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Chris Bell
Posted project update #10The Day After A PerFarmance
Post commentThe dust is beginning to settle after a busy weekend of preparations and perFarming.
Many thanks to all of our backers for helping to make this community immersion perFamance project possible. There will be a more comprehensive update to come. In the mean time, please be sure to fill out the survey (sent in a previous e-mail) to ensure we can get you your reward in a timely fashion.
Happy Living!
A PerFarmance Project
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GameStick
Posted project update #25GameStick Product Video
Hello everyone,
Just a quick post to give you guys a preview of a short product 'explainer' video we have put together that will be doing the rounds shortly with our business partners.
Hope you like it! We have a few more pieces in development that we will also post here when ready.
Love GameStick
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Creator Stu Alsford on May 2
Andrew.
Try using the contact me button over there ----------------------------->And yes, the date slipped to late June from what I remember. I'm sure there was an update about this.
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Creator Ma1ak on May 3
Great news except for the fact that backers turned out to be paying $10 more for the case while consumers would get it for free.
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Creator Stu Alsford on May 7
Ma1ak, they are also paying more for the dock, and subsequent controllers. So I don't mind so much.
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Less Than A Week Left!
Post commentWow! I cannot believe that we have only 6 days left on Kickstarter! We are so grateful to your pledges! We would have never made this far without your support! THANK YOU!
We are at $2,245 now and that's SO close to our goal! I'm very positive that we will make it! I can't thank you guys enough!
Please help us spread the word! Have a wonderful day!
~ Kobsupang Robertson
P.S. Howard wanted to thank you all too but he's shy today!
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Streetfest: Ideas City at New Museum
Post commentDear all,
We'lll be exhibiting Plant-in City this coming Saturday at Idea City at the New Museum. We will be featuring some new exciting developments and would love for you to stop by.
http://www.ideas-city.org/view/architecture-technology-for-plants
thank you for your continuing support,
Plant-in City Team
*****
About IDEAS CITY IDEAS CITY explores the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the vitality of urban centers, making them better places to live, work, and play. Founded by the New Museum in 2011, IDEAS CITY is a major collaborative initiative between hundreds of arts, education, and community organizations. This year’s theme is Untapped Capital, with participants focused on resources that are under-recognized or underutilized in our cities.
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Andrew Harmer
Posted project update #29The Fitzroy – Shoot – Week 2
Post commentThe Studio Shoot
It feels like its been a long time since our last update and its only been a week. So much has happened, and the whole team have been working solid since without a day off, they have been incredible!
Cerith Flinn (Bernard) and Andrew Harmer discuss a shot on set
We wrapped on the sub last Monday and moved into the studio in East Acton on Tuesday.
A very full boat for exiting the sub on Tuesday
In the studio we’ve been filming the entire bedroom, galley and storage hold scenes, as the sub is simply not large enough for us to be able to successfully film those scenes there. An example of the galley set can be seen with this 360 interactive video - thanks to Alex Scott.
The Green River Rock Band in their room with Wilbur
We’ve been working long days and its been completely worth it. We are really happy with how the rushes are looking and spirits have been very high across the cast and crew.
Andrew chats with the producers James Heath & Liam Garvo
The schedule has been over running slightly and everyone was good enough to come in and work on Sunday to get back on track. We have three more days left in the studio including this one before we wrap for the time being.
David Schaal (Cecil) likes a sharp knife
There will be a couple of extra days filming and couple of pick up days on the sub. Hopefully we’ll be able to show you some footage soon. We are really keen to show you guys something soon and before anyone else! After all you are our favourite people in the world.
In addition 'The Voice of Russia' recently got in touch with us and posted this article.
To keep up to date on the final days of the studio shoot follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. Also read the blog or sign up to the newsletter over at our site.
The Fitzroy Team
P.S. If you're interested in seeing a time lapse of the Sub, check out this video.
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Sally NYC Stroll
Post commentJoin Us for a Sally Stroll
We are having a Sally Stroll on Friday, May 5th starting at 11:00 am in New York City. Please join us!
What is a Sally Stroll you might ask? Well, this is our very first Sally Stroll and here is our plan. We are going to visit the places Sally visits in “Sally Discovers New York.” The entire Dog Mountain Team will be Sally Strolling. All who would like to join us along the way on this dog friendly walk are welcome. The real Sally couldn’t come, so Amanda created a delightful Sally cut out so you can have your picture taken with Sally at all her stops.The first stop will be in front of the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West at 11:00am. Next Sally and friends will stroll across Central Park, stopping to smell the flowers and then on to the Metropolitan Museum steps (all 28 of them) just in time for lunch and more picture taking.
