Photo: Off-Duty Band
Author Archives: Cimaxion
Photo: Scared Pink
As I Am: A Film By Alan Spearman and Chris Dean
Emmy-winning filmmaker Alan Spearman made this film about the thoughts and observations of Chris Dean, a young man from Memphis who experienced death as a child when his heart stopped and then lost his father to a shooting. Dean and the filmmaker explore familiar places and find despair, hope and joy in their work. Sean's words are completely and profoundly engaged with the people he knows and loves. He wonders about how to pull one's self out of the seemingly insurmountable conditions of the streets. He talks about the requirement to find something you love and follow it. His writing is magnificent. The film is magnificent. The people in the film seem aware that someone special is in their midst, doing something that is about them and ultimately for them.
Wong Kar-Wai’s New Film: The Grandmasters
Here is a beautiful trailer for Hong Kong master filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai's upcoming film, The Grandmasters. It appears to be a poetic take on the enduring and often ridiculous Kung Fu fantasy epic with actors spiraling impossibly in mid-air ballets that give slow-motion footage a bad name. Levitating humans who kick each other in the throat with dainty pointy-toes are not really very interesting. Lets see what Mr. Kar-Wai offers here. The trailer has some gorgeous stuff in it. Hopefully the director will keep his actors relatively anchored.
Photography: Robert Herman
Robert Herman is a photographer from Brooklyn who captures light and personality on the streets of New York. His light, color and sense of time out of joint is just beautiful. The past seems to live inside the present in Herman's work. Here is street photography in the tradition of Robert Frank that captures the fleeting moments of beauty and natural expression from people who are just living the moments of their lives. It is photography that requires an almost magical and instantaneous ability to see what is about to happen and frame it on the fly while trusting in the world to give you a good image. I admire this kind of talent with a camera above all others. I think this is where genius with a camera really makes itself known.
Herman is preparing a book of photographs called The New Yorkers.
Here is the photographer's web site.
More about him at Lenscratch.
A Year in Full Colour – Moleskine Planners
Graphic motion designer Rogier Wieland made this clever stop-motion film with 382 Moleskine notebooks. In a time when crinkly, tearable, erasable, cuttable, burnable paper is becoming an object of desire, a film like this makes me want to ditch my iPad and head out into the world taking notes.