Something that people were never going to pay for is not a loss.

Awwwe “Netflix may be losing $192M per month from piracy”.

Yeah you know, people share passwords, etc.

I had the response to this in my head, before reading in the thread :

“Something that people were never going to pay for is not a loss”.

Well, this is something I do understand. Do you?

I’m not attracted to Netflix or other faucets. I love movies though, and I torrent them a lot. And then if it’s good : I buy.

I don’t like the idea of faucets, in culture. I have CDs for music, thousands of books, and I own… walls of Blu-rays and DVDs. I’m old school, I’m sorry!

There are exceptions (I bought the Blu-ray box of Lady Bird, Manchester by the Sea and Phantom Thread, just because I loved the people around and read gorgeous reviews everywhere), otherwise : I buy when I watched and know it’s good.

It makes sense, right?

 

Thus, what I downloaded and disliked I, indeed, trash & never buy. It’s piracy, if you want, but it’s absolutely not a “loss” for a company.

Netflix could police, and surveil, and limit the passwords sharing, I’m sure. They don’t and shouldn’t because these “thieves” could… like what they see, and sign up later…

And as we talk about “studies”, some many others always showed this : the more people download (out of official faucets), the more they buy culture. It’s about curiosity, right?

I loved Stranger Things a lot, and I wanted to buy both seasons in Blu-ray. Nope : they don’t exist! You can buy the soundtrack, and stupid Pop Figures, that’s all (except for the Target limited edition – only in the USA). I understand it’s some kind of pressure to subscribe to Netflix, but, well, I don’t like faucets, I don’t like pressure either.

Something that people were never going to pay for is not a loss. Something that people want to pay for and doesn’t exist on purpose IS a loss.

What kind?

 

Thanks for reading!

Photography : Structures 2/2

René Char quote : “The words which will emerge know…

“The words which will emerge know of us what we ignore of them”

“Les mots qui vont surgir savent de nous ce que nous ignorons d’eux”

René Char

 

A few birds, for no reason

Photography : Structures 1/2

Pasternakisation

Communism in USSR : 1917 to 1991. It’s a long time for no-freedom! In these times, a single sentence could send you in Siberia for decades!

Many artists ran away, or became dissidents. There’s a wiki about them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_dissidents

Where I found that their possible paths were : “Exile, the mental hospital, or the labor camp”.

One safer way to resist, used by the people, was jokes and sarcasms. There are entire books of these! Talking, with persons well known, in kitchens, was the only way to express…

Today let’s talk about one Russian author : Pasternak, who, like Shostakovich, stayed in the country. Many others had to run away (Prokofiev, though he returned to Russia, Stravinsky, Nabokov).

There’s a study to make : How to stay under terrible political pressure and survive?

• Offer nothing to grip. Pasternak translated classical authors in Russian for years.
• Show your disagreement, but not enough to get shot.
• Disappear into nothingness, get yourself unnoticed.
• Hide.
• Get so famous that you become almost untouchable. Then you can act strongly… or more risky.

Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago and got it published in Italy (after USSR rejection), and got the Nobel Prize. He had to reject it but the international impact was huge…

I’m interested by this attitude, between escape/evasion and staying/death.

How to stand up, dangerous maybe but not enough to get killed. How to resist invisibly. How to have an impact, without getting arrested for it?

Thanks for reading!

 

Timid Blossoms Photography

27 Février 2019…

I live in the North of France. It should be freezing this time of the year. We often have snow until March!

These last days many records are broken. Therefore… plants and flowers are happy, they blossom in February like… three months too early.

Have a nice day!

From remaking “Suspiria”

Suspiria is a 1977 Italian horror film directed by Dario Argento. Today it’s a classic, grandiose and glossy. It’s also baroque in many ways : decors and colors are vibrant, the music is… not to be outdone.

Considered as a masterpiece, you have today to accept its… exaggerations. If your mind plays the game, it’s a very strange delight, full of great ideas.

When I heard about a remake I facepalmed, like many other movie lovers.

I’ll watch it soon but before that, I read interviews of other directors who reacted on the new Suspiria.

1. One saying it was stupid to remake it because the first movie was such a milestone.
2. Another one saying it was OK.
3. The director, saying it made something totally different, with, for example, colors “à la Fassbinder” (the first Suspiria also happened in Germany).

Tilda Swinton, actress in the new movie, told something very smart (which made me write this article) :

As the story of the first Suspiria is very light (“An American newcomer to a German ballet academy comes to realize that the school is a witches coven”), it can be used like an opera libretto.

I thought it was smart. I know dozens of “Manon Lescaut” or “La Bohème”, the Puccini opera, and each time it’s very interesting to see what they do with the characters, the decor…

What does Manon Lescaut want?

I don’t know I feel this is a good tool, but I need help. How can I formalize it?