From there we plan to Sally Stroll down 5th Avenue to 67th Street where we will hang a right into Central Park to visit the Balto Sculpture which is just a short walk away. As Sally knows “Balto is a Hero!”
Then we will continue down 5th Avenue to the Orvis Store at 42nd and 5th Avenue, where Sally will stop in for a snack. Dogs Welcome! Then we will go across the street to the New York Public Library to pose next to the Lions. “Lions in New York Oh My!”
We will keep you posted as to our where abouts on Facebook Check In.
In “Sally Discovers New York” Sally strolls on down to Battery Park, but since beautiful Battery Park is under reconstruction, we will save that for another day.
This should be a lot of fun, great camaraderie and exercise!
If you have had enough strolling for one day, you can always share a cab back!Hope you can come and stroll with us!
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Dennis Doros
Posted project update #26THE NEW YORKER’s Richard Brody posts another online appreciation... and it is absolutely beautiful!
APRIL 19, 2013
“PORTRAIT OF JASON” AND THE LIFE OF MOVIES
POSTED BY RICHARD BRODY
The cinema is the great compensatory art, the one that natural-born artists who lack any particular technical skill, craft, or knowledge gravitate toward, because it’s the one where the equipment itself supplies most of the needed technique. The artists need only bring their being—because being is the cinema’s very stuff and subject. That’s why it’s wrong to call movies a visual medium; it’s a shorthand that I’ve indulged in, too, but there’s actually no such thing as a beautiful image. If a director happens to be endowed with a visual gift (such as Stanley Kubrick, who started as a photographer), so much the better, but what makes an image beautiful is that it’s infused with a beautiful soul. That’s why there’s no formula for recognizing or identifying a beautiful image; it’s not definable as a geometric or formal quality, but rather, essentially, as a communion of kindred spirits that’s describable only in terms as literary as literature itself.
In other words, movies that are any good save people’s lives, and the 1967 film “Portrait of Jason”—which opened at IFC Center on Friday, in a deep-toned, richly textured, and (most importantly) sonically sharp restoration by Milestone Films—is one of the greatest cinematic salvations of all time, because it helped to save two people, one in front of the camera (its eponymous protagonist—indeed, its soloist), and the other behind it (the director, Shirley Clarke). I wrote a capsule review of it in the magazine, but it’s worth revisiting the movie in detail because its details are so extraordinary, starting with the question posed, at the very start, regarding the title.
The entire movie was filmed in a single all-night session in Clarke’s apartment in the Hotel Chelsea, at the start of which its performer introduces himself, twice, to the camera, first as Jason Holliday and then, with laughter, as Aaron Payne, which, he says, was his given name. He launches into the tale of how he changed it—an instant picaresque, involving his encounter in San Francisco with Sabu (“Jason was created in San Francisco—and San Francisco is a place to be created, believe me”).
Holliday (1924-98) is on camera for an hour and forty-five minutes, but he fills them with his whole life. He’s a monologuist of mercurial, Falstaffian genius—a gay black man who says that what he does is “hustle” and explains, “I’m a stone whore” (and adds, “I’ve been balling from Maine to Mexico”).
He speaks at length of his frustrations—of his longstanding desire to perform (“as I’m doing right now”), of his arrest (he tried to pick up a man on Sixth Avenue who turned out to be an undercover cop), his incarceration on Rikers Island along with drag queens, his legally enforced psychiatric treatment. He worked as a domestic, or “houseboy,” doing cooking, cleaning, and errands for the wealthy, and describes stifling anger at the smiling racism he encountered. He delves into his failed attempts to perform—the money that he borrowed from friends and family to put a night-club act together, the co-signature of a psychiatrist for his bank loan—and, to prove his point, he delivers a version of his act, with extraordinary, uproarious impersonations of Mae West and Katharine Hepburn, as well as a scene from Otto Preminger’s “Carmen Jones” and a song (his voice is somewhere in style between Nat King Cole and Johnny Hartman). He also talks about his family, and, in particular, his father, nicknamed Brother Tough (“a big-time gambler, bootlegger, and I’m out in the street skipping rope”), who beat him habitually with a strap.
