I first saw this Dominique Christina performance of her poem, Karma, about five years back. Still powerful.
There
Posts that focus on and link to the doings of others.
302 PostsThe Seventh Art is an independently produced video magazine about cinema.
Lots of good stuff here, including interviews with Pedro Costa, Sean Baker, Terence Davies, David Gordon Greene, Claire Denis, the Safdie Brothers, Ruben Östlund, Lukas Moodysson, Paul Schrader, and Thomas Vinterberg.
Anecdote Alert!
There is also an interview with Toronto filmmaker Hugh Gibson, who I first met in 1993 when he was just 14 or 15 years old. His parents had sent him to Art & Trash Video, a shop I ran from '93 to '98. Because he was underage, his folks wrote him a letter saying that he could rent any film he wished, regardless of the film's rating. I put a note on his file and for the next five years we rented Hugh many of the world's greatest films. (A&T existed pre-DVD, so we were renting out VHS tapes and Laserdiscs.)
To my knowledge, we had the largest foreign film collection in Canada: 14,000 titles from 113 countries, all organized by Country > Director. Regular customers included Cinematheque Ontario, The Festival of Festivals (now called TIFF), and every filmmaker in the city worth their salt. It was a great place to work.
In 1994, we were also one of the first video stores in the world to have a website. I'd built it to help myself learn how to build websites. A few months earlier I'd also built [sic], which was one of the first-ever blogs. (The word blog would not be coined for another 3 years.) [sic] won Canadian Website of the Year, which got it some press, and that, along with the Art & Trash site, led to my phone ringing and me becoming one of the first professional web designers in the country. My clients included YTV, The Ontario Federation of Labour, Danko Jones, and General Motors. I would do this for a living for twelve years until returning to retail at Vortex.
The Art & Trash site contained a searchable database of our entire inventory and I distinctly remember having to repeatedly explain to people what a website was. It was these customer interactions that, in a circuitous way, would also lead to me being interrogated in my living room after midnight by CSIS a few years later, but that's another story altogether.
Years later I would run into Hugh at TIFF when he was introducing a film he hadn't directed. We caught up and met for dinner a few times — turns out he lived on Roncesvalles — but then I lost touch with him when he moved out of the neighborhood.
Here's the trailer for his stellar documentary, The Stairs:
Guitarist and songwriter Karl Hendricks died yesterday after a three-year battle with oral cancer. He was at home in Pittsburgh with his wife and daughters (wearing a Funkadelic t-shirt). He was 46.
I realize this news won't mean anything to most of you, but Hendricks was a unique guitarist, singer, and songwriter known primarily as the frontman of The Karl Hendricks Trio ("Fervently confessional indie rock in the vein of Superchunk, Pavement, and Dinosaur Jr. that combines spindly, wailing guitars with lyrics of heartbreak, dissonance, and disgust. " – Allmusic).
He also owned Pittsburgh record shop, Sound Cat.
I listened to him a bunch in the 90s and still think fondly of a a number of his tracks, like The Worst Coffee I've Ever Had from "Declare Your Weapons" or Somewhere a Weekend of Sin from "For a While It Was Funny".
His music may not be to your taste, but in my 20s I loved it. No one really wrote, sang, or played like Karl.
All his records are out of print, but you can purchase digital copies on the Merge Records' website.
Ripple is a short film by Connor Griffith. "It's a flurry of frame-by-frame images, mostly from Google Earth and Wikipedia, that depict the many developed and undeveloped surfaces on the planet." — the Atlantic
Every Single Word Spoken is a site highlighting the lack of diversity in films and shows. It does this with math.
For instance:
Total runtime of all Nancy Meyers-directed movies: 12 hours and 43 minutes.
Total run time of POC speaking in NM-directed movies: 5 minutes and 23 seconds.
That’s 0.705%.
Total POC characters: 30.
Total POC characters with no name: 20.
Total POC characters that work in the service industry/assistance: 19.
Total POC characters whose actions affect the storyline: 1.
Number of lines that one character has: 4
This is obviously the entry on director, Nancy Meyers, which has an accompanying video:
When Hollywood claims it doesn't have a diversity problem, it's hard to argue with numbers.
The site was created by actor Dylan Marron, author of Conversations With People Who Hate Me. Marron also has a TED Talk:
Outstanding short film, Noah, just won TIFF's short film competition. Well deserved. Terrifically done.
Did you know Werner Herzog made a short film about the dangers of texting while driving?
Jeffrey Conners' impressive collection of Bike Badges.
You can view the entire collection on his Flickr.
Numerous artists come together to animate an Shane Koyczan's fantastic performance of his anti-bullying poem, To This Day.
No. No, I haven't. Or, Yes, yes, I have?
Follow-up video from the kid all grown up: