Those nice fellas over at Get Free Movement posted this Remix Project Mixtape on their blog and it’s been powering me through my morning work. Just the right balance of smoothness and motivation. Legal, and free far as I know.
22-track jazz inspired covers of popular hip hop songs.
This Monday’s shout out goes to the Philadelphia Medical Film Symposium, which is coming up in a few weeks.
The Philadelphia Medical Film Symposium, January 20-23rd
These folks have been collecting an amazing array of old medical archival films and experimental film reworking of them. You can register for the symposium on their website.
Here’s a glimpse of what they are offering:
“The Medical Film Symposium will examine—through screenings, presentations and papers—the relationship between moving images and medical science. Medical films comprised one of the earliest film genres, but the vast majority of these films are unseen and unknown today. The symposium will examine various categories of medical films: actualities and documentations of medical procedures, training films for health professionals, hygiene tutorials and contemporary medical imaging.”
Symposium Schedule
January 20-23, 2010
* Wednesday, 7:00pm: Screening of A Man to Remember at International House (presented by Nico de Klerk of the Nederlands Filmmuseum) [info]
Preceded by opening of Radiologic Images exhibit (begins at 6:00pm)
* Thursday, 7:00pm: Film screening at International House (curated by Barbara Hammer) [info]
* Friday, 4:00-6:00pm: Tour of Philadelphia’s medical history. Requires separate registration. More information here
* Friday, 7:00pm: Film screening at the historic Pennsylvania Hospital (curated by Andrew Lampert and Greg Pierce, open to symposium attendees only)
* Saturday, 9:00am to 5:00pm: Presentations at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
* Saturday, 8:00pm: Film screening at Moore College of Art (curated by Skip Elsheimer & Jay Schwartz)
Pulled out my old Hotel Costes 2 compilation the other night and fell back in love with this song.
Monday Mentions:
VideoEx
Snow Project
VideoEx, which is a great experimental film festival in Switzerland, has announced its call for entries–and there is no submission fee! They are looking for experimental films (35mm, 16mm, 8mm), videos, innovative animations, experimental documentaries and music videos. Deadline is January 30th, so get to it!
The Snow Project in Boston has two calls for submissions for art work–and you don’t have to be someone who is “good” at drawing or painting to submit. Thier Drawing Every Day exhibit featured doodles and sketches from simplistic to intricate.
The next Drawing Every Day submission deadline is January 5th. Their other exhibit, Hey I Know That Guy, has a submission deadline of January 19th.
If you were ever one of those people who talked about Europeans as being less violent than Americans, I hope the recent footage from the protests in Copenhagen are a sobering reminder that power is power and that humans everywhere–even in lovely socialist countries with universal health care–can all be driven to violence.
Not sure what the debate is and why so many eyes are on Copenhagen? This video is a great primer on the issues.
Any artist who has mixed money with their craft has had this experience: the grant decline letter.
2009 has been good to me in terms of grant funding so far. So I thought I’d be more crushed when I recieved the decline letter yesterday from the Leeway Foundation for their Lifetime Transformation Award–their largest grant.
But I wasn’t crushed. I didn’t get insecure about whether my art was good enough, because I felt honored that I had even made it to the final round.
And of course, the people I do know on that list are AMAZING artists. (Like, this film by Heidi Saman–you should see it if it comes to your town.)
Mostly, I just paniced and realized I needed a plan. I hadn’t realized how many things in my brain I was pushing aside with the line “I’ll just wait until I get the chunk of money.”
My soundbites for how to carry on after a grant decline letter:
Onward and backward
This week is all about archival research.
I’m preparing for a field trip in two weeks to the National Motion Picture Archives where I’m going to review old newsreels of Norman Schwartzkopf, Sr. in Iran in the 1950s as well as Jr. in the 1990s.
I’m also coordinating with the University of Florida library archives to get high resolution copies of news articles about my Schwarzkopf encounter on thier campus over ten years ago.
Tonight I am going to see A Sunny Day in Glasgow, a sibling band of warped but fluffy electronic sounds placed over ethereal voices. Some people describe it as ambient pop, some as shoegazer. I’m not really electronic enough to know what to call it.
Not for everyone’s taste, but tasty for those who enjoy these kinds of sounds.
TODAY’S MENTIONS:
Boston’s Distro-y
Philadelphia’s Punk Rock Flea Market
This weekend I was in Boston and went to this great art fair–Mass 
Market– that reminded me a lot of Philly’s Punk Rock Flea Market coming up this Saturday.
Even if the buy local angle isn’t your thing [insert ideological assertions about the importance of local economies here], it’s at least worth checking out for finding one-of-a-kind items from all the crafty smarties out there.
My favorite find from Mass Market was this bird in a cage t-shirt from Distro-y. 
These artists have some great work–and this particular shirt’s 37% off its original price right now.
Just don’t ever wear it anywhere you might ever run into me.
Tomorrow I am volunteering on a friend’s film set as they test out the newish RED camera.
If you’re not familiar with the RED, it is part of a growing trend in the digital filmmaking world toward tapeless recording.
I haven’t been on a set in several years since I stopped taking classes for my MFA and focused on my own thesis–a personal documentary that I mostly shot alone on a Bolex 16mm camera.
As I get older, I’m trying to bring more of my habit patterns to a more balanced state. I think undoing habits completely is unrealistic. But reducing the extremeness of the spectrum is not.
My Filmic Extremes
I’m a little like Hermione Granger in Harry Potter. I admit.
I’m not proud of it. And I’m just learning to understand the nature of this habit pattern I’ve developed over the years–so it’s still lingering rather strongly in my character.
I tend to occupy two extremes: either, I have to feel like I have to feel like I have a leg up on everyone else I’m in a room with and already know the task/skill/content on hand or I completely shut down, tell myself I can’t do something and am inept and then don’t even try to learn and give up.
I’d like to learn to be okay with being 75% good at something. To be at the average skill level at something. And to not give it up.
Sadly, this habit results in me doing these I receive attention and praise for, rather than listening to an inner desire about what I’d secretly like to learn.
I got praise for personal documentary work, so I stayed there. Externally, that’s my niche. I just got a grant a few months ago from Chicken & Egg Pictures and Rooftop Films to continue with another personal documentary. Inside, I’d like to write and direct a fictional feature length film within the next 5 years.
To get there, I need to practice being okay with not knowing how to do things right away on my own. And more importantly, to be able to embrace other people as teachers to help teach me.
I need to break this mythology I have that I only learn to do things on my own.
So even though it’s a little terrifying and goes against my functioning for the last 30 something years, I’m going to spend my Sunday crewing on this shoot, rusty after years of not setting up lighting for narratives, and with a camera I know zero about with a bunch of brilliant Temple U MFA students.
And, I’m not going to shut down and tell myself I can’t do this, and instead be grateful that I have the opportunity to learn from so many great teachers.
I am going to try to post about the RED on my twitter feed tomorrow–so you can follow along with my adventure there.