Holliday’s exuberant, floridly expressive personality and extravagantly uninhibited self-revelation was also an act of self-creation; it’s as if he created, on screen, in real time, a new identity from the scattered and broken pieces of his life. The voice in which he does so is a miracle and a treasure. In discussing the movie, I’m tempted simply to pass along as many of his zingy quotes as I wrote down—and, if there were any justice in the world of awards, Holliday would have won that year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, not William Rose for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
But for all the riotously expansive energy that Holliday delivers under pressure, his wall-rattling laughter at his own tribulations is a mask for his lifetime of scrutiny, evasion, and turmoil. It isn’t just ambient legal and social racism and the sanctioned persecution of homosexuals that drives him into frenzy, it’s the pressure to pass as a proper citizen in white society. (In one anecdote, he says, “As long as the white boy finds out that you don’t want to screw the white girl, then you’re in,” and he tells a remarkable story about Miles Davis’s response to seeing the great drummer Philly Joe Jones at the Village Vanguard in the company of a white woman.) It’s also the dangers he faces as a prostitute who often more or less masks his intentions (“You can always out-talk them”).
Holliday tells stories about life outside the official channels of mass media—pickups on the prosperous streets of the East Fifties, liaisons with workingmen, the ways and wiles of drag queens who sold stolen goods on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. He restores the term “hip” to its basic sense—being knowledgeable about deep, arcane, and vital things, having a survivalist sensibility in the menacing corners of society high and low. “Portrait of Jason” is, among other things, a classic of wisdom literature, not a bildungsroman (because Holliday remains, until the time of the filming, essentially unformed) but an unfurling of knowledge about parts of America, and parts of the soul, that few would acknowledge and fewer would discuss openly.
“Jason Holliday,” the character in the film, is the performance of the frustrated performer who performs everywhere but where he wants to (on stage), the mask for a man who lives with masks, whose very persona is that of the mask and whose most scathingly self-revealing stories concern his ruses, his evasions, his deceptions—and Shirley Clarke, the director, played a key role in composing that mask and revealing its essential authenticity. There’s no biography of Clarke (there ought to be one), and the most substantial text I’ve read about her, and, for that matter, about Holliday is Milestone Films’s ample and lovingly assembled press kit (it can be downloaded here). Clarke (1919-97)—born Shirley Brimberg to a prosperous New York family (her sister was the novelist Elaine Dundy)—was a dancer who took up film by accident in the early fifties (she “had received a 16mm camera as a wedding present”) and was nominated for an Oscar (for the short film “Skyscraper”) in 1960. She and Holliday were friends, though her relationship with him was fraught with conflict; she said in a 1983 interview (cited in the pressbook) that she ran into him in the street and told him, “I’d like to film you doing what you do, telling those stories you tell and talking about your life. It would just take one day.” The idea came to her suddenly, and, when the camera was rolling, she had an idea of the stories that she wanted him to tell (and can be heard frequently on the soundtrack, prompting him).
Her own career was centered on identity. In “The Connection,” her first feature, set in a loft where jazz musicians are waiting for a dealer to arrive with their heroin, she turned a character from a visiting playwright to a documentary filmmaker shooting footage of the musicians. She thus turns the actual connection in question to that of the filmmaker to his or her subjects and makes the film pivot on the radical identification that the filmmaker makes with them. (I’ve got a scattershot dossier here of capsule reviews of her films “The Connection,” “Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World” (scroll down), “The Cool World,” and “Ornette: Made in America,” as well as “Rome Is Burning,” a superb 1970 documentary about Clarke by Noël Burch and André S. Labarthe, in which she discusses the making of “Portrait of Jason.”)
In “Portrait of Jason,” Clarke invests herself in Holliday’s tales as a meticulous yet passionate insider; it’s as if she and he were involved in a mutual possession, Clarke unfolding her own psychic marginality and spontaneous artistry in his own dangerous self-dispersal and recovering her own artistic identity in his self-discovery—even as Holliday delivers himself, vulnerably and trustingly, to Clarke as the “material” he knows his life to be. Midway through the film, he delivers a sort of epilogue on the wing: “I’m doing what I want to do and it’s a nice feeling that someone’s taking a picture of it… I will have one beautiful something that is my own.” He could as easily be speaking for Clarke as to her. In a fairer world, “Portrait of Jason” would have done what her earlier works didn’t—it would have launched her, turned her into one of the most sought-out, most admired, and busiest directors of the time. Instead, it was something of the beginning of the end. She began her film on Ornette Coleman soon thereafter but didn’t finish it; she worked in video, taught at U.C.L.A., finished that film in the mid-eighties. The utopian project of self-composition through cinema was too far ahead of its time, but very much of ours. Had she lived longer (and had her health held out longer), she would likely have been the era’s endlessly rising new filmmaker.
P.S.: There are two other films that enact a similarly powerful personal reclamation from both sides of the camera: Jean Eustache’s “Numéro Zéro” and, of course, in an altogether different dimension, Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”; both came later.
