Remembering Spalding
reblogging sundancearchives:
“Today, June 5, would have been Spalding Gray’s 74th birthday. Known for his monologues–funny, sad, neurotic, and deeply human–his influence at Sundance Institute remains strong, even eleven years after his death.
“Spalding served as the emcee of the 1992 Sundance Film Festival’s award ceremony, the same year that the film version of his one-man show Monster in a Box, about his experience writing his first novel, had its US premiere at the Festival. The top photo, from a shoot by @thatrickmcginnis two years prior, captures Spalding with the enormous manuscript that was at least one of the monsters in his life. (Rick’s blog post about the shoot is itself a great portrait of Spalding’s persona.)
“Several other Festival films featured Spalding in some role; one that seems particularly fitting is Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon’s documentary Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud, in which Spalding read the writings of his fellow iconoclast. And Spalding’s influence extends to alumni, as well; he became friends with Steven Soderbergh after Soderbergh directed his 1996 film Gray’s Anatomy; Soderbergh would go on to direct a 2010 documentary about Spalding’s life titled And Everything is Going Fine.”
“Spalding continues to inspire new works for Sundance artists. Sheila Tousey’s Ghost Supper (Spalding Gray, You’re Invited, Too), supported at our 2014 Theatre Lab, is a solo show that explores how a woman comes to terms with her brother’s suicide through humor, grief, and storytelling. We think Spalding would have approved.”
Here is a clip from Spalding’s incredible 1987 film, Swimming to Cambodia.
June 03, 2015 at 17:05pm
We took a sneaky stop off at The Cottage on the way home from the hospital. I got a “non-malignant” diagnosis for my condition so was feeling pretty spritely, grateful. It’s times like that you look at the water and see every wave.
A sneaky stop at the Cottage on the way home yesterday.
A sneaky stop at the Cottage on the way home yesterday. June 04, 2015 at 04:46PM
Dino Death Match
National Geographic have uploaded an image gallery from one of the dinosaur shows we worked on. Some of the compositions on the stills they have chosen are a bit unusual, and they seem to have upload everything twice, but they still look marvellous to me.
Notes, writing, diagrams, and index symbols by Walter Benjamin
(source)
reblogging austinkleon:
Alan Wall’s reflections on Benjamin:
“Of all writers Benjamin was the most aware of the technologies that made writing possible. Although there had been ‘reservoir pens’ of one sort or another for centuries, the nineteenth century delivered the first true fountain pens (and a little later ball-point pens). These eliminated the need for the nib to be kept in close proximity to an inkpot, thus making the activity of writing more itinerant. And Benjamin was certainly an itinerant writer, writing in apartments, libraries, cafes and bars. He carried his pens and his notebooks around, as he often did copies of some of the images that most engaged him. He was a mobile intelligence unit moving through the streets of a city. ”
On his notation system for The Arcades Project:
“[Benjamin] attempted “to integrate the principle of the montage as an epistemological technique.” Color charts, schemata, and diagrams act as guiding principles to navigate the thicket of excerpts and quotations. Benjamin’s personal color-coding shows an attempt to make order within the vast constellation of his own notes—a tension between an impulse toward structure and the potential of the open field of his interests.”
#withdrawn
Against Design
“I recognize the value of building an established discipline, and of crafting a shared set of principles that define game design as a profession. But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.
And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve.”
Three Playlists for the End of English Spring
A Little Madness in the Spring is Wholesome even for the King
-Emily Dickinson
These three lists, on different platforms and all contain different tracks from each other, are a rough account of what I have been listening to for the last season. After November I didn’t listen to any music at all for a while, then coming back to it like someone who has been on holiday in the seventies and missed all the news in the meantime.
On listening again I personally sense a theme of renewal and progression, pretty obvious for the season I know, maybe you can feel that too.
(beware the 8tracks list autoplays on mobile)
Paul Greer 