1) I mean, here's an example of deep space, as in: the opposite of the flat space that we talked about this week. But I felt like the converging line and the height of these tubes(?) was doing a couple of the more interesting things from our deep space discussion.
2) I think this picture is doing the thing that Jeff talked about where the sky can flatten rather than deepen a space by blanking out any real depth cues. Even the clouds don't really help to give the image more range.
3) This image is flat-ish because the warm colors of the flowers and the sunset in the painting sort of place a thing that is in the foreground (flowers) on the same visual plane as a thing that is in the background (painting).
4) This photo is flat because (a) it doesn't have any variation in "normal" size for comparison and (b) though there is sort of textural diffusion, the various textures don't really refer to one another or compete.
5) This photo turned out a lot deeper than what I was going for. I thought that the large swath of sky and smoggy haze would equal a flat space, but instead the line of street lights that gradually get smaller on the horizon -- and the cars doing the same thing -- creates a feeling of distance and width.
One of my most consuming childhood frustrations was being aware of my own childishness when I was maybe seven- or eight-years-old. My parents, other adults, older kids: they all knew things and could do things that I wasn’t able to—read books with long words, stay up late, get a job, etc.—and it annoyed me hugely and incessantly. In SPAGHETTIFLOWER, the camera is constantly moving—and the actress, Reese, is constantly trudging forward—until the very, very end when she comes up to a strange light and, surprised and maybe enraptured, she drops the load of spaghetti that she was so diligently carrying all this way. I hoped that the plodding dolly would convey a sense of routine and boredom, even as Reese continues diligently with the senseless task of carrying a pile of spaghetti down the street. The shots we cut between are repetitive and numbing after a while; I was interested in reproducing the feeling of childhood habits and monotony.Finally, I started the film mid-trudge, hoping to communicate a sense of endlessness to the kid’s journey: her frustrations but also her industriousness.
Moreover, another part of childhood that I tried to capture was the seemingly huge importance of trivial and trite events and responsibilities to my younger self. When I was little, there wasn’t technically anything really pressing about my life at all—going to elementary school, playing with my friends, making my bed, learning multiplication—but my thoughts and feelings about all these little, commonplace duties and occasions were still adult-sized. Everything felt extremely crucial, even though so much of what I cared about was silly and insignificant when I look back now. In my film, the two most vital elements of the scene that I needed to cut back and forth from were the spaghetti—which is something completely inconsequential that feels important to this little girl—and her trudging feet—which indicate the endlessness of her quest.
1) On one hand, I think this is a fairly strong photo. It's recognizable but feels a little bit seedy; the colors of the neon wash out the background and it's lazy and urban. But I think the biggest failing of this photo is that I literally didn't do anything new with it. This exact same shot has been replicated over and over with the exact same framing and colors and context; I just basically knew that I liked "that" photo and recaptured it.
2) I'm happy that this photo looks sort of extraterrestrial and bulbous and otherworldly, but it really isn't the photo that I thought I was going to take. I'm fairly new to using cameras, so I'm still looking at things with my physical human eye and saying 'That looks cool' and being disappointed or frustrated when a camera lens doesn't see the exact same thing that I do. My lack of experience with cameras means that I don't always know all of the limitations of what they can and can't do and thus don't know how to address or remedy these limitations and problems in my own work.
3) This rusty truck felt like an important thing to photograph because I'm interested in this bilaterality between function and deterioration. It feels significant to talk about the decomposition and degeneration of serviceable/practical institutions or resources (i.e. a vehicle/transportation) and this is my attempt to talk about this concept through a visual outlet rather than a verbal one.
4) Here's some general mud. The lines in the soft, wet mud and the hard, craggy gravel kind of argue with one another in a way that's sort of satisfying and crunchy. I don't know how intentional the framing or the composition of this picture is -- I mostly just tried to find an interesting tire track and snap that -- but I think that's fine because it looks okay.
5) This is obviously my lamest shot; it's some kind of glass (?) or something. Big sigh. I liked the texture and wanted to get a shot where you could feel it. I don't think I really got that, BUT I still like three-tone lights coming from different angles of the frame and how it's dark and bright at the same time which feels moody and stormy.
Jenny Holzer is an American, feminist Neo-conceptualist artist that uses text to comment on social flaws and political inconsistencies. She's kind of angry and vicious and I want to marry her. She wrote 15 "Inflammatory Essays" that tear apart everything. She rages about revolution and gender roles and conformity and societal institutions. She's so bored of being polite. Mainly, I see a lot of value in her attacks via language and information systems; she doesn't just want to make noise, she wants to communicate. Ugh, Jenny Holzer is so cool.