P.P.S.: F. Scott Fitzgerald had a notion of the compensatory aspect of cinema, as, in the story “Mightier Than the Sword,” from 1941, he wrote:
Director Dick Dale was a type that, fifty years ago, could be found in any American town. Generally he was the local photographer, usually he was the originator of small mechanical contrivances and a leader in bizarre local movements, almost always he contributed verse to the local press. All the most energetic embodiments of this “Sensation Type” had migrated to Hollywood between 1910 and 1930, and there they had achieved a psychological fulfilment inconceivable in any other time or place. At last, and on a large scale, they were able to have their way.
If you'd like to read this on the New Yorker website, click here.
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Creator Frodon on April 26
Remarquable text. Thank you Richard.
We hope the film will be released in France...
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Creator Dennis Doros on April 26
Dear JM Frodon,
It will absolutely be released in France through our friends at Films du Camelia. Stay tuned!
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Robin Lung
Posted project update #16Major Archival Discovery of 1937 Nanking Started with a Party
It was my husband Paul who convinced me that I should have a fundraising party. So last October I got many volunteers together to throw one. Terry Lehman Olival helped by sending press releases to the local media and got the attention of Star-Advertiser reporter Mike Gordon. “That might be the coolest story I’ve heard in a long time,” Mike said, and promised to write an article on it.Post comment
The more Mike found out, the more he wanted to know. His article grew and grew. My fundraising party came and went; my Kickstarter campaign came and went. Finally the opus turned up – a 3-page spread on the film, complete with color pictures, showed up in the Sunday newspaper and drew response from people as far away as Kentucky!DeSoto Brown, curator at the Bishop Museum, also read Mike’s article and something clicked. He remembered a donation of lantern slides made to the museum by Betty Li, Li Ling-Ai’s older physician sister, back in the 80’s. In fact the slides were marked as being related to KUKAN!
Early in my research I had read that KUKAN’s director Rey Scott lectured with a group of slides, but no one in his family remembered seeing them or hearing anything about them. I had given up on finding them. So I was on pins and needles last week when I finally connected with DeSoto at the Bishop Museum and had a chance to examine the slides myself. They didn’t disappoint -- 97 images of 1937 Nanking, including some with Rey and Betty Li, brought Rey’s first trip to China to life for me in a thrilling way and helped answer some of the mysteries that had been plaguing me for years.For more of the story of FINDING KUKAN, visit the film's website HERE.
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Kim Boekbinder
Posted project update #25Ship Happens
Whoo! Hundreds of packages have been shipped out and some have already made it to their new homes. If you got a package already I forgot to include this:
About half the packages went out without that slip of paper. Half of them will have it. But I want pictures! Unboxing photos, wearing the shirts photos, holding CDs, not holding CDs, pictures with you, pictures without you. Whatever you want to do. Tag me @kimboekbinder on twitter and facebook.com/kimboekbindermusic
I have about 150 packages left in my house that will be shipped over the next few days. The last things to leave are t-shirts heading overseas. If you haven't paid the $5 extra for international shipping you can do so via paypal.com : paypal@kimboekbinder.com (As I have just discovered the shirts are actually $15 to send overseas every little bit helps.)
There may be a delay on a few of the shirts (11 of them, to be exact) - I ended up with too many of one size, and not enough of another. But that will be resolved by next week at the latest, getting fresh ones printed as I type.
Moon Visa packages are also being shipped in the next week.
Feels SO GOOD to be shipping "The Sky is Calling" out to all of you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Here's my friend Phil in his t-shirt.
Phil makes SCIENCE COFFEE (I love the science coffee: delicious, good for focus, no jitters.)
And Nicole - she gave me a pair of those bear ears once when I was on tour, they keep me warm and cute in the winter.
YAY!
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Creator Smiles on April 26
The T-shirt looks stellar. I totally missed that tier. Is it exclusive to the kickstarter campaign, or is it available elsewhere?
Thanks for the music.
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Discover / Recent Updates
Fascinating posts from projects new and old.
Creator Jason Preder on April 29
When will we get our Intergalactic promo codes?
Creator smile from The Lower East Side on April 29
Same question as Jason Preder: how and when will we receive the IAP unlock code? (especially since I never got any of the actual physical rewards promised) — smile
Creator EOPE42 on May 3
There's an update that explains some of the update/pledge rewards will be in v1.1 . That's the short version. They are doing Android atm, then v1.1 and bug fixes, then ks stuff and pc/mac additionally. A lot to crack on with tbh.