties. He sways before the fucking merch table, man, right? He scans the product. He scans deeper. And what does he get? He doesn't get a t-shirt or a random EP. He buys...a CD. He doesn't even know which CD in the artist's ouvre it is, and then curses himself for thinking of the term ouvre. He feels that he is probably the only person in that room who actually paid for a packaged CD (Capitol Records, if that matters anymore). The guy on the other side of the table, bearded, almost does a double-take when he points to the CD. Like the bearded man is selling something that is for free at the adjoining table. Bearded is sheepish, as if he doesn't want to take advantage of this confused man. But he serves him - cash, CD, change.
He has become the old guy who bought a CD, he mutters to himself (did the bouncer just call him Chief?) as he finds and unlocks his bike. Yes, he rode his bike there and will ride his bike home.
Walking the bike west, he realizes that Manhattan isn't Brooklyn and vice versa. This is an obvious thought, but he doesn't really see Manhattan at night that often, Midtown at night, never. There is the scent of money spent, and at every possible level - from empty condos high above the river to the drug deal on the dark sidewalk. He then sees three club chicks on the opposite corner. Black micro dresses, sheer, tight, a hint of sequins under the street light. They are dressed, their skirts simply belts covering their upper thighs. They hop a cab and are gone.
He leans onto his bike, tucks his pathetic but oddly proud CD into his shirt and slips onto the path along the Hudson.
There is space. Quiet. Night. Exterior. New York.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
a rented room, uptown
Hank Jones, pianist, New Yorker, legend, eventual recluse, lived a career that spanned just about 7 decades of American Jazz as both a composer and band leader and, notably, as possibly the greatest accompanist in the post war era. The seminal albums he helped create - quietly, elegantly leading and urging and whispering his expert language to some of the greatest artists in history - lend him the aura of both therapist and brother, and, of course, shadow.
Hank Jones dies, leaves a Grammy statuette in a shoebox, Debussy and Chopin sheet music in piles, and a Yamaha electric piano still plugged into the wall - one of four that make up the 12 x 12 room he rented, uptown, until his demise. His meals delivered by the diner downstairs, his landlord a nice fellow who tried to keep Mr. Jones connected to the outside world - this is the stuff covered in the Times, along with a quality obit.
And he exits quietly, like he played, with grace and calm, leaving the theatrics to horns and his namesakes on the drums. Yet his expansive, limitless musical vision and imagination was stuck in a tiny room, without even a true piano for him to practice. His age, race, class, and his illness finalizing him as a sideman even in his own canonization story.
Hank Jones dies, leaves a Grammy statuette in a shoebox, Debussy and Chopin sheet music in piles, and a Yamaha electric piano still plugged into the wall - one of four that make up the 12 x 12 room he rented, uptown, until his demise. His meals delivered by the diner downstairs, his landlord a nice fellow who tried to keep Mr. Jones connected to the outside world - this is the stuff covered in the Times, along with a quality obit.
And he exits quietly, like he played, with grace and calm, leaving the theatrics to horns and his namesakes on the drums. Yet his expansive, limitless musical vision and imagination was stuck in a tiny room, without even a true piano for him to practice. His age, race, class, and his illness finalizing him as a sideman even in his own canonization story.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
nykillsme (obit)
NEW YORK CITY (Tuesday, May 18, 2010)
Late last night New York Kills Me, a dazzling blog was--
New York Kills Me is now called dispatches, and linked to my art director site - van riper archives.
Monday, May 17, 2010
content specialist
After shopping around (highlight - beers with a nice editor at Paris Review), this essay found a home at Resource Magazine.
What happens when an analog and print-based media archives closes its doors? The sprawling space, previously stuffed wall to wall with curiosities and their keepers, sits empty. Countless boxes, cans, tape cases and folders stuffed with imagery – some of it historic – warehoused at an undisclosed location to be seen rarely, if ever, again. A global leader in film, print, and video archiving and distribution (to remain unnamed) recently closed the doors of its New York City-based storage facility. Closing a space of this sort represents the company’s abandonment of all things analog, as well as another irreparable break in the chain of film photography and film production.
This (digital) photography project is concerned with the physical spaces as well as the job descriptions that have been left behind in the name of technology. No longer in need of endless shelves, aluminum cans and archival boxes, the collection now fits quietly on sleek hard drives. Once industry standard, sculpturally beautiful machines – projectors, splicers, editing tables – now exist only as museum objects. And then there are the people: the negative cutter no longer has negative to cut, the tape dubber has no tape to dub. Now both, and others like them, must become ‘content specialists’ or, subject to Darwin’s principal, cease to exist.
