Joachim Hildebrand : Wild West

It’s a book. I smiled because of the photographer’s simple knack : showing a shock between the “wild west” and the… civilization. It shows something…

Tamed nature, right? Hmm… It at least show how Americans are conscientious.

 

 

Photography : Trees in sepia

France. 2009. Canon SX10.

 

 

Bookstopoo & Hapitoubimi : Chronicle 48

We’re at the beginning of a heatwave in France today. Sort of. Well, all my windows opened… as France fights Argentina for the football World Cup. I don’t need to watch it, because I can hear all the city screaming each time France scores a goal. 4-2 we won!

______

How to tell about something which happened only one time, yet comes within the scope of a series?

______

“How to catch what moves, generates, leaks, becomes, invents, slips, spurges… instead of  contemplating what we think is fixe, immuable, eternal, stable, immobile?”

______

Bookstopoo should be the title of a book I’ll write one day : a LIST of good books you should have in your toilets (why in the world do you call this “restroom”??).

______

Obedient to rules, no one can invent.

______

You remember the past. The good things or the bad things?

______

It’s called Hapitoubimi. What kind of animal is this?

______

I learned about this idiom, “dodge a bullet“, it’s great!

Urban Dictionary says “If someone has dodged a bullet, they have successfully avoided a very serious problem.”, that makes sense, thought I wonder, as an ESL, what is the color of it : is it by cowardice or because you’re smart? Is it effectiveness and skillfulness, or is it, when you dodge a bullet, because you’re a lazy coward? When do you use it?

Well, I ask this because I understood also that “dodge” is something which is simply “not right”, and I found many sarcastic things about Dodge City. I also remember in Deliverance (the movie) the talking about “an old Dodge” – sounded “old wreck”.

Other words I discovered with pleasure :

1. Honeycomb
2. Tit for tat
3. Betwixt

 

Have a nice day!

 

 

 

Blogging as Sowscattering Disorders

Well, it’s NOT about adding untidiness to the world – which is enough a mess.

But I ask myself about how to infiltrate a knowledge field, intellects and minds, to sow something, maybe to add seeds to this ground, to see what could blossom, what straight paths you could bend & twist… and then walk onto.

Thus it’s not about milestones, importance and revolutions.

Is it possible to think about this with the idea of blogging?

Imagine you want to blog about food, about fashion. You’d better be good at it, because there are always dozens of thousands of blogs about these. You could also, yes, infiltrate another domain… but with YOUR talents.You’re a food lover? Blog about programming (with your language).

Let’s pull strings :

1. Maybe you need to be original. Study a mega-niche, or a rare combination : “crossing Norway with my two cats to try restaurants”, or “purple winter dresses in South Dakota”.
2. Maybe you can arrange some concepts, put them together to create sparks, or to show an unexpected light… or to create monsters.
3. Invent a new machine from disparate tools and pieces.
4. Displace things and ideas, make them move, bend them.
5. Use an unappropriate discipline to study another. Study what’s in your plate as a colorist. Or bags trends with… what?
6. Focus on who are “positive nuisances”.
7. Find your own ideas studying something the wrong way.
8. Find empty boxes, find shortages, find imperfections. Then action.
9. Play. Look for processes. Twist them.
10. Take ideas, make’m jump on your own sieve.
11. Watch words. Jargon. Demolish. Or add squibs in it. Your squibs.
12. Accept drifts. Watch around.
13. Invent indeterminations. Use them randomly, unpredictably.
14. Make things proliferate. Explore. Play.
15. Make your readers wonder. Make your readers smile. Make your readers wanting to know more. Make your readers more curious.
16. Breathe. Watch appearances, meetings, plugs and unfoldings.

The point is multiple and unstable. Get your own ideas. Distribute seeds for who is able to see. Open new roads, and why not, get new followers!

Most advanced, yes acceptable.

Thanks for reading!

Finder Keeper Sharer, “What is my blog about?”

