Having been in NY on 9/11, I gain an irregular perspective when at Ground Zero.
On Sunday I had the privilege of shooting inside 7 World Trade Center, from which I could look down onto the changing site. I was reminded that the place and the event act as the center for entire points of view, from which much of our culture is remade.
In the NYT yesterday, Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote about the quirks and qualities of Bernard Tschumi’s Blue Building on the LES. A while back my good friend, musician and genius phrase-ologist Olga Bell mused that if a Rubik’s Cube wrote a poem, it would be Blue Building. Inspired, I took some photos and thanks to mo-graph artist Matt Garton at R/GA, tried a little experiment. It’s just a test of what could be, but thanks to Bell and Chuck Choi, you may be seeing a lot more architecture in my work.
The Mayor’s Office of New York City is about to make it AGAINST THE LAW to photograph anything more than a snapshot without a permit and insurance. There’s a petition you can sign to try and stop this, and a rally today in Union Square.
This may not seem offensive to you, but think carefully about civil liberties, and it should start to scare you. Aside from creating even more financial and logistical barriers for artists, this makes it essentially illegal to document a protest, rally or demonstration, even if you’re not participating. So who bears witness? Not the citizens I guess. That’ll be against the law. But then, what does in matter when the city already video tapes everything you do.
Occasionally, some of us here at Desedo volunteer to help a group called 24 Hours for Darfur. It’s an interesting project and worth checking out and supporting.
A cause célèbre, the Darfur issue is commonplace in the news and on the Issues Circuit. The focus on the region and the genocide there has grown for some time, and it’s easily found in most “incredible indignation” conversations, alongside Iraq, the Bush Administration, Those People and for some of us, Doping in the Tour De France.
Because of this broad and common exposure, it’s taken on a familiar buzzword-numbness and abstraction, becoming just another part of the sea of information and ideas we dip in and out of every day. (For an unmatched exploration of this phenomenon see Regarding the Pain of Others.)
But I recently saw a film, The Devil Came On Horseback, which broke through that numbness and caused me to feel very deeply about Darfur, the people in it, what it means to know such things about such a place, what I can or can’t do to help or prevent or make any kind of change, what my duty is as a citizen, and on and on. Like most things, if you really sit down and think about it, there’s a lot to consider, and after watching the film, you’ll most-likely find yourself checking your own values and assumptions about a range of topics that reach all the way into your own home, head and heart.
What’s more, the main subject of the film besides Darfur, is former marine Brian Steidle, someone who demonstrates many qualities most of us would be very lucky to share. I’ll take him as an inspiration.
The film is well made: well shot, arranged and edited, has a clear focus and subject, is the definition of bearing witness, and has to be seen.
It’s showing this week at IFC.
What’s interesting?
The lightest points always grab our interest.
Movement grabs our interest.
Promise is interesting.
New is interesting.
Loud is interesting, as is weird.
We’re vying for interest. Your interest.
Info-sthetics manages understanding information, but not interest.
Entertainment manages interest, but often, not understanding.
Interest begets entertainment, understanding, motivation, and the flip reverse of this.
The things that are often the least interesting, if painted in the right manner, would grip us in blockbuster numbers, which would change the world.
Colors are interesting.
Texture is interesting.
Conflict and emotion are interesting.
Suffering? interesting.
Interest fuels emotion. More often, emotion fuels interest.
What do you want? What are you looking for? What’s in it, for you? What’s your bag? Deal? Situation?
What are you interested in?
Interesting: Speech.
Interesting: TED.
Interesting: Understanding.
Interesting: Love.
(p.s. since posting this entry, the cyclist pictured above tested positive for an homologous blood transfusion, meaning he was caught illegally transfusing somone else’s fresh lab-treated red-blood-cell-rich blood into his body in an effort to gain an unfair advantage over his competition, which advantage he did gain, winning 2 stages of the tour de france, even after a spectacular failure and appearance of irrecoverable weakness earlier in the race. interesting.)
The following appears in the the preface to Anne Carson’s new translation of four plays by Euripides.
“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of greif. . . . Perhaps you think this does not apply to you. Yet you recall the day your wife, driving you to your mother’s funeral, turned left instead of right at the intersection and you had to scream at her so loud other drivers turned to look. When you tore her head off and threw it out the window they nodded, changed gears, drove away.
“Grief and rage-you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you-may cleanse you of your darkness. do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much.”
And so on. Remarkable.