2) Chad VanGaalen
Chad VanGaalen is this Canadian musician with a weird, creaky voice that also draws and animates his own music videos with gooey, crawly, fluorescent dead things and monsters and flowers and cars; he is so, so, so cool. He makes me feel really excited and gross in the same way that a good horror movie with a lot of gore makes me feel. I want to listen to the album Soft Airplane forever until I die.
3) Vampire Movies, All
In July I watched a different vampire movie every single day. And then I kept watching more after July was over because I am into vampires. I like that everyone is trying to come up with new ways to reinvent old vampire lore. I like the blood and sex and theatrics. Whether it's an undead motorcycle gang or an ancient vamp that plays a 1974 Les Paul or an angsty teen in the Pacific Northwest whose skin glitters in the sun (!!) or a slick half-breed that kills off vampires in a leather trench coat: IT'S A LOT OF FUN.
4) Larry, or: Teenage Fangirls Everywhere
Larry is the couple name for Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, (beloved) members of the band One Direction who are speculated to be in love with one another. The thing that I'm so interested in is the power and ambition of teenage girls when it comes to fangirling. There's a really important episode of the podcast Reply All where Harry and Louis's relationship is put under the microscope and teenage girls from various Larry conspiracy Facebook pages and Youtube channels are interviewed about proof they've found that supports the Larry theory. The thing that's so critical about this podcast is that the hosts treat these young girls with nothing but confidence and appreciation. More than the Larry conspiracy, I totally dig teenage girls and the sheer size of their devotion, intensity, and ambition. I'm so into young girls liking stuff and believing in stuff and talking about it all in this big, global, positive way.
5) Weetzie Bat
Weetzie Bat is this sunny, sprawling, absurdist 1989 novel by Francesca Lia Block and I feel like it's this top secret bible for my entire life. I've told a lot of people that if they want to understand me -- Avery Jalaine Taylor -- they should just read Weetzie Bat and its sequel Witch Baby (which I'm even more obsessed with than the first book). The universe of Weetzie Bat is all cheerful and colorful and noisy, but also lonely and longing and restless, and full of real life issues like sexuality, substance abuse, heartbreak, death, disease, and divorce. I've read it four million times since I discovered it as this weird, furious, anxious, little 13-year-old who needed the kind of brutality and sugar that's inside this book. I think it's like 50% responsible for me becoming a film student.
6) Brandon Graham
Brandon Graham is my favorite cartoonist out of 10,000,000,000 cartoonists that I love. This guy is sexy. Everything he draws is soft and curvy and pinkish and full of girls and guns and monsters. He wrote/drew King City and Multiple Warheads and drew Prophet, all of which are so beautiful and bizarre that they make me feel like fainting. I'm obsessed with how simultaneously cute and CUTE and NASTY he can be. Just the basic aesthetic of his comics are so completely part of my brand, but then he also writes these silly and startling stories that are all sad and romantic and brave, and I love him.
7) Lester Bangs
Lester Bangs was a music journalist who died in 1982. (He was portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Cameron Crowe's 2000 Almost Famous, which is very good). I've been reading a lot of Bangs' work recently and not entirely because I always want to know his take on Iggy Pop or Captain Beefheart or whoever. Mostly, I'm obsessed with how fearless Bangs was and I kind of consult his old articles and essays like a weird, voodoo textbook to being brave in the 21st century. I mean, okay, he was kind of mean. He wasn't super forgiving and he was persnickety and fussy and sort of ruthless. But he was also bold and honest and gutsy and reasonable and tenacious: all things that I want to be, especially in the art that I make. He was this furious hurricane of a writer -- in the same Rolling Stone article he called Lou Reed "a prick and a jerkoff" but also said, "Lou, as you were courageous enough to be our mirror, so in turn we'll be your family." He had something to say about everything. The thing that I've written in literally every single journal that I've ever owned is: "Just for the record, I would like it known by anybody who cares that I don't think life is a perpetual dive...I suspect almost every day that I'm living for nothing, I get depressed and I feel self-destructive and a lot of the time I don't like myself. What's more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we've got and, simplistic as it may seem, it's a person's duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We're all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. ...I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes." Are you kidding me.
I've been systematically devouring the collected works of poet/essayist Anne Carson for the past year. She writes about being hungry and filthy and unbearable; sometimes reading her work feels like being flayed alive or lit on fire or being in church or reading my own diary. I showed her stuff to one of my friends who said she was "noxious" and "unreadable." So maybe the altar of Anne Carson isn't a popular place to worship, but I think I'm so attracted to the vinegar of her because it speaks to the vinegar of me. Her collection Red Doc is so outstanding -- so impossibly and unfeasibly visceral and savage and smart -- that I sometimes can't even read it because it's too good.