In France we have the beaufs. What is it in your country?

The French “beauf” is vulgar, uneducated and narrow-minded (I also found “blinkered”, what’s the difference?). The English wiki adds : “vulgar, unintelligent, arrogant, uncaring, misogynistic”.

But it’s not your redneck, it’s different. Well, it’s maybe the French version, after all…

In France, le “beauf” has a big beer-belly, a moustache, he never reads, and thinks with clichés, popular believes.

It comes from Cabu, a cartoonist from Charlie Hebdo who has been assassinated in the 2015 shooting attack. It comes from an abbreviation of “beau-frère” (brother-in-law).

Here he are two types of beaufs. PSG comes from the Paris soccer team, and Kro is the worst beer ever. The second type of beauf is terrible (probably worst). I let you guess.

Well, just FYI.

Have a nice day!

 

 

:

 

 

Eye Tracking

We all are surrounded with photos, even more than moving images : you have pictures everywhere.

Therefore some artists in photography wonder how to make you watch a picture more than for two seconds.

It’s a whole field to study (I’d like to!).

Many devices are now capable of tracking how your eyes move over a picture.

I’ve seen it in Paris a few years ago. I watched a picture, then the computer showed me the “path of my look”. Seeing elements of the photography in a certain order, then fastly checking things, looking for other things. It was great!

Computers know how you read (1), or how you watch a web page (2).

 

 

 

 

The funny thing in that it depends on many things, culture, age, and… sex (men, obviously, watch differently, right?).

I also heard that advertisers have a big problem : the readers’ brain is VERY accurate in the process of NON WATCHING ads.

I found it hilarious, and that made my day.

 

 

Men (left image) don’t look at the shoes, hmm?

 

 

Thanks for reading!

The Return of the Vinyl

ONE

I’m 52 and therefore I grew up with vinyls, LPs, EPs and singles.

I had dozens and dozens LPs. I was listening to music daily. It’s strongly associated in my head with the pleasure of music discoveries.

I remember Talking Heads and King Crimson, Mike Oldfield and Yes, second hand’s Genesis’ Trick of the Tail, the first time I listened to Killing Fields, or Soil Festivities and Mask (Vangelis), or EPs of Kate Bush, Bryan Ferry, Propaganda or Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I remember the singles : AC-DC (Hell’s Bells), Stranglers (Golden Brown), Buggles (Video Killed), The Police (Spirits in the Material World), etc…

TWO

I remember, in the end of the eighties, the excitation triggered in music lovers : Compact Disc! A better sound, no more surface noises and clicks and pops, no need to clean them, no needle to brush…

I bought my first one in Germany. It was “the first CD not available in Vinyl” : Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. And for good reason : it was one single track, one hour long!

Since then I never bought any vinyl anymore. Indeed, vinyl became boring for everyone, with all it’s flaws, the dust everywhere, the risky exercise which it to change track (a wrong move and you have a scratch).

I love classical music. 70 mn on a CD is perfect. And a great sound, and… etc. The only regret we all had was… the sleeves.

THREE

I hear today about “the return of vinyl”.

Vinyls are beautiful. The sleeves are taller and gorgeous! I know that. And it’s a pleasure to “own” your LP (and the sound IS better than any streaming shit, yep).

I have to say that the main asset of this music listening process is you go back to the idea of listening an “album”, a whole suite of tracks. There’s no “next track” on a turntable!

FOUR

This, of course, triggers facepalms for many music lovers with a little experience. The “warmer sound”? It’s noisy, with clicks and pops, and it’s dirty all the time, and more :

Digital does not really exist…

Analog or digital, it’s just a “recording thing”. In the end : the speaker are vibrating (analog), the air is moving (analog) and your eardrum TOO.

The “warmer and richer” vinyl sound does not even exist. But I do understand one has the idea of it. “Warmer”. Yeah yeah yeah. I suppose that when you grew up with MP3, you find it warmer. Vinyl listening becomes like eating roasted chicken with french fries, plenty of sauce and onions, and carrots and pees, after the MP3 diet : crispbread with nothing on it.

