Far Country Tell : the wit of jesus and orpheus

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Andrew Wyeth 1917-2009

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It has been almost three months . . . the music video is finally complete. Here is an exclusive (low-rez) look:



Books from Reno Lauro on Vimeo.

music video: behind the scenes

A short behind the scenes video is now available for the Feeding 5000 music video Books:

Music video: shoot complete

The music video shoot came to a close Sunday . . . I probably lost about 3 months off my life span but all in all everything went well. It's nice to see footage and think: "shit, that's exactly the way I wanted those shots to look!"

Some stuff exceeded expectation . . . thanks to the lovely Cristina Lewis for her participation in the video.

The Arri 16mm worked like a champ (thanks dad for keeping that ship together throughout the shoot!)

The band brought a photographer in to take photos for the DVD cover. Until i get some pics of the video up you can get a taste of the set we built (thanks to Mark Spacek for hitting the beach and helping bring my vision to reality!)

you can see the rest of the photos by Eric Doggett here:

music video

On the heals of the first performance of a play I co-wrote about JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis I'm gearing up to shoot a music video for a local band here in Austin -- Feeding 5000

All in all the next two months will be seriously busy but I'm pretty excited because 1) I'm actually getting paid to shoot something and 2) I get to try out a new piece of equipment that I recently acquired:

Arri 16mm BL

In a world going digital I've been trying to incorporate more and more film stock into my work . . . The texture is irreplacable.  I'll have screen shots to post in several weeks.

CGI TV

Getty images

Not everything you saw on TV during the Olympic opening ceremonies actually happened . . . and I'm not talking about the guy 'flying' to light the torch. Apparently it has been revealed that there was extensive use of 'live' CGI to enhance the fireworks display. (read report here) (update: see original SkyNews report here)

Now Chris Chase at Yahoo Sports says "The Opening Ceremony is, at its core, just one big performance. And isn't it accepted that some things might not be legit at a performance?  The final torch bearer wasn't actually running around the top of the stadium, does the fact that everyone could figure that out make it any less impressive? It might have been unnecessarily deceptive, but the firework-faking isn't really that big of a deal."

Is that really the case? Is the deception of billions of people not that big of a deal? It may not be --and there in lies the rub.

My first inclination is to say that there really is no comparison between the gravity defying man and the fireworks. We know that the man flying is performance because it breaks the laws of everyday existence and is presented as such . . .

but the 'coverage' of the fireworks display is more in the genre of 'photo journalism'. It is televised reporting of an event . . . television is supposed to allow millions (billions!) of people to participate --as though they were there-- in a geographically and temporally localized event.

In fact, however, we never experience those events . . . we constantly go beyond the event.

We enter the world of hyperreality.

The point that Chris Chase of Yahoo Sports is attempting to make (in a flippant throw away manner) is that situation, audience expectation and 'genre' will dictate the limits of 'reality manipulation' via television. The opening ceremony of the Olympics is in the same genre as David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear or David Blane levitating whereas the coverage of the war in Iraq and the Democratic/Republican National Convention are in a more authentic genre or television journalism.

Indeed, this is not the case! The DNCC has already hired 'seasoned production and design teams' to produce the convention for television. (see the report here) Is this not in the genre of performance? This is 'reality tv' and its actors have been writing the book for the new New York Reality TV School for decades now. (see the Nightline report here)

But certainly this osmotic membrane that is television has no effect of how we live in the everyday world!?

I remember how utterly 'fake' the Lunar Earthrise seemed to me when the footage came back from the Japanese Kaguya satellite. (see the Earthrise here) Does it really matter that we see what they said we are seeing? It looks like a movie or a video game. Kaguya's hi-def cameras captured what Baudrillard calls 'The Pornography of the Real' . . . Like the porno --which grants us a view of something that we would never see but wish it would look like in an attempt to remind us of what we think we experienced or never had but always wanted to-- maybe all that matters is that television shows us what we think something should look like.

This the genre of performance has such a power over our lives it even has had an effect on the U.S. torture policy. (see Newsweek report here)

Dahlia Lithwick says, "According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on "24" organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show"reflects real life."

what is going on here?

So, in hyperreality, not only are we constantly going beyond the event . . . but in our attempts to capture 'reality' the event is slowly becoming our 'reality'. More importantly and precisely, media is affecting our bodies and the way we move through our world and daily concerns.

The tangled webs we weave . . .

what will we do?

***

Update:

MSNBC has a new report about the CGI fireworks citing British Sky News (source)

"Even those at the city’s new Bird’s Nest National Stadium, where the Olympics are being held, viewed the fake footage from their seats as they watched on the stadium’s giant television screens, said Britain’s Sky News, in a story, “Olympic Fireworks Faked for TV.”

“Stunned viewers thought they were watching the string of fireworks filmed from above by a helicopter,” said SkyNews.com. “ But in reality they were watching a 3-D graphics sequence that took almost a year to produce.”

mythic walks and spiders

Very cool news out of Oxford, England tonight.

Addison's Walk: A Mythic Conversation, a play I co-wrote with a friend from St. Andrews, was warmly received by attendees of the 2008 C.S. Lewis Conference.

The play imagines the night of September 19th, 1931 when C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson spent the evening debating the relationship between myth and the Christian faith. [See a pic of Addison's Walk here!] No one really knows what was said that night but that conversation led to Tolkien's poem (written as a final response to Lewis on the matter) Mythopoeia and to C.S. Lewis becoming the staunch poster boy for hip Protestant intellectual types (since up to that point Lewis was, a best, a generic theist).

For anyone interested in Tolkien's work, Mythopoeia is vitally important to understanding Tolkien. The poem itself contains everything one needs to know about Tolkien's 'doctrine' of sub-creation.

There's already talk of a 'traveling show' being produced which would take the play (and a panel discussion) to colleges around the U.S. I'm really excited about this because it brings me one step closer to my hope of writing and directing a Tolkien biopic. Let's see what happens . . .

***

On another front. On August 1st  The Mirror Crack'd: Fear and Horror in JRR Tolkien's Major Works will be available for purchase from Amazon and the Cambridge Scholars Press site. . . well, just Amazon.co.uk for now. The cool thing is that you will find my essay Of Spiders and (the Medieval Aesthetics of) Light: Hope and Action in the Horrors of Shelob's Lair on chapter 3.

You can see a sample PDF of the book here:

Download the_mirror_crackd_sample.pdf

restore vision . . .

When I think of Imaginative Guerrilla Resistance I not only think of events that alter human activity but events that help us see the with new eyes . . . it makes our stale settings fresh again . . . to see things as they are or were meant to see them.

I first heard about Improv Everywhere in 2003. I can't quite remember what I was listening to, This American Life i think, but i remember being blown away by the possibilities of it all. Art that ruptures our everyday space, our absorption in the temporal. In many ways their guerrilla art has been a major source of inspiration for my dissertation work.

Specifically, what I think is their greatest mission . . . The Moebius.

resist . . .

over the course of my dissertation I have been repeatedly asked, "what does imaginative guerrilla resistance look like?". As i am adding the final touches to my work i've come to realize that first and foremost imaginative guerrilla resistance is an activity . . .

Behold, the world of Guerrilla Gardening . . .