Des Temps

Author: raafi

  • The Marketplace of Ideas

    MHB
    JA, codename jah neezy

    Willingly or no, every artist who throws his hat in with another set of creatives becomes a part of a marketplace of ideas. The quality of that marketplace — the quality of ideas bandied about within it — will determine how much that artist can gain from his cohort. Here we find the basis of the classic fork: which has more value, the auteur or the collaboration? Film being, at its heart, a collaborative medium, there seems to be at every turn a marketplace among collaborators to be considered or skipped. Does one stop at the fruit vendor for a fresh grapefruit on the way home, or peruse the picked-over stack at the supermarket? Does one go fruitless, or make do with a can of Del Monte? Depending on the context, any one of these routes can lead to the proper nourishment of creativity.
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  • Ohio in the Crosshairs

    chilli-plant

    chilli-garage

    I managed to visit the town of Chillicothe, Ohio about eighteen months ago. The visit was part of a solitary three-day road trip that I made on the old post road, route 50, from Cincinnati to Washington, DC. In my dispatch, I focussed more on the relationship between photography and deserted places. I had not, in my short time there, spoken to a soul or had time to dig deeper into the causes behind what struck me as a forlorn, but visually arresting location. During the afternoon stroll I took through the town I found myself looking down the barrel of an idyllic tree-lined street; standing at its dead end I watched as two teen bikers approached. I knew that there would be time for one shot, one shot only.

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  • Mass Processor: Access Granted

    chicken or egg?

    Access is that most elusive quality that is granted to some who wield cameras. The best seem to command it of their subjects instantly, effortlessly. The rest of us work for every scrap we can get and hire the best camera people to buttress ourselves. Perhaps as a cheat, a short-circuit, we who shoot things with cameras for a living decide to use our friends as subjects from time to time. It is simply too enticing not to do.

    From Crackle: Dangerous Beats


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  • A Hiring Lesson

    it's all in the approach

    a state of mind, yes

    Our valentine’s day bash, Seven Minutes in Heaven, successfully in the books, the hour for reflection is upon us. Here at Desedo Films, these skinny tie times have demanded much of us and our closets (let alone our chiseled physiques), not least of which being that we have had to vacate the double Windsor in favor of the Shelby. Our most recent hire, Jared, takes to the instruction with all the aplomb of a true gentleman.

  • Voting With Our Eyes

    Pleasure to see you again as well, sir

    On the campaign trail today Hillary — does she need a last name at this point? — showed the first crack in her armor. While some in the media, and even a competitor in the race, seemed eager to brand the event as the candidate’s Muskie moment, the rare glimpse into the personality of a presidential hopeful offered much in just a single crack of the voice, a flushed pause. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has long maintained she is “the most famous person nobody knows,” yet the most instructive moment as to the inner thoughts of a person putting the whole of her being towards the goal governing this nation was parsed by the major media almost exclusively for its strategic value. As cinema, however, a more compelling moment of drama could not have been directed by Orson Welles.
     

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    We are a nation, more than ever, that votes with our eyes. And as television has become a part of the election process, our sophistication in analyzing the memes of people who stand before cameras has increased furiously. In Mrs. Clinton today, we were presented with the full case of the reasons behind her efforts, and not a few of the rationalizations she has had to make along the way to buttress them. Witness the contrast between two consecutive clauses:

    “We do it, each one of us, because we care about our country,” the justification, heartfelt, “but some of us are right and some of us are wrong,” the candidate, steely, and the unsaid unprovable: I am on the right side.
     

    dis/honest campaign?

    The previous night, the besmirched baseball star Roger Clemens took to 60 minutes to try to rescue a piece of his honor after being accused of steroid use by Major League Baseball’s official investigation of the drug scandal. Before the Rocket made his sit down with Mike Wallace, however, he made sure to address the American people directly via youtube. He followed up today by holding a press conference in which he played a secretly-made recording of a conversation between himself and his accuser and announced a lawsuit against him. The timing and filing of the lawsuit, however, inadvertently contradicted some of the claims Clemens made in the 60 minutes interview.

    In this case, we must also vote with our eyes. The plain-spoken effort of someone attempting to save his dignity is clear. The integrity with which he has chosen to pursue that end is clearly in doubt, and our decision, whether it is an honest or dishonest man attempting to save his name, is the one that will ultimately shape discourse on the topic. At this time in our media landscape, the lawsuit itself has become it’s own form of supporting argument in the court of public opinion.

    The ready availability of image-making tools has placed a premium on the ability to use them in compelling ways, but also on the need for emotionally compelling subjects. One suspects that the thirteen minutes of the Clemens interview will eventually find its way to the middle of the pack of Mike Wallace interviews, but that Mrs. Clinton’s personal account of reasons that she pursues high office will live on in political lore. For clip of the day, anyway, she gets my vote.

    —
    AP photos cribbed from the Times.

  • Tidings

    As our politicos yammer about a widening income gap, two America’s and such, I’d like to take this time of respite to remind our friends that good pop is a grand unifier if only for fleeting minutes. We should find further comfort in the ability of a gold chain to proffer authority upon its wearer, even if for the sake of comedy.
     
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    Run-DMC, Justin, rope chain or herringbone, and that’s the way you do it.

  • Black Nerds: a reprise

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    Editors Note: The below text is a follow-up to Raafi’s now-famous post about Black Nerds.
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    Over the past couple months I’ve had to do a lot of soul searching over exactly what the word “nerd” actually means and found myself in a sort of Potter Stewart limbo. After all, blogging about what it means to be a nerd isn’t very cool, but I digress. My fragmentary notion that the black nerd is an emerging presence in our culture that is under-recognized has provoked many sorts of reactions from the vituperative (I see you Tai) to the laudatory. In the process the link has found its way into blogs at USA Today, MIT, and Ebony/Jet. The New York Times called to say wassup and just this week I appeared coast-to-coast on Canadian radio. Did I mention that Clutch Magazine thinks I’m a black man to watch? (I’ll mention here, in passing, that the Beastie Boys once recorded a song entitled “Hey Ladies!”).

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