Hi-Fi meant “High Fidelity” – What about the sound quality, now?

 

“The LP’s drawbacks include surface noise, less resolution due to a lower Signal to Noise ratio and dynamic range, stereo crosstalk, tracking error, pitch variations and greater sensitivity to handling”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording

 

FIVE

The return of the vinyl is not real. The market climbs a little, because it’s trendy. I was a vinylseller in 1989, and I can tell you it was fucking something else!

 

SIX

…says the contrary, what I called my Abba shock :

One day I downloaded a HUGE Flac archive of “Abba 24Bit Vinyl Pack” (each album weighed almost a gigabyte – a CD is mastered in 16 Bits, normally). So I began to listen on my expensive Sennheiser headphones a luxurious lossless compression of Vinyl music, digitalized at an splendid rate…. with a slight wow and flutter, some clicks and pops too, and Oh. My. God. It was fantastic!

What’s that paradox? Digitalized vinyl at high rate, without compression (Flac instead of Mp3) gave me an ears orgasm. Nailed.

OK. you won. I give up.

 

Have a nice day!

 

 

 

 

Best Documentaries about Cinema, Actors and Film Making

I can’t wait to watch the HBO Documentary about S. Spielberg. This impatience made me thought about great other documentaries about cinema I watched before.

Here a some you could stream one day. I know them, they’re GOOD :

• Stanley Kubrick, A Life in Picture (awesome)
• Hearts of Darkness : A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) (flabbergasting)
• The Kid Stays in the Picture (about a Paramount producer)
• Listen to me Marlon (built around the voice of Marlon Brando)
• The Cutting Edge – The Magic of Movie Editing (I ADORED this one)
• Cameraman : The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
• Fellini : I’m a big liar
• Dangerous Days : Making Blade Runner (very, very good)
• A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies
• Room 237 (really fascinating theories about The Shining)
• The Beast Within : The Making of ‘Alien’

I googled to find more docs with good notes (or on “every” list), I will check soon :

• Side by Side (digital or not?)
• Visions of Light (about Photography in movies)
• Directed by John Ford
• American Masters Episode: Woody Allen (Sydney Lumet, too, I think)
• Burden of Dreams (Herzog & Kinski in the forest)
• Final Cut: The Making of Heaven’s Gate and the Unmaking of a Studio
• Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
• No Subtitles Necessary : Laszlo & Vilmos
• Billy Wilder : confessions
• Jodorowsky’s Dune
• Lost in La Mancha
• That Moment : Magnolia Diary
• Cinematographer Style
• The Godfather Family : A Look Inside
• Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau

 

Have fun!

JP

 

Where to apply modernity?

Reading my Jeff Wall book I found this little paragraph about certain movie directors who were modern (and even avant-gardist) BUT in a tradictionnal form.

Fellini, Bergman, Rohmer, Bunuel, Eustache or Fassbinder, making movies with this idea :

Putting modernity pressure not on the form itself, but elsewhere, on elements of the classic form.

Each example is very clear, when opposed to Jean-Luc Godard, who killed, enstranged, deformed, distorded, dented the classical forms of movies : experiences on the sound, narration, superposition, edition.

“Rule Breaking Films” (you can YouTube this) are interesting ALSO to find out (and list and sort) where modernity has been applied.

Kaleidocopic (Persona), surreal/casual (8 1/2), jazzyist jumcuts (A bout de Souffle), no sets (Dogville), refusing artificial dramas (Patterson), watching the camera (Pierrot le Fou, Monica, Do the right Thing) : you’ll find your own examples with Google.

 

Anyway, what’s interesting me here is this tool :

Apply modernity, break some rules, push avant-garde elements. OK, but what if on some places only, letting the rest totatlly “normal”?

Where? Poetry? Photography? What’s your field? How will you choose your “element”?