10) Howl's Moving Castle
I don't even think I need to explain this at all. It's just so sweet and beautiful and gentle and smart and pure-hearted that every time I watch it my stupid dumb heart grows a million sizes like the Grinch's and I write big weepy journal entires about how freaky and mushy I feel about it.
10.5) Literally Everybody and Everything
I'm such a complete and total sucker. I kind of went crazy tearing through this humongous roulette of everything that I love, trying to figure out whether to choose Neil Gaiman or opera music or fishnet tights or Malcom Liepke or Velvet Goldmine or Belle & Sebastian or Louie or videos of raccoons or The New Yorker or Margaret Atwood or The Talking Heads or John Kacere or Dorm Life or vegetarianism or America's Next Top Model or Mint Juleps lipscrub from Lush or flash-fiction or Thomas Pynchon or dogs or David Bowie or fleece-lined leggings or the Faroe Islands or the gurlesque movement or Andy Warhol or the collected works of Arthur Rimbaud or Kim Deal or new school supplies or Lagoon or The Social Network or #FreeTheNipple or Phillip Larkin or good hair days or Mark Rothko or The Virgin Suicides or Kurt Vonnegut to talk about in this blog post, because I'm basically dying to talk about everything to everyone all the time. Everything is so cool. Music is cool, literature is cool, cartoons are cool, animals are cool, TV is cool, etc., etc., etc. But I feel like the coolest thing ever is when someone I love comes over and talks to me about, like, what crappy YA novel that I just read or whether they've seen this new movie and if they think it sucked or not. Everybody is so, so good. Everybody is so interesting, and funny, and smart, and fun to eat ice cream with, and wonderful to take Sunday naps with. I'm such a giant sap, but I love everything so much that sometimes it feels like I'm going to explode just because of how big and terrible and consuming my love for everything and everyone is.
1) This is 100% a picture of the ceiling of Sodalicious at The Village, and a big part of the thing I was trying to capture was the incongruous feeling between the trendy, yuppie soda shop and this cold, industrial latticework of exposed pipes and architectural framework. Also, in the middle of all the straight lines and the symmetry of the hard black beams there are these shiny, space-y discoid things that throw off the equipoise and regularity of the layout. I hoped to capture a some of that subtle off-ness, that little bit of good kinesis and chaos up there on the ceiling at Sodalicious.
2) I'm interested in functional objects that are kind of in the off-season of being put to use. This is my shower drain after the shower hadn't been used for 24 hours; instead of being, I don't know, wet and soapy, it's dry, it serves no purpose unless there's water to go down it. All of that said, I didn't know how to take a photo that would convey that exact thing that I just described. I tried getting close enough that the dryness is evident, that this looks like a thing that's out of commission, at least for now. I still don't know if I got it.
3) My friend Matt got some after-market fireworks and we went off to some secret snowy place to shoot them off illegally. It was pitch black but the fireworks were so bright, making my friend look like some kind of hellbeast as he shot them off. I wanted to capture the good, lawless, fiery feeling of being something bright in the darkness. I wanted to get a shot that showed how violent and fierce it felt to be surrounded by sparks and smoke. I think I got something "cool" here, but not necessarily as incendiary and zoetic as the thing I was feeling in the moment, or the thing I wanted someone to feel when they looked at the photograph.
4) I was trying to somehow be even more of a so-called documentarian with this photo (even though I don't really understand my own logic here; every one of the photos I took this week was documenting something). I was trying to get an expansive look at a life (in this case: my life) by picking through the detritus of that life. In hindsight, I think this half-empty bathroom trashcan can only ever paint a narrow picture of someone's life. Here we maybe see that the person living here is female (shout out: Tampax) and blonde, and otherwise fairly indiscernible. I feel like this is a start or even just an idea that needs to be broader and more specific, but as is, it really isn't reaching enough to convey anything solid.
5) I don't remember what this is. Like, some kind of gas tank behind a restaurant or something. But that's a good part of the photo that I was trying to get. When I saw this weird, complex, metal thing, I thought: What is that? I wanted to get into the core of this random piece of machinery and show that I don't understand it. I wanted to show some unlabeled valves and switches, a mysterious tag that says "PRESSURE BUILDING," etc. I wanted to share both my interest and my bewilderment at this thing with whoever would see this picture. Like, we're all confused, but isn't it fun to look at?