• “When you think remaking something is useless, but you have to find a good angle to realize it’s not”?
• “When you have to think about something in a new way (borrowing from another field) to find a new interest in it”?
• “Once you have a core, a spirit, you can weave things around, it’ll be interesting to notice the differences”?
• “Working on decisions : let’s keep this from the original/let’s change that”?

Tell me?

What’s the point to remake something frame by frame (like they’ll do with The Lion King)?

Creators of Intensity

Just after the war, in Japan, some directors were auditioning actors for a movie.

Akira Kurosawa tells that when he saw Toshiro Mifune in the room, he asked him to act angry, or waiting. He was in an awe. He was so amazed by his “presence”…

They made SEVEN movies together, including Seven Samurai. He’s the guy with the sword, on the left :

We all know women who, when they enter a room, make the room quiet. It’s also a presence.

It can be linked to beauty, a certain beauty, but not necessarily. It’s about essence. A whole pack maybe : intelligence, elegance, a… way.

There’s something here, a Type. I call this type “creators of intensity”. I had a few friends like that in my life.

These persons have always incredible stories to tell. They meet incredible people, who make incredible things because of them.

Their presence make other change. They gave’em energy.

Stars (Monroe?), great managers (ever heard of Napoléon?), or writers, or scientists. They are surrounded with incredible stories.

I think they give energy, and inspirations. People around want to prove something, they stand up to be seen, maybe. They can act crazy, really crazy.

Then let’s hope they’re not drama kings and queens! Before chaos will swirl around them then, even deaths. Endlessly.

Thanks for reading!

Michal Sawtyruk, Polish digital artist

This guy is exhausting. There are so many digital artists, today it’s difficult to be stopped by a picture, the “Wait, what?” way. He has many skills : light, colors, composition. But most of all, he captures a mood. See :

https://michalsawtyruk.com/

https://www.deviantart.com/michalsawtyruk

https://www.artstation.com/michalsawtyruk

“Remarkable Pivots” : What can a place do in a movie?

I found a book about this subject and you know me and my habit to read the table of contents…

What can a place do in a movie?

Yes, it’s a decor, a setting, a scenery. And also :

1. A space to travel in.
2. A welcome cell.
3. A remarkable pivot.
4. A refuge.
5. A worksite.
6. An unshakeable fortification.
7. A temple. A forest. A waste ground.
8. An aseptic abode.
9. Underground…

A combination of many of them?

Voilà. My Structure/Tool here is this :

Take any subject : photography, poetry, blogging, teaching, marketing.

List elements. In a movie : story, actors, scenery, light, sound, music.

Select one element and focus on it, then extend. Give it a much bigger importance. The best importance. What do you find? What does it give and bring?

Teaching? Focus on the tables in your classroom. Poet? What paper will you use?

Have fun! I’m now digging in the history of cinema to find movies where the scenery is the star or a house a character….

E.E. Cummings : “the poem her belly marched through me as…

the poem her belly marched through me as
one army.   From her nostrils to her feet

she smelled of silence.   The inspired cleat

of her glad leg pulled into a sole mass
my separate lusts
her hair was like a gas
evil to feel.   Unwieldy….

the bloodbeat
in her fierce laziness tried to repeat
a trick of syncopation Europe has

—. One day i felt a mountain touch me where
I stood (maybe nine miles off).   It was spring

sun-stirring.   sweetly to the mangling air
muchness of buds mattered.   a valley spilled
its tickling river in my eyes,
the killed

world wriggled like a twitched string.

E.E. Cummings

How could we call the science of ways of studying a field?

Imagine you want to study a big subject, like Greek Mythology or History of Italy, or American Cinema…

It’s all a matter of choices. The vocabulary is interesting :

1. Boundaries : time, places, links with other fields.
2. Sources : books, dictionaries, articles, web.
3. Methodology : reading, writing, thinking, asking.
4. Guides : what is the first book, which will help you to decide others? Who would you ask advices?
5. Maps : bibliography, etc.

 

Mythology : What collection of myths would I study? How do I move into this? With scholars or popularizers? Greek only, or Roman too? Do I read novels? Do I link mythology with history (Troy)? Literature (Odyssey)? Do I care about legends, or characters? Do I visit the places in Greece? Do I study the influences of it in modern times? On what : words (names on places, months, characters), stories, art? Do I confront different schools of scholars?

How do I study the US Civil War? Men? Battles? Slavery? Chronology? Links with Europa? Maps?

How do I do?

• I like to have a dictionary
• Old history next to new history books
• A casualness (a freedom born from the fact I’m having pleasure, and I’m not writing a thesis)
• Zooming (studying precisely a single day, for example)
• Biographies or testimonies from people who were there
• Blogs
• Piling books and pecking into them

 

What did I study like that? Manet and Picasso, Brian de Palma and Akira Kurosawa, French Revolution, US Civil War, Napoléon, the battle of Stalingrad, the D-Day, Chekhov and Faulkner, Brahms, Bartok and Stravinsky, Puccini’s operas, strangeization in Arts,

And you?