 

Thanks for reading!

JP

Tropes & Clichés and other blocks of storytelling

I write this because I believe that English uses the word “trope” in a different way than in French. It’s a rare word here, and I had to check in dictionaries to understand it.

I hear that in the world of telling stories, a trope is like a “little structure”, linked to other words : conventions, stereotypes, clichés, but also “twists and turns”.

1. Big tropes, archetypes with capitals like : The Chosen One. The Artifact of Power. The Damsel in Distress. The Knight in Shining Armor.
2. Typical narrative structures like : enemies to lovers, tough guy secretly sensitive, forbidden love,
3. Situations or plot elements : “there’s only one bed”

 

It leads to many questions & paths :

• Tropes by categories (ex : Fantasy Tropes : quest, dark lord, hero, good vs evil, blah blah)
• Clichés are boring, aren’t tropes boring?
• New tropes?
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clich%C3%A9 Clichés are irritating, right?
• Platitudes. Stereotypes.
• Tropes are good because familiarity.
• When tropes are predictable to the point of boredom.
• Are predictable tropes clichés?
• Tropes as metaphors.

 

Well, it’s too big. Creativity and storytelling, finding the frontier between good tropes and boring ones, etc. I need a book. You have an idea?

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : _bodylanguage_

 

 

A little snow time for you…

It is possible, in the end of June, that you’re too hot these days. Here a few photos I took in December 2009 in the North of France. For your pleasure. You’re welcome.

Have a nice day!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playmobil’s Life

André Breton Poem : “At ten in the evening…

Woman in the night

At ten in the evening all the women in one… race to their rendez-vous in open country, at sea, in town.
It is she who trumps the funfair bull’s-eyes and dew-sieves of the woods.
Above the roofs the queen of cormorants, wasp sting at hour-glass level, tolls with her beak the trussed sack of portents spattering between the promises.

André Breton

Photo : Ernst Haas

 

Femme dans la nuit

A dix heures du soir toutes les femmes en une courent au rendez-vous en rase campagne, sur mer, dans les villes.
C’est elle qui fait la vole des cartons de la fête et des tamis de rosée dans les bois.
Par dessus les toits la reine des cormorans, le point de guêpe au niveau du sablier, fait tinter de son bec le sac des présages fermé giclant entre les promesses.

Instant Kharma (and books)

This morning I decided to offer a dozen books to the free-books-box of the TGV train station of Lille.

With a little advance on my schedule I went into a second hand bookstore where I found in an awe a great book about one of the most interesting photographer of today : Jeff Wall.

A pearl! Thank you, my good Norwegian Angel!

Exquisite Discomforts

In an article about Jean de la Fontaine, Paul Valéry floods you with great little ideas. Here are some, for your thinking pleasure :

 

Nonchalance carefully considered. Facility : the apogee of art

Easiness from experience? Or as a will, a process? Not engaging all strengths?

Exquisite Discomforts

Inventing limits? Effort roads? Fighting against a delightful memory? An intelligent enemy?

To change what happens into what stays

Capturing? Drawing? Inspiration? Creativity?

So many advantages of which you hardly see the shadows

Lured? Trap? Stupidity?

Some commandments who seems so futile

Thinking out of the box and contempting what we see? Godless spirit watching religion?

To think an instinct of the artificial exists

 

The obedience of clay

 

Never a finding – or an assembly of findings – could establish a work

 

When all that counts is well veiled

 

 

What do expand here? You have two hours!

Thanks for reading!

JP

 

Photo : Mauro Fiorese

 

Werner Bischof, Swiss photographer

Werner Bischof (1916-1954) was one of the first Magnum Photos member.

Harmony. Moderation. A humanist. The most “awwee” photographer I know.

 

Have a nice day!

JP

“Taken for granted” questioning

In any discipline, “Taken for granted” questioning is a funny tool.

It’s a pretty serious game, too.