Content Specialist Gerry Post, who posed for the project, recently looked back on his career from the vantage point of his newly minted flat screen computer monitor.
My first job was in 1960, apprenticing for an editor at Trident Films, and, this may sound stupid, but, I miss touching the film. It gave you more of a feeling of doing the work. When you touched film, working on a Steenbeck flatbed or Moviola, and you held the film in you hand, and it would roll in your hand…it was a good feeling, a closeness to the project. A work-print would get cut, torn, taped back up with grease pencils marking where new cuts would go, dirt on the film, you could see the work put in, literally, you could see the work on the film. It’s cleaner now. It’s much cleaner now. Which is a good thing, I suppose.
photography : todd warnock
creative direction : tim sutton
What happens when an analog and print-based media archives closes its doors? The sprawling space, previously stuffed wall to wall with curiosities and their keepers, sits empty. Countless boxes, cans, tape cases and folders stuffed with imagery – some of it historic – warehoused at an undisclosed location to be seen rarely, if ever, again. A global leader in film, print, and video archiving and distribution (to remain unnamed) recently closed the doors of its New York City-based storage facility. Closing a space of this sort represents the company’s abandonment of all things analog, as well as another irreparable break in the chain of film photography and film production.
This (digital) photography project is concerned with the physical spaces as well as the job descriptions that have been left behind in the name of technology. No longer in need of endless shelves, aluminum cans and archival boxes, the collection now fits quietly on sleek hard drives. Once industry standard, sculpturally beautiful machines – projectors, splicers, editing tables – now exist only as museum objects. And then there are the people: the negative cutter no longer has negative to cut, the tape dubber has no tape to dub. Now both, and others like them, must become ‘content specialists’ or, subject to Darwin’s principal, cease to exist.
Content Specialist Gerry Post, who posed for the project, recently looked back on his career from the vantage point of his newly minted flat screen computer monitor.
My first job was in 1960, apprenticing for an editor at Trident Films, and, this may sound stupid, but, I miss touching the film. It gave you more of a feeling of doing the work. When you touched film, working on a Steenbeck flatbed or Moviola, and you held the film in you hand, and it would roll in your hand…it was a good feeling, a closeness to the project. A work-print would get cut, torn, taped back up with grease pencils marking where new cuts would go, dirt on the film, you could see the work put in, literally, you could see the work on the film. It’s cleaner now. It’s much cleaner now. Which is a good thing, I suppose.
photography : todd warnock
creative direction : tim sutton
Friday, April 30, 2010
quick man save yourself
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written/directed : tim sutton
cinematography : pete konzcal
edited : jesse coane
sound design : gary at the chop shop
producers : amy lehfeldt/karen tighe
written/directed : tim sutton
cinematography : pete konzcal
edited : jesse coane
sound design : gary at the chop shop
producers : amy lehfeldt/karen tighe
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
I suppose this is why we stay, actually...
It's either deal with subway terror (not to mention schlepping in the fucking rain) or get inspired by Glenn Beck to lead a plot to kill local and federal government representatives - choices, choices.
Monday, March 29, 2010
the pigeon is not okay
Elevated, passing the avenues that teach city kids their letters, the tower always within sight, he gazes out the window and never stops chatting with himself. Avenue U, Bay Parkway, Avenue X, a sleeping man with a Yankees hat, a fighting couple too young and too uninterested to have three young children, all of them looking exhausted. The ride to Coney Island is always exhilarating to him, and it takes a big chunk of time (this is good, this is good planning).
We hop out, down, and then over a Black Sea-sized puddle separating the sidewalk from long since dead and buried Surf Avenue. Surf Avenue gives new definition to the word 'depressed' - yes, for a while now, nothing new - but its hard to imagine this street or neighborhood playing a role in the Victorian era transforming into the Modern age, the red carpet to the richest men in the world. Ever been to Gary, Indiana? Stand on the corner of Surf and West 24th Street...an argument for new development if ever there was one.
We step into an arcade to introduce him to some germs he hasn't met yet.
I wanted the place to be decrepit-chic but charming, a blast from the past. I wanted the place to be something that it was not. It was empty, except for a local kid who was haggling with the counterman in Russian. Cigarette smoke hung low in the air and the games all had a grease-smudged sheen to every bit of surface, handle, seat, joystick, coin slot. Zach was amazed, but didn't beg for money to play the games, he just enjoyed the wander, the beeps and chirps and flashing lights and centipede-filled screens. It was a room from some other world, not necessarily the bright and shining world I think he expected when I mentioned the word video within the word combination video games. This room was not an iphone, and so, after a bit, we exited without him requesting to stay.