How could we call the science of ways of studying a field?

Thanks for reading!

Pic : Tamas Deszo

Organic Storytelling?

Interviews between two movie directors are the best. It gets higher and it’s more interesting and complex, of course : pros are talking.

There’s an interview of Jeff Nichols (Shelter, Mud) by Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, The Age of Innocence), where they explain that they are both criticized because their movies “lack of intrigue”. In a way, like in the movies of the 70s, a more mature era…

It’s true that most movies are strongly driven by a scenario. Everything is well explained and you feel you hand held by the makers, who WANT you to think this and that, adding music where you have to cry, etc…

Nichols and Scorsese both use the same language : the narrative energy must be there of course, but it’s obtained by asking questions and answering them along the scenes, by the editing, the light, events, and their order. The movie moves forward without constantly telling you IT-IS-A-STORY. Nope : there are characters, and events (like in real life, right?) and hidden structures – of course.

The audience doesn’t “feel the author”. Their intelligence is active, and it can blossom in many ways. It gives a rhythm, a more organic one, a more unique way of unfolding the movie.

 

In French, we call Organic Farming : “L’agriculture Bio” – from biological.

The word “Organic” is interesting. It means :

1. Without chemical (for food)
2. Living organisms
3. Unified (an organic whole)
4. Flowing, natural (an organic development)

 

 

Therefore it’s a structure I love. We could call “Organic Storytelling”, in a movie, in an article, a book, a novel, a way of making things grow and evolve without the chemical (but effective, too) processes of tricks and pushes and manipulation.

 

There’s a good example in sex and pleasure : every evolved adult knows that if you can bring and orgasm to your partner (man or woman) in many ways, you can separate these two paths :

1. In the appropriate moment, stimulations and proper movements brings your lover a good orgasm. It’s as if you were pulling a bucket of pleasure with a string, from the top of the well…
2. And there’s this other way, where you partner gets so aroused that he/she becomes a sphere of electricity : anything can bring her/him to explosion. It’s as if the bucket of pleasure were levitating up in the well, delicately guided by you and your string, from the top of the well…

What’s the best?

 

 

Intention of effect kills effect, says the wise man, and I agree with the wise man.

With this “organic building” structure, what would be photography, painting, poetry, blogging, teaching? Do your audience really need to know what you want them to feel? Is it a good question? Hmmm need a conversation, I know…

Vocabulary as seeds : what is control here? What are propositions?

 

Thanks for reading!

The Misanthrope’s Priggish Typologies

[ Mode misanthrope ON ]

You shouldn’t call people “idiots”, but maybe say, more politely, that they “have an idiotic behavior”. OK.

In this blog I try to talk about how to deal with this “complicated thing” with intelligence, elegance and subtlety. Yeah, right…

…knowing it’s a little snobbish : one theory of the world of humans is that everybody makes stupid things all the time and that only some smart-arses think they are not part of the herd of idiots.

Feeling “we’re the resistance” in a mainstream idiotic civilization is priggish.

Out of the usual and clever ways of being zen, “watching calmly the chaos”, inner retreat and making little glimmers in the night, there are other stages reached because you can’t stand it anymore and you call the whole bunch of idiots : idiots. So there!

How to deal with these? Because you’re not allowed to punch people in the nose nor to spit in their eye, right?… You can (after facepalm and take a deep breath) :

1. Become sarcastic (loud or inner)
2. Burst into laughter (hysterically, if you need)
3. Enter fury (inner is better, or else it’s “gimme the rifle”)
4. Truss up your rage and make a typology of idiots
5. Drink.
6. Go away where you’re alone.

 

I love that because I just learned the world “truss” (ligoter, on dit en français), but is it truss or “truss up”?

A typology of idiots is absolutely vain – because you can’t fix stupid – but it’s funny and it keeps your furious energy busy and it could be useful to know your enemy better (if you agree that idiots are or can become enemies) – knowing that the best defense here is to run away.

Typology is a way to tame your emotions with reason. It’s a fight!

Unfocused, slow or boring persons, bad choosers or “I’m special”s, wrong understanders, “know it all”s and inconsistent brains – sorry for my grammar, I don’t have much time for these (though I could write a bit about this case : “I’m very special” – “No you’re not” would be my answer).

[ Mode misanthrope OFF ]

(breathing)

 

Alone with a book. Relief. Little wine maybe?

Have a nice day!

Baudelaire poem : “Be quiet and more discreet…

Meditation

Be quiet and more discreet, O my Grief.
You cried out for the Evening; even now it falls:
A gloomy atmosphere envelops the city,
Bringing peace to some, anxiety to others.

