They come home

Wars are primarily fought by the poor.

17% of returning veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD according to some statistics.

Blake Miller's photograph become an iconic image of the battle of Fallujah, seen in recruitment offices around the country.

She still remembers Miller's call just before the assault on Fallujah, and his terrible question: "How can people go to church and be a Christian and kill people in Iraq?"

"He was raised where that's one of the Ten Commandments, do not kill," she said. "I think it's hard for a soldier to go to war and have that embedded in them from small children up, and you go over there and you've got to do it to stay alive."

Link

Beyond belief

NY Times today has an article about a climate scientist who is speaking out about attempts by the Administration to silence or curtail NASA scientists publicly speaking about the science of global warming.

All other lunacy aside, any time a governmental body wants to monitor scientists conversations with reporters on the issue of global warming then you know they have finally exceeded all bounds of reason. The right wing always wants to silence artists or at least push in the other direction of the liberal arts; but to try and attempt to influence discourse upon science against a majority consensus... I'm at a loss for words.

I was warned my first January in New York would be miserably cold. Thus far we've had thunderstorms and pleasant days.

At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

Link

a us citizen asks the president an honest question

Yeah so I stopped the wacky George Bush posts but not even Dr. Strangelove can beat his ability to generate pitch black humor. This amazing clip from the Daily Show posted on Crooks and Liars" gives you an example of what happens when he is challenged by a knowledgable member of the public. More frightening than funny.

Bushie

Spider-Man all wrong

Nah, I'm not talking about JMS' story arc involving Gwen Stacy's kids. I'm talking about this insane live action Japanese Spiderman show from 1978 which just looks like a rad 70s action show until all of a sudden about two minutes into the credits something makes you go what the fuck what does that have to do with Spider-Man?

Spider-Man Japan!

Cloudbusting

Flying between NY and the NW to shoot my video I spent a lot of time watching VH1 Classic in the air.

On my first trip out, spending most of the flight thinking about how exactly we were going to turn my treatment into something we could actually shoot on our budget, I came across a video that hit me in a way videos just don't or can't any longer. I was floored emotionally.

The video for Kate Bush's Cloudbusting.



Which I give you a link to here formatted for iTunes and the new iPod video merely to share with people what I now regard as one of the best 5 videos ever made - I'm putting this at a tie between Mike Mills' All I Need video for Air at a tie for first place. And I do not like videos that are literal. But listen - they looped the song to make it work. It's really a short film set to that song, just as we hoped Directions would give rise to.

What I can say is this: for every over the top color grading so every video looks like Fight Club, or every overblown CGI idea, or every show off camera move and quick edit... Nothing compares to someone like Donald Sutherland and what he can convey in single human gestures. That's something no special effect or gimmick or stylization can come close to.

I did not know until now that Terry Gilliam was involved in conceptualizing the video. Maybe that explains a lot. But ultimately it was directed by Julian Doyle, his effects guy (who I think may have gone to my film school) who I wish now had directed more.

It's a fascinating story about the video and the song, and in some ways I don't know if I should explain this or not so if you'd like to keep the interpreation of the song / video as your own skip ahead; it's based upon a long out of print memoir by Peter Reich called A Book of Dreams about growing up as the son of Wilhelm Reich; a lovable crackpot who was a contemporary of Freud and Einstein but eventually came to believe that life was pervaded by orgasmic life energy called Orgone that could be channeled to affect the weather and destroy invading UFOs. Make no mistake, Reich was crazy, but it didn't help that the US gov't actually did persecute him and destroy all his work; it only fuelled the delusion further. So strange to say that this is actually based upon a true story. This book was also the basis for Patti Smith's Birdland off the legendary Horses album. I just tracked down a copy at great expense and am about to read.

And again it's what the music video as a legitimate form in its own right needs more of these days.

Kate's new album Aerial is considered by myself and Colin Meloy and Chris Walla as one of the absolute best albums of last year. Colin emailed me one day nothing but a few lines of the lyrics; to say merely, how good is this?

Who knows who wrote that song of Summer
That blackbirds sing at dusk
This is a song of colour
Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust
Then climb into bed and turn to dust

Kate Bush

Some direction in life

Happy birthday to Nick. I sent Nick an article on January 23rd being the worst day of the year (according to some lunkheaded sociologist) and forgot to tell him happy birthday the same day. This was not an intentional head fuck. I felt pretty awful for it.

Nick's birthday also saw the launch of the project we here at otaku-house and his band and a group of remarkable directors have been working on for months now for Death Cab for Cutie - Directions.

This is why I've been so silent and hard to get a hold of. I've been working as a producer on the project with Jill Kaplan and Nick and being a producer is not my strong suit - I tend to be very scattershot and although the budgets were small this was still equivalent to having 11 videos produced concurrently, which would be hard at any point. But it has been gratifying in every sense to be a part of this, mostly because all it required was for me to explain how best to encourage directors to do their best work and to express what I love about music videos.

Directions also sees me finally following up on 16 Military Wives, at last.