We passed a few entrances to the Midway, booming with a Euro thump thump thump and repeat, endlessly, a beat familiar to those who, say, dance shirtless in open-air Turkish nightclubs on our way to the Boardwalk for some fresh ocean air, maybe a Polar Bear Club sighting, this being Coney Island, one never knows. Instead, we had to curve our walk to avoid a dead pigeon, lying headless in the parking lot. stiff, bristled feathers and a former foot plastered to the pavement. I kept our curved walk brisk, hoping it hadn't registered with him.
Dad?
Yeah bug?
Why isn't that pigeon flying?
We talked about how sometimes animals and people get hurt so badly that they don't live anymore. The conversation went on for a little while, and I think I did okay, this being the first dead animal he had ever really seen - really looked at - but it stuck with him. He talked about it later that night. He mentioned it the next day. But, at that hour, the boardwalk helped him put it out of his mind. So did the donut I bought him without him even asking for it. And, most of all, so did the train ride home.
It should be illegal to be that happy on an F train.
Monday, March 22, 2010
the back-up singer
He was one of two guys from North Carolina singing background, nice and sweet, for a young and, honestly, forgettable new soul band that was the first opener of the evening. Probably first time in New York, his voice had just enough depth, adorned with the scratch that comes with age. Before I took his photograph I thought he was in his twenties. He is not in his twenties. And he is not on top. He drank after the set, and sat at the table with the rest of the band, but invisible, dislodged from the conversation. The others were younger, and talked around him, leaning back in their chairs so that he wouldn't disrupt their eye contact. It didn't bother him. He seemed used to it.
The Revelations came on and, as is the case now in this Post Daptones world, the band is entirely made up of young white Jews. That's not completely true. If they aren't young Jewish Columbia-University-graphic-novel-by-Daniel-Clowes types then they are willowy Mid-westerners with short hair, parted long over their eyes, or maybe bearded and, most likely, the proud (but not showy) owners of a record collection that takes up an entire wall of their shared apartment on a quiet block in Humboldt Park. They care deeply about their coffee. But sometimes drink tea. Their vinyl shrine is dedicated to singers most people don't know about, including the tea drinking young man's Lutheran parents.
So race matters still and in completely new ways in this particular corner. The music is very much a 'white man's' game, but the singer and spot light remains the 'black man's' place. The Revelations work with a performer that would probably have been voted off Idol during the first Hollywood week. Not horrible, but not good, and certainly not a star.
But here this band stood, and this singer stood, playing gracious host on the stage with a true giant. Fifty years in the business but standing straight and strong with a muscularity and spirit that could knock a man down. And here he is, after so many years and songs and cities and clubs and women and drink - surviving it all - yet the airlines lose his luggage. He's forced to work up a secondary income with a dry cleaning business. Few people know his name. He is owed thousands and thousands of dollars in royalties. He has to tip toe around instruments and amps on stage rather than walk a clear straight path to his damn microphone. He has to put up with major and minor disrespect on a number of levels unfit for a man of his stature. He was, unbelievably, an opening act of the night.
And yet as Otis Clay sang, belted, cajoled, howled, shrieked, conjured, whispered, and lived out the lyrics of his unforgettable songs and unfathomably beautiful and graceful performance, these young white men stood on the stage with greatness, and basked in the experience, his source taking them to a level they would not dream of reaching on their own and would remember for the rest of their lives. They met their maker, right then and there. And that infinite well they were able to tap into, that root of pure energy was owned - and generously offered to them, to us - by the one great man in this town that night. And that is power.
Friday, March 12, 2010
tongue
Like seeing Woody Allen walking, in hat and corduroy blazer, down 5th Avenue at around 88th Street on a crisp fall day, there are certain New York essential moments that I have been waiting around this damn town to experience so that the eventual pack up and move to Hudson will come with great satisfaction, relief, and without (impossible) regret. Not a star sighting. Throw a rock in this city and you'll hit Jennifer Connelly, smiling right at you as if she has a crush on you (I look back on that experience often failing to remember that I was passing quickly by in a moving van so...). Star sightings are boring. The experience we collectively crave, living here, is more a happening during which you break through a dimension that separates legend and reality; when the glorious classic runs into your own experience and, out of nowhere, you are part of the intricate map of the city's soul. A true New York moment.
Through a friend and with friends, somehow, we were commissioned by Katz's Deli to make a short film titled 'Lunch.'
To be paid, lovingly, in pastrami. Coming soon.
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