1. To play it, watch your “territory” and list everything about it.
2. Then check what’s taken for granted, even the obvious.
3. Then question everything with “What if I destroy one element, or reverse it?”.

 

An example. Theater, a play.

Actors are on the scene, playing as if they were someone else, telling a learned-by-heart text written by someone, they rehearsed before to make the whole thing fluent, there’s a red curtain, the lights are off during the play, the audience is sitting in aligned chairs and they listen, there’s maybe an intermission, but the play is “played” in one piece…

 

Now for each element, say : NO. Or “let’s do the contrary” :

• Put the audience on stage and actors in the room.
• Mix them up.
• Let the audience stand up.
• Divide the play into 5 minutes parts.
• Don’t switch off the lights.
• Make actors talk to the public.
• Ask the public things.
• Change the text during the play.
• Use two stages or more.
• Show the rehearsals.

Well, etc. For each line, pull the string, see what comes to you. Personally, I love the “two stages” idea. Interactions…

 

Now do it with : marriage, base ball, religion, politics, blogging, teaching, poetry, sex, photography. Anything can be questioned, especially :

What’s taken for granted?

What if you destroy/invert a line? Why would you do that? Exploration, invention?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Instagram : mariakdolores

Films with gathered disillusioned friends?

Films with gathered disillusioned friends?
(The Big Chill & Peter’s Friends to begin)

They were friends, they gather, they talk. Things burst. Disillusions. Memories. Mistakes. It’s a good subject, and I’d like to study the way writers treat this matter. Thus :

I had the idea to ask this question on a Facebook group page (“Cinema, mon amour”) then in another one (“The Empire Magazine Group”) and got a few answers. I present here the greatest ones (more than 7/10 on IMDB) :

 

The Big Chill (1983) : A group of seven former college friends gather for a weekend reunion at a South Carolina winter house after the funeral of one of their friends.

We All Loved Each Other So Much (1974) : Gianni, Nicola and Antonio become close friends in 1944 while fighting the Nazis. After the end of the war, full of illusions, they settle down. The movie is a the story of the life of these three idealists and how they deal with the inevitable disillusionments of life.

Peter’s Friends (1992) : Six former college friends, with two new friends, gather for a New Year’s Eve weekend reunion at a large English countryside manor after ten years to reminisce about the good times now long gone.

Career Girls (1997) : 2 young women reunite and rekindle their friendship after having said goodbye at their college graduation, six years earlier.

Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979) : Seven former college friends, along with a few new friends, gather for a weekend reunion at a summer house in New Hampshire to reminisce about the good old days, when they got arrested on the way to a protest in Washington, DC.

84 Charing Cross Road (1987) : True story of a transatlantic business correspondence about used books that developed into a close friendship.

We have many in France :

Le péril jeune (1994) : Ten years after their Upper Sixth, Bruno, Momo, Leon and Alain meet together in the waiting room of a maternity hospital. The father of the awaited baby is Tomasi, their best friend at that time, who died one month before due to an overdose. They remember their teenage, their laughs, their dreams, their stupid pranks… Through the pasts of the five main characters, a description of the French youth in the middle of the seventies.

Les petits mouchoirs (2010) : A near-fatal accident leaves one friend in the hospital while the rest go on their annual vacation. But their secrets and personal grief threaten to drive them apart.

Mes meilleurs copains (1989) : They are the best friends of the world. Five friends who shared everything: may 68, hippies years, the rock and their love for Bernadette. This Bernadette has left them to become a rock-star, and is back 15 years later for a weekend. Jean-Marie Poire describes with this movie the portrait of a generation with lots of humor served by excelent actors.

La quarantaine (1982)

 

Thanks for reading!

Roger Ebert’s quote : “”A lifestyle where smart people…”

“A lifestyle where smart people are required to lead their lives according to dumb rules”

Roger Ebert

 

Where? Who? When? Why?

Photo : Barbara Morgan

 

Teresa of Avila quote : “There are more tears shed…

“There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers”

Tereza of Avila