I am enormously proud of what we shot. I always believe that the primary responsibility you have as a video director is to the band and their aesthetic. Thus, 16 Military Wives was a fun exercise in whimsy. But it isn't exactly what I'd like to explore personally with filmmaking. What we're doing with Directions is not, I'm quite certain, groundbreaking or original. What we did get right, I believe, is giving directors the ability and latitude to follow their muse - something that was blindingly obvious to Nick as a producer and someone who has been through the process of being in and graced with music videos, and from me as a director and hearing what sucks about the process. So I feel that the video we've shot (we still have to edit it) is exactly that - it is an example of what I'd like to explore in film, at least aesthetically and tonally.

And mostly that isn't anything to do with me but my crew, my incredible crew, the best I've ever had, mostly all again from the Decemberists video but with some new additions.

So to Tarin Anderson and Bernadette Spear and TG Firestone and the absolutely unbelievable art direction team of Jess Engler, Adam Bloodhead, and Ryan Smith... I wish I could spend more time just hanging out with all of you.

I'm also working with Rob Ryang of p.s. 260 and you've probably all seen his Shining trailer but if you haven't then watch it and know how I am the luckiest director around these days to be working with him.

Working with Tarin and Rob has been probably the best thing that's ever happened to me as a director.

I don't know, I just really can't thank my crew enough.

Here are some photos of the incredible set I had built. Everyone pitched in to make this happen.




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Congratulations to Colin and Carson for their imminent arrival, someone who is inarguably going to be one of the most amazing little people we've ever met. Congratulations to the rest of their band for their good fortune and future.

About two years ago I was telling Carson Ellis about a graphic novel I desperately wanted her to draw. Chris Walla was around at the time and asked if I'd ever read the His Dark Materials books by Phillip Pullman. He told me I should really, really read them.

I had not. I had slightly heard about them somewhere. It sounded vaguely Harry Potterish - or at least, being sold by the book industry as a variation on such, children's fantasy.

I devoured those books as a kid. T.H. White, C.S. Lewis, Madeliene L'Engle.

I was particularly into the Madeline L'Engle books - A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, a Swiftly Tilting Planet. They were illuminating and were about an odd family of overly bright children with an absent father who worked for the government and the fear of nuclear annhilation was a pretty large part of them; which pretty much sums up my childhood.

I thought several years ago that maybe they'd be possible for adaptation, thinking wildly in my head of things I'd like to do if all things were possible. It just sensed right to me; and my memories of the book conjured up a children's movie that thematically I could get underneath easily, combined with a chance to do a blowout visual piece, something like a kid's movie that would look like 60s avant garde crossed with pure 80s period dressing - A Clockwork Orange meets The Shining for kids if that makes any sense.

So I reread the books. And I got this awful knot in my stomach. Something akin to betrayal, or what an ex Scientologist must feel when they read about Xenu.

The books are fantastic and spellbinding and have beautiful digressions into the mysteries of the universe and such vividly drawn children, especially gifted children who aren't overly precious... But they are also pretty straightforward Reaganesque, Christian propaganda. Mind you I'm being overly harsh, because they aren't nasty and dispiriting about it the same way C.S. Lewis is; it's blindingly obvious what stance his books have. L'Engle equates an alien planet's oppression to be a fairly transparent critique of socialism as a pure evil which gets defeated by the power of love and the aid of an actual angel spreading Jesus waves.

I read that Phillip Pullman lectured of how the end of the Narnia series culminates with one of the girls being cast out from paradise forever for showing an interest in boys and makeup as she enters her late teens. And then presto - it's announced that everything is awesome - all the children have died in a train accident and are to live in the paradise of Narnia forever!

That is, to paraphrase Pullman, an intensely fucked up message to share with children.

But yes me and my new friend Cat Solen have discussed this at length, how the adult versions of our selves revisiting these books cannot fathom the warm nostalgia and personal connection we have to these worlds given that in essence they are books which have a fairly strong and direct ideological message which we can't abide by now.

We like life, the here and now, and can appreciate the harsh aspects of existence but celebrate what is good and proper and possibile within a lifetime here on Earth, and wish there were books that said so to children.

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Which brings me to Phillip Pullman, and all you ever need to know about him is in this article in The New Yorker which finally got me up on my bicycle to Community Bookstore in Park Slope to grab the last copies they had of these books, and I had my holiday downtime reading set. And within three days I'd finished it all.

And these are the first books I cannot wait to share with whatever children I might have someday. They are absolutely staggering. They are not perfect; and at points I'd be hard pressed to say that they're necessarily kid's books because they can be so brutal, but I would gladly share them with my children knowing it would not in some way fuck them up deeply but prepare them for life; for both the coming joy and dread and how those two live side by side always but it's all right because everything is tinged with wonder.

The books are essentially about something revolutionary in today's developmentally retarded day and age in which youth is pushed at as an attainable goal: that the loss of innocence for wisdom is not merely neccessary, it is in actual fact a good thing. Ignorance is not bliss. The book's radical cosmology is both blasphemous enough and brilliant enough to suggest that taking a bite of the apple metaphorically and literally may have been one of the proudest things our species ever got itself into.

This is also the first work of fantasy I've read literally since Tolkein's extended essay on picnicking hobbits called "The Lord of the Rings" that seems absolutely toweringly original and singular.

I cannot recommend these books enough, and from now on when Chris Walla tells me to listen to something or read something, I will not hesitate.