While the vulgar herd of mortals, under the scourge
Of Pleasure, that merciless torturer,
Goes to gather remorse in the servile festival,
My Grief, give me your hand; come this way

Far from them. See the dead years in old-fashioned gowns
Lean over the balconies of heaven;
Smiling Regret rise from the depths of the waters;

The dying Sun fall asleep beneath an arch, and
Listen, darling, to the soft footfalls of the Night
That trails off to the East like a long winding-sheet.

C. Baudelaire

 

I found many other translations on the web. You can have fun for a moment with the “translation choices” problem…

The title itself is a mess : Recueillement is contemplation, meditation, recollection, it contains “closure with myself alone” and remembrance, immobility.

“Sois sage, ô my douleur”. Douleur? It’s pain. But it can be, I agree, grief, or sorrow, or despair. But I’d say “pain”…

This poem is about a guy to try to calm down his pain, felt as a little person he knows very very well. Trying maybe to distract her, to… tame her?

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Recueillement

Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille.
Tu réclamais le Soir ; il descend ; le voici :
Une atmosphère obscure enveloppe la ville,
Aux uns portant la paix, aux autres le souci.

Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile,
Sous le fouet du Plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci,
Va cueillir des remords dans la fête servile,
Ma douleur, donne-moi la main ; viens par ici,

Loin d’eux. Vois se pencher les défuntes Années,
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées ;
Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant ;

Le Soleil moribond s’endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul traînant à l’Orient,
Entends, ma chère, entends la douce Nuit qui marche.

Giuseppe De Nittis, Italian painter

Giuseppe De Nittis (1846 – 1884) was an Italian painter. A typical case : he’s said the most important painter of his country in the whole XIXth Century, and well, I never heard his name before !

He has this “thing” I found with Sargent or other painters of this time : this feeling between “a good artist but lacks something” and “I can’t stop exploring it”. Gorgeous, hard to put in a style, good lights and colors. I found 7 pictures. There are some more on the web. This needs more exploration, don’t you think?

Have a nice week-end!

Complicated Enemies

In an interview of Jason Reitman, movie director, I read :

“I love when things become complicated. I have the impression that it’s in these moments that we’re alive the most”.

That’s understandable for a guy who write movies, right?

If things become complicated, it can become fun… until you’re too stressed, right?

But as you have a strong personality, complicated is good. Can be. Why?

1. Because you have to think.
2. Because it disturbs you.
3. Because you have to wait and watch.
4. Because you have to be clever.
5. Because you have to focus.
6. Because you have to prepare.
7. Because you have to foresee.
8. Because it increases possibilities.
9. Because you like to fight.
10. And what else?

 

One good example of things becoming complicated is when appears a close enemy.

The far enemy is another thing. Sometimes we even invent an enemy – it’s a good energy to use where you are.

 

What do you do in front of a close enemy (at work, in family, in a team, wherever). What’s your weapon? Smile? Diplomacy? Hierarchy? Mediator? Open battle? Lures and cunnings?

Whatever. It’s a good conversation subject.

1. Because you have to think.
2. Because it disturbs you.
3. Because you have to wait and watch.
4. Because you have to be clever.
5. Because you have to focus.
6. Because you have to prepare.
7. Because you have to foresee.
8. Because it increases possibilities.
9. Because you like to fight.
10. And what else?

 

See?

“I love when things become complicated. I have the impression that it’s in these moments that we’re alive the most”.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

The lost blankie rabbit 😥

from Instagram: http://bit.ly/2DwvU0S

Obliged Flowers

I know an horrible real story :

On Christmas morning, the 25th, near Orléans, France, a family awakes. The little kids want to go see under the Christmas tree to find out what Santa brought them!

They find the presents but the father is not in the house. They check the whole house. No dad. They found his body hanged to the tree, in the garden, in the mist of the morning. He committed suicide in the night.

Since I heard this story, which is a true one, I always think about these kids when it’s Christmas. About their devastation, and then, along life, about their mood when Christmas comes.

Less gross, I have this pattern in my head, always :

When it’s party day, I can’t not think about people who dislike it. Christmas can be a day of mourning or loneliness, and Saint Valentine’s day can be a terrible thing for people who are alone, who lost someone, because of bereavement or break-up.

There are also people who just dislike it. For years I hated the oceans of sweetness, colors and musics of Xmas… until I got my kids.

Personally, I won’t queue with my fiancée in restaurants among billions of other couples because “it’s the day I should do it”. I’ll cook, instead. We both prefer that. Nobody’s obliged, right? It’s just that I feel the business around…

I offer flowers in other days.

Thanks for reading!

The Happy Lonely Christmas Liars

Trente Parke

Cut flowers are dying.
A bunch of tulips is an agony.